BAGHDAD – Hundreds of Sunni Arabs opposed to the presence of Kurdish troops in disputed areas of northern Iraq demonstrated Saturday against a plan to deploy a mixed force of American, Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers in the area.
Courtesy: AP
- More than 300 people in the Sunni-dominated town of Hawija, once an insurgent stronghold, gathered in a stadium to protest the inclusion of Kurdish troops in these patrols.
- The split between Iraq's majority Arabs and the Kurdish minority, which controls a semiautonomous region in the north, is one of the most significant long-term threats to the country's stability, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.
- Sunni Arabs fear the Kurds are looking to add Arab lands to their semiautonomous region.
- The top U.S. military commander in the country believes al-Qaida in Iraq is taking advantage of tensions between the Iraqi army and the Kurdish militia, the peshmerga, to carry out attacks on villages not guarded by either side.
- To try to fill the gap, Gen. Ray Odierno last month proposed the idea of a mixed force that would include U.S. troops serving in an oversight role to help Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers work together to secure areas along that fault line.
- The issue has come to the fore with a series of deadly bombings targeting villages outside the tense city of Mosul, where al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgents remain active despite numerous U.S.-Iraqi military operations.
- Odierno said the deployment of the U.S.-Iraqi-Kurdish protection forces would start in Ninevah province, which includes Mosul, then extend to Kirkuk and to Diyala province north of the capital.
- The plan, which would represent a departure from a security pact that called for Americans to pull back from populated areas on June 30, has yet to be approved.
- Odierno said a high-level meeting between Iraqi, Kurdish and U.S. officials would be held in September, but the U.S. military could not confirm if the meeting had occurred or provide other details about the progress of the proposal.
- The demonstrators in Hawija, west of the disputed oil-rich city of Kirkuk, held banners that called the plan a violation of the constitution and the security agreement, which took effect on Jan. 1 and replaced the U.N. mandate for foreign forces.
- Resentment against the plan is building among Arabs in the town and other areas that are dominated by Arabs, said the head of Hawija's city council, Hussein al-Jubouri.
- "Arabs in this and other disputed areas reject this proposal because they say it will provoke sectarian divisions among residents, and it is a violation of the constitution," he said.
- In Baghdad, a senior parliament official said Odierno's plan was still being studied and no final decision had been reached.
- "There were reactions against it and we are studying these reactions in order to evaluate this plan," said Abbas al-Bayati, chairman of parliament's security committee.
- "The problem is that the presence of American forces in these areas will violate the U.S.-Iraq security pact, so to approve this plan it must be modified to conform with the pact," al-Bayati said.
- He said the opposition from Arabs in Kirkuk and other places stems from their objections to having Kurdish forces on patrol in those disputed areas.
- At the heart of the dispute is the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as well as villages in Ninevah province that the Kurds want to incorporate into their semiautonomous area despite opposition from Arabs and minority Turkomen ethnic group.
- A minister in the Kurdish regional government supported the plan for mixed patrols Saturday, calling it a good step toward resolving unsettled disputes with Iraq's central government.
- The minister, Mohammed Ihsan, said he met with American military officials in the Kurdish city of Irbil on Wednesday to discuss the plan.
- "We have agreed on the American proposal ... It is a way to build trust and goodwill between both sides to resolve the lingering problem of disputed areas," Ihsan said.
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