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6,000 Kurdish troops might be sent to
secure Kirkuk city
18.7.2007 |
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July
18, 2007
Kirkuk, Kurdistan region border with (Iraq),
-- The Iraqi government will soon dispatch about
6,000 former Kurdish guards "Peshmerga" (Kurdistan
National Guard) to protect electric and oil
infrastructure from insurgents attacks, a security
official said on Tuesday.
"A brigade of 6,000 peshmerga will be sent to an
area southwest of Kirkuk to protect electric
generators between Kirkuk and Baiji," Brigadier
General Jabbar Yawar, a spokesman for the Kurdish
Regional Government security force said.
A Kurdish legislator Khaled al-Shawani told
parliament that talks are going on between the
Kurdistan Regional Government and the central
government in Baghdad about sending Kurdish troops
to the oil-rich city to protect it from further
attacks.
A deadly bombing in the city
killed Monday about 85 people
and wounded scores. All but one of the victims died
when a massive truck bomb exploded near the Kirkuk
Castle and the headquarters of the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani.
At least 55 of the 179 massive transmission towers
running between the oil hub of Kirkuk and the
central Iraqi refinery city of Baiji have been torn
down in recent years, contributing to Iraq's
frequent power outages.
Yawar said a delegation from the Kurdish government
agreed to dispatch the force after talks with Iraq's
defence minister earlier this month and are only
awaiting the final approval of Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki.
Similar plans are being drawn up to dispatch Kurdish
soldiers to the area around the northern city of
Mosul, where insurgents frequently rupture oil
pipelines connecting Kirkuk to the Turkish port of
Ceyhan.
The peshmerga are former Kurdish guerrillas who were
involved in the 2003 US-led liberation before
joining national Iraqi security forces.
Iraq could potentially export 1.2 million barrels of
oil a day from its generous Kirkuk reserves but
attacks on its northern infrastructure have left the
pipelines dry for months.
AFP | AP
**
Kirkuk city is a Kurdistani 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, its population
is a mix of majority Kurds and minority of Arabs,
Turkmen.
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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