ARAB families transplanted to the oil-rich northern Iraqi town of Kirkuk by Saddam Hussein say they are now facing a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Kurds seeking to wrest back control.

The complaint comes after increasing violence between the divided province’s Arab, Kurdish and Turkoman populations, each claiming rights to the city dating back to Sumerian times.

Kirkuk has seen several political killings in recent months, culminating yesterday in the arrest of six Iraqi Arabs suspected of belonging to the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, which the US accuses of having links with al-Qaeda.

Colonel Hassan Alawi, the Kirkuk police chief, said the six were suspected of assassinations and attacks on US-led forces in Iraq.

The arrests are certain to fuel calls by Kurdish leaders for the removal of Arabs transplanted to Kirkuk by Saddam during the former Iraqi leader’s genocidal campaign to depopulate Kurdish areas. His aim was to establish Arab control over the northern Kirkuk oilfields, which pump 200,000 barrels a day along a pipeline to Turkey.

Nechirvan Barzani, Prime Minister of the Kurdistan regional government, recently said in London that Kurds and other ethnic minorities could not tolerate any further “injustices” meted out during Saddam’s time.

He added: “Kirkuk is a serious issue and it needs a serious solution. If Kirkuk is not solved it is like a timebomb primed to explode. The solution is simple. The Arabs who were brought to Kirkuk should go back where they came from — with compensation from the Iraqi Government. The same should also happen to the Kurdish refugees.”

Kirkuk’s Arabs, however, accuse the newly powerful Kurds of using their armed Peshmerga militias to launch their own postwar programme of ethnic cleansing: shooting, threatening and beating Arabs who insist on staying in the homes they have occupied for more than two decades.

In Kirkuk’s Qadisiya area, the many “for sale” signs testifies to the mass flight of Arabs and influx of Kurds.

The rapid flux of populations creates unlikely neighbours, who pay lip service to tolerance but would clearly rather be rid of each other.

Abdul Muttarib Jabbar, a Kurdish carpet-seller, yesterday finished moving his family into a half-built breezeblock house built on an empty plot.

Seeking no one’s permission and paying nothing for the land, he insisted he was simply returning to the city his Kurdish father fled in the 1960s to escape represssion.

Brandishing 1949 identity papers “proving” his family’s links to Kirkuk, Mr Jabbar was curt about his new neighbours. “It is better for them to leave. Why did people who used to live in Ramadi come here?” he asked. “I think life will be difficult for everyone if they stay.”

He is one of the lucky ones. Near by hundreds of Kurds live on a bombed-out Iraqi military base now turned over to “evacuated and returned people”, who live amid the unexploded rockets and twisted debris left from the war.

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