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Kurdish Leader Says Iraqi Governor Assassinated
ANKARA, Feb 19 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The governor of Arbil province in Iraqi Kurdistan has been assassinated new agencies reported Monday.
A spokesman for the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (PDK) told agencies that the governor, Francois Hariri, was shot dead by unknown gunmen in his car while driving in Arbil, the capital of the province.
"An investigation has began to find the assassins," he said.
Hariri, a Christian, had escaped unharmed from an assassination attempt five years ago, the Turkish News Agency, Anatolia, reported.
As a standoff between Iraq and the U.N. continues over economic sanctions imposed on the country following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990-91, with U.S. and British planes patrolling "no-fly zones" in the north and south, the Iraqi Kurdish community has broken away and created a semi-autonomous region of its own in the north of the country.
Two rival Kurdish factions, the PDK and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), control northern Iraq, which has not been run by the Baghdad government since the end of the Gulf War.
The PDK holds a major part of the territory including Arbil province, which has a population of 900,000, and the areas close to the Turkish border, while the UPK holds the area close to the border with Iran.
Ankara authorities work in cooperation with the two northern Iraqi Kurdish factions in order to suppress Kurdish insurgents of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who have taken refuge in northern Iraq.
The PKK withdrew from Turkey in September 1999 under orders from its jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who was sentenced to death by a Turkish court in June 1999 for separatism and treason.
The PDK and the PUK have, in the past, had troubled relations that sometimes erupted into violent skirmishes, but relations between the two have improved since they signed a peace deal in Washington in September 1998.
Their leaders met last January to discuss disagreements between the two groups in the town of Salahuddin, where the PDK has its headquarters, for the first time in several years.
British and American planes based in Incirlik, in southern Turkey, patrol Iraqi Kurdistan. The region was declared a no-fly zone for Iraq's air force at the end of the Gulf War in order to protect the Kurdish population.
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