ERBIL — A leaked document has gone viral on Kurdish social media proving that the Baghdad-appointed governor of Kirkuk, Rakan al-Jabouri, has been involved in forceful expulsion of Kurds from their own lands.

For decades, Kurds accused the successive Iraqi regimes of Arabization of their homeland. Even after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Kurdish population of Kirkuk and other disputed areas have been subject to the same sectarian plan which are now redressed in a different system.

An official letter by the notorious Kirkuk governor Rakan al-Jabouri has asked Kirkuk Joint Operations Command to help the relocation of an Arab tribal leader in the Kurdish village of Palkana.

The village was completely Arabized by Saddam Hussein, but the non-indegenious Arabs were compensated and returned to their areas of origin in southern Iraq after 2003’s liberation of Iraq. However, with the spike of disputes between Erbil and Baghdad, and after the Iraqi army overran Kirkuk in 2017 to push out the Peshmerga forces, these Arab families once again returned to the Kurdish village to occupy them for the second time.

Jabouri’s letter to the Kirkuk Operations Command asks for providing residence to an Arab tribal leader who had been moved to Palkana as part of the Arabization Campaign and was compensated later for returning to his original hometown.

The Kirkuk governor claims in the letter that Kurds have occupied the house of the Arab tribal leader, and that the army should help ousting the Kurds and help the Arabs settle in.

BasNews