KIRKUK: Police deployed in the northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk to prevent any outbreak of ethnic violence ahead of an independence referendum strongly opposed by the central Baghdad government and Western and regional powers.
The Kurdish region plans to hold the Sept. 25 vote despite an Iraqi government warning it is “playing with fire” and US declarations it could undermine the fight against Daesh.
The referendum could raise particular tension in Kirkuk, where Kurds vie with Turkmen and Arabs for power. Turkey, which has moved a detachment of tanks and troops to its border with northern Iraq, said the breakup of Iraq or Syria where Kurds have gained territory and influence in the war against Daesh could stir global conflict.
Kurdish security and the city police erected checkpoints across Kirkuk after a Kurd was killed in a clash with the guards of a Turkmen political party office in the city.
Two other Kurds and a Turkmen security guard were wounded in the clash that broke out when a Kurdish convoy celebrating the referendum, carrying Kurdish flags, drove by the Turkmen party office, according to security sources. The Kurdish dead and wounded were among those celebrating, they said.
Turkey has long seen itself as the protector of Iraq’s Turkmen minority.
Turkey’s defense minister warned on Tuesday that the breakup of Iraq or Syria could have dire consequences.
“A change that will mean the violation of Iraq’s territorial integrity poses a major risk for Turkey,” Nurettin Canikli said in Ankara.
“The disruption of Syria and Iraq’s territorial integrity will ignite a bigger, global conflict with an unseen end.”
Turkey, with a large Kurdish population of its own in the south of the country, fears the referendum could embolden the outlawed PKK which has waged an insurgency in the southeast since the 1980s.
Canikli said Ankara could not allow the formation of an ethnic-based state in the south of the country.
“Nobody should have any doubt that we will take every step, make every decision to stop the growth of risk factors,” he said.
Tensions rose after the Kurdish-led provincial council in Erbil voted this month to include Kirkuk in the referendum despite the fact that the city lies outside the official boundaries of the autonomous Kurdistan region.
Kurdish peshmerga fighters prevented Kirkuk’s oilfields falling into Daesh’s hands when they seized the city and other disputed territories as the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of an IS advance in 2014. In recent months, Daesh has been driven back across Iraq, but remains dug in close to Kirkuk.
Iraq announced on Tuesday the start of an attack to dislodge Daesh from the town of Ana as they push westward toward Al-Qaim, the border post with Syria.
Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite militias, highlighting the broader perils emanating from the vote, have threatened to remove peshmerga from Kirkuk should the Kurds persist in holding the vote.
The Kurdish authorities are showing no sign of bowing despite intense international pressure and regional appeals, not least from allied Washington, to call off the vote, which Baghdad says is unconstitutional and a prelude to breaking up the country.
Friction between Irbil and Baghdad has simmered for years. The Kurds complain central government has not paid the salaries of civil servants in Kurdistan, while Baghdad has strongly opposed Kurdish sales of oil without its consent.
The two sides cooperated in the battle against Islamic State but many Iraqis wonder whether the central government can unite a country that has suffered sectarian and ethnic violence since a US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Iraqi Kurdish President Massoud Barzani said on Monday he would proceed with the vote in the absence of any international guarantee that Baghdad would hold talks on Kurdish independence,
Although US-backed Iraqi forces have dislodged Islamic State from its urban stronghold of Mosul and dashed its dreams of a caliphate, security officials say the jihadists will now wage guerrilla war in a new attempt to destabilize Iraq.
Three people were killed and 34 injured when two suicide bombers targeted a restaurant on the road between the northern towns of Tikrit and Beiji on Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said. Security forces killed a third suicide bomber outside the restaurant.
Police deploy in Kirkuk as tensions rise
Police deploy in Kirkuk as tensions rise
‘People are suffering in a way you can’t even imagine’: Al Arabiya journalist recounts Sudan devastation
- Al Arabiya anchor Layal Alekhtiar’s journey through Sudan exposes the brutal reality behind the headlines
- Millions are displaced, aid deliveries blocked, and camps are filled with traumatized women and children
RIYADH: Al Arabiya anchor Layal Alekhtiar arrived in Sudan expecting to interview the de facto president. What she encountered along the way, over six harrowing days on the ground, reshaped her understanding of violence, survival, and the limits of language itself.
Speaking to Arab News after her return, Alekhtiar described what she witnessed not as collateral damage or the fog of war, but as something far more deliberate and systematic: a “gender-ethnic genocide.”
What she saw was a campaign of targeted killings of men and the mass rape of women that has shattered entire communities and displaced millions. “People are suffering, suffering in a way you cannot imagine,” Alekhtiar told Arab News.
“Firstly, I am speaking about the displaced people in the refugee camps. Fifty percent of the women who had arrived there had been raped. These are the women I encountered in the camps.
“For them (the militias), this is something they have to do to the women before allowing them to exit the war zone that they are in.
“Some of the women are much older, some of them are young girls, very young girls, 13, 14, 15, 16, and they have children who they don’t even know who the father is because they were raped by three or four, multiple masked men.”
Since the conflict erupted in April 2023, the civil war in Sudan — driven by a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces — has displaced millions and left a trail of murder and sexual violence in its wake.
Men are killed before reaching aid sites while women and girls are often raped so violently they require surgery. Mothers are found dead, still clutching their children. Pregnancies from gang rape are widespread.
This was not abstract reporting for Alekhtiar. It was what she saw.
She travelled to Port Sudan on Dec. 2 to interview Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and Sudan’s de facto president.
However, at the request of his office, the interview was to take place in Khartoum — a city without functioning airport infrastructure and retaken from the RSF only in March.
With a small team — a videographer, producer and driver — Alekhtiar undertook the gruelling 12-hour drive from Port Sudan to the capital.
“Looking from one area to another area, you see the difference, you see the depression, you see it on the faces, you see it on the street, you see it everywhere, and you see the effect of the war,” she said.
The destruction was physical as well as psychological. “We saw so many cars and even RSF trucks that were scorched and burned on the side of the road.”
What unsettled her most was not only the scale of the devastation, but the fact that it was inflicted by Sudanese on Sudanese.
“What I have heard from them, there is no way someone can be a human being and can do that. No way. It’s impossible,” she said.
“And the way the city, the way Khartoum is destroyed, no way a person in their own country would do something like this. It’s crazy.”
Along the journey, Alekhtiar spoke to locals wherever she could, asking what they wanted from a war that had consumed their lives.
“They don’t want war. Definitely, they want peace. All of them want that. But at the same time they will not accept being under the leadership of the RSF. For them, there’s no way. And this is something I have heard from all of the people I have spoken to. I did not hear otherwise.”
From outside Sudan, the conflict is often reduced to brief news alerts. Alekhtiar says those accounts fall far short. When asked whether the coverage reflects reality on the ground, she replied without hesitation: “No, not at all, not at all.”
Nearly everyone she met had lost everything — homes destroyed, savings wiped out when banks were looted and burned. According to UNHCR, nearly 13 million people have been forced from their homes, including 8.6 million internally displaced.
On the road from Port Sudan to Khartoum, the scale of death was impossible to ignore. Alekhtiar recalls seeing clouds of flies everywhere, drawn by bodies buried hastily or not at all along the route.
During her six days in the country, her team stopped in Al-Dabbah, where UNHCR tents shelter displaced civilians. What she saw there still stays with her. “I want to emphasize one thing and it is very alarming,” she said.
“What I was witnessing in the camps was only women and children; there were no men. The only men I saw were very old in age. It’s a genocide. They are killing all men. They cannot go out.
“What we saw in the videos, it was real,” she said, referring to the graphic footage of atrocities circulating on social media. “It’s not true that it was one video and the reality is different than that. No, it was real.
“It’s a gender-ethnic issue. It is really a genocide. I’m not just using the word genocide for the sake of using the word. This is actually a genocide.”
Life in the camps was defined by scarcity. There were no spare clothes, almost no supplies, and most people slept directly on the ground. The UN was scrambling to respond, Alekhtiar said, but had never anticipated displacement on this scale.
She watched buses arrive packed with women, screaming babies in their arms. When she asked why the infants were crying, the answer was devastatingly simple.
“Because they are hungry … they are breastfeeding and we cannot feed them because we have not eaten,” they told her. The women’s bodies, starved and exhausted, could no longer produce milk.
UN staff told Alekhtiar they lacked resources as funding was insufficient. RSF fighters were also blocking the main roads, preventing aid from reaching those who needed it most.
Alekhtiar wished she had more time in the camps because this — bearing witness and amplifying suffering — is the core purpose of journalism, she said.
What the women told her there continues to haunt her. Rape survivors said they were treated as slaves, stripped of humanity by their attackers. “They need help, on a psychological level, human level, all levels,” Alekhtiar said.
“These women, I don’t know how they will live later. Some of them cannot talk. They are sitting and looking at me; they cannot talk. Some of them keep crying all day long. Some of them don’t go out of the tent.
“Some of them have kids with them. They don’t know who these kids are, because they found them on their way, and they took them, because they were children alone.
“One woman told me she took a child from his mother’s arms who was murdered, and the child doesn’t speak, even at his age of 3 years, he stopped being able to speak. So many stories, so many stories.
“The problem is the war is still ongoing, and they will come from other cities in their millions. We are not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands. We are talking about millions.”
Alekhtiar does not believe placing further sanctions on Sudan is necessarily the solution.
“The international community, countries, right now are announcing sanctions on Sudan, but that’s not enough,” she said.
“What people need there is support, humanitarian support, and they need real support from the whole world to stop this war because it’s not a normal war.
“A whole race is being killed. Being killed because they want to change the identity of one region. It’s a genocide.”
International sanctions have targeted individuals accused of mass killings and systematic sexual violence. The UK has sanctioned senior RSF commanders over abuses in El-Fasher.
The US, meanwhile, has sanctioned the Sudanese Armed Forces over the use of chlorine gas, a chemical weapon that can cause fatal respiratory damage.
Asked about her own experience in the field, Alekhtiar said the availability of clean water was among the biggest challenges she faced.
“Showering was not an option,” she said, as most water came out black, contaminated, its contents unknown.
She barely ate, overwhelmed by what she was witnessing.
“I was crying all the time there, to be honest. I was sick for two days when I arrived back,” she said.
“After you leave, you become grateful for what you have when you see the suffering of others. They changed my whole perspective on life. It changed me a lot.”
