KIRKUK, Iraq, 19 March 2005 — Turkmen and Arab Shiites demonstrated yesterday in the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk against the Kurdish push to annex the city.
“No, no to federalism; no, no to the division of Iraq,” a few hundred Shiites from radical cleric Moqtada Sadr’s movement shouted as they trickled out from the Khazal Al-Tamimi mosque in the city’s center.
Local Sadr representative Sheikh Ahmed Al-Lamy was explicit about their opposition to the Kurdish push to implement Iraq’s interim constitution, which calls for the return of tens of thousands of Kurds who were expelled from Kirkuk. The demonstrators are “here to denounce the transitional law and its article 58,” Lamy said.
Article 58 lays out clear steps for resolving former President Saddam Hussein’s four-decade policy of Arabization, in which he moved Shiites from the south to Kirkuk and kicked out the city’s native Kurds.
“Arabs are Iraqis and we must continue to live with our Kurdish, Turkmen and Christian brothers in the city of Kirkuk, and nobody has the right to chase us out,” Lamy said.
Iraq’s outgoing foreign minister, Kurd Hoshyar Al-Zebari, said yesterday the country’s leading Shiite and Kurdish political blocs had agreed that the next government would implement Iraq’s transitional law on Kirkuk.
Meanwhile, Sunni clerics said in Friday sermons that the resistance against the US presence in Iraq has nothing to do with killing civilians, while Shiites urged Sunnis to join the political process for the common good.
“Gangs-for-hire have come from across the border to kill innocent people so that everyone would say: look they (insurgents) are killing civilians,” Sheikh Abdul Ghafur Al-Samarraiy told worshippers at Baghdad’s Umm Al-Qura Mosque, headquarters of the influential Sunni Muslim Committee of Muslim Scholars.
“We hear talk on television that the killing is targeting one sect but not the other, meaning Shiites but not Sunnis. That is a grand illusion, because the killer’s knife does not differentiate between Sunni and Shiite.” He said 30 Sunnis were among the 47 killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a Shiite funeral tent in the northern city of Mosul on March 10.
In Adhamiyah, a predominantly Sunni district of the capital another imam urged Iraq’s security forces not to hinder those who are carrying out attacks against US-led foreign troops in the country.
“We must distinguish between terror and resistance. People have an internationally recognized right to defend their country, but the rifle should not be pointed at the Iraqi brother who is trying to keep the peace,” said Sheikh Ahmed Taha Al-Samarraiy.
