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Protests in Mosul over annexing parts of
city to Kurdistan
4.7.2009
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July
4, 2009
MOSUL, Northwest Iraq,— An official of
the Turkmen Front in Mosul said on Friday they
staged a demonstration in coordination with tribal
chiefs and notables to protest the annexation of
parts of the province of Ninewa to the Iraqi
Kurdistan region.
“A peaceful demonstration was organized in the area
of al-Qobba,www.ekurd.net
north of Mosul, on
Friday afternoon with 300 tribal chiefs and notables
of Arab, Turkmen and Kurdish areas in the city to
reject some of the items contained in the Kurdistan
region,” Mohammed Jarallah, the Front’s media office
director, told Aswat al-Iraq news agency.
The predominantly Turkmen area of al-Qobbais 10 km
north of Mosul.
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“The demonstrators
called on the local government in Ninewa as well as
the central government to quickly intervene to stop
attempts of cutting parts of Ninewa to annex to
Kurdistan region,” he added.
The autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region’s parliament
ad
voted on June
24, 2009 with a majority of 96 out of 97 who
attended that session in favor of a draft
constitution that considered
Kirkuk as a Kurdish province,www.ekurd.net
in addition to some
areas in Ninewa.
The Kurdistani military forces, the Peshmearga, has
been deploying in the disputed areas for months, and
the government has been raising flags in areas it
intends to annex.
Mosul, capital city of Ninewa province in Iraq, near
the border with Kurdistan region, lies 405 km north
of Baghdad. The Yazidis are primarily ethnic Kurds located near Mosul.
A Kurdish Yazidis are primarily ethnic Kurds located
near Mosul. Some 350,000 Kurdish Yazidis live
in villages around Mosul near Kurdistan autonomous region border.
Kurdish Yazidis look to
Kurdistan region, the Kurdish Yazidis
are concentrated in key areas for the referendum,
including lands coveted by the Kurds north of Mosul
and around Sinjar on the Syrian border. The Kurds
see the referendum as a chance to right Saddam
Hussein's historic wrongs of forced population
transfer and Arabization. The Arabs see it as a
Kurdish land grab.
"We hope that the land now lived on by the Yazidis will join
the Kurdish area," the community's leader, Amir Tahseen Beg, told
the Associated Press in 2007 from his residence in Sheikhan. "This will depend
on the referendum,www.ekurd.net
but our areas must return to the original motherland."
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution states that
there will be a referendum in the areas bordering the Kurdistan autonomous
region, including the northern oil city of Kirkuk, so that people can choose
whether to be ruled by the central government or the Kurds.
The Yazidis are a dominant group in the northwest
region, a historically oppressed people who speak Kurdish and are ethnically
Kurd but follow their own religion. In fact, they are reputed to be devil
worshippers, not just by Iraqi Muslims but they’ve been characterized that way
by Western scholars over the years.
On November 1, 2008, hundreds of Iraq’s Shabak
people took to the streets in Mosul-Ninewa calling for
including them in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, according
to a local official.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, aswataliraq
info | Agencies
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