Kurdish fighters have pressed further into IS-held territory in northern Iraq, and leaders are adamant any territory taken is theirs to keep
The sun rises in the morning sky and the moon has yet to fade away. The column of armoured vehicles and white pick-up trucks stretches as far as the eye can see, towards a hill clouded with dust and morning fog.
Perched on a peak, nameless silhouettes watch from behind sandbags as they prepare to send rockets towards enemy lines.
The red, white and green flag of the Kurdish region of Iraq quietly flaps in the wind from many of the moving combat vehicles. But in an instant, the rhythmic hum of their engines is drowned by the staccato scream of machinegun fire, the thud of mortar bombs and the roar of coalition jets.
This is the start of the second phase of the Peshmerga’s offensive from Khazer to retake territories east of Mosul, the Islamic State group’s de facto capital in Iraq and the largest city under its control.
It is an operation that the Kurdish forces hope will pave the way to lay siege on the city in cooperation with the Iraqi army and the US-led coalition.
Kurdish authorities claim to have taken 11 villages from IS, pushing further into the group’s territory and closing on Qaraqosh in Nineveh province, a Christian stronghold with a pre-war population of 75,000.
“This successful operation will tighten the grip around IS’s stronghold Mosul,” Masrour Barzani, the chancellor of the Kurdistan Region Security Council, said in a statement.
On day three – Tuesday – clashes were ongoing. Peshmerga were injured by IEDs and suicide attacks by IS fighters.
While the Kurds are often eager to say they fight the world’s enemy for the sake of humanity, they do not shy away from talking about their other goal: gaining ground for a greater Kurdistan.
By seizing territory from IS, the Peshmerga establish control over “disputed territories” – areas both claimed by the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan and the central government in Baghdad.
General Hama Rashid Rostam told Middle East Eye that ground seized by his men was rightfully Kurdish.
“We are fighting IS, but at the same time we have ambitions for Kurdistan: the Kurds as a nation and a people like everybody else,” he says in the freshly captured village of Qarqasha.
“We are ambitious. It’s our right and we are going to get it.”
Home to not only Kurds but also minorities such as Turkmens, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians, Yazidis, Kakais and Shabaks, the disputed territories in the Nineveh plain – where the Peshmegra offensive is taking place – were “Arabised” by consecutive Iraqi governments, expelling hundreds of thousands of local inhabitants from their home to settle ethnic Arabs.
The Kurdish population say they have faced systematic persecutions, including large-scale massacres under Saddam Hussein.
Arif Tayfur, the commander of the Khazer sector and a senior KDP official – the political party of the Kurdish president Massoud Barzani – told MEE that Kurds had had every intention of keeping what has historically been theirs.
“The areas we are capturing now, we say it belongs to the Kurdistan region. But they (Baghdad) say it belongs to Iraq. Well, we will not abandon these territories,” he said.
“We sacrificed our blood for our land,” he added, referring to the 14 Peshmerga fighters who had died in the offensive so far. “These areas all belong to Kurdistan but Arabs are living there. We will not give them back.”
The rhetoric is sharp, but it is also supported by Iraqi law.
Article 140 of the country’s constitution deals with “disputed territories”, and outlines steps that should be taken in order to resolve the territorial arm-wrestling. They include negotiations between Baghdad and Erbil and referendums “to determine the will of the citizens”.
Through negotiations, the Kurdish authorities could try to hold their grip over the areas theyseize, or use it as bargaining chips with Baghdad to gain preferred areas such as oil-rich Kirkuk, according to Renad Mansour, a fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre.
“In the Nineveh province they will be able to say: ‘Okay we will give it back, but what do we get in return?’ So they are viewing it as an opportunity as well,” Mansour said.
“But of course, there are certain areas, cities and villages, that they won’t give up or it will be hard for them to give it up. Like parts of Nineveh and Kirkuk.”
“The reason they want a referendum is so that they can say it’s not an occupation, it’s the will of the people,” Mansour said, adding that after decades of Arabisation campaign by previous Iraqi governments, “there are definitely concerns that you would have a Kurdification”.
“I don’t see them having any sort of aggressive policies of Kurdification, like explicit ones, but again the fears are that there might be more implicit ways of favouring Kurds over others,” he said.
Since the fall of Saddam, Kurdish forces have been accused of employing harsh tactics in these areas, such as forcing out Arab farmers without due process, arbitrary arrest of political opponents, and even pressing minorities to identify as Kurds, according to a Human Rights Watch report published in November 2009.
“The victims of Saddam Hussein’s Arabisation campaign deserve to be able to return to, and rebuild, their historic communities,” the report said.
“But the issue of redress for past wrongs should be separate from the current struggle for political control over the disputed territories, and does not justify exclusive control of the region by one ethnic group.”
Indeed, it is something commander Tayfur agrees. Local minorities would need to choose their loyalties: “If they decide to belong to Baghdad, we will immediately pull back.”
Inside Qarqasha, gun shots and mortar explosions could still be heard late in the afternoon on the second day of the offensive. Resting next to stormed houses, Peshmerga fighters smoke cigarettes and nap, taking cover from enemy snipers.
Behind them, dozens of yellow and orange excavators are already carving out new trenches, coincidentally defining the new borders of their growing region.
“We have the right to fight for a greater Kurdistan,” General Rostam said.
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