This paper will examine the urban interventions of the Iraqi government with a particular focus on Kirkuk from the time of the Ba‘th-led coup in 1968 to the first Gulf War. I find that, during this era, the Ba‘th Party government sought to transform the parts of Kirkuk that conformed the least to its political and ideological aims, using ethnicity—or, in Arabic, qawmiyya—as an indication of one’s loyalty to the state. Consequently, these major infrastructural projects were acts of ethnic cleansing. Soon after taking control of Iraq in 1968, the Ba‘th Party issued decrees gradually bringing many plots of land in Kirkuk under its control that were widely known to be in predominantly non-Arab neighborhoods. The Kurdish and Turkmen inhabitants of those properties were meagerly compensated, then expelled and prevented from purchasing any other property within the province. While this tactic of demographic manipulation in Ba‘th-era Iraq is well known, a less well-known strategy of displacement and coercion was the use of urban development schemes. For instance, the Iraqi government commissioned the building of a large highway interchange through the middle of a dense, overwhelmingly Kurdish residential neighborhood that was recognized as a center of resistance to Saddam Hussein, a project that certainly led to the demolition of many houses. Another focus of these development projects was Kirkuk’s citadel—the city’s ancient core, still continuously inhabited, and known as a stronghold of the remnants of its Ottoman-era Turkish-speaking culture. The citadel’s last remaining inhabitants were forced out on the pretense of preservation of its ruins, though their homes were razed in the process. The schemes conceived and carried out in Kirkuk in the Ba‘th era stand in stark contrast to urban development projects in earlier eras in Iraq, which sought to benefit, or manage, certain citizens on the basis of class rather than through the concept of differing qawmiyyas. For its primary material, this paper relies on comparisons of historical maps of Kirkuk; archival material found in the Doxiadis Archives in Athens, Greece; and items from local publications, including a bilingual periodical issued by an Iraqi Turkmen organization and a compilation of facsimiles of Ba‘th-era decrees printed in Kirkuk.