Iraqi Armenians (Arabic: أرمنيون عراقيون ’Armanion Iraqion; Armenian: իրաքահայեր irakahayer) are Iraqi citizens and residents of Armenian ethnicity. Many Armenians settled in Iraq after fleeing the 1915 Armenian genocide. It is estimated that there are 10,000–20,000 Armenians living in Iraq, with communities in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, Kirkuk, Baqubah, Dohuk, Zakho and Avzrog.
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👉 Iraqi Armenians in the context of Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq
Between 1968 and 2003, the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party of the Iraqi Republic perpetrated multiple campaigns of demographic engineering against the country's non-Arabs. While Arabs constitute the majority of Iraq's population as a whole, they are not the majority in all parts of northern Iraq. In an attempt to Arabize the north, the Iraqi government pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, killing and forcefully displacing a large number of Iraqi minorities—predominantly Kurds, but also Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyrians, Shabaks and Armenians, among others—and subsequently allotting the cleared land to Arab settlers. In 1978 and 1979 alone, 600 Kurdish villages were burned down and around 200,000 Kurds were deported to other parts of Iraq.
As a part of the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict, the campaigns represent a major chapter of the historical ethno-cultural friction between Arabs and Kurds in the Middle East. Rooted in the doctrines of Ba'athism, the Iraqi government policy that served as the basis of these campaigns has been referred to as an example of internal colonialism—more specifically described by Ghanaian-Canadian scholar Francis Kofi Abiew as a "colonial 'Arabization' program" consisting of large-scale deportations of Kurds and forced Arab settlement within the country.
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Iraqi Armenians in the context of Armenian Americans
Armenian Americans (Armenian: ամերիկահայեր, romanized: amerikahayer) are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, the Adana massacre of 1909, and the Armenian genocide of 1915–1918 in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East (especially from Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey) migrated to the United States as a result of political instability in the region. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons. The Los Angeles area has the largest Armenian population in the United States.
The 2020 United States census reported that 519,001 Americans held full or partial Armenian roots either alone or combined with another ancestral origin. Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian Americans instead. The highest concentration of Americans of Armenian descent is in the Greater Los Angeles area, where 166,498 people have identified themselves as Armenian to the 2000 census, comprising over 40% of the 385,488 people who identified Armenian origins in the United States at the time. The city of Glendale, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, is widely thought to be the center of Armenian American life (although many Armenians live in the aptly named "Little Armenia" neighborhood of Los Angeles).