Word: iraq
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...over the country on polling day. But the Kurds were furious. While ethnically mixed Diyala is under the jurisdiction of Baghdad, the province's northern section is predominantly Kurdish and falls along the fuzzy but increasingly agitated fault line that separates the Kurdish north from the rest of Iraq. The Kurds complained that the Iraqi army might interfere with their votes and insisted on matching its deployment with Peshmerga forces. After a flurry of helicopter shuttles between Kurdistan and Diyala and well over 40 hours of stubborn negotiation, U.S. commanders last week brokered a deal that will see area security...
...nothing to be afraid of," said Mullah Bakhtiar, a powerful local Kurdish leader, during a meeting with Lieut. Colonel Mike Kasales, who commands U.S. troops in the area. And that's exactly what has American commanders worried about the situation that will result from U.S. moves to withdraw from Iraq. Similar election-day arrangements had to be brokered for contentious areas of ethnically mixed Nineveh, while the three provinces that fall in Iraqi Kurdistan and the fiercely contested province of Kirkuk, won't vote until later this year...
...province. "The Kurds like us because we bring that stability. The Iraqis like us because we bring that stability ... I would not be surprised if you had a U.N. peacekeeping force here, in this part of the world, along the 140 line [dividing Iraqi Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq] as this thing matures and develops, to keep two belligerents away from each other...
...current Kurdish-Arab tension over ownership of northern Iraq dates back to Saddam Hussein's policies during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when his regime murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands more, resettling the territory with Iraqi Arabs from further south. After the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. protected a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, and after the 2003 invasion, the Peshmerga moved down to take control of parts of Diyala, Nineveh and oil-rich Kirkuk, all of which they claim as historically Kurdish. Iraq's new constitution promised that...
...blast walls and periodic road closures. Iraqi authorities are orchestrating what amounts to a nationwide lockdown for the coming vote, which many Iraqi and U.S. officials view as a key test of both the country's security forces and the durability of the reduced levels of violence in Iraq. On election day, Iraq plans to seal its borders, close Baghdad International Airport and ban all but specially licensed vehicles from moving in downtown areas across the country...