Incoming Iraqi Governor: Politics Can Trump Violence

The Iraqi north is a place where the war hasn’t stopped, and may not even have started in earnest, as Arabs, Kurds and other minorities compete for land and oil resources in cities like Mosul and Kirkuk. Befitting President Obama’s call yesterday for concerted Iraqi efforts at sectarian reconciliation and political unity, Juan Cole reprints a translated interview with the incoming governor of Ninewa Province, home to Mosul, a place I’ve felt an attachment to ever since visiting there on a 2007 reporting trip.

First of all is to achieve true national reconciliation that allows all those displaced to return to the city, and I believe that our city is able to absorb all the displaced. From there we would launch a strategic and objective development program. We would like all the citizens in the governorate to participate in this development program, and we have an ambitious economic program for the governorate.

I stress that we must depart from several disputed issues between the Kurdistan Region’s government and the government in Baghdad, and that we want to work with our Kurdish brothers as well as all the other ethnicities on grounds that we are all citizens of the governorate, and away from any foreign agendas.