17.03.2005 - Source: Integrated Regional Information Network

Kirkuk: Ethnic tension on the rise in Kirkuk ("original document (English)") [ID 10541]

"Political and social tensions between Kurds, Arabs and Turkoman could be escalating again in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, 255 km from Baghdad, as Kurdish officials renew calls for the city to be part of an autonomous Kurdistan."

Document(s): original document (English)

28.01.2005 - Source: International Crisis Group

Report focused on escalating crisis in Kirkuk ("Iraq: Allaying Turkey's fears over Kurdish ambitions") [#28629],  [ID 10542]

Information regarding the situation of Kurds, Arabs, Turkomans and Chaldo-Assyrians in Kirkuk

Document(s): Open document

10.11.2004 - Source: Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Kirkuk: political parties blamed for rising tide of ethnic tension between Kurdish, Turkoman and Arab inhabitants of the city ("Political Parties Stir Unrest in Kirkuk") [#26922],  [ID 10543]

Document(s): Open document

27.10.2004 - Source: Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Kirkuk: Arabs / Turkmens plan counter demonstrations ("original document") [ID 10544]

"(Al-Mutamar) - Arabs and Turkomen in Kirkuk are taking steps to stage a large demonstration in reply to the repeated demonstrations staged by the Kurds who have called for the removal of Arabs from the city. A source in Kirkuk's Arabic Gathering said the Kurdish demonstrations, which had not been spontaneous but staged and partisan, included a large number of demonstrators from outside of the province. Demonstrators' demands focused on removing the Arabs, which is an insult to the government, the source said.
(Al-Mutamar is issued daily by the Iraqi National Congress.)"

Document(s): original document

25.10.2004 - Source: Integrated Regional Information Network

Kirkuk: Political, ethnic tensions halt IDP resettlement in Kirkuk ("original document") [ID 10545]

"International NGOs planning major projects to help internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the northern city of Kirkuk have had to suspend work after an agreement reached by the city's three main ethnic groups collapsed amid mutual recriminations.

In the absence of any leadership on the part of the central government in Baghdad, and with the number of families returning since last year's war swelling to an estimated 14,000, the leaders of Kirkuk's Kurdish, Turkoman and Arab communities came together this July to set up an IDP committee.

At first, the new body's work went well. But with over 3,000 families, mainly Kurdish, living in tents, and the city's stadium and 20 of its schools full of IDPs, the situation became untenable.

By mid-August, committee members had agreed that they should work with the international forces and NGOs to concentrate IDPs in two places in the city: the disused military camp at Faylakh and an area on the Kirkuk-Laylan road, freeing up public buildings and land occupied by squatters, in some cases, since the previous summer.

NGOs were to be given free rein in constructing houses and basic infrastructure at the two sites. Then, a month ago, the agreement broke down.

In a city where inter-ethnic politics often reportedly resembles a game of Chinese whispers, the details of the split are not entirely clear. One senior US military official closely involved in the committee described it as a "silly quibbling over details".

"Kurdish representatives argued that areas of temporary settlement should be extended beyond the two agreed areas," he told IRIN in Kirkuk. "Their Turkoman colleagues insisted Faylakh and Laylan should be filled with IDPs before looking elsewhere. The Arabs backed them up."

It was at that point that the Turkoman representatives walked out of the committee.

Widely seen as a moderate, Tahsin Kehiya, secretary of the Kirkuk branch of the Iraqi Islamic Turkoman Union and head of Kirkuk's city council, gave a similar analysis.

"I don't think anybody would oppose the return of people forced out by the former regime," he told IRIN in Kirkuk. "But that return must not be done at the expense of anybody else. That is why we agreed on Faylakh and Laylan, both state-owned land, to build temporary accommodation."

But he also complained that IDPs continued to return in an arbitrary way, cooperating only with the Kurdish authorities that are strong in the northern half of the city, rather than with the local government as a whole.

Like everybody else, he added, Iraq's Kurdish parties had political designs on oil-rich Kirkuk. It was this, he explained, that made their ongoing distribution of land in Faylakh and elsewhere so provocative.

"My feeling is that the dispute can only be resolved by good cooperation," he said. The Turkoman delegates on the IDP committee had another suggestion: the formation of a multi-ethnic commission to verify IDPs' claims to have lived in Kirkuk before allowing them back to the city.

The form to be used by the commission is in the process of being drafted. It is the concept, though, that irks the Kurds.

Kurdish officials deny giving Kirkuk returnees the money and building materials they have handed out to families returning to other Arabised areas whose Kurdishness is beyond doubt. But they acknowledge that, faced with the failure of either the Coalition authorities or Baghdad to do anything to "remedy the injustices" of Arabisation as promised in this March's Temporary Administrative Laws, they have done nothing to prevent people going back.

"That doesn't mean some of the returning families have never lived in Kirkuk," said Rizgar Ali, IDP committee member for the Sulaymaniyah-based Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). "The only people claiming that are former Baathists and the racist Turkoman parties."

He was referring to the Iraqi Turkoman Front, an umbrella of staunchly nationalist parties known for their close links to Turkey.

"I was kicked out of Kirkuk in 1963 and my children were born in Sulaymaniyah, with Sulaymaniyah written on their ID cards," he added.

"According to this form they are preparing, I would be allowed to come back, but they would not. Is that fair?"

Despite the two sides' strong language and apparently diametrically opposed positions, officials said they thought a new compromise was not far off. Others are less sure.

As one international NGO worker following the negotiations put it: "On paper, there is a new agreement, but it appears the old cracks are just papered over. We need a stronger resolution than that, before we can start working."

It's a pessimism shared by Irfan Kerkukli, secretary of the Iraqi Turkoman People's Party and a member of Kirkuk's city council.

"The major issue in Kirkuk is that both Kurds and Turkomans feel that historically they have been wronged," he said. "To overcome the problems that causes, we need as much outside help as we can get, starting with Baghdad.""

Document(s): original document

23.09.2004 - Source: Integrated Regional Information Network

Kirkuk: Focus on continuing displacement of Arabs in Kirkuk ("original document") [ID 10546]

"There are reports of the continuing displacement of Arabs from Kirkuk in the north of Iraq, many of whom are living around old military bases 10 km north of the city, according to local aid agencies.

Others have taken refuge in abandoned schools inside Kirkuk or in small villages after being forced out by the Kurds.

"The Kurds have been forced by Kurdish officials to return to the city before a national census takes place in October 2005," officials of the Islamic Arabic Union in Iraq told IRIN in Kirkuk. The organisation is helping the displaced by providing food, but say that much more aid is needed.

"We lost everything," Khalid Raja, 46, an Arab father of six living in an abandoned school, told IRIN in Kirkuk. "They do not have the right to take us away from what we have built on the land. We cannot live in these conditions. We are all suffering from the heat and are afraid because we are living in an open space and anyone can enter this building at any time," he
added.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said there were difficulties in assisting the displaced Arabs since they were widespread and their numbers were not known. "This situation should be taken care of by the government as soon as possible," Ahmed Rawi, an ICRC spokesman, told IRIN in Baghdad.

Arabs have been living in Kirkuk since the 1970s when Saddam Hussein started his Arabisation programme, putting members of his ethnic group into oil rich areas and displacing Kurds that had dominated the city of Kirkuk.

However, since Saddam was ousted in April 2003, Kurds have been returning to reclaim land. In addition, US troops were accompanied by Kurdish fighters (Peshmerga) when they took control of Kirkuk last April, giving the impression that the Kurds could go back and take control of the area, rather than living together with Arabs.

The Kurdish government says its aim is to ensure a favourable ethnic balance before the start of a national census and a planned referendum on Kirkuk's future, to be held in early 2005 as part of the national election.

Some international observers have raised concerns about the tense ethnic situation and warn of further displacement.

"Unmanaged returns can lead to ethnic strife and political instability [in the north]," Roberta Cohen, senior fellow and co-director of the Brookings School of Advance International Studies (SAIS) project on internal displacement, told IRIN in an earlier interview. She noted that Kurdish displacement would be protracted since it could take months to resolve the competing property and land claims.

There are reports that Kurds are moving back to the city and are waiting for houses in tents, in the hope that houses are being vacated.

"There were more than 800 here but every day dozens more are arriving," Kharish Rozbayani, who deals with resettlement issues under the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party, told IRIN in Kirkuk. "More then 250,000 Kurds were forced to leave here for the sake of Saddam's inspiration of independence, and we are preparing to get our rights to return to our land," Rozbayani said. "We are from Kirkuk and we are back now," he added.

Many of the displaced Arabs have gone to live with relatives in southern Iraq, particularly Nasiriyah and Basra, but others who don't have a place to go are living in unused or damaged buildings, according to some humanitarian organisations.

Their living conditions are said to be bad due to the absence of sanitation and potable water. Some Arabs claim they didn't have time to move their belongings as the Kurds pushed them out. "Saddam forced us to go in and now the Kurds have forced us to leave, and we didn't get anything but suffering for our family," Ahmad Abo-Abdu, 55, whose displaced family now lives at the military base near Kirkuk city, told IRIN.

Arab leaders in Kirkuk claim that some people refusing to vacate their houses have been abducted by Kurds. "The [political]parties are pushing the population back and trying to kick out the Arabs," Mohammed Khalil al-Jaboury, 38, an Arab city council member, told IRIN. He added that the local authorities in Kirkuk were not doing anything to help them and had made
false promises.

"The central government must solve the problem and I think that it will take a really long time since some of them [the displaced] have nowhere to go. We are working out what to do, but there is little we can do for them since the places where they were living are now under the control of the Kurdish people," the Kurdish governor of Kirkuk, Abdul Rahman Fatah, told IRIN.

An Iraqi NGO working for the homeless has said that the situation is becoming critical and that the government needs to take immediate action to prevent discontent from turning into violence. "Arabs started to get angry and want their rights, the right to have a home and we are really afraid that things may turn nasty," Abbas Kubaissy, spokesman for the NGO, told IRIN.

The Ministry of Migration and Displacement said it has been trying to find out how many families have left Kirkuk and gather information about those left displaced around the city, but that it will take time.

The government has established the Iraqi Property Claims Commission (IPCC), which started accepting claims this June. The idea is to restore property to its original owner while providing some sort of compensation to those forced to leave.

The problem is that no one knows exactly how it will work in practice as no cases have yet been adjudicated. Funding is also a problem, according to officials. The commission currently has a budget of US $180 million for claims all over the country. But if a claim involves multiple owners who have all made improvements to the property, one claim could be worth up to a million dollars.

According to a Human Rights Watch report in August this year, more than 6,000 land claims had been reportedly lodged at IPCC offices in 10 of Iraq's 18 governorates since the fall of Saddam."

Document(s): original document

17.09.2004 - Source: Integrated Regional Information Network

Diyala: Political IDPs on the rise in Diyala governorate ("original document") [ID 10547]

"An estimated 11,300 residents of the towns of Khanaquin and Mandeli in the Diyala governorate in northern Iraq are occupying a football stadium and tents near Baqouba in the south of the governorate, after being forced out of their homes.

Residents not considered ethnically Kurdish or Turkmen were asked to leave their houses by the governor of Diyala province recently, Safah Hussein, internally displaced persons coordinator at the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement, told IRIN.

“Their situation is very bad. They need a lot of things,” Hussein said. “Every time we go to check the situation, there are many more people.”

In general, Iraqis who originally moved to northern Iraq under former president Saddam Hussein’s “Arabisation” programme have been under attack since the regime fell in April 2003 and US-led troops came in. But the number of homeless people has risen rapidly in recent weeks, he said.

People complain to government officials that peshmerga, a militia run by northern Iraq politicians, come to their homes and tell them to leave, Hussein said. Officials agreed that peshmerga have approached people on an “occasional” basis, he said.

Under an interim Transitional Administrative Law written by US-led administrators and approved by a former appointed government in November, Arabs who were not from the region could be asked to leave, Rahin Mohammed Amin, a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) office in Baghdad, told IRIN. The PUK’s leader Jalal Talabani controls the northeast region in question.

Amin said he didn't agree that the governor of Diyala should force people out, but felt that a turnabout was fair play for a group of people who had forced his family and others to leave their homes over the last 30 years.

“Saddam wanted to change the ethnic make-up of this place. He didn’t do it in a legal way,” Amin said. “We aren’t saying Arab people can’t live in Kurdistan. We just don’t want them to live where they never lived before.”

People who have been “newly introduced to specific regions or territories” can be resettled, compensated or given land nearby, according to the Transitional Administrative Law. The law also says no final decisions can be made about houses and property before a government is elected and a new Iraqi constitution is approved. An election for a national assembly is scheduled to be held before the end of January. In recent days, US military officials, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and others have suggested compromises to deal with the increasingly dangerous security situation in Iraq.

“I am from Khanaquin, and we were kicked out by the Arabs,” Amin said. “That wasn’t done legally. We can solve this legally with negotiations now.”

Ministry of Interior officials are expected to make a final decision about the land, Amin said. But to complicate matters, “hundreds” of Kurdish people have been forced out of houses in the towns of Ramadi and Samarrah in the insurgent-heavy “Sunni Triangle” north and west of Baghdad. Many of them want to return to their homes in the northeast region, Amin said.

“We were all forced to switch to other cities when it was not our desire,” Amin said. “Now, we have a right to return back.”

Meanwhile, ministry officials will open an office in Baqouba to look after the displaced people, Hussein said. Iraqi workers for the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) were also helping the displaced people, he said. Heating oil for the winter months had been distributed to them this week, he added.

Aid agencies in the past have fixed up some buildings for families to live in and provided clean drinking water, Hussein said. DRC workers could not immediately be reached - Hussein said foreign workers left the city following a car bomb in Baqouba about a month ago."

Document(s): original document

19.02.2004 - Source: Integrated Regional Information Network

Arabs face displacement by Kurds ("original document") [ID 10285]

Information about some 100,000 Arabs who have been forced to leave ethnically mixed areas of northern Iraq since the ousting of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.

Document(s): original document

16.02.2004 - Source:

Arabs are fleeing their villages in northern Iraq ("original document") [ID 10548]

"In a quiet mass migration, Arabs are fleeing their villages in northern Iraq and Kurds are moving back in, reversing Saddam Hussein's campaigns of ethnic cleansing and effectively redrawing the demographic map.

At the same time, politicians in Baghdad are trying to negotiate a formula for the future of Iraq, ahead of the July 1 planned transfer of power to Iraqis and the end to the U.S.-led occupation.

The United States and some Iraqi leaders are pushing for a federal system they hope will maintain the country's unity while satisfying Kurds, who want to preserve the autonomy they have held for years in the north.

That would mean eventually defining the frontiers of a Kurdish federation. And with more Kurds moving back into their ancestral lands, Kurdish leaders' claim over a larger area in a future federal division is strengthened - raising tensions with Arabs.

Amid the bitterness and suspicion, even the concept of federalism is poorly understood in a country accustomed to centralized rule from Baghdad. Many Arabs see it as code for Kurdish aspirations to split from Iraq.

With Saddam's regime crumbling in April, Mohammed Abu Khomra, an Arab, fled his home in the village of Daqouq fearing Kurdish revenge.

"Federalism amounts to ethnic cleansing," said Abu Khomra, 29, who now lives in Tuz Khurmatu, 20 miles south of Daqouq. "Kurds are now staying in our house and say they will not leave."

Like Abu Khomra, thousands of Arabs are moving out of formerly Kurdish villages in which they were settled in a campaign by Saddam to "Arab-ize" Kurdish regions.

Saddam's military destroyed more than 4,000 villages in a 1987-1988 campaign to crush Kurdish rebels. The operation included the bombing of some of the Kurdish areas with chemical weapons.

Saddam's forces killed some 182,000 Kurds, by human rights groups' estimates, and tens of thousands of Kurds fled their homes. Since then, the regime moved Arabs into Kurdish villages. Abu Khomra, for example, was given a furnished house when he moved into Daqouq in 1997.

Now, as Arabs pull out, Kurds are moving back to the towns and hamlets they fled over the past decades, bringing the ethnic makeup closer to what it was before Saddam's campaigns.

Soon after Saddam's fall, Mohammed Abdullah Salehi, a Kurd, returned to his home village of Sangoor. He and his family now stay in a house first owned by a Kurd but then occupied by an Arab family that fled in April.

Salehi said he wasn't interested in settling scores. All he wanted was to farm his land and tend his goats. "Now I am at peace. I've come back to my home," he said.

Kurds are insisting on retaining - or expanding - the system of self-rule they enjoyed under U.S. protection after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Kurdish militiamen, known as peshmerga, fought alongside U.S. soldiers last year and now expect a political payoff for that support.

Creating a federal system in Iraq will be messy. Some officials have spoken of using the 18 existing provinces as the basis for federal regions.

Those political boundaries don't match up with the ethnic lines, however - particularly in the complicated case of the Kirkuk region.

Kurds consider oil-rich Kirkuk the heartland of a Kurdistan but it also has Arab and Turkoman populations and is not in the Kurdish autonomous region.

In his attempt to keep Kirkuk province firmly in Arab hands, Saddam detached four largely Kurdish districts - out of an original seven - and attached them to the neighboring Sunni Arab provinces of Salaheddin and Diyala.

Drawing the federal borders along current provincial lines would keep them out of the Kurdish-run areas. But the more Kurdish returnees come back to those districts, the stronger Kurdish leaders' claim to them will be.

Kurds regard the Hamreen Mountains as the natural borders of Iraqi Kurdistan. The range runs across the country from the Mosul area in the northwest to meet the Iranian border nearly as far south as Baghdad.

In Ya Tagh, a village some 75 miles south of Kirkuk, about a dozen Kurdish families have returned, finding most of the houses dismantled. Before fleeing, Arab occupants pulled down roofs, windows and other parts of their homes - apparently so they could rebuild elsewhere.

Joma Ahmed, 74, was delighted to have his land back, after living in the Samood camp as a refugee and having to pay for his goats to graze in nearby villages.

"We want Kirkuk," he said. "This is a Kurdish region."

He also said he would not live with the Sunni Arabs who dominated Saddam's regime. "After this, how can we live with them?" he said, waving an Arab newspaper with a photo of Saddam.

The mood is even less compromising in the Kurdish cities, where for many activists, federalism means the first step to full independence.

"Now is not the right time to call for independence," said Ferhad Pirbal, a writer and university professor in Irbil. But "federalism is the means to reaching that goal.""

Document(s): original document

11.02.2004 - Source:

Fears of ethnic strife are growing in Iraq ("original document") [ID 10287]

"The closer Iraqis get to sovereignty, the more they voice fears that ethnic and religious differences could fracture their nation. (...)

Neither the allied official nor the Iraqi clerics, tribal sheiks, politicians, foreign diplomats and ordinary people interviewed over two weeks said that civil clashes were imminent. But they said that the potential was there, as politicians and allied forces try to forge one country out of ethnic and religious groups with conflicting grievances. (...)

Deadly riots among Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen have already shaken Kirkuk, the oil city in the north, as the groups battle for property and primacy. (...)

After a generation of oppression, each of the major groups - Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis - claims to have suffered more than others, and each doubts others will treat them fairly after the Americans hand over power.

Iraqis and foreign experts said some clashes were likely, particularly given the militias that hold sway across Iraq and the ample arsenals available to various groups. (...)

Sunnis charge that countless numbers of people are coming in from Iran with fake documents to vote for the Shiites. The Shiite leadership is not truly Iraqi, but Iranian, and therefore illegitimate, these Sunnis say.

But so far, Shiites and Sunnis have not openly clashed. After several mosque bombings for which no one claimed responsibility, Shiites tend not to blame Sunni extremists; instead they accuse foreigners. (...)"

Document(s): original document

13.08.2003 - Source: UK Government

Thousands of Arab families have been forced from their homes by returning Kurds [ID 10289]

"Thousands of Arab families relocated to the Kanaqin area by Saddam have been forced from their homes by returning Kurds. The Kurds, who were forcibly relocated to the south or centre by Saddam have returned to reclaim the houses and land of which they were dispossessed. One former peshmerga who is now a policeman thought that the evictions were a fair state of affairs. Another policeman said that it was made clear to the Arabs that they were not welcome but that a few Arab and Turkmen families who were not considered guilty of collaboration with Saddam's regime had stayed."

Document(s): Open document