Advocates:
Kurds Keeping Christians and Yazidis From Going Home
by John Rossomando
IPT News
February 14, 2017
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 Iraq's Assyrian
Christians and Yazidis face an uncertain future, and advocates claim that
the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) intends to prevent the minority
groups from returning to the lands they fled in 2014 when ISIS took over.
They also don't forget that the KRG and its Peshmerga militia fighters
refused to defend them from the ISIS onslaught in 2014.
The Kurdish Peshmerga disarmed
Christians and Yazidis prior to ISIS's June 2014 rampage across Iraq.
Survivors of the ISIS onslaught told the Daily Beast in August 2014 that Kurdish
authorities and the Peshmerga misled them and abandoned them when they came
under attack.
Bitter feelings remain even after Kurdish and Yazidi forces and ended the terrorist group's presence in the Sinjar
province in December 2015 where most Yazidis lived and freed several Christian towns from ISIS control last
October.
Khalid Hayder, a Yazidi living in West Virginia after serving as a
translator for the U.S. Army in Iraq, expressed bitterness about how the
Kurds "betrayed" the Yazidis and the Christians by leaving them
to be wiped out.
"My fellow Yazidis and my brothers and sisters the Christians are
going to face the same horrific tragedy once again if the Kurds dominate
the region unless there is international protection," Hayder said.
State Department officials formally designated both religious minorities as
genocide victims last year. Prior to June 2014, Iraq's Christian community numbered around 350,000, a fraction of the estimated
800,000 to 1.4 million Christians from various sects who lived in the
country prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
The history of the Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq and
Syria offers little expectation that the Kurds will protect them, Hayder
said. He claims that many crimes against the Christians and Yazidis were
committed under the Kurdish flag.
Not everything is simple. Hudson Institute religious freedom expert Nina
Shea notes that the Kurds feel overextended and that they are stretched
very thin by their approximately 500-mile front line.
"They [claim they] cannot take more security responsibility for
Nineveh unless they claim Nineveh," Shea said.
A law passed by the KRG since ISIS invaded allows Kurds to take
ownership of abandoned Christian or Yazidi buildings, said Jeff Gardner, an
American advocate who runs
an organization called Picture Christians.
"The Kurds are keeping the Yazidis out of the Sinjar; they won't
even let them bring food and spare parts in for things like cars and
people. And they are moving into cities that the Islamic State has been
driven out of and saying, 'See these are abandoned' and making legal
claims," Gardner said. "Many of those making legal claims [for
the abandoned properties] are Kurdish businessmen."
For example, in October a Kurdish court ruled in
favor of a Kurdish man who occupied the home of an Assyrian Christian.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., complained about "reports of land
confiscation and statements you have made regarding Kurdish territorial
claims to the Nineveh Plains region" in a
letter last May to Kurdish President Masoud Barzani.
No one seems to want to help the Assyrians reclaim their properties,
Kaldo Ramzi, foreign relations director of the Assyrian Democratic Movement
(ADM), told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) in an email. His
people feel trapped between the "big sharks" – the Shias, Sunnis
and Kurds – without much of a voice of their own, Ramzi said.
Kurdish officials need to explain their blockade and their allowing
these businessmen to seize Yazidi and Christian homes, Gardner said.
Complaints made to the Kurdish government in Erbil have fallen on deaf
ears, Ramzi said.
Ensuring that the Assyrian Christians and Yazidis can return to their
homes is in the U.S. national interest and the State Department should take
steps to ensure this happens, Shea said.
"If they feel that they don't have any hope there, if they don't
have justice and rights to their land – the lands that they own – then they
will disappear; they will leave," Shea said. "They will emigrate
out of there, and that will be the end of diversity and pluralism in
Iraq."
A KRG representative told the IPT that Christians and Yazidis are being
kept away for their own good, claiming that ISIS littered their villages
with improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
That's not true, Gardner said.
"I have been through the liberated areas. I have sent reporters
into the liberated areas, and they are not full of IEDs," Gardner
said. "And even if they were, they have a force trained by the
American military – trained by the forces of Delta Force – that can deal
with the clearing of the IEDs and explosives."
Kurdish authorities also keep the Nineveh Plain Protection Units (NPU),
one of two ethnic based armed units legally recognized by Baghdad, bottled
up in refugee camps rather than letting them into areas freed from ISIS
control. Moreover, the Iraqi Kurds blocked an Assyrian request to recruit
1,000 extra troops for the NPU under the umbrella of their joint command.
The NPU currently has somewhere between 400 and 500 men. Kurdish security
forces also try to prevent NPU soldiers from returning to their units when
they get back from leave, an NPU representative told the IPT.
The U.S. government has tremendous leverage over the Kurds, Shea said,
and should review Kurdish treatment of Assyrian militia members.
"There is no other solution for security for Christians other than
their own militia," Shea said. "Unless there is a big plan on how
to make the Christian areas and the Yazidi areas of Nineveh safe, they have
to have their own militia. Otherwise it stands to reason that they cannot
live there."
Obama administration officials never bothered to develop a plan to
protect the Christians, Yazidis and other minorities from the major powers
in Iraq, Shea said.
Since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, Barzani has worked to permanently
displace religious minorities and increase the Kurdish population the
Nineveh province, Gardner said, as part of a long-term plan to build a
greater Kurdistan. Sunni Kurds have settled into Assyrian Christian and
Yazidi areas to help stake a claim to their land.
This plan aims to extend Kurdish authority beyond the firm boundaries
found in Iraq's 2004 constitution by expanding its de facto control
westward to the Syrian border and southward into the Sinjar region where
most Yazidis live, Gardner said.
Two weeks after capturing areas around Khazir in Nineveh governorate
last June, Peshmerga commander Hadi Halabjayi declared them
"Kurdistan's now. We will not give them back to the Iraqi army or
anybody else."
Human Rights Watch cited Halabjayi's statement in a report last
November, noting that Assyrians, Yazidis and other minorities
complained about heavy-handed tactics against those opposed to the Kurds
expansionist plans. These tactics included arbitrary arrests, detentions
and intimidation.
This is nothing new. Assyrian Christians complained about the illegal settlement of Kurdish
families on Assyrian land in the early 1990s. The ultimate strategy aims to
unify Iraq's Kurds with those in Syria and Turkey in a broader Kurdish
state, Gardner said.
But Turkey considers Kurdish independence a nonstarter, so
realizing the Kurdish dream is sure to incite the Turks and put ending
Syria's civil war out of reach.
The Peshmerga have Assyrian and Yazidi units, the KRG office in
Washington told the IPT, and it called Gardner's claim that the Kurds have
been harsh to the religious minorities "completely false."
The best possible solution would be the creation of a separate province
for Assyrians and other minorities, Ramzi said.
This also includes Catholic Assyrian Christians known as Chaldeans.
"... [A]ll the Cha[l]dean Syriac Assyrian political parties ...
demand [an] International protected zone to monitored by international
community," Ramzi wrote in an email. "The popular demand for
Nineveh Plain is to become new province and for sure we should ask Iraqi
government for that."
Related Topics: John
Rossomando, ISIS,
Kurds,
Peshmerga,
Kurdish
Regional Government, religious
minorities, Yazidis,
Christians,
Sinjar
province, Khaled
Hayder, Nina
Shea, Hudson
Institute, Jeff
Gardner, Picture
Christians, Masoud
Barzani, Assyrian
Democratic Movement, Kaldo
Ramzi
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