Iraqi Turkmens

Iraqi Turkmen Front

The Iraqi Turkmen Front (Irak Türkmen Cephesi, الجبهة التركمانية العراقي) is a political movement founded in 1995 which seeks to represent the Turkmen people of Iraq. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the ITF has contested control of Kirkuk and other areas of Turkmeneli. Although the ITF opposes Iraqi federalism on the grounds that it would give too much power to Iraqi Kurds, the former ITF president Faruk Abdullah Abdurrahman has expressed a desire for an eventual Turkmeneli state. In the meantime, the ITF seeks recognition for the Turkmen people as a national minority.

The ITF is a coalition of the following political parties:

Iraqi National Turkmen Party (INTP), founded in 1988 and operated in the northern Iraqi no-fly zones
Turkmeneli Party, founded in 1992 in Northern Cyprus as the Turkmen Union Party
Provincial Turkmen Party
Movement of the Independent Turkmen
Iraqi Turkmen Rights Party
Turkmen Islamic Movement of Iraq

In the Iraqi legislative election, December 2005, the ITF list (#630) polled 76,434 votes, or 0.7% nationwide, according to the uncertified published results. The overwhelming majority of those votes were cast in Kirkuk Province, where the ITF won more than 10% of the total. Most of the rest of the ITF's votes were in Salah ad Din province. According to the full official results of that election, the ITF is entitled to only one seat in the permanent National Assembly.

In the aftermath of the first Iraqi parliamentary election in 2005, the ITF lodged a number of formal complaints to the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq alleging vote fraud on the part of the Kurdish parties and protesting the Commission's decision to allow Kurdish internally displaced persons and refugees to vote in the places from which they had been expelled under Saddam Hussein. In the election, they received just over 90,000 votes, or 1.1% of votes cast, earning them three seats in the trasitional National Assembly of Iraq.

In early March 2005, the ITF agreed to join the Shia-led UIA's caucus in the National Assembly according to Zaman Online, after a disappointing result in which more Turkmens seem to have voted for the UIA or the Kurdish alliance than for the ITF.

On April 28 2007, ITF held a rally in Ankara against the Kirkuk referendum and demanding a special status for the city. At the demonstration, banners that read "Vampires who drank the blood, cannibals who ate the flesh of Isa, take your hands off Iraq!" were present.

On June 29 2007, Chairman Sadettin Ergeç told at a conference in New York City that their struggle aimed to save Kirkuk as the capital of Iraqi Turkmens or at least earn it a special status.

The ITF receives funding from the government of Turkey.