There are parties and groups in Kirkuk that want to annex the city and make it part of Iraqi Kurdistan. We are against this. We would prefer to see Kirkuk become its own region. Our current plans are to return the city back to normal and to allow the return of all those who were displaced. But these plans don’t seem to be acceptable: Only Kurds are being allowed to return. Millions of acres of land belonging to Turkmen people have been taken and not returned. This is because the central government is weak and it has a bad relationship with Kirkuk’s provincial government.
NIQASH: And you believe your group has a solution?
Mahdi: First, we believe that all of Kirkuk should be protected against terrorism. The police and army should be reformed to reflect the make-up of the population here – so 32 percent should be Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab and 4 percent should be Christians. We have discussed this previously. But there is a dictatorship mentality here that rejects this idea.
NIQASH: You’re not talking about the Iraqi Kurdish military though – the forces known as the Peshmerga? After all the local authorities say that Kirkuk is under the control of the Peshmerga.
Mahdi: Security in Kirkuk should be managed in a cooperative way. But even the two major Iraqi Kurdish parties here – the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party can’t agree on this.
NIQASH: But they can agree that their forces should stay in Kirkuk.
Mahdi: Each military force has its own specific mission and its limits. Their task is to guard Iraqi Kurdistan. Kirkuk is a disputed territory and is not part of Iraqi Kurdistan.
NIQASH: It seems that Turkmen groups would like to make the areas of Tal Afar and Tuz Khurmatu into provinces, that will then become a part of a planned “Turkmen” region. Is this true?
Mahdi: Each ethnic group has its own ambitions and we’ve been working on making Kirkuk a separate region for around a decade now. That is the dream of Iraq’s Turkmen – that we can rule ourselves, according to the Iraqi Constitution, which gives us the right to form regions and change districts into provinces. It’s the same dream that Iraq’s Kurds have for their region and that Iraq’s Sunni Arabs have for a region of their own.
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