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Fire and Water: The First Five Hundred Years
The first experience of the country now known as Iraq with the nomadic Turkmens or Turkomans (also called Ghuzz or Oghuz) occurred in the early 1040s. It was at this time that massive Turkmen migrations from Central Asia produced the dynasty of the Seljuk Turks who, under their early sultans - Toghrul Beg, Alp Arslan, and Malik Shah - came to dominate the Islamic heartland - Iran, Iraq, and Syria - by the last quarter of the eleventh century. The Seljuk Turks advanced south out of the Central Asian steppes, then westward across northern Iran in two successive groups, the first referred to by Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir as the Iraqi Turkmens or simply "Iraqis." They took this name not from present-day Iraq, which corresponds roughly to ancient Mesopotamia, but from northwestern Iran, then caUed the Jibal ("the Uplands") or Iraq 'Adjami ("Persian Iraq") where they briefly settled, not without horrific devastation, during the 1030s. Curiously enough, the Iraqi Turkmens, whüe serving as the vanguard for their Seljuk cousins led by Toghrul Beg, refused to submit to their authority and fled before them into the region called the Jazirah (Arabic: "island"), which included parts of northern Iraq, including Mosul (al-Mausil) and Singara (Sindjar). They burst upon the scene as much in the role of refugee as invader, a distinction that would have mattered little to those whom they piUaged and slaughtered.
In early 1044, the Iraqi Turkmens captured Mosul, then ruled by the Arab emir Qirwash (Karwash) Mu'tamid ad-Daulah ibn MuqaUad. Qirwash belonged to a prominent Bedouin tribe called the Banu 'Uqail, who, like certain other Bedouin tribes of that period, had abandoned their footloose, predatory ways and put down roots in a cultivated region. In the case of the Banu 'UqaU, their baUiwick was Mosul and surrounding cities such as Tell ' Afar, as well as the land stretching to the west as far as the Jabal Sindjar. After having been driven out of his capital, Qirwash regrouped, largely with the help of his tribe, the Banu 'UqaU, and another Arab dynast, Dubais, who ruled between Kufa and Hit (the Kurds were either late in providing help or gave none at all). On the twentieth...