Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Nineveh, al-Hadba has vowed to push them back. "We reject the presence of the peshmerga," says Atheel Nujaifi, the party's leader and the presumptive governor of Nineveh. "We want the only force in Nineveh province to be a legitimate government force that follows the command of the Iraqi security forces." Top U.S. military commanders in Nineveh say Nujaifi's stance is just electoral bluster. But he insists he is being serious. Nujaifi says that as soon as he is sworn in and the new government is seated, he will request that Baghdad formally ask the Kurdish regional government...
...very wrong very quickly. Last summer, Iraqi security forces and peshmerga almost came to blows in the disputed area of Khanaqin, in Diyala province, after Iraqi troops tried to enter the mixed town. There are dozens of similarly contested zones in Nineveh. "It would be an ugly fight," says Colonel Brian Vines, the U.S. Army liaison to the Nineveh Operations Command, which oversees the province's local and national police as well as army units. "I think that in some places they're going to have to forcibly move [Kurds] out of these disputed zones...
There are risks besides an all-out confrontation. The fledgling Iraqi security forces could fracture along ethnic or sectarian lines. A Kurdish battalion commander and 200 of his Kurdish soldiers stationed in Nineveh deserted en masse last summer during the Khanaqin standoff, taking their weapons with them into Erbil, says Vines. At the same time, a Kurdish brigade stationed in Diyala refused orders from the central government, according to other sources...
...recently as January 2009, of approximately 14,000 that had been stolen, slightly more than 8,000 have been recovered or are in various stages of being returned to the Iraqi government. In December of 2008, three Iraqi antiquities were recovered in Peru. They haven't been returned to the government yet, but they have been recovered. That fact that they were discovered in Peru highlights a disturbing new development. Recovery was much easier when the markets were limited to New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. Which is what they've been for the last several decades...
...gold, inlaid with lapis lazuli and carnelian. It is still missing. It's always a painful reminder to me, and until each and every piece that has been stolen from the museum is returned, I will have considered my mission in Iraq to have been a failure. When the Iraqi people have everything returned to display in a museum open to all. That's how I define success...