SULAIMANIYAH, Iraq: An influential Kurdish member of the Iraqi Parliament yesterday accused Turkey of undermining the influence Kurds have gained since the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
“Turkey has maneuvered to create an anti-Kurdish (Iraqi) Parliament,” Mahmoud Othman told a press conference in Sulaimaniyah, one of the main cities of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.
“It is behind the adoption of Article 24 of the electoral law as it is trying by all means to reduce the gains made by the Kurds after the fall of Saddam Hussein,” he said. Iraq’s Parliament proposed under Article 24 of the election bill a deal that will share power equally between Arabs, Kurds and Turkoman in the oil-rich Kirkuk region, a move bitterly opposed by the Kurds, given their numerical superiority.
Othman did not elaborate on how he thought Ankara had managed to influence Iraqi MPs to write a clause in the electoral bill, though Kurds have long complained of Turkish efforts to undermine them through alliance with ethnic Turkoman and Sunni Arabs.
Meanwhile, a 24-year-old suspected Al-Qaeda fighter captured in Iraq claims to have kidnapped and killed 16 people, including five women, a senior Iraqi official said yesterday.
“Our forces captured Jassem Al-Khafadji who says he has kidnapped and assassinated 11 men and five women,” Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Al-Askari told reporters in Baquba.
In another development, Moqtada Sadr ordered most of his militiamen Friday to lay down their arms, and his spokesman said the young cleric might call off all resistance if the Americans accept a timetable to leave Iraq.
He instructed his Mehdi Army militiamen to join religious and social welfare classes as part of a new organization — the “Momahidoun,” or “those who pave the way.” Posters announcing the Momahidoun have appeared on walls in Sadr City, the cleric’s Baghdad base and home to an estimated 2.5 million Shiites.
“It is an ideological, cultural, religious and social army that will be charged with carrying out an intellectual and scientific holy war and to free the minds, hearts and souls from the secularist Western onslaught and is absolutely prohibited from the use of arms,” the posters say.
