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September 5, 2008
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Khanaqin agreement has come in place – Kurdish official
Voices of Iraq
Head of Kurdistan region's presidency office unveiled that the Khanaqin agreement that has been signed by the Iraqi federal government and Kurdistan's regional cabinet has been in place since Friday,
The agreement stipulates distributing four checkpoints shared between mainstream government forces and local police in Khanaqin to achieve stability in the town”.
"Three checkpoints will be controlled by the local police, while the forth will be controlled by both the Iraqi army and local police," Dr. Fouad Hussein told
Voices of Iraq
On Wednesday, the Iraqi government and Kurdish officials resolved a dispute over control of an ethnically mixed town of Khanaqin, ending a standoff that had threatened to trigger violence.
"The agreement stresses the mutual work to eliminate terror, and to protect Khanaqin from being a terror location, it ensures good security situation for the town," he said.
"Whether it is the Iraqi army or peshmerga (Kurdish local armed forces) that controls security in Khanaqin, they all are Iraqis," he added.
Earlier today, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for convening a meeting tomorrow to discuss the Khanaqin crisis according to the semi-official al-Iraqiya TV station.
"I cannot comment about what it going on in Baghdad, but premier al-Maliki knows about the agreement," Hussein said.
Differences erupted between the Baghdad central government and the government of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region after Iraqi forces carrying out Operation Bashaer al-Kheir (Promise of Good) in Diala entered Khanaqin to track down gunmen.
The Iraqi forces, by virtue of orders from Maliki, gave the peshmerga, or the Kurdish region guards, 24 hours to evacuate their posts in the disputed district.
The peshmerga commanders in the area rejected the orders, affirming that they have received instructions from the leaders of the Iraqi Kurdistan region to remain in their positions.
The Iraqi Kurdistan region's cabinet secretary, Muhammad Qora Daghi, had told VOI earlier this week that a Kurdish delegation comprising the deputy secretary general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Burham Saleh, a member of the PUK politburo, Fouad Maasoum, and two members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) politburo, Hoshyar Zebari and Roznouri Shawis, was in Baghdad to discuss the Khanaqin crisis with senior Iraqi officials.
Sami al-Atroushi, a member of the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), which has five out of a total 275 seats in the Iraqi parliament, described the entry of an Iraqi army force in the Khanaqin district as "political blackmailing and pressures by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on the Kurdistan region to give up article 140 of the Iraqi constitution."
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution is related to the normalization of the situation in Kirkuk city and other disputed areas like Khanaqin.
It calls for conducting a census to be followed by a referendum to let the inhabitants decide whether they would like Kirkuk to be annexed to the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region or having it as an independent province.
These stages were supposed to end on December 31, 2007, a deadline that was later extended to six months to end in July 2008.
The former regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had forced over 250,000 Kurdish residents to give up their homes to Arabs in the 1970s in a bid to "Arabize" the city and the region's oil industry.
Kurds, however, seek to include the city in the autonomous Iraq's Kurdistan region, while Sunni Muslims, Turkmen and Shiites oppose the incorporation. The article currently stipulates that all Arabs in Kirkuk be returned to their original locations in southern and central Iraqi areas, and formerly displaced residents returned to Kirkuk.
The article also calls for conducting a census to be followed by a referendum to let the inhabitants decide whether they would like Kirkuk to be annexed to the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region or having it as an independent province.
Kirkuk, 250 km (156 miles) north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, sits on the ruins of a 5,000-year-old settlement. Because of the strategic geographical location of the city, Kirkuk was the battle ground for three empires, Assyria, Babylonia and Media which controlled the city at various times.
Kirkuk is the centre of the northern Iraqi petroleum industry. It is a historically and ethnically mixed city populated by Assyrians, Kurds, Arabs and Iraqi Turkmen. The population was estimated at 1,200,000 in 2008.
In cooperation with the Multi-National Force (MNF), Iraqi security forces have been conducting a wide-scale security operation codenamed Bashaer al-Kheir (Promise of Good) since July 2008 in Diala with the aim of tracking down armed groups in the province.
The operation has recently extended to include disputed areas in the province, including Khanaqin district.
Following an agreement between Kurdish authorities and the central government in Baghdad, peshmerga forces withdrew from the districts of Qara Taba and Jalawlaa, which belong to disputed Khanaqin.
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A Kurdish man now living in New Zealand searches for the family he lost in Iraq. Despite the sectarian violence that rages around him, watch as he struggles to find the family he had to leave behind.
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