Iraqi authorities have revoked a decision to limit the use of the Turkmen language in northern Kirkuk province following local and international backlash, according to local media on Thursday.
Iraq's Prime Minister Shia al-Sudani has directed authorities to ensure that Turkmen remains part of the languages used for official correspondence in Kirkuk, along with Arabic and Kurdish, state-run Iraqi News Agency (INA) reported.
A day earlier, the government moved to bar Turkmen from the list of official languages in Kirkuk, a region with a sizeable ethnic Turkmen population dating to the Ottoman era.
The decision drew immediate outrage from Kirkuk's Turkmen community, with Turkmen leaders rejecting it as “unconstitutional and unacceptable.”
Turkmens are Iraq's third largest ethnic community after Arabs and Kurds.
There are no official figures for the country’s total Turkmen population, but Turkmen officials say they account for about 7% of the country's population of 38 million.
Iraq's neighbor Türkiye has taken a firm stance against attempts to manipulate its ethnic makeup.
Hours after the decision, Türkiye denounced the Iraqi move, terming it "a violation of the fundamental rights of the Turkmens, who are one of the constituent and primary components of Iraq."
"It also clearly contradicts the provisions of the Iraqi Constitution as Article Four of the Constitution stipulates that Turkmen will be the official language in the administrative units in which the Turkmen population is concentrated," read a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement.
Such steps "ignore the rights and sensitivities" of the Turkmen community and "will harm the efforts toward establishing a culture of peaceful coexistence in Kirkuk," the ministry said, urging Iraqi authorities to review the decision as soon as possible.
