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  Kurds Defend Policies in Sharp Rebuke to Iraqi Government
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ContributorArmyDem 
Last EditedArmyDem  Dec 01, 2008 09:50pm
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CategoryNews
MediaNewspaper - New York Times
News DateTuesday, December 2, 2008 03:50:00 AM UTC0:0
DescriptionBy RIYADH MUHAMMED and ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: December 1, 2008

BAGHDAD — The Kurdish regional government released a pointed rebuttal on Monday to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s recent criticism of its policies, in a sign of growing fault lines between the Kurds and Iraq’s central government.

Mr. Maliki gave a speech on Nov. 20 in which he said the Kurds were pursuing several unconstitutional policies, including the development of an oil business independent of Baghdad and the opening of representative offices in foreign countries. His government has also criticized the activities of Kurdish defense forces, known as pesh merga, outside the region.

Over the past year, relations between the Kurds and the government in Baghdad have worsened, with officials clashing on issues that reflect the region’s growing power and autonomy.

Ethnic tensions between Kurds and Arabs are threatening again to become a serious political divide in the country. The Kurds, who predominate in Iraq’s three northernmost provinces and speak Kurdish rather than Arabic, fought a long and bitter battle against Saddam Hussein, whose policy of ethnic cleansing is believed to have killed 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds in the years before the American invasion.

Although the Kurds are currently part of the ruling coalition, their increasingly public and acrimonious fight with the central government raises questions about whether the alliance will last much longer.
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