Baghdad: Kurdish forces have prevented displaced Arabs from returning to disputed areas of Iraq that Kurdish leaders want to incorporate in their autonomous region over Baghdad’s objections, a report said on Thursday.
Human Rights Watch warned the Kurdistan regional government against meting out “collective punishment of entire Arab communities” for Daesh’s attacks.
“Cordoning off Arab residents and refusing to let them return home appears to go well beyond a reasonable security response,” said Letta Tayler, senior terrorism and counterterrorism researcher at the New York-based rights group.
The HRW report said Kurdish forces have for months barred Arabs displaced by last year’s Daesh offensive from returning to their homes in disputed areas.
Kurds however had been able to return to the same areas and even in some cases allowed to move into the homes of displaced Arabs, the group said.
When militants launched a devastating military blitz across Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland in June last year, Kurdish forces moved into the vacuum left by fleeing federal security forces.
The move expanded their territory by around 40 per cent and gave them control over areas that Kurdish leaders have long sought to add to their three-province autonomous region in the north.
Militants attacked several of those ethnically and religiously mixed areas in August but Kurdish forces, backed by a Western air campaign, are reclaiming lost ground.
Human Rights watch said it had documented “apparently discriminatory acts” in districts of Arbil province within the autonomous region as well as of Nineveh province outside it.
It said some Kurdish officials defended the measures by arguing that Sunni Arab residents in the area had supported the extremist advance and were still collaborating with Daesh.
The watchdog said some restrictions against Sunni Arabs had been eased in January but stressed the Kurdish authorities needed to do more.
