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Kurdish troops in Iraq because they
'Cannot sit still and watch Kurdish civilians
killed'
26.8.2011
By Yaseen Taha
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August 26, 2011
DIYALA,
Iraq, — As US troops prepare to withdraw, conflict
along ethnic and sectarian lines is one of Iraq’s
greatest potential problems. Now Kurdish troops are
moving into Diyala province to protect their own
people there.
“Our patience is not eternal and we cannot take it
anymore. As of today, we will protect our people
with our own hands.” This was the statement made by
Kurdish politician Mahmoud al-Sangawi as he
announced that military forces from the
semi-autonomous state of Iraqi Kurdistan were being
dispatched to the Diyala province inside Iraq proper
to protect the Kurdish people living there.
Al-Sangawi is a high ranking member of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two leading
political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan, who currently
administer the region.
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Kurdistan Peshmerga Brigade in Khanaqin.
The Diyala district,
which includes a string of villages and some of
Iraq's oil reserves, is home to about 175,000 Kurds. |
The Kurdish forces have
been deployed beyond the borders of the
semi-autonomous state because, according to
officials, ongoing and recent violence in Diyala has
led to deaths and displacement among the Kurdish
living there.
The Kurdish bloc in Baghdad’s parliament recently
estimated that, since the fall of the former Iraqi
regime after a US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003,
nearly 500 Kurdish civilians have been killed in the
Diyala region and 1,400 Kurdish families have been
displaced because of violence against them. The
province, which is 55 kilometres northeast of the
Iraqi capital Baghdad, is made up of six districts
and has a population of around 1.5 million people.
These are a mixture of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen –
although Arabs make up almost three quarters of
Diyala’s population, there are some areas where
Kurds are in the majority.
A press release issued by the PUK after its last
meeting in mid-August concluded that “the tense
situation in Sadiya, Jalawla and other Kurdish areas
in the Diyala province poses a real and direct
threat to all Kurdish people. Careful investigation
has revealed that attacks [against Kurdish] are not
being carried out by terrorists,” the politicians
said, “but are being organized as part of a campaign
that seeks to continue the policies of Arabisation.”
Arabisation was the name given to a policy practised
by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein that saw
hundreds of thousands of Kurdish families deported
and ethnic Arab families brought in to take their
place. The tug of war over geography in places like
Diyala, Kirkuk and Mosul has continued even after
Hussein’s regime toppled. In 2003, Article 140 of
the new Iraqi constitution was formulated to remedy
the expulsions, the ethnic cleansing and Arabisation,
through three steps.
These are, firstly, normalization - a return of
Kurds and other residents displaced by Arabisation –
followed by a census taken to determine the
demographic makeup of the province's population and
then finally, a referendum to determine the status
of disputed territories. Obviously whether a
territory is home to mainly Kurds or mainly Arabs
will have an effect on who can lay claim to the
area.
Originally Article 140 was supposed to begin to be
implemented at the end of 2007. However as yet, no
real steps appear to have been taken and all the
while tensions between Iraqi and Kurdish interests
in disputed areas continue to rise. And
post-US-withdrawal, analysts believe that if a civil
war was to start in Iraq, then these types of
disputed areas might well become flashpoints for
conflict.
In fact after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq,
Kurdish military forces – known as the Peshmerga –
were sent to serve in several parts of Diyala. Often
US troops had acted as a buffer between Kurdish and
Iraqi forces and they’d also trained a number of
tri-partite forces, consisting of themselves as well
as Iraqi and Kurdish military. Eventually though,
the Kurdish forces had been convinced to leave the
Diyala province, leaving the security of the Kurds
resident there in Iraqi army, Iraqi police and US
military hands.
However, as recent political declarations and troop
movements indicate, this month things have changed.
On Aug. 18, a representative of the government of
Iraqi Kurdistan Kurdish, Kamal Kirkuki, explained
that the 2008 withdrawal of Peshmerga forces from
Diyala had been made because of pressure from the US
and he described it as a “strategic mistake”.
“These areas are part of the Kurdistan region,”
Kirkuki argued, “and it is our duty to send the
Peshmerga forces there to save the lives of
citizens. We asked for deployment of the Peshmerga
in the Kurdish parts of Diyala and the government of
Iraqi Kurdistan has responded positively to that
request.”
Several thousand Peshmerga fighters have now taken
up positions on the outskirts of towns in Diyala
where Kurds have been attacked. According to
information obtained by Niqash, the Kurdish forces
are heavily armed. They have also been given
dispensation by local clerics to break the fast
expected of them during the month of Ramadan,www.ekurd.neta
holy month during which Muslims fast and refrain
from smoking or sex during the day in order to learn
humility, spirituality and patience. The fatwa – a
religious opinion issued by a holy man – was issued
because, as one of the clerics said, because the
Peshmerga troops “are travelling and performing a
sacred duty.”
The towns of Sadiya and Jalawla, both in the
Khanaquin district where the Peshmerga have been
deployed, are home to a mixture of Arabs and Kurds.
And Kurdish theorists have voiced their suspicions
that there is also a hidden battle to categorize
these areas as home to either one ethnicity or the
other.
Official statistics appear to indicate that
currently the Arab ethnicity is winning. The number
of Kurds living in the area has dropped since the
regime change in 2003 and the number of Arabs has
gone up. In the town of Jalawla, the percentage of
Arab residents has gone from 40 to 77. In Sadiya,
Arabs went from 37 per cent of the population to 82
and the number of Kurdish declined from 31 per cent
to just 7 per cent. And in Qartaba, the Arab
population has risen from 52 per cent to 66, while
the Kurdish dropped from 27 to 16 per cent.
The numbers of Kurds living in the area had fallen
because of security concerns, Jabbar Yawar, the
spokesperson for the Kurdish Peshmerga military
forces, argued. Out of 555 people who were killed in
the area, 423 were Kurdish. Yawar also listed the
number of families that had been forced to leave
their homes in the Diyala province: 679 in Jalawla,
610 in Sadiya and 64 in Qartaba.
In Baghdad, the spokesperson for the Kurdish voting
bloc in Iraq’s federal parliament, Muayad al-Tayeb,
told reporters at a press conference held in his
Baghdad office that Kurds in the area had made
formal complaints about the performance of Iraqi
military in the region. He accused the Iraqi armed
forces of condoning attacks against Kurds, saying
that “we believe that [Iraqi prime minister] Nouri
al-Maliki, as commander in chief of the armed
forces, can put an end to violence in the region.”
The deterioration in the security situation comes at
a particularly difficult time, just as US forces are
slowly withdrawing from Iraq, with American forces
that were previously cooperating with Iraqi and
Kurdish military ceasing those operations at the
beginning of August.
Burhan Mohammed, a Kurdish MP in Baghdad, believes
the tensions in Diyala stem from the Iraqi
government’s lack of commitment to Article 140.
Hardly any of the plans mooted in Article 140 have
been acted upon and “this has opened the door wide
for the expulsion of Kurdish families from their
homes,” Mohammed said.
Meanwhile the Iraqi politicians who hold the
majority of seats in the Diyala province have denied
that Kurds are being specifically targeted in recent
violence and they condemned the deployment of
Kurdish military in the area. In a press release,
the Iraqiya List MPS argued that this move “will
only further complicate the situation.”
Nonetheless the Kurdish military are sticking to
their guns, literally. They will not withdraw from
Diyala this time until the security of Kurdish
civilians is guaranteed. Because, they argue, the
Peshmerga “cannot just sit still and watch Kurdish
citizens killed.”
Copyright, respective
author or news agency, niqash.org
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