Thousands of secular Iraqi Arabs find haven with old foes in Kurdistan

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Iraqi Arabs See Unlikely Haven With Old Foes
By EDWARD WONG
Published: September 2, 2006

....With sectarian violence boiling over in much of Iraq, tens of thousands of Arab families are on the move, searching for a safe place to live. Surprisingly, given the decades of brutal Sunni Arab rule over the Kurdish minority and the continuing ethnic tensions, many like Mr. Abdul Rahman are settling in the secure provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan, run virtually as a separate country by the regional government.

The influx of Arabs has made many Kurds nervous, and regional leaders are debating whether to corral the Arabs into separate housing estates or camps.

“For the Kurdish people, it’s a sensitive issue,” said Asos Hardi, the editor of Awene, a newspaper that has run editorials in favor of segregating the Arab migrants. “Of course, everybody supports those people who have left their lands and their homes because of violence, but we don’t want it at the expense of giving up our land or changing the demographics of our land.”

Across Iraq, growing numbers of Arabs have been fleeing their hometowns in search of basic security. Outside Kurdistan, nearly 39,000 families have been uprooted by the Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence, a figure far higher than an estimate of 27,000 released by Iraqi officials in July, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement. Families usually move from mixed areas to cities or neighborhoods where their sects dominate.

But some are choosing Iraqi Kurdistan even over sectarian enclaves in Baghdad and homogeneous cities like Falluja, for Sunnis, and Najaf, for Shiites. Besides having greater security, Kurdistan might appeal to more secular Arabs because the Kurds, who make up a fifth of Iraq, are often not religious conservatives....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/world/middleeast/02arabs.html?ref=todayspaper

[bemildred]

1. A recipe for conflict.

Arab refugee camps in Kurdish territory.

[pinto]

2. Apparently a lot of money is flowing into Arbil, Kurdistan

article from last November, timesonline (UK)

ON THE ground, Dream City looks like nothing more than another walled compound in a country full of ruined army bases.

It is only when watching the promotional film that the future of this particular site is revealed as a complex of 1,200 luxury homes, a shopping mall, parks and schools: in short, a slice of Western suburbia grafted on to an Iraqi city.

The $300 million (£170 million) project, the brainchild of an Iraqi exile businessman, is quickly rising on the outskirts of Arbil, one of the boom towns of the Kurdish region of Iraq. The skyline of the region’s other main city, Sulaymaniyah, is also a web of cranes and semi-built apartment blocks, the main street a long building site of hotels, offices and houses rapidly shooting up to accommodate the sudden flood of workers to the area.

Much of the muscle going into the building boom is provided by Iraqi Arab companies and labourers from the south who have moved to this once war-torn region of northern Iraq to escape the horrors of the rest of the country.

A bubble of relative security, with a quasi-democratic, quasi-authoritarian government, the Kurdish region of Iraq is benefiting from the dilemma of businessmen wanting to invest in an oil-rich country that is also one of the most dangerous places on earth. “Of course it is better to invest here than in Baghdad,” said Talib Ali Ahmed, head of Sulaymaniyah’s Chamber of Commerce.

<more, interesting read>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1851967,00.html

[Finder]

3. This has been part of the plan all along...

since the first Gulf War. I support the ends but disagree with the means this administration decided to use.