Word: nineveh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...UNHCR also warned that the provinces of Baghdad, Diyala, Kirkuk, Nineveh and Salahuddin are still very dangerous. Those provinces account for the vast majority of the refugees. Indeed, three-fourths of all refugees are from the capital alone. "It's is the epicenter of the whole displacement," says Harper. As a result, bombings in Baghdad resonate across the refugee community. (See pictures of the renewal of the southern city of Basra...
...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...
Kurds say al-Maliki has been quietly rotating senior Kurdish officers out of army units stationed in volatile provinces, including Nineveh, and replacing them with Arabs. That's disputed by Major General Hassan Kareem Abbas, the Shi'ite commander of the Nineveh Operations Command. Kurdish officers have been replaced, the general says, but by other Kurds, a view supported privately by senior U.S. officers in Mosul...