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Iraqis say Kurdish city is only safe place
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2.9.2006
By Edward Wong, 2 September
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Sulaimaniyah,
Kurdistan-Iraq, — Along with a Ferris wheel and ice
cream stands, the park at the heart of this Kurdish
city has a monument listing the names of dozens of
Kurds killed in a torture compound here by Saddam
Hussein’s intelligence officers.
Yet, there was Sabah Abdul Rahman, a former
intelligence officer, strolling just yards from the
monument with his family on a recent evening.
Driven from Tikrit, Mr. Hussein’s hometown, by
violence and their resentment of the American
military, the family had arrived here that very day
and found a $30-a-night apartment.
“This is the only safe place in all of Iraq,” said
Mr. Abdul Rahman, himself a Sunni Arab, as children
scampered around him. “There’s terrorism elsewhere
and the presence of the Americans.”
With sectarian violence boiling over in much of
Iraq, tens of thousands of Arab families are on the
move, searching for a safe place to live.
Surprisingly, given the decades of brutal Sunni Arab
rule over the Kurdish minority and the continuing
ethnic tensions, many like Mr. Abdul Rahman are
settling in the secure provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan,
run virtually as a separate country by the regional
government.
The influx of Arabs has made many Kurds nervous, and
regional leaders are debating whether to corral the
Arabs into separate housing estates or camps.
“For the Kurdish people, it’s a sensitive issue,”
said Asos Hardi, the editor of Awene, a newspaper
that has run editorials in favor of segregating the
Arab migrants. “Of course, everybody supports those
people who have left their lands and their homes
because of violence, but we don’t want it at the
expense of giving up our land or changing the
demographics of our land.”
Across Iraq, growing numbers of Arabs have been
fleeing their hometowns in search of basic security.
Outside Kurdistan, nearly 39,000 families have been
uprooted by the Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence, a
figure far higher than an estimate of 27,000
released by Iraqi officials in July, according to
the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement.
Families usually move from mixed areas to cities or
neighborhoods where their sects dominate.
But some are choosing Iraqi Kurdistan even over
sectarian enclaves in Baghdad and homogeneous cities
like Falluja, for Sunnis, and Najaf, for Shiites.
Besides having greater security, Kurdistan might
appeal to more secular Arabs because the Kurds, who
make up a fifth of Iraq, are often not religious
conservatives.
Arabs moving to Kurdistan are required to register
with security agencies, which track how many arrive
and where they live. The chief security officer for
Sulaimaniyah, the largest city in eastern Kurdistan,
said about 1,000 Arab families had moved into this
area, and that thousands more families had settled
in other parts of the Kurdish north. Most are Sunni
Arabs, said the officer, Sarkawt Hassan Jalal.
Some Arab migrants here are poor laborers. Dozens
can be seen sleeping every night outside the Qadir
Mosque in downtown Sulaimaniyah. But many migrants
come from the professional class — doctors,
engineers and professors.
Also among them are members of the ousted Baath
Party and former security or intelligence officers
like Mr. Abdul Rahman, who may be fleeing
persecution by other Iraqis or arrest by American
soldiers.
“We know the parents of families who come here are
Baathists, but they’re allowed to live in
Sulaimaniya if they have a Kurdish sponsor,” said
Muhammad Bayer Arif, the principal of the Jawahiri
School, the only primary school in the city where
classes are taught in Arabic. Enrollment has jumped
to more than 1,500 for this school year from 1,250
last year.
Many Kurds are not as sanguine as Mr. Arif. They are
all too aware of the bitter history of Arab rule
over the Kurds, which was brought to the fore in
late August when Mr. Hussein and six aides began to
stand trial on charges of killing at least 50,000
Kurds and annihilating 2,000 villages in a 1988
military campaign.
Some Kurds fear that the Arab migrants will bring
with them suicide bombers. In addition, the arrival
of middle- class Arabs has driven up rental costs of
homes by as much as 50 percent, Kurdish officials
say.
Some Kurds also say the wave of migration evokes Mr.
Hussein’s “Arabization” policy, in which he moved
Arabs into Kurdish territory and expelled more than
100,000 Kurds in order to change the demographics of
the region, especially around the Kirkuk oil fields.
“This will be another form of Arabization,” said Mr.
Hardi, the newspaper editor.
Anwar Abu Bakr Muhammad, a schoolteacher chatting
with friends in the city’s main square, said: “If
they’re separated from us and live in their own
camp, there won’t be any problems. We don’t want the
same violence that exists elsewhere in Iraq to take
place here.”
But, to some those fears seem unfounded. “Until now,
there’s been no problem,” said Mr. Jalal, the
security official, when asked about the possibility
of suicide bombers and other violence.
Many of the Arabs praise the hospitality of the
Kurds. “The people are very good to us, and we have
more freedom here,” said Mr. Abdul Rahman, the
former intelligence officer. “There are no
Americans. Tikrit is very bad — there are mass
arrests, curfews, no services, no electricity.”
He and his wife, who is half-Kurdish, brought along
their two children and Rusol, a young girl whose
father was arrested by the Americans after the
invasion. No one knows his fate. Rusol’s older
sister died of “crying and too much depression,” Mr.
Abdul Rahman said.
“We moved here to find a doctor for this girl,” he
said as Rusol cracked a shy smile.
On this late summer evening, there were many other
Arabs gathered in Freedom Park.
A young woman in a red blouse stepped off a dizzying
ride of whirling swings. She and a girlfriend had
just been screaming their heads off. The woman, Arij
Abdul Qadir, said she moved here recently from a
Shiite slum in Baghdad with her husband, their
children and her sister.
The husband found work as a hotel receptionist, so
the family has free lodging. Ms. Abdul Qadir, 30,
said one of the biggest boons was the relative
abundance of electricity — Sulaimaniyah usually has
15 hours a day, while Baghdad sputters along with 6.
“There’s no life, no electricity, no security in
Baghdad,” she said. “We’ll stay here as long as
there’s no security. When there’s security, we’ll go
back.”
Ms. Abdul Qadir said she had learned a few words of
Kurdish, and she had enrolled some of her children
in the Jawahiri School, the elementary school where
lessons are taught in Arabic.
Over at the school, the principal, Mr. Arif, said
the surge in enrollment had strained his resources.
By the time classes start in mid-September, there
could be as many as 1,700 students, Mr. Arif said.
With only 12 classrooms, the school plans to run two
shifts a day.
Enrollment has also soared at the two intermediate
schools in Sulaimaniyah that teach in Arabic.
That has raised concerns among Arab parents like
Naseer al-Yasiri, a construction manager from
Baghdad who recently enrolled two children in the
schools.
“How will they teach all those students?” he said as
he sat in a trailer on a construction site at the
city outskirts. A television was tuned to the
genocide trial of Saddam Hussein.
Kurdish neighbors recently invited the family on an
overnight trip to a mountain resort. The children
have frolicked at Freedom Park and at the Azmar
Hotel, perched high in the hills above the city.
“They were like birds freed from a cage,” Mr. Yasiri
said.
“Of course I miss Baghdad,” he added. “But when you
see it now, it’s a ghost city. Who’s left there?
Terrorists?”
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