MESOP : ETHNIC CLEANSING IN SINDSCHAR ? Arabs Accuse Kurds of Exploiting War with Islamic State to Grab Land

By Sam Dagher and Ben Kesling – Washington Post – 25 Nov 2014 – After U.S.-backed Kurdish forces drove Islamic State militants from the Iraqi city of Sinjar this month, some of the fighters involved began looting houses of Sunni Arabs suspected of ties to the extremist group.

A week later in the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, Kurdish fighters expelled about 60 Sunni Arab families who had remained in the ruins of one village, according to local officials and residents. They said it was one of more than 50 Arab villages razed or partially demolished by Kurds who recaptured them from Islamic State since July. The Kurds suspected some male relatives of the expelled families of fighting with the Sunni radicals of Islamic State.

Sunni Arab officials and residents in Iraq accuse Kurds of exploiting the war with Islamic State to grab land. In Syria as well, Sunni Arabs are either fleeing, being forced out or are blocked from returning to areas seized by Kurds or Iran-backed groups, according to residents and some of the Kurdish fighters themselves. It is part of a broader shift in Iraq and Syria, where opponents of Islamic State such as Shiites and Kurds are claiming recaptured land and oil resources that have long been in dispute. These conquests are redrawing internal boundaries, displacing communities and deepening ethnic and sectarian tensions in the two increasingly fragmented countries.

After Kurdish forces known as Peshmerga took over Sinjar on Nov. 13, more than a dozen members of the Yazidi minority fighting with Kurds vowed to never let Arabs return. “Kurdish Muslims who have done nothing wrong can come back,” said Khalaf Dakheel Ceedo, 52, a Yazidi Peshmerga who stood in the middle of Sinjar’s ruins soon after its liberation. “But for Arab Muslims, no way.”Iraq’s population is divided among three major groups–Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims who form the Arab ethnic majority, and Kurds who are an ethnic minority. All the territory captured by Islamic State since June 2014 is in majority-Sunni Arab provinces–something that often puts the broader Sunni Arab community under suspicion in the eyes of some Kurds and Shiites.

Immediately after the Kurdish forces captured Sinjar, Peshmerga in uniform and allied Yazidis could be seen looting houses and shops in town while trucks filled with furniture, rugs and appliances streamed out of the area.Days later, the Peshmerga set up strict checkpoints to stop the practice because, as one guard said, they worried the looters might trigger Islamic State booby traps left behind in houses. And, he added, it just looked bad to outsiders, gesturing to a reporter standing nearby. Yazidis bore the brunt of Islamic State’s brutality in Sinjar. More than 1,000 Yazidi women have been kidnapped by Islamic State, according to the United Nations, and community leaders say many remain slaves. Sunni Arab officials warned that if the Kurds drive members of their community away from Sinjar, this risked pushing more people into the arms of Islamic State, also known as Daesh. “There are some outlaws who helped Daesh,” said Hussamelddin al-Abbar, a Sunni Arab member of the provincial council of Nineveh, where Sinjar is located. But he cautioned: “After what happened in Sinjar, people will say it is better to stay under Daesh.” Mehme Khalil, the Kurdish-appointed mayor of Sinjar region, denied plans to purge Arabs from the area. But he said the lack of government services and uncertain security prevented their immediate return.”Everyone’s a brother to us,” said the mayor, wearing traditional Kurdish garb of baggy trousers and military-style jacket. “But anyone who committed a crime has no place among us.”Still, he said those with suspected connections to Islamic State wouldn’t be allowed back into Sinjar.Both Kirkuk and Sinjar lie along a fault line between the semiautonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq’s north and territory captured by Islamic State–all of it in Sunni-majority provinces just south of the Kurdish region.

Kurds have been expanding the territory under their control by taking hold of contested and resource-rich areas such as Kirkuk province and the region of Sinjar after capturing them from Islamic State. In some of the disputed areas, Kurds laid claim to the land in the decade before Islamic State came along and they view the recent conquests as settling old scores dating back to the Saddam Hussein regime. These areas and others are part of a long-running land dispute that has pitted Iraqi Kurdistan against the central government in Baghdad and local communities against one another, helping fuel the country’s Sunni insurgency.

“These areas are part of Kurdistan and they were subjected to Arabization” by Saddam Hussein, said Hemin Hawrami, head of foreign relations for the governing party in the Kurdistan region.He wouldn’t comment on the allegations of demolishing villages in the Kirkuk area except to say: “We are protecting our people, Kurd, Arab, Turkmen from terrorism. This protection is paid for with the Peshmerga’s blood.” Ethnic strains flared anew following the two-day Kurdish-led offensive, backed by U.S.-led airstrikes, that wrested Sinjar out of Islamic State’s hands. Kurdish forces have proven to be the West’s most trusted and reliable partner on the ground in the fight against Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria and they have scored a number of important victories over the past year.

Before Islamic State took over Sinjar in August 2014, the area was not predominantly Kurdish. It had a mixed population of Yazidis, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Kurds and Shiites.Sinjar is part of the province of Nineveh, one of three Iraqi provinces with a Sunni-Arab majority. Kurds have long maintained that Sinjar, like other disputed territory, should be annexed to their region. But before Islamic State’s onslaught, the Kurds had reluctantly agreed to a tenuous power-sharing arrangement with the Nineveh provincial authority and central government in Baghdad that U.S. diplomats and military officers helped negotiate. “They always wished they could control the area,” said Sheikh Ghazi al-Faisal, an Arab tribal leader in M’sherfa, a village about an hour from Sinjar liberated from Islamic State last year. “Now they have the chance.”

U.S. officials in Iraq referred questions to the State Department in Washington, which didn’t respond to questions.

Speaking at a joint news conference in Washington on Tuesday, the presidents of France and the U.S. said no ground troops would be sent to Syria to fight Islamic State and that they would continue to rely on local forces. President Barack Obama cited the Sinjar offensive as an example of this cooperation.”What we might be seeing is opportunistic re-engineering of entire areas,” said one Western official, explaining that the destruction of villages is meant to ensure certain segments of the population don’t return. “If people don’t go back home, you undermine national reconciliation–and you are looking at a very uncertain future for Iraq.”

In March, a Human Rights Watch report documented total or partial destruction in at least 47 predominantly Sunni Arab villages in northern Iraq captured from Islamic State by Iran-backed Shiite militias fighting alongside the U.S.-backed central government. It called the process “methodical, driven by revenge and intended to alter the demographic composition of Iraq’s traditionally diverse provinces.”In Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, both Kurdish forces and Shiite militias carried out a similar campaign, according to residents, human rights groups and Western officials.In Syria, few Sunnis have returned to areas near the capital Damascus and in the central city of Homs and the surrounding countryside after they were recaptured by the Shiite-linked Syrian regime and its Lebanese Shiite ally Hezbollah since June 2013, according to residents and local officials.

In northeast Syria, where the U.S. is sending about 50 commandos to support Kurdish forces in the fight against Islamic State, many Arabs are fleeing areas recaptured by the Kurds for fear of retribution, according to residents and Kurdish officials. Syrian Kurdish leaders say all areas they reclaim will be part of their self-ruled cantons, which they want the West to recognize.In Kirkuk, Deputy Governor Rakan al-Jubouri and other Sunni Arab officials said they were making preparations earlier this year for Arab civilians to return to villages west of the city after they were freed from Islamic State by Kurdish forces in March. Then Kurds expelled the police and began razing villages, Sunni Arab witnesses said. “Injustice is being committed in the name of liberation from Daesh,” said Mr. Jubouri. “My greatest fear is that this will only fuel enmities and drive more young men to join terrorist organizations.”