Arab, Turkmen blocs reject deployment of Peshmerga in Kirkuk

KIRKUK / IraqiNews.com: A number of Arab and Turkmen members of the Kirkuk provincial council have expressed rejection to the deployment of joint forces, including Peshmerga, asserting that the deployment of these forces have been done without their knowledge. “We have rejected the idea of forming this joint forces, mainly the presence of Peshmerga forces, and we presented alternative solutions, such as forming forces from Kirkuk’s components,” Ali Mahdi Sadeq, member of the council’s security committee, told IraqiNews.com news agency. “We are against joining the Peshmerga in this joint forces and we have preservations and will not accept that,” he added. “I’m a member in the security committee and we have held a meeting with Commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq General Ray Odierno, during which we underlined our stance rejecting the formation of these forces and the presence of Peshmerga,” he noted. He called for the reformation of these forces with the participation with equal share of Kirkuk components. Joint patrols between Iraq’s largely Arab army and Kurdish Peshmerga troops that U.S. officials hope will build trust have started in tense disputed areas, the U.S. military commander in Iraq said on Tuesday. General Ray Odierno, who leads the 107,000-strong U.S. force still deployed in Iraq, said around 70 percent of planned joint patrols, which are being supervised by U.S. soldiers, have been trained and deployed and the rest would follow within days. For his part, Sheikh Abdullah Sami al-Aasi, head of the council’s security committee from the Arab bloc, said “We had no meeting with Arab bloc regarding the deployment of Peshmerga forces in Kirkuk.” “I hear from mass media about the formation of these forces and mechanisms and how they will work,” he added. “Security violations in the city is so simple and police and army forces can handle them without the Peshmerga forces’ intervention,” he said. Al-Aasi called for keeping the local forces to protect Kirkuk as they represent all Kirkuk’s components from Arab, Kurds, Turkmen, Cheldeans and Assyrians. Kirkuk, 250 km (156 miles) north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, sits on the ruins of a 5,000-year-old settlement. Because of the strategic geographical location of the city, Kirkuk was the battle ground for three empires, Assyria, Babylonia and Media which controlled the city at various times. Kirkuk is the centre of the northern Iraqi petroleum industry. It is a historically and ethnically mixed city populated by Assyrians, Kurds, Arabs and Iraqi Turkmen. The population was estimated at 1,200,000 in 2008. SH (I)/SR 1