Insurgents battling U.S. and Iraqi forces in the northern city of Mosul have been trying to drag the Kurdish minority into their fight and set off a sectarian war, Kurdish and Arab officials say. Violence against Kurds has escalated in recent days, officials say. The offices — and officials — of Kurdish political parties have been attacked. Insurgents fired on a truck carrying Kurdish peshmerga fighters. And at least one Kurd was said to have been beheaded in Mosul, a largely Sunni Arab city. "They are trying to ignite the flames of sedition between Arabs and Kurds," Khasro Gouran, Mosul's Kurdish deputy provincial governor, said by telephone from Mosul. "They want the Kurds to react and the peshmerga to come in (from outside Mosul) so there would be sectarian strife in the city."
"They won't succeed because the Kurdish leadership is aware of their plans," Gov. Duraid Kashmoula, an Arab, said of the insurgents. The Kurds are not the only ones under attack. During the latest bout of violence, masked men have stormed police stations, looting and burning some. They've also set up their own checkpoints and set cars ablaze, prompting the Americans to launch military operations to oust fighters from their stronghold in the city. Gouran said that in recent days three Kurds were killed, including at least one whose decapitated body was discovered with the head placed on the back.
The two main Iraqi Kurdish parties are mostly secular U.S. allies that have a bloody history of animosity with some militant Islamic groups and Baath Party loyalists, both believed to be active in the Mosul insurgency. The parties have long been targets. The Kurdish minority generally lives in peace with Mosul's Arab majority, although land and property disputes have in the past created some tensions. When the militants overpowered Mosul's police force, which U.S. and Iraqi officials say is infiltrated by insurgents, the local government called in reinforcements, some of which came from the mostly quiet Kurdish region. Gouran said some of the Iraqi National Guard reinforcements rushed to the city came from the Kurdish provinces of Dohuk and Irbil. He said many of their members were former peshmerga, a term that refers to the Kurdish militia that fought former Baghdad governments. In addition, Kurdish political parties called in peshmerga fighters to guard their offices. The Kurdish militia proved harder for insurgents to overpower than the police — in some cases killing or capturing their attackers. |