Turkmen front urges govt. to track down Najaf culprits

KIRKUK / IraqiNews.com: The Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF) condemned on Saturday the blasts that have taken place recently in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, urging the government to track down the culprits. “The ITF is denouncing the cowardly bombing attacks that targeted innocent civilians in al-Najaf al-Ashraf on Thursday (Jan. 14) and claimed the lives of 25 persons and wounded dozens others,” read an ITF release received by IraqiNews.com news agency. The Najaf Health Department’s information director, Salim Ni’ema, had said on Thursday that one civilian man was killed and 77 others wounded in three synchronized blasts in Najaf. The Iraqi Turkmen or Iraqi Turks (commonly misspelled as Turcomans, Turkomens, and Iraqi Turkmans) are a distinct Turkic ethnic group, the third-largest ethnic group (after Arabs and Kurds) in Iraq, living mostly in northern Iraq, in an area which they call “Turkmeneli”, notably in the cities of Kirkuk, Arbil, Talafar and Mosul. There are also significant numbers of Turkmen in the central provinces of Baghdad, Wassit. Estimates of their numbers vary dramatically, (in accordance with Iraq’s assimilation policies no realistic and independent census results have been revealed regarding the Iraqi Turkmen population) from 500,000 by most western sources to 4,500,000 by other sources. They have been undergoing decades of assimilation campaigns in Iraq. AmR (S) 2