LONDON, March 26 (UPI) -- The Baghdad government has expelled 150 Kurdish and Turkoman tradesman and seized their land in Kirkuk, a major oil center, an Iraqi Kurdish newspaper reported Tuesday.

The report appeared in Brayti, the daily newspaper of the Kurdistan Democratic Party led by Masud Barzani. The KDP controls a part of the de facto autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan adjacent to Kirkuk.

The Iraqi government, the paper said, had broken contracts signed with Kurdish and Turkoman merchants to settle the area with Arabs.

According to analysts, the regime of Saddam Hussein has conducted an "Arabization" campaign in Kirkuk and other areas in Northern Iraq over the past 20 years.

One device employed by the Iraqi authorities is a "nationality correction" law, under which Kurds are required to "correct" their nationality by signing papers denouncing their birth records and stating they are Arab. Kurds who refuse to sign have their property seized, according to observers familiar with the area.

Kurds in the Kirkuk area who refuse to change their ethnic identity are denied food rations, government employment and the possibility of registering their children, according to Sayidi Barzinji.

Barzinji, president of Salahadin University in the Kurdish city of Erbil, is quoted in the most recent issue of the New Yorker magazine. 

The government has ordered maternity wards to register only Arab names, Barzinji said. 

In the past two years, more than 100,000 Kurds have been expelled from Kirkuk, according to both the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which rules the other part of the autonomous region.

The Kurds are estimated to number 4.5 million in Iraq and the Turkoman, descendants of Turkic tribes long settled in the area, are thought to number between 350,000 and 500,000. Turkoman and Turkish estimates are much higher. The population of Iraq is estimated at about 23.5 million, the majority of whom are Shiite Muslim Arabs with a minority of Sunni Muslim Arabs.

The New Yorker reported Baghdad's campaign of Arabizing Kurdish territory was continuing unabated.

The KDP and the PUK, under Jalal Talbani, have shared control of most of Iraqi Kurdistan since the defeat of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Kirkuk lies just south of the no-fly zone patrolled by U.S. and British aircraft to prevent Saddam from attacking the Kurds and other minorities, including Turkoman and Christian Assyrians, who inhabit the autonomous area.