Tit-for-tat Kurds reverse Saddam's 'ethnic cleansing'

For Iraqi Kurdish mathematics teacher Mohammed Aziz, two wrongs can make a right. After decades of forced exile by the Baath party of Saddam Hussein, he is back with a vengeance.

Aziz was just four years old in 1975 when his family was evicted from Bawaplawi village, near the northern city of Khanaqin, and Arab settlers grabbed their home.

Now schoolteacher Aziz is back and has done to the Arabs what they did to him.

"Our homes were taken over by the Arabs without paying us any compensation," Aziz, 37, said at the modest single-storey brick house which he has occupied since the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003.

"We moved in and took any house that was empty. The Arabs who were here had fled."

Saddam's "Arabisation" campaign sought to change the demography of Khanaqin, which originally had a vast majority of Kurds and a smaller minority of Shiite Arabs, Turkmen and Jews.

With the fall of Saddam's regime, the Kurds are back and the Arabs are nowhere to be seen, at least in Khanaqin.

"Ninety percent of the people who were forced out of Khanaqin have returned," said the city's mayor, Mohammed Mala Hassan, 52. "I want the others to return too, but I have no money to provide them with the basic facilities." AFP