KHANAQIN, Iraq: For Iraqi Kurdish mathematics teacher Mohammed Aziz, two wrongs can make a right.
After decades of forced exile by the Baath party of Saddam Hussein, he is back with a vengeance. Aziz was just four years old in 1975 when his family was evicted from Bawaplawi village, near the northern city of Khanaqin, and Arab settlers grabbed their home.
Now schoolteacher Aziz is back and has done to the Arabs what they did to him. “Our homes were taken over by the Arabs without paying us any compensation,” Aziz, 37, said at the modest single-story brick house which he has occupied since the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003. “We moved in and took any house that was empty. The Arabs who were here had fled.”
Saddam’s “Arabization” campaign sought to change the demography of Khanaqin, which originally had a vast majority of Kurds and a smaller minority of Shiite Arabs, Turkmen and Jews.
With the fall of Saddam’s regime, the Kurds are back and the Arabs are nowhere to be seen, at least in Khanaqin.
“Ninety percent of the people who were forced out of Khanaqin have returned,” said the city’s mayor, Mohammed Mala Hassan, 52. “I want the others to return too, but I have no money to provide them with the basic facilities.”
Kurds such as Aziz did not depend on handouts from the authorities and instead took the land that was hastily abandoned by the Arabs. For Aziz, it is a case of correcting an injustice done more than three decades ago. “What they did was wrong in taking our homes. We also just took the empty houses, but that is because our houses were taken in the same way in 1975,” he said.
Inside his home is the tricolor — red, white and green — of the peshmerga, the Kurdish security forces, which somehow seems to give him the authority to live in it.
He said the area is safe and has not seen the violence that has afflicted other parts of Iraq because of the peshmerga presence.
Most of the dwellings in the village are mud huts, with only a few made out of bricks, and they are built in walled compounds.
Khanaqin, which is close to the Iranian border, has emerged as a new flash point because of its untapped oil wealth and proximity to the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. Khanaqin mayor wants his region, which includes 175 villages, to be attached to the KRG and break away from the authority of the restive Iraqi province of Diyala where the majority are Arabs.
Aziz said he was forced to teach his subject in Arabic at a school in the Shiite majority province of Babil where they were forced to settle by the previous regime. “I am happy to be back here because I can now educate my three children in Kurdish,” he said, pointing to two boys aged 10 and seven years and a girl of one. “I am happy to see my land.”
The effects of Saddam’s “Arabization” have been rapidly undone by the Kurds. But this has sparked new tensions with Baghdad, particularly over peshmerga influence in the region. Talks are under way between Kurdish leaders and the government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki to end simmering tensions between federal forces and the peshmerga.
