Several hundred Arab and Turkmen residents marched through Kirkuk on 11 February 2005, alleging that Iraq's January elections in the northern oil city had been marred by fraud. The crowd gathered in the city center before moving south past the local offices of the two main Kurdish political parties.
A statement distributed at the rally, signed by 16 Arab and Turkmen organizations, called for the ballot to be rerun so that results could be verified. Signatories included the Iraqi Turkmen Front, which receives funding from Ankara, the Shiite Dawa party, and the movement loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.
Arab Sunni and Shiite parties had boycotted the vote in Tamim province, surrounding Kirkuk, to protest the registration of tens of thousands of Kurds who had been expelled from the city under Saddam Hussein. That decision shifted the provincial contest toward Kurdish candidates. A Kurdish-language weekly reported that the main Kurdish alliance was on course to take roughly two-thirds of the vote and 26 of the 41 seats on the Tamim provincial council.
Kurds have long sought to incorporate Kirkuk into an expanded autonomous region and establish the city as its capital, a goal that has drawn warnings of sectarian unrest from Arab and Turkmen communities and their backers in Ankara.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this AFP wire report, first published in February 2005, in its own words.