Iranian Turkmen are a seminomadic people who practice Sunni Islam in a Shia-dominated country.  Today, Turkmen in Iran are primarily herders and farmers, cultivating cotton, wheat and barley, in rural areas of the country’s northeast.[1]

The traditional Turkmen tribal structure is remarkably egalitarian.  Decisions are based on the consensus of an assembly, and tribal leaders or khans – who are not chosen on the basis of lineage or wealth – are charged with being the principal servants of their community.[2]

Demography

Turkmen currently constitute approximately 2 percent of the Iranian population, according to the latest CIA World Factbook estimates, which would put their number at roughly 1.3 million.[3]  It is difficult to determine the extent to which their numbers have fluctuated over time, however, as the Iranian government has not consistently assessed ethnic composition in its national censuses in an effort to present a unified national image.[4]  Past estimates do exist, but they tend to vary considerably.  A 1997 estimate puts their number at 2 million.[5]  A country study of Iran commissioned by the U.S. government in the late 1980s claims that there were 250,000 Turkmen in Iran in 1986.[6]  One scholar has put their number at 863,000 in 1928.[7]  It is not clear, however, whether these estimates were posited by the Iranian government, the U.S., or a non-state entity such as the United Nations, and as such their accuracy is uncertain. 

Outside of Iran, most Turkmen reside in Turkmenistan (85 percent Turkmen) or Afghanistan (3 percent Turkmen).[8]

Geographic Distribution

Most Iranian Turkmen live near Iran’s border with Turkmenistan, but there are also significant concentrations farther west in the northeastern section of Mazandaran Province.[9]  Major Turkmen communities in Iran exist in Gonbad-e Kavus and Pahlavi Dezh.[10]  Outside Turkmenistan and Iran, Afghanistan’s Fariab and Badhjis provinces are home to considerable Turkmen communities.[11]

Historic Hardship

Like other non-Persian groups in Iran, Turkmen have long suffered hardship at the hands of various regimes.  While they were afforded significant autonomy between 1795 and 1925 under the Qajar ruling family, which had come from a Turkic-speaking section of Mazandaran, things took a turn for the worse when Reza Shah ascended to the throne.[12]  As shah officially from 1926 until 1941, he launched a brutal pacification campaign against ethnic tribes in an attempt to strengthen national unity.[13]  As part of the campaign, the Shah executed tribal leaders whom he perceived to hold excessive power.[14]  Reza Shah’s policies led to a mass exodus of Turkmen to the Soviet Union during the 1920s.[15]  Many of these individuals returned in the 1930s, however, after enduring religious discrimination under Soviet rule.[16]  Reza Shah abdicated the throne when British and Soviet troops invaded Iran during World War II, but foreign occupation also provoked unrest, including uprisings by several Turkmen tribes.[17]

Decades later, after the Islamic revolution of 1979 resulted in the installation of fundamentalist Shia rule, the Sunni Turkmen again rose up, demanding autonomy, political representation, and language rights in a rebellion that was ultimately crushed by the new government.[18]  During the 1980s, as the regime continued to suppress the rights of women and minorities – as illustrated by a notable incident in 1983 when a government decree ordering Turkmen women to stop working on farms sparked reactionary violence – and the Iran-Iraq war carried on, large numbers of Iranian Turkmen sought refuge in Turkey.[19] 

During the 1990s tensions dissipated somewhat, as Iran and Turkmenistan moved to further stabilize their relationship.  At the beginning of the decade, Iran and the Soviet Republic of Turkmania (today Turkmenistan) entered into an agreement that allowed Turkmen greater freedom to cross the borders of the two nations for the purposes of tourism and religious pilgrimage.[20]  Discrimination against minorities continues today though, and ethnic tensions have risen of late under the hard-line rule of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

Ongoing Hardship

While the Turkmen-inhabited northeastern region of Iran has been largely spared the ethnic violence that has erupted elsewhere in the country of late – cited by some as the most serious ethnic unrest in Iran’s modern history[21] – under the Ahmadinejad regime, non-Persians and non-Shias still continue to endure considerable hardship.[22]  Turkmen, as well as their Sunni brethren among Iran’s Kurds, Arabs, and Baluchis, have been largely shut out of upper-level government positions.[23]  Moreover, Sunnis endure restrictions on language rights and the ability to worship freely, and some have claimed that the media promulgates anti-Sunni propaganda.[24]

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