Politics

Nineveh governor needs multiple coordination in order to enter Sinjar, says KRG official

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)-affiliated militia groups and Iranian-backed armed factions have a heavy security presence in the town.

Kurdistan 24 2023/10/21 14:44

An Iraqi soldier stands against the backdrop of a wall on which the Kurdistan Workers' Party acronym has been inscribed, Dec. 4, 2020. (Photo: AP)

Iraq Sinjar PKK KRG Nineveh

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – In order for the Nineveh governor to be able to visit Sinjar, a town under his jurisdiction, he needs coordination with several security actors in the area, a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) official said on Saturday in a bid to explain the extent of militia groups' control in the area.

The remarks by Dindar Zebari, the head of KRG Office of the Coordinator for International Advocacy, came during a conference on the Future of Yezidis in Kurdistan, Iraq, and Diaspora in Erbil, where civil society leaders and government officials discussed the state of affairs of Sinjar and the Yezidi population following the 2014 ISIS attacks and its repercussions.

Since 2017, the town has been under the control of numerous armed groups, some of which are alien to the area, according to Iraqi and Kurdistan Region officials.

“In order for Nineveh Governor [Najim Al-Jubouri] to be able to visit Sinjar today, he has to coordinate with multiple parties,” Zebari said, recalling what the governor had personally told him.

Sinjar is a Yezidi-majority town located in western Nineveh province, which has been under the governorship of Al-Jubouri since 2019. Zebari's example was an attempt to show the dominance of armed groups in the area.

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)-affiliated militia groups and Iranian-backed armed factions have a heavy security presence in the town along with the Iraqi military and police. KRG officials have blamed the groups for hindering the administrative and security normalization in the war-torn town.

Kurdistan Region's Peshmerga forces who liberated the town in 2018 from ISIS were ousted in the area by the Iraqi army and Iranian-backed Shiite militia groups.

Japanese Ambassador to Iraq Futoshi Matsumoto on Thursday told Kurdistan 24 that a PKK-affiliated group has denied access to over 1,000 Yezidi students in Sinjar to study at a school funded by the Asian country.

Erbil and Baghdad in September 2020 struck a deal to normalize the administrative and security situations in Sinjar. Per the agreement, all the armed groups, including the PKK, should leave the area and hand the security dossier to the local Yezidis.

The UN, the UK, and the US have expressed support for the implementation of the agreement.