As one resident put it: “everyone [he was referring to Baghdad and Erbil] wants Bashiqa.” The town’s geography and ethnic, religious and linguistic composition would make it a valuable inclusion for both the Iraqi Kurdish and federal Iraq.
Bashiqa has been a sub-district of Mosul since the formation of Iraq in 1919 and is economically, politically and socially linked to the city and to federal Iraq. Geographically speaking, it is close to Mosul and as an Arabic speaking town it is also linguistically connected to federal Iraq. Most people in Bashiqa identify as Iraqi with one woman declaring ‘hamoot li al Iraq’ or “I would die for Iraq”.
In the same breath, however, locals will often say they would probably vote to join Iraqi Kurdistan if they were forced to choose. The Yazidi-dominated towns around Bashiqa, and most of the Yazidis in the area, outside of the ones in Bashiqa, speak Kurdish; they identify as Kurds culturally and with the Iraqi Kurdish authorities politically.
And some of the biggest reasons people in Bashiqa have started to lean toward Iraqi Kurdistan and away from Mosul and the rest of Iraq since 2003, is the lure of jobs, security and government services.
During the 2003-US led invasion that toppled the regime of former leader Saddam Hussein, the US army authorized the deployment of Iraqi Kurdistan’s own peshmerga, a military force, in many areas in the Ninawa province, including Bashiqa. The Iraqi Kurdish forces were friendly toward the US forces and this move was made to protect the local population from potential violence coming out of Mosul, a historic centre of Baathist support and therefore supportive of Saddam Hussein.
The presence of those Iraqi Kurdish forces introduced a new dynamic to Bashiqa and many surrounding towns: the Iraqi Kurdish came to be seen as guarantors of security against all those forces that did not guarantee it – such as the Baathists, or Saddam loyalists, as well as Sunni Muslim extremists (Hussein was a Sunni Muslim). That is why Bashiqa residents now question the ability of the Iraq army to protect them if the Iraqi Kurdish forces were to leave. And all of this has allowed the Iraqi Kurdish to make economic and political inroads into Bashiqa.
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