Yeah, We'll have an Iraqi constitution in six months - no problem.
The Kurds who descended upon this hardscrabble Arab village in northern Iraq 11 days ago were so confident they could seize the surrounding farmland that they brought along three tractors.
But instead of responding by fleeing, as thousands of other Arab villagers in northern Iraq have done when confronted with similar Kurdish demands, the residents of Haifa refused to budge. “Our people went to them and said, ‘What the hell are you doing here? This area doesn’t belong to you,’ ” recalled Kadhim Hani Jubbouri, the village sheik.
Words were exchanged. Threats flew. When the Kurds began tilling a field edged with harvested hay, gunfire erupted.
Arabs contend the Kurds shot first. Kurds maintain it was the Arabs who opened fire. Both agree, however, that the 15-minute firefight was one of the clearest signs of the growing fissures between Iraq’s dominant ethnic groups — its Arab majority and its Kurdish minority — since the fall of former president Saddam Hussein’s government.
At the same time, in central and southern Iraq, fault lines have widened between the country’s two principal religious communities: Shiite Muslims, who are a majority of the country’s approximately 24 million people, and Sunni Muslims, Iraq’s traditional rulers and Saddam’s principal supporters.
Although a rift between Sunnis and Shiites is relentlessly discouraged by leaders of both communities, tensions have escalated in recent weeks, raising new prospects of strife.
In Khaldiya, a Sunni-dominated town west of Baghdad, unknown assailants ransacked the green-domed shrine of a Shiite saint and set off an explosive last month that damaged his brick tomb.
In Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, some residents suspect that recent killings of former Baath Party members are inspired by religious zeal, and leaders of Shiite religious parties argue that vengeance is warranted against officials of a government that subjugated Shiites, particularly in its last decade of rule.
From
qctimes.com
"Just one big happy family."
JMO
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