Word: iraqis
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...apartment Hassan shares with an Iraqi refugee and a fellow Somali, he shows pictures of his wife, son and daughter in Mogadishu. A calendar hangs on the wall as the sole decoration in an otherwise spartan room with two beds and a lonely CD player. Had he made it to Sweden, Hassan says he would have had his wife and children travel to meet him there. Now, he thinks he made a mistake in leaving. "Given a choice," he says, "I would love to go back home...
Behind-the-scenes U.S. pressure has finally forced Iraq's leaders to accept a political compromise, with Sunday's vote in the Iraqi parliament to adopt an electoral law setting rules for national elections in January - and potentially clearing the path to withdrawal for tens of thousands of U.S. troops. (See a photo-essay of six years with U.S. troops in Iraq...
...Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged to abide by the Iraqi constitution and "normalize" Kirkuk by removing the tens of thousands of Arab Iraqis settled there by Saddam as part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. After such normalization, according to the constitution, Kirkuk - and other areas with large Kurdish populations in four Iraqi governorates - should then hold a referendum to determine whether they should continue to be administered by Baghdad or be ruled by the Kurdistan Regional Government. It may have been constitutionally mandated, but the idea of forcibly resettling Kirkuk's Arab population was unthinkable...
...central government's growing strength to push back against gains won by the Kurds in the aftermath of the invasion, when the government in Baghdad was weak. The central government has already blocked oil pumped under the auspices of the Kurdish regional government from being exported in Iraqi pipelines, even though revenue from the sales would have been shared with the central government...
...other security challenges become more manageable, the Arab-Kurd fault line in Kirkuk has become increasingly dangerous. Such is the enmity between the two leaders that al-Maliki and Kurdish Regional Government President Masoud Barzani rarely speak to each other. Iraqi troops and the Kurdish Pesh Merga have clashed several times in disputed areas in recent months, forcing U.S. officers to mediate to avoid escalation...