Kurdish militia forces Christian Assyrians, the Yezidis and the Shabak to speak Kurdish

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Translation from Arabic News from Iraq

Inter Press News agency report on the volatile situation in Nineveh province according to researcher (Josette Hiltermann), Vice-director of the Middle East and North Africa in the International Crisis Group, said: "At the heart of this issue is a dispute over land and under whose control and it means also luring minorities nicely and otherwise rudely in order to gain their loyalty, an attempt to ensure the loyalty of minorities in one way or the other."

According to Amnesty International, the northern Nineveh province is constitutionally under the Arabic authority, but the Kurdish authorities moved silently its security forces and political administration to the region in 2006, when the central government was preoccupied with the events of sectarian violence that broke out between Shiites and Sunnis. After the cessation of violence this year, the Arabs wake up to the new threat, a Kurdish occupation of the province. The Kurds claim that Nineveh was home to hundreds of thousands Kurds, before forcing the former Iraqi governments (including the government of Saddam Hussein) to change the Kurdish nationality. They now want control of land and want minorities in the Nineveh to be considered part of the Kurdish people, says Amnesty International.

The local government in the province of Nineveh admitted the existence of significant violations of minority rights in the disputed areas to the existence of militias and parties controlling these areas, considering them "lawless territories." Dildar Zebari, Deputy Chairman of Nineveh province, and a Kurd, said that "the control of militias and Kurdish parties is on the areas where people coexisted and not those disputed, and imposed on the region a lawless situation,” asserting that "These militias are firing on Christians or Shabak or Yezidi threatening homeowners of murder in case not to speak Kurdish.”

Zebari said that "the schools in those areas also studying the Kurdish language in a coercive," adding that" the Third Division of the Iraqi army formation were subjected to quotas is also comprised of Kurdish officers only who control those areas and making random arrests and liquidations that serves the interests of their party."

Zebari said that "claims were raised by the local government in Mosul to the central government in Baghdad to find a solution to this problem that is confronting the minority in those areas, and make the rule of law under the control of the central government and not to the militias" and he alleged that Kurdish militias are forging the official records of these minorities to be Kurds.

The Amnesty International report, released on Tuesday that included details of unconfirmed reports of arbitrary arrests and detentions, enforced by fear and violence attributed to the Kurdish authorities.