(New York Times) - Osman Siddiq, his wife, and eight children were deported in July from their home in Kirkuk and trucked 80 miles east to the self-governing Kurdish enclave that lives under Western air protection. The Siddiqs are Kurds, the predominant ethnic group in northern Iraq, and they had rejected Decree 199, proclaimed last year by Saddam Hussein for "nationality correction" - Iraq's equivalent of ethnic cleansing. It gives Kurds and other minorities (Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Turkmen) the chance to avow that they "mistakenly" registered themselves as non-Arabs and that they wish to reclaim their Arab origins.
2002-08-15 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive