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Northern Iraq grows increasingly violent 9.10.2006
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KIRKUK, Kurdistan
(Iraq) October 8, -- Bombings and shootings are
increasing in Iraq's north as part of a power
struggle between Arabs and Kurds. Car bombings in
oil-rich Kirkuk grew fivefold last month and
hundreds of Kurdish families have left the north's
biggest city, Mosul, to escape the violence.
The bloodshed is not nearly on the scale of Baghdad,
where thousands have died in recent months in a wave
of sectarian killings and insurgent attacks. In the
provinces where Mosul and Kirkuk are located, the
toll has been several hundred during the summer.
But the creeping violence in the north — a region
U.S. officials had hoped was getting more stable —
underlines the difficulty in keeping all of Iraq's
potential hotspots under control at once.
It also suggests growing strains in another of
Iraq's sectarian divides. Baghdad has been suffering
from violence between Sunni and Shiite death squads.
In the north, the tensions are between Arabs and
Kurds, who claim Kirkuk as part of their autonomous
zone of Kurdistan to the north.
The violence also has begun to take on the grisly
nature of Baghdad's sectarian killings: In recent
months, authorities in Kirkuk and Mosul have found
bodies dumped in the city, their hands bound with
signs they were tortured before their deaths.
Kirkuk officials have gone so far as to dig a
10-mile trench around the southern and western
sectors of the city — where Sunni Arabs are
concentrated — to cut off side roads in an attempt
to stop car bombs from entering.
Some 2,000 Iraqi soldiers and police launched a
sweep through Kirkuk on Friday and Saturday,
ordering people off the streets and searching homes
for weapons and suspects.
"It makes me feel there's some security in the
city," Ashti Mohammed, a Kurdish mother of five,
said after her house was searched Saturday. "I
always feel terrorized each time my children leave
for school. If I hear an explosion, no matter how
far away, I'm afraid for them."
The number of car bomb attacks in the city jumped
from three in August to 16 in September, according
to figures from Kirkuk police. The number of deaths
from violence in the city rose from 12 to 42.
Numbers for the rest of Tamim province, where Kirkuk
is the capital, were not available. But Associated
Press figures gathered from police reports show a
swell of violence. July was the peak with at least
93 dead, compared to around 20 a month in the
spring.
The attacks are largely blamed on Sunni Arab
insurgents targeting Kurds and the Kurdish-dominated
police force.
Kirkuk is the center of what many warn could be a
major conflict looming in Iraq. The Sunni Arab-led
regime of Saddam Hussein moved thousands of Kurds
out of the city and brought in Arabs to "arabize"
the city and solidify control over its oil wealth.
The city's population of around a million is thought
to be about 40 percent Kurdish and 30 percent Arab,
with a substantial population of ethnic Turkomen —
though exact figures do not exist.
Since Saddam's fall, Kurds have flooded back to the
area, many of them living in camps or stadiums
awaiting new homes. The Iraqi constitution calls for
Kurds to be assisted in returning and for those
brought in by Saddam's regime to be removed ahead of
a referendum on whether to include the city in the
Kurdistan region.
Sheik Abdul-Rahman al-Munshid, a top sheik in the
Sunni Arab Obeid tribe, blamed the increasing
violence on "the attempts at ethnic cleansing that
the Arabs feel Kurdish parties are working for."
"It is the demands of the Kurdish political forces
and their attempt to throw out all groups and to
work to make Kirkuk part of the northern region that
create this fear among non-Kurds," he said.
In Mosul, to the northwest, it's the Kurds who are
feeling under siege. Some 750 families have moved
out of the city in the past three months, fleeing to
Kurdish villages in the province under the
protection of Kurdish peshmerga militias, said Hamid
Zaimil, a Kurdish representative on the city
council.
Abdul-Ghani Botani, an official with the Kurdistan
Democratic Party — one of the two chief Kurdish
parties — said 1,500 families have fled the city
since Saddam's fall in April 2003.
On Saturday, a prominent KDP lawyer was shot to
death outside his home. In August, a suicide bomber
detonated a car packed with explosives outside the
offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the
other main Kurdish party, killing nine people.
Sunni Arabs dominate Mosul — but not by much, with
some 1.8 million out of the province's 4 million
people, living alongside a population of some 1.3
million Kurds. The rest are a mixture of Turkoman,
Yazidi and other ethnicities.
Police could not provide official death figures from
the province, but AP reports showed that deaths
numbered around 80 a month from July through
September, up from a few dozen a month in the
spring.
U.S. forces launched a major sweep in Mosul in late
2004 after Sunni insurgents fleeing their stronghold
in Fallujah started carrying out attacks in the
city. This year, troop levels decreased gradually,
and currently stand at 4,000 troops, tasked mainly
with training Iraqi forces. Some troops that already
had been due to rotate out were moved to Baghdad in
August to participate in the sweep there.
Zaimil, the Kurdish city council member, said Mosul
could be feeling the fallout from sectarian tensions
further south. He said violence increased when Sunni
Arabs fleeing violence by Shiite militias in the far
southern city of Basra arrived in Mosul.
Botani, the KDP official said Sunni Arabs "still
cannot recognize the Kurdish minority in Mosul."
"We have moved from dictatorship in the government
to dictatorship in the street. The old regime used
to drive out Kurds, and the same thing is happening
now, just now it's done in the streets by killings
and bombings," he said.
AP
The former Iraqi president forced about 250,000
Kurdish residents to give up their homes to Arabs in
the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city and the region's
oil industry.
Kirkuk city is not under the full control of
Kurdistan Regional Government administration. A
referendum in 2007 will decide whether the oil-rich
Kurdish province should be annexed to the safe
semiautonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq's north.
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