The de facto Republic of Kurdistan

A brilliant (and long) article on what is really happening in
the de facto Republic of Kurdistan:

Mosul Diary
“They Destroyed Everything”
By PATRICK COCKBURN

[i]The three months it took to cobble together a government
in Iraq after January’s election shows the depth of the
divisions between the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities.
In the north of the country the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds
are close to civil war. Their savage skirmishes, around the
oil city of Kirkuk and in the streets of Mosul, are generally
unreported in Baghdad. The war of 2003 made the Kurds
the north’s dominant power. They are no longer penned in
their mountains, or in their decrepit cities crowded with
refugees from the 3800 villages destroyed by Saddam
Hussein. But their advance south is contested by the Sunni
Arabs, everywhere on the retreat but able to stage daily
suicide bomb attacks, ambushes and assassinations. On 4
May a man with explosives attached to his body blew
himself up in a queue of young men trying to join the police
in Arbil, killing 60 of them and wounding 150. Ghassan
Attiyah, a political commentator in Baghdad, told me that
‘the Kurds were able to destabilise Iraq for half a century
under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. The Sunni
Arabs are certainly strong enough to do the same thing if
they want to.’

… [/i]

Read the rest of the article:
counterpunch.com/patrick05132005.html

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