ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—Military officials in the Kurdistan Region said on Wednesday that they have deployed a brigade of Peshmerga forces in the Makhmur region south of Erbil “to protect the civilian population from radical groups.”
“Based on demands from people in the area who have come under increasing threat from terrorist groups, we have deployed a Peshmerga brigade there,” Deputy Peshmerga Minister Anwar Haji Osman told Rudaw.
Last month, residents of rural areas around the town of Makhmur, which lies in the disputed territories, said that armed Islamic groups were on the rise in their regions and they appealed for protection from the autonomous Kurdistan Region.
Haji Osman said that the deployment of the Peshmerga forces was an answer to the “defenseless local population”.
“If need be, we can send more troops,” he added.
“We ask the Kurdish leadership to dispatch a force to the area,” a Kurdish villager near Makhmur told Rudaw last month. “Even the Arab Sheikhs demand the deployment of Peshmarga forces from the Kurdistan Region to protect them.”
The villagers say that members of the extremist militant Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) come to the area from across Iraq’s Sunni provinces.
Haji Osman said that the Peshmerga “will remain in the area as long as the local people want it.”
Makhmur, 67 kilometers south of Erbil, is a majority-Kurdish town, but the wider area is also home to Arab herders and farmers.
The villagers say that the newly-arrived militants harass the local population, especially Arab villagers who work with the Kurdish population.
According to data obtained by Rudaw, since April militants have killed 29 Arab villagers who had joined the ranks of the Kurdish Peshmarga forces, the police and government institutions.
“We will stay until we have cut off the hands of the terrorists,” vowed Haji Osman.
