Kirkuk residents demand truth about fate of their missing
The families of people who have gone missing from Kirkuk and other disputed areas in Iraq over the past decade hope that the federal government retaking these areas will lead to more information on their fate.
BAGHDAD — Now that Iraq's central government in Baghdad has retaken control of Kirkuk and other disputed areas that had been administered by the Erbil-based Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), citizens of those regions are demanding to know the fate of relatives who have disappeared or been detained during the past 14 years.
Dozens of Kirkuk residents demonstrated Nov. 7 to demand information on the fate of their kin allegedly held by Kurdish security forces. Their demands were echoed by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who on the same day called for an investigation into how these people disappeared.
Iraqi Kurdistan's peshmerga and Asayish fighters have overseen security in Kirkuk, the Tuz Khormato district and other ethnically mixed, disputed areas of Iraq since 2014, when they were able to take advantage of the chaos created as the Islamic State seized a third of Iraq’s territory. Before then, the Kurdish forces had shared control with the central government in Baghdad.
In the face of accusations that Kurdish forces active in Kirkuk and the disputed areas took part in kidnappings and forced disappearances, Azad Jibari, the former head of the security committee of Kirkuk’s provincial council, denied Nov. 8 that the forces had played any such role.
