The World Factbook, described as "information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities," is perhaps the most prominent unclassified publication of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a major source of information.
Yet, a numerical discrepancy concerning the ethnic makeup of Iran prompted me three months ago, on October 5, 2014, to send the agency a letter (via its website):
Dear Sir or Madam:
I have looked at the World Factbook (WF) figures since 2000 on the question of ethnicity in Iran.
From 2000 through January 2011, the WF uses one set of numbers, which indicate that 51 percent of the population is Persian; but then, in November 2011, it switches to a 61 percent figure for Persians, where it has remained ever since. This is ostensibly based, the WF says in the November 2011 entry, on a 2008 estimate.
In the space of 10 months, then, the Persians increased 10 percent, the Lur 4 percent, the Kurds 3 percent, the Turkmen & Baloch remained unchanged, the Arabs lost 1 percent, the Azeris 8 percent, and the Gilaki and Mazandarani vanished.
One wonders (1) why it took 3 years to incorporate this estimate and (2) where such dramatically different percentages come from. Could you help me understand this change?
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Pipes
Middle East Forum
An automated reply quickly came back:
Thank you for contacting the CIA. Your question or comment has been successfully submitted. Your confirmation number is 5UGH8Y. Due to the large volume of inquiries we receive, we may not be able to respond to your e-mail.
By way of proof, here are screen shots from the WF over a period of years, starting with the 2000 edition:
The January 2011 edition:
The November 2011 edition:
The January 2013 edition:
The December 2013 edition:
The April 2014 edition:
Three months have now passed, long enough to conclude that the agency found my questions unworthy of its attention. Or, perhaps, it was embarrassed by the questions? The first answer suggests that the roughly $15 billion institution needed years to keep up with current information; the second implies that the Obama administration seeks to curry favor with Tehran by making the Persian element substantially larger than it should be, thereby hiding the extent to which the Islamic Republic of Iran is an empire, one in which the non-Persian elements are repressed by the dominant Persians.
If I am wrong, the CIA needs to explain itself. (January 5, 2015)
Jan. 4, 2018 update: Brenda Shaffer offers strikingly different figures for Iran:
ethnic minorities comprise more than half of the country's total population of 82 million, according to mainstream academic assessments. The largest group is Azerbaijanis (approximately 24 million), followed by Kurds (8 million), Lurs (3 million), Arabs (3 million), Turkmens (3 million), and Baluch (3 million).
Dec. 16, 2019 update: Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council takes up this usually-hidden topic today in National Interest, noting that exactly how ethnically diverse Iran actually is, remains "a matter of some debate."
There are currently "no agreed-upon academic or governmental sources on Iran's ethnic make-up," says Brenda Shaffer of Georgetown University, one of the country's leading experts on Iran's ethnic minorities. And because there aren't, U.S. government estimates — including the CIA's vaunted World Factbook, which policy institutes and academia routinely rely on for figures — have tended to reflect official Iranian data regarding the population of its provinces.
That, Shaffer insists, is a mistake, because the Iranian regime has a vested interest in overrepresenting the country's Persian majority — and underplaying the size and salience of other ethnic groups. By her estimates, "the most reliable estimates of what Iran actually looks like internally" can be extrapolated from earlier, and less political, sociological surveys carried out in the 1970s. Based on those figures, Shaffer projects that Iran's current population of more than eighty-five million is made up of some forty-two million Persians, an estimated twenty-seven million Azerbaijanis, and roughly eight million Kurds, five million Arabs, two million Turkmen, and one-and-a-half million Baluch.
In other words, while Persians are indeed a majority within the Islamic Republic, their numbers are considerably more modest than generally advertised. The rest of the country, meanwhile, is comprised of a number of large and influential ethnic groups.
These groups are mostly concentrated in Iran's various provinces, from East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan and Ardabil in the country's northwest (home to the bulk of Iranian Azerbaijanis) to Sistan-Baluchistan in the southeast, where the preponderance of Iranian Baluch reside.
Let's restate Berman's version of Shaffer's numbers more clearly: 85 million total in Iran, made up of 42 million Persians, 27 million Azerbaijanis, 8 million Kurds, 5 million Arabs, 2 million Turkmen, and 1½ million Baluch. Two obvious problems: 42 is not "indeed a majority" of 85 and these numbers total 85½ million.
Putting those problems aside, Shaffer's figures show Persians at 49.1 percent, Azerbaijanis at 31.6, Kurds at 9.4 percent, Arabs at 5.8 percent, Turkmen at 2.3 percent, and Baluch at 1.8 percent. In other words, Persians constitute a slight minority.
Feb. 1, 2021 update: And that slight minority seems to be cascading down, according to figures from David Goldman, who adds a whole other dimension to this topic. He points out that Iran's overall Total Fertility Rate (number of children per woman, TFR) is 1.7 but the ethnic Persians' TFR is just 1.0. Assuming the Persian and non-Persian populations are close to parity, that implies a non-Persian TFR of about 2.4, or almost 2½ times that of the Persians. In which case, the CIA increase of the Persian population from 51 to 61 percent is doubly absurd and inaccurate. If anything, the Persian population is heading toward 41 percent.
Apr. 28, 2021 update: Brenda Shaffer concludes her study Iran Is More than Persia: Ethnic Politics in the Islamic Republic with some policy recommendations, the first of which is, "Revise U.S. government publications, including the CIA's World Factbook, about the size of ethnic groups in Iran."
May 31, 2021 update: Well, the CIA has responded to these critiques in its own muffled and inadequate way. First, it changed URL, so the old one does not work and the older volumes are no longer accessible; click here for the new URL. Second, it went mute on the size of ethnic groups (and their languages) in Iran. All it says now is:
Ethnic groups: Persian, Azeri, Kurd, Lur, Baloch, Arab, Turkmen and Turkic tribes
Languages: Persian Farsi (official), Azeri and other Turkic dialects, Kurdish, Gilaki and Mazandarani, Luri, Balochi, Arabic
This cop-out can be understood several ways: 1. Throwing up the hands in the face of contradictory pressures of Tehran and the truth. 2. Wanting to avoid future criticism. 3. Avoiding political pressures from the Trump and Biden administrations.
Whatever the truth is, it's likely shameful.
