Iraqi Kurds, Arabs spar over Mosul security forces

Jul 19, 2009, 11:05 GMT

Mosul, Iraq - Kurdish Peshmerga militias have the right to remain in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, an Iraqi Kurdish general on Sunday said in defiance of the Arab nationalist governor there.

General Jabar Yawar, a spokesman for the Kurdish Regional Government's Ministry of Peshmergas, said Governor Athil al-Najifi had overstepped his authority when he recently promised to eliminate Peshmerga paramilitary fighters from Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital.

'Al-Najifi's recent statements reflect his personal views, and possibly the opinion of his political bloc, but do not necessarily reflect the position of the constitutional authorities of the federal government in Iraq or its laws. His statements are unenforceable,' Yawar told the German Press Agency dpa.

'The Kurds have no doubt that the situation in Mosul ... has changed,' al-Najifi told dpa a week before US soldiers' withdrawal from Iraqi cities last month. 'They will come to grips with the changed situation.

'I expect that the Kurds will withdraw from the city and there will be a single security force in the city, with not a single Kurd or Peshmerga in it,' he said.

Al-Najifi's Hadbaa List won January's provincial council elections in Nineveh on a platform of taking control of the local government from the Kurdish parties that had won the last provincial elections, aided by a widespread Arab-Sunni boycott of the polls.

'Areas within the geographical map of the province are outside the law, since they are under the control of the Peshmerga forces,' al-Najifi recently told reporters.

'These are political problems outside the jurisdiction of the governor of Mosul or the other heads of administrative units in the country,' Yawar responded.

'Mr al-Najifi's remit is only to resolve the administrative problems in his province. The responsibility for resolving these kinds of political problems is with the Iraqi state, in accordance with the mechanisms outlined by the constitution,' Yawar told dpa.

The government of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq has grown more assertive in recent weeks.

The Kurdish parliament last month approved a draft constitution that includes parts of Nineveh, Kirkuk, and Diyala provinces within its definition of Kurdistan. Kurdish voters will put the draft to a referendum in parliamentary polls scheduled for July 25.

The city of Mosul and Nineveh province, one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse areas in Iraq, remains the site of near- daily, deadly attacks.

On Saturday a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi policeman and wounded another as they patrolled the city's eastern neighbourhood of al-Zuhur, police told dpa.

In a separate incident, two other Iraqi soldiers were wounded when a bomb exploded as their patrol passed through Mosul, which lies some 400 kilometres north of Baghdad.

At least four people were killed and 35 others were wounded when a car bomb exploded in the eastern Mosul neighbourhood of Kukjali, an enclave of the Iraqi Shabak minority, last week.

Following that attack, Hanin al-Qadu, who represents Iraq's Shabak minority in parliament, blamed the attack on Kurdish Peshmerga militias and Kurdish parties.

Yawar brushed aside the accusations on Sunday.

'All are free to express their views in the new Iraq, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or sect,' he said. 'Mr. al-Qadu is free to express his views however he wants.'