THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF TURKMENS CONTINUES IN TEL AFER

Merry Fitzgerald, Assistant of Iraqi Turkmen Front Representative in Europe

...When speaking in the name of the people of Tel Afer at the European Parliament in Brussels during the Iraqi Turkmen Conference on 27th March 2007, little did I know that on that same day the martyr city of Tel Afer was once again the scene of horrible acts of violence and killings of more than 150 innocent Turkmen civilians. The Western media reported that a truck packed with 1,814 kilograms (4,000 pounds) of explosives detonated in a Shi`a area of the city and that this was the deadliest single attack since the invasion of Iraq 4 years ago. They also reported that Shi`a gunmen, including police, went on a 'revenge shooting rampage’ afterwards, killing at least 45 Sunni men. But according to the Shi`a Turkmen Council in al-Mosul, it is the Kurdish parties who carried out the 27th March bombings of civilians in Tel Afer, sparking "retaliatory" massacres later that night (...) The Turkmens of Tel Afer have been victims of the worst humanitarian conditions since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. While thousands of them have been forcibly evicted from their houses and from their city the Kurdish parties of Messrs Barzani and Talabani continue with their policy of 'kurdification", they are bringing in thousands of Kurds and are settling them in the areas Turkmens were forced to leave. What the American military call operation "Empty Tel Afer" has resulted in the devastation of thousands of civilian lives. The siege of Tel Afer is an example of American and Kurdish brutal incursions into densely populated areas under the pretence of "fighting terrorism". The real terrorists are those who use heavy artillery bombardment, aerial bombing raids, who destroy power lines and water systems and who continue to terrify families with their house-to-house searches and raping women. The crimes against humanity committed by the US military never reach, in full details, the American newspapers and are barely mentioned in the other Western media. How many in the West know that the US has used chemical weapons such as white phosphorus in Tel Afer?...

continua / continued