The military camp was built in Topzawa village, 15 kilometers southwest of Kirkuk, in 1987, leading to villagers being forcibly displaced from their homes and moved elsewhere in the country. Many victims of the regime’s genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds were held in the camp until they were moved to southern provinces and massacred.
The Iraqi army’s 11th Division have in recent days made their way back into the military camp, setting up concrete walls in preparation for the base’s renovation, despite the strong protest of the people of the village.
“They tell us that we have to leave and say ‘this is not your place. Why did you build houses here?’ This is our land. This is our village. They are telling us that we must leave,” Dilbar Mohammed, an elderly resident of Topzawa, told Rudaw’s Hardi Mohammed on Thursday, while sitting on one of the concrete walls that have been set up right next to her house.
“We have no one coming to our aid,” she decried.
Loudspeakers in mosques have been used to call on the people of the village for protests against the army’s return, but their efforts have proved futile.
“The first thing they said was that they would force the families out of here. That was the first thing they said. We then tried to go see the Commander of 11th Division, Maad Badai, but they would not let us,” said Abdullah Mohammed, another Topzawa resident.
“They have come here and they are trying to trespass. I just came back from farming, hoping to rest in my own home, but I see the army is standing by my door. Do I look like a terrorist?” said Aras Mohammed, another resident.
The Commander of the Iraqi army’s 11th Division, Badai, in late May sent a letter to the Kirkuk agriculture department, asking them to make land in several villages south of Kirkuk available to be turned into military bases and residential units for the soldiers. The decree was strongly opposed by Kurdish and Turkmen farmers who held sit-in protests for over a month.
A decree from Hussein’s regime in 1975 expelled Kurdish and Turkmen farmers out of their lands in south of Kirkuk, transferring the ownership of the properties to the defense ministry and the municipality.
The Kurds and Turkmen came back to re-inhabit the land following the fall of Hussein’s Baath regime in 2003. The Iraqi Council of Ministers issued a decree in 2012 calling for annulling all decisions from the body in charge of northern Iraq affairs during the Baath regime’s reign.
The 2012 decree was never fully implemented, causing problems for the Kurdish and Turkmen farmers in Kirkuk following the Iraqi army’s 2017 takeover of the city as there have been multiple attempts to take advantage of anti-minority bills and decrees issued under the Baath regime.
