Governor intervenes as Iraqi army raids Kurdish homes in Kirkuk’s Nawroz neighborhood

KIRKUK — Iraqi army forces have intensified measures against Kurdish families in the Nawroz neighborhood of Kirkuk, residents and officials said, after troops raided homes and blocked access to others early Sunday.

Residents said soldiers stormed one house at dawn, assaulted the occupants and forced them out. Another home, where three people including a person with a disability remain inside, has been surrounded, with troops preventing anyone from approaching.

“My neighbors are trapped inside the house. There are three people, and one of them is disabled,” said Bahoz Nabaz, a resident of the neighborhood. “The army has parked a military vehicle in front of their door. If they come out, they will immediately arrest them and seize the house.”

“That family is now as if detained. They cannot come out. How will food and water reach them?” he said. “The army has a plan to seize our houses one by one. Yesterday two houses, today one house, and it seems tomorrow they will take three more until they empty our neighborhood.”

Shawkat Rasoul, whose home was seized, told 964media: “At 3:00 a.m. we went to my sister’s house for suhoor. When we returned, we found the army inside our home. After an hour and a half they beat me and threatened my wife and child with weapons and threw us out.”

“If I have violated anything, let them remove me by law, not by storming in and frightening us in the middle of the night,” he said.

The Nawroz neighborhood includes 122 houses sheltering about 172 Kurdish families. The homes were built under the Baath regime for people close to the party. After 2003, Kurdish families displaced to the Kurdistan Region returned and settled there.

The Iraqi army considers the houses its property. The dispute is before the courts and has not been resolved. Two years ago, army forces moved into the neighborhood seeking control, citing claims that the Ministry of Defense owns the land and properties.

Kirkuk Governor Rebwar Taha visited the neighborhood and said he had reached an agreement with senior army commanders that troops “must not remain in those locations” and that Kurdish homeowners would return.

“What happened today in the Nawroz neighborhood regarding that house was the action of several officers who themselves have their eyes on these houses; it was not an action by the army,” Taha said.

“The homeowner will return to his house and the house will be handed back to him, and later we will pursue judicial and legal solutions,” he said.

Mazin Gharib, a member of parliament from Kirkuk, told 964media: “The scenes we saw were very unreasonable. Who accepts that in the month of Ramadan and at the time of suhoor they go after women and children in that way?”

He said the Kirkuk Operations Command told him: “This is an individual behavior by those officers and soldiers, and the Operations Command is not aware of such conduct.”

Residents say army forces have not approached Arab homes in the surrounding area, focusing only on Kurdish houses.

Similar disputes have emerged in other parts of Kirkuk, where the army has sought to prevent Kurdish farmers from cultivating their lands. In January 2025, parliament approved a law to return land to its owners, but implementation has not begun. The law concerns more than 300,000 dunams of agricultural land belonging to Kurdish and Turkmen farmers seized under the former Revolutionary Command Council.