Word: iraqis
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...officers in Diyala have spent weeks mediating between Kurdish Peshmerga forces and the Iraqi military over security arrangements for next week's provincial elections. The national army had planned to set up security checkpoints in northern Diyala, just as they will do all 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...
...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...
...Obama says, 'Hey, we want you guys to accelerate your exit out of there.' There's a lot of anxiety associated with that statement here in Diyala," says Colonel Burt Thompson, the top U.S. military commander in the 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...
...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...
...Kurds] think this town belongs to the Kurdistan government," said an Iraqi army officer who was present during the negotiations over election security in Khanaqin. "It was Bush, the father, who made a line [in 1991] where the Iraqi army was not allowed to cross. This town is south of the line. [Disputed polling sites in] Sheikh Baba and Jabara are south of the line too. They want to make the Kurdish government as big as they...