ARBIL, Iraq, 18 May 2003 — At least three people were killed and several injured in shootouts between Arabs and Kurds in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk that began overnight, witnesses said yesterday.
Gunfights broke out following disputes over the ownership of houses and land, the witnesses came to tell AFP in the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil further north, which is controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Massoud Barzani.
The two sides also fought with knives, said one witness, who added he had seen the bodies of three Kurds killed in the Al-Shuhada neighborhood of the city.
A KDP delegation headed to Kirkuk to try to restore calm in the key oil-rich city. Kurds accused the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein of pursuing an active policy of settling Arabs from central and southern Iraq in and around Kirkuk in order to change its demographic character.
Two days of looting and score-settling gripped Kirkuk after US-backed Kurdish forces seized the city on April 10 following the US-led ouster of Saddam’s regime.
Some Kurds tried to forcibly recover their properties and expel Arab inhabitants, sparking fights. Kurdish fighters later pulled out of the city to be replaced by US troops.
Meanwhile, a Kurdish guerrilla group based in northern Iraq said yesterday it was ready to work peacefully alongside the United States to help build a democratic Iraq.
The Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party (PCDK), closely linked to the Kurdish rebels neighboring Turkey has fought for decades, said it was abandoning the armed struggle. “(We) will work jointly with the United States and democratic forces,” it said in a statement in the Turkish town of Tunceli.
The news will be welcome in Washington as it seeks to rebuild Iraq’s political and physical infrastructure after the war to topple Saddam Hussein.
But the group’s close links to the Kurdish rebels both Turkey and the United States class as “terrorist” will likely complicate any cooperation the group may seek with US forces.
Kurdish sources say the PCDK was formed last year as an offshoot of the rebel group Turkey fights, known as the PKK or KADEK, and has perhaps 2,000 lightly armed fighters in northern Iraq who have sometimes clashed with other local Kurdish factions.
Turkey keeps its own troops in northern Iraq to crack down on the rebels it has fought in a conflict that has killed more than 30,000 people since 1984.
Ankara is under pressure from Washington and Iraqi Kurds to withdraw its forces but is unlikely to welcome any indications that the United States is negotiating with rebels Turkey has vowed to wipe out.
Opposition to pro-US policies over Iraq has fallen in Turkey following the end of the war, according to a public opinion poll published in the mass-circulation Milliyet daily in Ankara yesterday.
The survey found that 40.9 percent of respondents disapproved of the Turkish government’s stance in the Iraq war, while 41.5 percent said they supported Ankara’s anti-war policies.
Before the war strong anti-war feeling in the country led the parliament to reject the deployment of US forces in Turkey for an invasion of Iraq from the north, triggering tensions between the two long-standing NATO allies.
Opinion polls at the time had showed that around 80 percent of Turks were against supporting US military action against their neighbor.
The latest survey, carried recently among 1,881 respondents, also found that a quarter of the population - 24.8 percent - believed that Turkey’s failure to back the United States would lead to a deterioration in bilateral ties. Only 16.2 percent believed that relations would improve in the future, while 38.4 percent said the ties would continue unaffected.
US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said earlier this month that in order to repair bilateral ties, Turkey should admit it made a mistake by denying the United States support in the war.
Ankara rebuffed the appeal, saying that the two countries should leave behind tensions over Iraq.
