Turkmen party wants 2 army divisions in Kirkuk prior to U.S. pullout

KIRKUK / IraqiNews.com: A main Turkmen party in Kirkuk urged on Saturday the Iraqi parliament’s security & defense committee to work on sending two military divisions from central and southern Iraq to the northern city of Kirkuk ahead of the U.S. withdrawal, scheduled late this month. “There are only a few days left for the U.S. forces to pull out from Iraqi cities, where national security forces would be responsible for maintaining security and stability, a matter which requires sending two military divisions from central and southern Iraq to the province,” according to a statement by the Turkmen Eli Party as received by IraqiNews.com news agency. The oil-rich northern Iraq city of Kirkuk, one of the disputed areas, is an apple of discord between the central Baghdad government and the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government Kurdistan RegionG), which calls for annexing it to the Iraqi Kurdistan. The city, 250 km northeast of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, is a potpourri of Arab, Kurdish, Turkmen and Christian population. A fact-finding commission on disputed areas in Iraq had been set up by virtue of a mandate from the UN Security Council to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) to help the Iraqi government settled that dispute. Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution provides for the normalization of Kirkuk through having back its Kurdish and Turkmen inhabitants and repatriating the Arabs relocated in the city during the former regime’s time to their original provinces in central and southern Iraq. The article also calls for conducting a census, to be followed by a referendum to let the inhabitants decide whether they would like Kirkuk to be annexed to the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region or having it as an independent province. These stages were supposed to end on December 31, 2007, a deadline that was later extended to six months. AmR (S) 1