DAQOUQ: Iraqi Arabs claim they are being forcibly expelled from homes and villages in and around the northern city of Kirkuk by Kurds who are bent on undoing years of their own forced expulsion at the hands of the Iraqi regime.

As many as 2,000 people from four villages near the town of Daqouq, about 17 miles south of Kirkuk, are reported to have left property and land that once belonged to Kurds, after being served with eviction notices by an official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan-which took control of the area following the fall of Kirkuk on April 10.

The Arab villagers have sought refuge in the homes and tents of fellow members of the Shummar tribe in a larger village nearby.

“This is the legacy Saddam left us,” said Walid, a farmer from the village of al-Untasir, who came to Daqouq to plead his case with PUK officials.

With the US military struggling to retain even a tenuous grip over Iraq’s northern cities, a wave of reprisals by the Kurds against their former Arab oppressors is sweeping the region.

In Kirkuk, Arab residents of the Qadassiyah district say they have been the target of looting and a drive-by shooting by Kurds. They said three houses in the area had been seized by armed men who then spray-painted the word girow, Kurdish for “taken”, on the outside.

Settling claims over displaced people and confiscated property in Iraq is one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues facing post-war authorities in the country.

Since the 1991 Gulf war, the Iraqi regime has systematically expelled an estimated 120,000 people — mostly Kurds, but also Turkomans and Assyrian Christians — from Kirkuk and other towns and villages in this oil-rich region in a process known as “Arabization”. There are thought to be as many as 400,000 displaced people in northern Iraq.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.