Gorilla’s Guides

Relations sour between Kurds and central government

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has asked Kurdish militias known locally as peshmerqa to evacuate areas south of the “green line*” demarcating the autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq.

Maliki has went as far as sending Iraqi troops to flush out the Kurdish militias from villages, towns and cities officially not part of the Kurdish region.

Iraqi troops have reportedly spread their control in the string of towns and villages in the restive Province of Diyala which the Kurds claimed as their.

Kurdish self-rule areas include the provinces of Arbil, Sulaimaniya and Dahouk but the Kurds have sent in their militias to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and scores of villages and towns in the provinces of Mosul and Diyala.

Maliki’s move has brought almost all Arab political factions, whether Sunni or Shiite together, demanding stringent measures to curtail Kurdish ambitions.

Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia known as Mahdi Army fought both U.S. troops and Iraqi forces, has likewise thrown his weight behind Maliki.

In his latest Friday sermon, read for him by a representative in Baghdad, Sadr urged the government to hoist “the Iraqi flag in predominantly Kurdish areas” outside the Kurdish autonomous zone.

The Kurds see the move as “muscle twisting” by Maliki.

Kurdish politicians including Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish autonomous region, have protested the move by the Iraqi army against Kurdish areas in Diyala.

But the central government seems determined to spread its control over these areas and says troops will be deployed everywhere outside the Kurdish self-rule region.

Maliki is also reported to have even questioned budgetary allocations to Kurds which amount to 17% of the country oil revenues.

The government says the Kurds should not get more than 14% of the budget in proportion to the number of people in their areas.

Source: Relations sour between Kurds and central government By Fadhel Dhaher Azzaman in English