ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A Kurdistan Region’s influential Islamic preacher on Sunday stood by his earlier remarks calling the mid-20th century departure of Kurdistan's Jewish community a blessing, describing those who left for Israel as “invaders” and accusing them of being accomplices in the Gaza war that has claimed more than 70,000 lives.
Haji Karwan, who is affiliated with the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), on Saturday shared a black-and-white video on his Facebook page about the Jewish community performing religious practices in Kurdish clothes. Under its caption, he wrote, “Thank God that Kurdistan has been cleaned from these creatures.”
“I don’t regret what I wrote on the video,” Karwan told Rudaw English on Sunday, while saying that he does not harbor any anti-semetic sentiments to “non-Zionist Jews.”
The post drew criticism, with many of the social media users commenting on it saying that the post involves radicalism and hate speech. An account named Pola M Anwar urged the Islamic preacher to “convey the beautiful and merciful image of Islam, rather than celebrating the expulsion and cleansing of a country of its minorities, which contradicts the true spirit of Islam."
At least 120,000 Jews had left Iraq and today’s Kurdistan Region in the early 1950s. In addition to the establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, their immigration was also fueled by the massacre of around 200 Jews in April 1941, following the collapse of a pro-Axis government in Baghdad that came to power through a coup.
Their departure was also motivated by advancing property confiscation and arbitrary arrest of the community after founding the Jewish state and the subsequent defeat of Arab states in the first Arab-Israeli war, ultimately resulting in a law allowing Jews to leave Iraq provided that they renounce Iraqi citizenship and relinquish their properties to the government.
“Today the descendants of these Kurds and other migrants are enforcing brutal policies against people in Gaza,” the Islamic preacher claimed.
The war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise incursion into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking approximately 251 hostages. Israel fiercely responded, launching a military campaign against the strip that has killed more than 73,651 people, according to the latest figures released by Gaza health ministry on Sunday.
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Ranjdar Cohen, head of the Jewish-led Erbil-based Aramic Organization for the Development of Social Peace, said Jews were “forced to flee from their homes in Iraq and Kurdistan” and that “here is our homeland.”
“About 200 Jewish families are living in the Kurdistan Region now,” he added, noting that their rights are protected according to the Kurdistan Region Law No. 11 in 2007 to protect religious and ethnic groups.
Cohen framed the remarks by Karwan as a “reflex” to what has been circulating on social media against him “from fake pages that seek sedition.”
Haji Karwan has appeared as one of the outspoken figures against the war in Gaza, issuing stark statements against Israel while collecting and transferring financial and other aid to the residents in the strip.
In response, several Kurdish pages that claim to have affiliation with Israel and the Jewish community are posting regularly about him, often accusing the preacher of financing Hamas operations in Gaza.
These social media pages are steered by "intelligence services from hostile countries to make frictions between Jews and Muslims in the Kurdistan Region,” Cohen claimed.
Meanwhile, Amir Osman Mawlud, the director of coexistence affairs in the Kurdistan Regional Government’s endowment ministry, reiterated that the regional government remains obliged to “protect all the ethnic and religious groups without discrimination."
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