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BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents battling U.S. and
Iraqi forces in the northern city of Mosul have been
trying to drag the Kurdish minority into their fight
and set off a sectarian war, Kurdish and Arab
officials say.
Violence against Kurds has escalated in recent days,
officials say. The offices - and officials - of
Kurdish political parties have been attacked.
Insurgents fired on a truck carrying Kurdish
peshmerga fighters. And at least one Kurd was said
to have been beheaded in Mosul, a largely Sunni Arab
city.
"They are trying to ignite the flames of sedition
between Arabs and Kurds," Khasro Gouran, Mosul's
Kurdish deputy provincial governor, said by
telephone from Mosul. "They want the Kurds to react
and the peshmerga to come in (from outside Mosul) so
there would be sectarian strife in the city."
"They won't succeed because the Kurdish leadership
is aware of their plans," Gov. Duraid Kashmoula, an
Arab, said of the insurgents.
The Kurds are not the only ones under attack. During
the latest bout of violence, masked men have stormed
police stations, looting and burning some. They've
also set up their own checkpoints and set cars
ablaze, prompting the Americans to launch military
operations to oust fighters from their stronghold in
the city.
Gouran said that in recent days three Kurds were
killed, including at least one whose decapitated
body was discovered with the head placed on the
back.
The two main Iraqi Kurdish parties are mostly
secular U.S. allies that have a bloody history of
animosity with some militant Islamic groups and
Baath Party loyalists, both believed to be active in
the Mosul insurgency. The parties have long been
targets.
The Kurdish minority generally lives in peace with
Mosul's Arab majority, although land and property
disputes have in the past created some tensions.
When the militants overpowered Mosul's police force,
which U.S. and Iraqi officials say is infiltrated by
insurgents, the local government called in
reinforcements, some of which came from the mostly
quiet Kurdish region.
Gouran said some of the Iraqi National Guard
reinforcements rushed to the city came from the
Kurdish provinces of Dohuk and Irbil. He said many
of their members were former peshmerga, a term that
refers to the Kurdish militia that fought former
Baghdad governments.
In addition, Kurdish political parties called in
peshmerga fighters to guard their offices. The
Kurdish militia proved harder for insurgents to
overpower than the police - in some cases killing or
capturing their attackers.
The solution offered its own problems: The fact that
many of the National Guardsmen were Kurds and former
peshmerga members didn't sit well with some of the
city's Arab residents.
Kurdish and Arab officials took pains to stress that
National Guardsmen were members of Iraq's security
forces regardless of their ethnicity or their
religion and that no peshmerga fighters were
patrolling the streets.
"The Kurds have no intention to take over Mosul or
to `Kurdicize' it," Gouran said. "The relationship
between Kurds and Arabs in Mosul is strong."
Such assurances fail to ease the concerns of some.
"There has been an escalation in armed attacks
against the Kurds and this proves that the Arabs
don't agree to let the Kurds control the situation
in the city, " said Salem Ghanim Aziz, an Arab
resident.
He said that having Kurdish forces could complicate
matters, arguing that Arab residents might want to
take revenge against the Kurdish fighters from the
north that some blame for taking part in the looting
that swept through Mosul when it fell during last
year's U.S.-led invasion.
"This is an Arab city and we don't accept
strangers," said another Arab resident, who
identified himself only as Abu Omar. He said he
doesn't accept the presence of Kurdish National
Guardsmen any more than that of the militants.
Some Kurdish residents said they heard Arab
neighbors gloating over recent attacks on the
Kurdish parties.
Officials say such sentiments are not widespread and
mostly come from Arabs who belonged to the former
regime, pointing to Arab-Kurdish intermarriages and
amicable relations in the city.
"People say that the Kurds have ethnic designs on
the city," said an Arab provincial council member
who didn't want his name used for fear of
retaliation. "But some of these people have Wahhabi
thoughts and others are the disadvantaged members of
the former regime who wear the mask of Arab
nationalism."
Similarly, he said, some were circulating rumors
that other security reinforcements dispatched from
Baghdad were Shiites coming to rule over the Sunni
majority.
He said the reinforcements were only trying to
"prevent Mosul from becoming another Fallujah."
Many in Mosul say they are tired of the violence
that has shattered the normalcy of their lives and
restricted their movement under a curfew imposed on
the city.
One Arab resident who asked that his name not be
used said he wanted calm to return to Mosul, be it
at Kurdish or Arab hands.
"Don't they say this is a unified Iraq? Let them
come from the north or the south as long as they
restore security," he said. "Let's forget this talk
about ethnicity and religion."
"We're living in hell," he said. "We want to able to
go out to the market. We're sick of this."
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