“If there were elections tomorrow in Bashiqa, the KRG would get one hundred percent of the votes,” one local suggests. Only a second later, though, the man added that the bombs could have been “people from Mosul punishing us for being too close to Kurdistan” over the past few years.
Many suggest that these recent bombings will push people toward the KRG because, when the going gets rough, the people in Bashiqa trust the Iraqi Kurdish forces, the peshmerga (who are actually all from Bashiqa anyway), to protect them. “The peshmerga keep us safe from people from the outside”, said one man, “I don’t trust the Iraqi army to protect Bashiqa”.
On the other hand, residents worry that if Bashiqa moves too far to the Kurdish side, they will draw the anger and attention of extremist groups in Iraq seeking to maintain the state and support the al-Maliki regime. In fact, some have suggested that Bashiqa may have already gone too far east and that these bombs could be a punishment, or a reminder that they are still part of Iraq.
Whether the bombs are to show Bashiqa that Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga cannot protect them from Mosul, or that only the peshmerga can protect them from Mosul, nobody really knows.
In terms of the local population though, Bashiqi blood remains thicker than Iraqi politics or Kurdish oil. For the time being anyway. Locals are worried about more deaths and injuries but they swear they will always put their town and its people first.
“I care about Bashiqa, not Iraq, and not Kurdistan” said one man, before suggesting an alternative, albeit rather unrealistic one. “If these guys [Iraqi Kurdistan and Baghdad] continue this, Bashiqa will just kick out all the political parties and create its own state.”
That’s probably wishful thinking – no other, bigger states in Iraq have managed to achieve this (some have tried).
“The only way this violence will stop is if we have to choose,” another man said, referring to the choice that disputed territories may be asked to make between Iraqi Kurdistan and federal Iraq, should Article 140 – legislation that is meant to solve the problem of disputed territories – ever be enacted.
For the time being though, Bashiqis can only continue to wonder who set the bombs and why violence has finally come to their town. And they know that if this is the first spiral of pre-election violence aimed at shoring up support for one political group or another, then it will be a very long winter indeed in “little Iraq”.
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