Talabani supports giving vice president post to Turkem

SULAIMANIYA / IraqiNews.com: Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said on Thursday that he supports giving Turkmen the vice president post, asserting that boosting democracy in Iraq would contribute in guaranteeing Kurds’ rights. This came as he chaired the meeting of the higher council of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in Sulaimaniya on Thursday. “We support giving Turkmen this post as they are one of the main components of Iraq,” he said. The Iraqi Turkmen or Iraqi Turks (commonly misspelled as Turcomans, Turkomens, and Iraqi Turkmans) are a distinct Turkic ethnic group, the third-largest ethnic group (after Arabs and Kurds) in Iraq, living mostly in northern Iraq, in an area which they call “Turkmeneli”, notably in the cities of Kirkuk, Arbil, Talafar and Mosul. There are also significant numbers of Turkmen in the central provinces of Baghdad, Wassit. Estimates of their numbers vary dramatically, (in accordance with Iraq’s assimilation policies no realistic and independent census results have been revealed regarding the Iraqi Turkmen population) from 500,000 by most western sources to 4,500,000 by other sources. They have been undergoing decades of assimilation campaigns in Iraq. SH (P) 60