BAGHDAD

An Iraqi lawmaker has called on the Turkmen community to increase their birth rate.

"Despite the difficult living conditions nowadays, everyone should increase the number of children," Arshad Salihi, the head of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, said on his Facebook page.

“We need to increase the number of our souls," he said.

The Iraqi MP argued that the Turkmen family was composed of around ten members in the past.

The Turkmens are Iraq’s third largest ethnic community after Arabs and Kurds.

There are no official figures for Iraq’s total Turkmen population, but Turkmen officials say they account for about 7 percent of the country's population of 38 million.