October 17, 2006
Kurds and Christians flee Mosul's insecurity
By Shamal Akrayi
The Kurdish Globe
Increasingly large numbers of the Kurds and Christians have literally been forced to flee for their lives.
The continuing instability in Mosul, 396 km northwest of capital Baghdad, is resulting in an increasing flow of refugees fleeing the city towards more stable areas in Kurdistan. Over recent months the security situation in Iraq's third largest city, which is home to ethnic Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans and various Christian minorities, has only got worse which has served to further fuel the exodus.
Increasingly large numbers of the Kurds and Christians have literally been forced to flee for their lives after threats and attacks by insurgents who dominate the mostly Sunni Arab city.
Salim Hussein Ali, 45, who is now earning a living as a construction worker in the predominately Kurdish town of Akre, left Mosul after insurgents' threats.
"I sold my house for only 110 million Iraqi Dinars," he said. This was a considerable loss on the property which was worth 250 million only a year ago. However, he had no choice but to sell up in order to pay a 30,000 dollar ransom for his brother in law who was being held by kidnappers.
Various reports have put the number of Kurds killed in Mosul since the fall of the Ba'athist regime in April 2003 at around 800. Also, a further 11,000 Kurdish and Christian families were forced to flee to regions under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government. However, the violence and campaign of intimidation has also affected the Arab and Turkmen communities with some 150 families from these groups being forced to settle in the three provinces which currently make up Kurdistan, Erbil, Suleimaniya, and Duhok.
Mosul is considered as one of the "hottest" areas for militant activity in Iraq, with anti-American feeling running high amongst the majority Sunni Arab community. This tense situation has consequently led to strong anti-Kurdish feeling due to the fact that Kurds have generally strongly identified with coalition forces. In particular, neighborhoods, such as Al-Jazair, Al-Noor, Al Nabi Younes, Al-Karama, Aden and Bakir, which have large Kurdish residents, have seen major targets of organized assassinations and inter-ethnic violence.
Kurdish population of Mosul fear that what is taking place is a continuation of the Arabization policies of the former regime which aimed to homogenize Iraq by either forcibly assimilating or physically removing non-Arab Iraqis. Out of the thousands of refugees from Mosul 1,900 families have settled in Akre.
However, Akre, previously a small market town just to the north of the Kurdish capital Erbil, is straining under the pressure of the new arrivals. In recent months, house prices have sky rocketed and the town's infrastructure is barely able to cope. This is a situation which is repeating itself along a huge belt of northern Iraq. Increasingly, it is possible to observe "ethnic unmixing" in previously multi ethnic and multi religious towns across Iraqi and even in the federal capital Baghdad which is in the process of being divided between Sunni and Shiite Arabs.
Officially, there may not be a civil war, but certainly some kind of population exchange is taking place. That Iraq may be divided into neat and fairly ethnicity homogeneous units may well become an established fact, despite the rhetoric of the central government.
