Word: khanaqin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...concern that the forces sent by Baghdad and the Kurdish government to provide election security may not depart after the votes are counted. "I'm worried the Iraqi army won't leave. Then the Peshmerga won't leave. Then we will have a militarized city," the Kurdish mayor of Khanaqin, who asked to remain unnamed, warned. "What if they fought...
...Underneath the tension over election security, then, is the knottier problem of where to draw the boundaries of the Kurdistan Regional Government's authority. The Kurdish alliance is confident of winning votes in Khanaqin, which was under Peshmerga control until last August. "There are a lot of folks up there who really don't consider themselves being a part of Diyala province," said Thompson at a U.S. base outside Baquba. "You talk to folks, and they're like, 'Governor who? Governor Ra'ad? He never visits us. We don't get anything from Diyala province.' ... The Kurds provide for basic...
...Neither side is expecting the election to alleviate the growing friction. From the doorstep of his modest farmhouse outside Khanaqin, Mudhar Mohammed Madloum can see a Peshmerga checkpoint on one hill and an Iraqi army checkpoint barely half a mile away. Similar pairings are scattered along Diyala's contentious fault line. "The Peshmerga checkpoint has been here since the fall [of Saddam]. The Iraqi army checkpoint has been here for a few months," said Madloum. "They are not both necessary...