Archive for September, 2008
Tensions Rising Between Kurds and Iraqi Government
Alter NET
A dispute over territory is raising fears that of ethnic clashes between Kurds and Arabs.
Tensions between Kurds and the Iraqi government over disputed territory have heightened recently, raising fears that they might lead to ethnic clashes between Kurds and Arabs at a time when the war-torn country is slowly recovering from years of sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Arabs.
Last month, the Iraqi Army deployed units to areas under Kurdish control in volatile northern Diyala Province, as part of its “Operation Good Tidings” to expand government authority over the area.
The center of the controversial move was Khanaqin, 140 kilometers northeast of Baghdad. It is a small, largely Kurdish town that has oil reserves and is close to the Iranian border. Kurdish Peshmarga troops left their bases in the nearby districts of Jalawla, Saadiya and Qara Tapa in northern Diyala after receiving warnings from the Iraqi Army. Read the rest of this entry »
Negotiating Nationhood on the Net: The Case of the Turkmens and Assyrians of Iraq
Hala Fattah, Royal Institute of Interfaith Studies, Amman.
A central argument that has swirled around the contours of the Iraqi nation from its inception in the 1920s has migrated to the Internet. The argument pits the legitimacy of Iraq as a nation-state against that of a whole host of different “national” communities settled within the modern state. The claim has been made that Iraq has never cohered into a nation because successive governments have prevented the assimilation and integration of “the multiple histories of Iraqis” into “a single narrative of state power”.1 The argument is more a Western construct than an indigenous formulation. State-centered ideology is not monolithic and has its ebbs and flows: in certain periods (such as under the monarchy), Iraqis did indeed forge solid ties of marriage, commercial partnerships, and social relationships across ethnic and sectarian lines.2 Moreover, Iraqi nationalism appeals to certain groups more than others. Various observers have noted that, over the last eighty years, some of the Kurds and some of the Shi’a have been somewhat more ambivalent about their Iraqi identity than others in the country. Recently, different ways in which social groups both inside and outside of Iraq are currently reformulating their ties to Iraq and notions of “Iraq” have appeared on the Internet at the same time that the country passes through one of the severest tests in its history. Read the rest of this entry »