DM Monitoring
Baghdad: Baghdad and Irbil on Oct. 9 unveiled what they called a “historic” agreement aimed at solving all security, governance and service provision issues in Iraq’s northern Sinjar region, an area which armed groups compete for that saw most of its population displaced due to the strong presence of terrorism. An official stated that the agreement will normalize the region, while an expert pointed to the fact that the deal will help ease the friction between Turkey and Iraq, namely the presence of PKK elements in the region.
“This agreement is highly significant and is expected to normalize the situation in the Sinjar region,” State Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Aydın Marouf told Daily Sabah, underlining that it is also a positive milestone for bilateral cooperation between Irbil and Baghdad.
In the normalization process, security arrangements will be implemented in line with the deal such as booting out armed groups, including the PKK terrorist organization, its affiliates and Iran-backed militias. Through the establishment of security and the removal of armed groups, it is expected that the displaced Yazidi community, which suffered genocidal attacks by Daesh when the group took control of significant swathes of the region, can finally return.
“When Daesh occupied the region, the Yazidis had to live under oppression and were subjected to forced displacement. The hundreds of thousands displaced Yazidis could also not return after Daesh left the region because the void was filled in by other illegal armed groups,” Marouf explained, stressing that the Yazidis reject the PKK presence as the group hinders their return. Daesh slaughtered more than 3,000 Yazidis, enslaved 7,000 women and girls and displaced most of its 550,000-strong community from their ancestral home Sinjar. Since Daesh was driven out of Sinjar, a majority-Yazidi district on Iraq’s northwestern border with Syria in 2015, the town and its surrounding areas are controlled by a patchwork of armed groups.
The PKK terrorist group managed to establish a foothold in Sinjar in mid-2014 on the pretext that it was protecting the local Yazidi community from Daesh. Since then, the PKK has reportedly established a new base in the area for its logistical and command-and-control activities besides their main headquarters in the Qandil mountains in northern Iraq.
“A strong terrorism structure existed both during the rule of Daesh and later in the region – a structure that was out of the control of the central government. The PKK reached a new level in Sinjar as an administration dominated by the terror group and its affiliates emerged here,” Bilgay Duman, coordinator of Iraq Studies at the Center For Middle Eastern Studies (ORSAM), told media,
