Al-Jeiran Newspaper

With sectarian and racist motives, Baathist regime of Iraqi started forcing Arab Shiites and Kurds to leave their homelands and confiscated all their IDs and historical documents proving their Iraqi nationality.

The main reason was that Saddam wanted to change human structure of Iraq while Shiites and Kurds comprised more than 80 percent of Iraqi population.

After revolution in Iran and closure of US and Israeli embassies in Tehran, Americans thought of coup in Iran in order to compensate their failure. However, the coup effort with 18 American helicopters failed in a desert in Iran. So, they supported Saddam and his brutal ideas, and led him to attack Iran.

Arab and Eruopean countries supported him with money and financial and logistical aids. American media claimed that Imam Khomeini was to export Islamic revolution and that he didn’t consider Arabs as Muslims. The war started and the excuse was to return the second half of Arwand River (Shat al-Arab) to Iraq. It was amazing that Saddam Hussein had agreed earlier (1975) with the Shah of Iran to use this river equally, half by half. At that time, Saddam asked Iranian Shah to pressurized Kurds. However, it was Saddam who violated the agreement unilaterally.

Industrialized and colonialist governments as well as Egypt took advantage of the war, which left more than two millions and half dead, wounded and disabled. They soled and exported weapons to Iran and sometimes to Iran. Egyptian arms factories worked around the clock and even more than 1 million Egyptian workers went to Iraq. Meanwhile, Iraqis went to war fronts and what Iraqis received was war casualties.

After 8 years of war and bloodshed, the war stopped and Saddam agreed with the items of Algeria Agreement and the situation returned to normal.

Saddam granted Iraqi citizenship to appease his Egyptian partners. He even went further and allowed thousands of Iranian terrorists of Mojahedin-e Khalq to remain in Iraq. He provided them with weapons and tanks and trained them by his republican guards.

During the uprising of Shaabanieh in 1991 in northern, central and southern parts of Iraq, following the end of Kuwait occupation by Saddam, MKO members and elements of Republican Guards killed hundreds of Kurds and buried them in mass graves. After these attacks, compulsory immigrations of Shiites and Kurds, some Turkmens and others intensified.

Baathists insolently considered the MKO as the gusts of Iraq. According to our information, more than a million and half Iraqi men and women have lived in Iranian refugee camps since 25 years ago; most of these people are Fili Kurds and Arab Shiites. They have neither Iraqi identity nor Iranian one.

A Fili Kurd once told me that one of his relatives, a 25 year old boy, recently back from Iran, is unable to read or write. He has no identity no citizenship. I personally know Kurd families with the same problem, girls and boys who have grown up without any identity.

Iraqi government, in the first place, should have allowed Iraqi families to return and get back their identities and citizenship.

Al-Jeiran/Dr. Adnan Jawad Al-Temeh/Germany

2007/05/02