History[edit]

They are ethnic Assyrians from Kirkuk who lived in or near the citadel, where they adopted the Turkish language from Iraqi Turkmen, especially during the Ottoman Empire. Their dialect is mutually intelligible with the Iraqi Turkmen dialect. Their official hymns, eulogies, and prayers are in Turkish.^[1] Their bible is in the Ottoman Turkish language written in the 1800s and is recited by community leaders.^[2][3] The Citadel Christians are not to be confused with the community of Iraqi Turkmen who follow the Roman Catholic Church, which numbered around 30,000 in 2015 and live all across Turkmeneli, including Kirkuk, while the Citadel Christians were exclusively in Kirkuk before the migrations.^[4][5][6] The Citadel Christians, however, enjoy good relations with Iraqi Turkmen and were both persecuted by the Ba'ath regime and the Islamic State. The Citadel Christians were described as a community of "a few thousand" in 2017.^[7] The Citadel Christians, and minorities in Kirkuk in general, had much cultural heritage destroyed by the Islamic State, and had most of their churches were shelled or destroyed, and many of them migrated.^[8] The community sees itself as culturally Turkic and ancestrally Assyrian, and they do not view themself as assimilated but rather embrace the Turkic aspects, with a leader of the community saying "our language since the days of our ancestors is Turkish, which we consider our mother tongue, and on top of that, we do not know anything about Chaldean. Our traditions of cooking, activity, culture, clothing, and civil life, are all Turkish".^[7] The Citadel Christians also saw the visit by Pope Francis to Iraq in 2021 as a symbol of hope for the future.^[9]