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Struggle never ends for Iraqi Kurds in
Kirkuk
21.11.2007
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November
21, 2007
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- Driven from their homes in 1987 by Saddam
Hussein because they were Kurds, the Fakeh and
Nasser families have now returned to the
northeastern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.
But while the first wave of families to arrive back
to this hotspot of sectarian violence have been able
to return to their homes, those who followed endure
squalor and suffering, forced to squat in abandoned
army barracks.
"One day Saddam's men came and said 'You are Kurds.
You have one week to get out'," says Jiane Fakeh,
45, on the doorstep of a house overlooking the
desert outskirts of Kirkuk, an ethnically volatile
and much fought over oil hub.
"When the soldiers came back seven days later, they
took all our belongings."
This plump and smiling woman came back to the land
of her ancestors in 2003, but in place of their
farmhouse, which was torn down by an Arab from the
main northern city of Mosul, now stands a huge
villa.
The walls are decorated with ornate plaster horses
and a carved lookout turret. Towering above the
entrance sits an enormous portrait of Saddam,
dressed in bedouin clothing, still discernable
despite a top layer of paint.
"The old owner was a mukhabarat (spy) for Saddam,
but above all, a massive oil smuggler," laughs Fuad
Fakeh, 27.
"He thought putting a huge portrait of Saddam
outside his house would protect him from the police.
The first thing the people did when they started
coming back here 20 days after the Americans entered
Baghdad, was to paint over the portrait."
Hidden away for 16 years in the neighbouring town of
Erbil, now the capital of the autonomous Kurdish
region of Iraq, the Fakeh family used to regularly
pass by their old home.
"We saw the house being built but we were not
allowed to stop or speak to the people there. The
whole village was full of Arabs. Saddam's people.
Giving them Kurdish land was their reward," says
Adnan Fakeh, 27.
"We were lucky because this particular Arab was a
crook. He was frightened of the new authorities and
he had the money to move away," he adds. "This was
not the case for all my friends."
www.ekurd.net
Four years ago they began the arduous process of
replanting vegetables and corn, buying new cattle
and rebuilding chicken coops.
"Thank you, America," says Ibrahim Fakeh, 22.
"Without you, we would never have been able to
return home. The Kurds will never forget that."
In the slum district of Nasser, where buildings such
as the former headquarters of Saddam's feared secret
service have empty rooms and broken windows covered
with plastic sheets, smiles are more rare.
The Kurds were poverty-stricken before being driven
out and are poverty-stricken still, after 15 years
of food shortages and being pushed from one Kurdish
region to another, even as far as Iran.
At 33-years-old, Shler Nasser, her face hidden by a
white veil, looks at least 20 years older. "We
returned to Kirkuk after the fall of Saddam," she
says as she cleans an old cooker in the courtyard.
"We were from here. We said to ourselves that maybe
if we go back we will be given a house... But we
were wrong. Life here is terrible."
Her carpenter husband looks for work during the day
but unlike other Kurdish regions where construction
is booming, in Kirkuk, where political and criminal
violence reign, building work is scarce.
"I earn between 150 to 200 dollars in a good
month... Hardly enough to eat. If I had known what
it was going to be like, I would have stayed at
Shamshamal... But now, I don't have enough money to
return."
There are thousands of Kurds like Nasser, squatting
in stadiums, barracks and abandoned buildings in
Kirkuk.
His cousin Goran Omar, 22, is one of them. Six
months ago a car bomb exploded around 100 metres
(yards) from him, knocking him from his bicycle.
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"There are kidnappings, but they do not go after the
poor like us. Shootings but above all the bombings;
The bombings are the worst... But if you are too
frightened, you cannot survive here. So you can't
afford to be afraid."
AFP
Kirkuk city is a
Kurdish city
and it lies just south border of the Kurdistan
autonomous region and it is not under the full
control of Kurdistan Regional Government
administration, the population is a mix of majority
Kurds and minority of Arabs, Christians and Turkmen.
lies 250 km northeast of Baghdad.
The former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein forced
over 250,000 Kurdish residents to give up their
homes to Arabs in the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city
and the region's oil industry.
Based on Iraq's Constitution a referendum is to be
held in late 2007 to decide whether the oil-rich
Kurdish province should be annexed to the safe
semiautonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq's north.
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