Iraq Turkmen: Baghdad does not want to resolve Kirkuk land ownership dispute

President of the provincial council of Kirkuk Hassan Turan Bahauddin (L) listen to the deputy director of the police Major General Turhan Abdul Rahman during a meeting with religious authority Sheikh Qanbar Musawi (3rd L) on June 16, 2014, in the northern oil hub city of Kirkuk. Iraq said June 15, it had “regained the initiative” against militants who seized vast swathes of territory across the north of the country, with the situation on the ground being further complicated as forces from the autonomous Kurdish region making territorial advances, taking control of one of two official border crossings with Syria earlier in the week. [MARWAN IBRAHIM/AFP/Getty Images]

Deputy head of the Iraqi Turkmen Front said Baghdad has no will to solve the dispute over land ownership in Kirkuk, the Anadolu Agency reported.

A statement issued by the Front said Hassan Turan made the remarks during a seminar held in Kirkuk yesterday in which he explained that the land was seized under the rule of Saddam Hussein, stressing that “the land in Kirkuk represents its identity”.

According to Turan, Turkmen parliamentarians have attempted to solve the land ownership disputes since the fall of Hussein in 2003, noting that “the political will in Baghdad stands against solving this problem”.

READ: Iraqi national security advisor meets Bashar al-Assad in Damascus

For his part, leader of the Iraqi Turkmen Front, MP Arshad Salihi said the successive regimes have played a role in the marginalisation of the Turkmen component and the seizure of their land.

Saddam Hussein’s regime seized lands owned by Turkmen and Kurds and gave them to expatriate Arabs to change the region’s demography.

After the fall of the former Iraqi regime in 2003, Iraq formed a commission to investigate the land ownership dispute, however, the commission did not accomplish many of its tasks due to the complex security situation in the region.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.