Human Rights Watch: Iraqi Kurds Destroyed Arab Homes

Kurdish Peshmerga troops training near Erbil, Iraq, January 26, 2016. Source: Defense.gov.

NGO watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a scathing report on November 13 accusing Iraqi Kurdish forces of “unlawful demolitions of buildings and homes” in Nineveh and Kirkuk, northern Iraq, over the course of 20 months. The charges underline the sectarian and ethnic fault-lines dividing Iraqi society and imperiling a successful post-ISIS recovery. The accusations also threaten to strain relations between the Iraqi Kurds and their major patron, the U.S., which supplies and advises their Peshmerga troops as a proxy force for combatting ISIS.

The HRW report, based on eyewitness interviews, investigators’ visits, and satellite imagery, documents the alleged destruction of buildings “in at least 21” Iraqi villages by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) from September 2014 to May 2016. Imagery indicated further destruction in another 62 Kurdish-captured villages that HRW did not visit, although the organization was unable to draw “definitive conclusions” on these. Civilians interviewed in Qarah Tappah, near Kirkuk, stated that Kurdish forces destroyed the homes of those who joined ISIS, while others reported looting, burning, and bulldozer demolitions. The demolitions violate the laws of war, the group writes in its report.

Responding to the HRW report, the KRG blamed the property damage on combat and the Peshmerga’s disposal of ISIS explosives. HRW’s report counters that the Kurds destroyed only Arab buildings in Nineveh and questioned the logic behind detonating leftover bombs. “The extent and timing of much of the destruction… cannot be explained by ISIS-planted IEDs or damage from coalition airstrikes, shelling or other actions during battle,” HRW insists, saying that much of the destruction occurred after battle.

The November 13 report is not the first HRW criticism of Kurdish forces in Iraq. In February 2015, HRW accused the KRG of detaining thousands of Arabs in “security zones,” preventing them from returning home and destroying some Arab homes while moving Kurds into others. Nor are the human rights abuses limited to Iraq, according to HRW. In June 2014, the group asserted that the Democratic Union Party, which controls the Kurdish regions in northern Syria known as Rojava, used child soldiers, committed abuses through security forces, and suffered from improprieties in its criminal justice system.