Word: northerner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...want a glimpse into the challenge the U.S. faces as it tries to prevent Iraq from coming apart, consider the plight of Salim Izzat. Five months before the U.S. invasion last March, Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime ordered Izzat to vacate his farm outside the northern-Iraq town of Dibagan, 50 miles southeast of Mosul. The command was part of the regime's systematic, 15-year-long campaign to populate the predominantly Kurdish reaches of northern Iraq with ethnic Arabs. Kurds like Izzat were pushed out of their homes by force; dissenters, including Izzat's brother, were executed...
Nowhere is that task more delicate than in northern Iraq, home to most of the country's 4 million Kurds. The area has been among the nation's most peaceful since the overthrow of Saddam, but that calm was shattered on Feb. 1 when a pair of suicide bombers detonated themselves in the offices of the two main Kurdish political parties in the city of Arbil, killing more than 100. The attacks raised fears that the violence plaguing the rest of Iraq might now routinely spill into the Kurdish areas and might have strengthened the Kurds' determination to defend...
...worried that Kurdish hopes for greater autonomy could spark clashes with Arabs living in northern Iraq, especially if the Kurds claim control over Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city in an area prized for its vast oil reserves. The prospect of an oil-rich, autonomous Kurdish state also frightens Iraq's neighbors--Syria, Iran and Turkey--all of which have large, restive Kurdish populations that might be emboldened and financed by wealthy Iraqi Kurds. Turkey, which has fought a 15-year war against Kurdish separatists, has threatened to send its army into Iraq to prevent the Kurds from attempting to secede...
...north," says Mustafa, the U.S. official in Mosul. "But there is a real conflict that political parties are exacerbating with their attempts to manipulate public opinion." Some locals say Kurdish authorities have incited ethnic hostility by giving benefits to their kinsmen. Nasser Rahim Jusef, a Turkish employee of the Northern Oil Co., says the former regime's program of "Arabization" is being replaced by "Kurdization": at the expense of other ethnic groups, Kurds are being recruited back into jobs Saddam's regime pushed them out of. "The oil business needs to be a meritocracy," says Jusef, who has worked...
...Tiny cells lining a long, dimly-lit corridor contain people who until recently were considered some of Iraq's most dangerous insurgents. Their inspiration, they say, comes directly from al-Qaeda. So too did some of their instructions, until the American invasion of Iraq smashed Ansar's base in northern Iraq, and sent its members fleeing into Iran. "About 35 Saudis came to see us from al-Qaeda before the war, in order to cement their relationship with us," says Quds Hassan Abbas, 32, who led one of Ansar's fighting battalions until shortly before the war erupted...