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Kurds and Arabs vie for control of Mosul
27.9.2006 |
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Across northern Iraq
people are voting with their feet. In and around
Mosul, the third-largest Iraqi city, some 70,000
Kurds have fled their homes so far this year. Many
have run away after receiving an envelope with a
bullet inside and a note telling them to get out in
72 hours. Others became refugees because they feared
that a war between Arabs and Kurds for control of
the region was not far off.
"There is no solution except the division of the
province," said Khasro Goran, the powerful Kurdish
deputy governor of Mosul. He believes that all the
Kurds in the province want to join the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG), which under the federal
constitution is almost an independent state.
Violence in Mosul, a city of 1.75 million people, is
not as bad as in Baghdad or Diyala province, claims
Mr Goran, who is also head of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP) in Mosul, during an interview
with The Independent inside his heavily fortified
headquarters. This is not saying a great deal, since
he added that 40 to 50 people were being killed in
Mosul every week.
"Two officials from the KDP working in this building
were shot dead outside their homes a few days ago,"
said Mr Goran, an urbane, highly educated man who
spent 11 years in exile in Sweden and speaks five
languages. He has been the target of eight
assassination attempts, in which several guards have
been killed.
It was only possible for me to go to Mosul because
Mr Goran sent several of his bodyguards in two cars
to pick me up in the Kurdish capital, Erbil.
Travelling at high speed into Mosul, they pointed to
the remains of the headquarters of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, which had been destroyed by a
large suicide bomb in a Volvo in mid-August. The
blast killed 17 men, mostly soldiers on guard.
Fearing a similar attack, the KDP had just added
another concrete blast wall to its already
impressive defences.
The fate of Mosul, the largest city in Iraq in which
Sunni Arabs are in the majority, may determine how
far Iraq survives as a single country. The
proportion of Arabs to Kurds in the province and
city is much disputed.
There is no doubt that the Arabs are in a majority
of around 55 per cent in the province, but they
angrily dispute the Kurdish claim to make up a third
of the 2.7 million population. When an Arab MP in
parliament in Baghdad claimed this week that the
Kurds made up only 4 per cent of the population of
the city, all the Kurdish MPs staged a walk-out in a
fury.
At the moment nobody wholly controls Mosul, one of
the oldest urban centres on the planet, sprawling
along both banks of the Tigris river. The 2nd Iraqi
Army Division is based in the city, and the 3rd
Division is outside, each 15,000-strong, and both of
them are at least 50 per cent Kurdish, and with
Kurdish commanders. But the Americans, fearful of
the Sunni Arab reaction, have forbidden the army to
patrol too aggressively.
If the Kurds have the army, the Arabs have the
police. There are 16,000 policemen in the province,
and 6,000 in the city. The Kurds regard them with
the greatest suspicion. As we drove to the KDP
headquarters, one of the Kurdish bodyguards told me
to "hide your notebook and pen if we stop at a
police checkpoint, because we don't trust them". The
Kurds have long accused senior police officers of
being crypto-Baathists, sympathetic to the
insurgents.
The US experience in Mosul has not been happy.
During the first year of the occupation General
David Petraeus, the US commander of the 101st
Division, tried to conciliate the many officers and
officials of Saddan Hussein's regime who came from
Mosul. In the long term the experiment failed. When
US marines stormed Fallujah in November 2004, most
of the police in Mosul resigned, and insurgents
captured 30 police stations and $40m (£21m) worth of
arms almost without firing a shot. The US was forced
to call in Kurdish peshmerga fighters to retake the
city.
The US and Kurds still co-operate. The Americans are
highly reliant on Kurdish intelligence to search for
guerrillas. But they are also conscious that a
recent confidential Pentagon poll leaked to ABC
television showed that 75 per cent of Sunni Arabs in
Iraq supported armed resistance. The US forces, who
used to have four bases in the city, have now
retreated to one large base at the airport.
A final explosion may not be far away. Under article
140 of the new Iraqi constitution, there must be a
vote by the end of 2007 to decide which regions will
join the KRG. Mr Goran says that such a poll could
see all of Mosul province east of the Tigris and the
districts of Sinjar and Talafar to the west of the
river joining the KRG. "As we get closer to the
implementation of article 140, the problems will get
worse," he says.
independent co.uk
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