Turks outside of Turkey
Due to a long history of migration and resettlement, there are more than a few non-Turkish Turks, i.e. ethnic Turks, speaking Turkish and with Turkish cultural practices, but no formal legal connection to the Turkish Republic, living outside of Turkey. These communities exist all over the middle east and eastern Europe in the former territory of the Ottoman Empire, but many of them have shrunk as a result of migration to Turkey or to other countries. In much of eastern Europe, in particular Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, and Kosovo, large Turkish communities exist and have some legal rights to study and use their own language, but local discrimination and long standing ethnic tensions do exist, especially in Greece which does not recognize the existence of a large part of its Turkish community. In the Levant, Iraq has a large Turkish minority, approximately 3 million people (out of 35 million total Iraqis), who are called Iraqi Turkmen (note: Turkmen in this case is the term used to describe Turks living in Arab countries; Turkmen is also the name of an ethnic group living in Turkmenistan. They’re all Turkic peoples). Syria likewise has between several hundred thousand to three million Syrian Turkmen (the Syrian Civil War has made accurate counting difficult and there is limited data beforehand) Both of these populations were and are heavily oppressed by the respective Ba’athist regimes in their countries, including being banned from using or teaching Turkish, so many speak Arabic as a first or second language. North Africa (excluding Morocco) has a large population of Turkish descent, but it’s difficult to ascertain accurate numbers so estimates range from several hundred thousand to up to a quarter of the population of each country depending on who is doing the estimates. In all of these cases, identifying someone as Turkish is a political statement. It builds a direct tie between the Turkish Republic and these communities which can be regarded with suspicion or repression by the other governments or communities in the region, and while the Turkish Republic is politically distinct from the Ottoman Empire, there’s an undertone of its former control and legacy that’s present. Wars and political conflicts make it difficult to get accurate figures on the Turkish population outside of Turkey as well as information on their cultural identity and practices.
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