Vehicles of the Iraqi army drive during their withdrawal from the neighbourhood of the northern city of Kirkuk yesterday. Kurdish security forces, aka the Peshmerga, deployed near Kirkuk, a Kurdish official said.
KIRKUK: Kurdish forces deployed to new areas of a disputed north Iraq province in what a top officer said yesterday was an attempt to move into oilfields, as five days of unrest killed more than 215 people.
The deployments increased already high tensions in Iraq, adding a long-running Arab-Kurd dispute over territory to a stand-off between Sunni Arab protesters and the country’s Shiite-led government that descended into bloody violence.
Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki pointed to the civil war in neighbouring Syria as the cause of renewed sectarian strife in Iraq, while the head of the Sahwa anti-Al Qaeda militia forces threatened all-out conflict if militants who killed Iraqi soldiers are not handed over.
“After consultations with the governor of Kirkuk, there has been a decision for peshmerga (security) forces to fill the vacuums in general, and especially around the city of Kirkuk,” Jabbar Yawar, secretary general of Iraqi Kurdistan region’s peshmerga ministry, said in a statement.
Oil-rich Kirkuk province and its eponymous capital are a key part of territory that the autonomous Kurdistan region wants to incorporate over strong objections from the federal government in Baghdad, a dispute diplomats and officials say is a major threat to long-term stability.
Yawar said the peshmerga deployments were aimed at combating militants and protecting civilians, but Iraqi army officers ascribed other motives to the moves.
“They want to reach (Kirkuk’s) oil wells and fields,” Staff General Ali Ghaidan Majeed, the commander of Iraqi ground forces, said. He said the deployments were a “dangerous development” and violated an agreement that peshmerga forces and Iraqi soldiers would man joint checkpoints.
Another high-ranking Iraqi officer said that “after the latest movements of the peshmerga forces, the army is on alert. The army sees the move of the peshmerga as a (political) manoeuvre and not to fill any vacuum.”
The deployments came amid a wave violence that began on Tuesday when Iraqi security forces moved against Sunni anti-government protesters near the northern Sunni Arab town of Hawijah, sparking clashes that killed 53 people.
Subsequent unrest, much of it apparently linked to the Hawijah clashes, killed dozens more and brought the death toll to more than 215 yesterday.
The violence is the deadliest so far linked to demonstrations that broke out in Sunni areas of Shiite-majority Iraq more than four months ago.
The Sunni protesters have called for Maliki’s resignation and railed against authorities for allegedly targeting their community, including what they say are wrongful detentions and accusations of involvement in terrorism.
AFP
