|
Strife in Mosul as Sunni Arabs Drive Out
Kurds
30.5.2007
|
|
|
|
Kurds, Sunnis struggle for Mosul
May 30, 2007
MOSUL, Northern Iraq, -- The letter tossed
into Mustafa Abu Bakr Muhammad's front yard got
right to the point.
"You will be killed," it read, for collaborating
with the Kurdish militias. Then came the bullet
through a window at night.
A cousin had already been gunned down. So Muhammad
and three generations of his family joined tens of
thousands of other Kurds who have fled growing
ethnic violence by Sunni Arab insurgents here and
moved east, to the safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.
"We had our home in Mosul and it was good there, but
things are now very bad between Arabs and Kurds,"
said Muhammad, 70, standing outside his new,
scorpion-infested cinderblock house in the nearby
town of Khabat.
While the US military is trying to tamp down the
vicious fighting between rival Arab sects in
Baghdad, conflict between Arabs and Kurds is
intensifying here, adding another dimension to
Iraq's civil war. Sunni Arab militants, reinforced
by insurgents fleeing the new security plan in
Baghdad, are trying to rid Mosul of its Kurdish
population through violence and intimidation,
Kurdish officials said.
Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, with a population
of 1.8 million, straddles the Tigris River on a
grassy, windswept plain in the country's north. It
was recently estimated to be about a quarter
Kurdish, but Sunni Arabs have already driven out
at least 70,000 Kurds and virtually erased the
Kurdish presence from the city's western half, said
Khasro Goran, the deputy governor of surrounding
Nineveh Province and a Kurd.
The militants "view this as a Sunni-dominated town,
and they view the Kurds as encroaching on Mosul,"
said Colonel Stephen Twitty, commander of the 4th
Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, which is deployed in
Nineveh.
Some Kurdish and Christian enclaves remain on the
east side, though their numbers are dwindling.
Kurdish officials say the flight has accelerated in
recent months, contributing to the wider ethnic and
religious partitioning that is taking place all over
Iraq.
Nineveh is Iraq's most diverse province, with a
dizzying array of ethnic and religious groups woven
into an area about the size of Maryland. For
centuries, Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Turkmens,
Yezidis, and Shabaks lived side by side in these
verdant hills, going to the same schools, bartering
in the same markets, even marrying one another on
occasion.
But what took generations to build is starting to
unravel in the shadow of the Sunni Arab insurgency,
which is tapping into several wells of ethnic
resentment.
Already embittered at the toppling of Saddam
Hussein's Sunni Arab government, insurgents here
have been further enraged by their current political
disenfranchisement, the result of their boycotting
the 2005 elections. The main Kurdish coalition now
holds 31 of 41 seats on the provincial council and
all the top executive positions, even though Kurds
make up only 35 percent of the province.
Sunni Arabs have asked for new provincial elections
and are growing frustrated that the Shi'ite- and
Kurdish-dominated national government seems to be
ignoring their requests.
Just as worrisome for the Arabs is a growing push by
the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan to annex
large swaths of eastern and northern Nineveh. A
contentious measure in the Constitution gives the
regional Kurdish government the right to take the
land by the end of 2007 through a popular
referendum.
The parts of the province that Iraqi Kurdistan wants
are called the "disputed territories" along its
border, areas that were historically Kurdish until
Saddam Hussein moved in Arabs and forced out half a
million Kurds to strengthen Arab control, Kurdish
officials say.
nytimes com
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 