Demand for more housing in Khanaqin

When Ali Kudaday Kani goes to bed at night he must dream of tape measures. The headman of Melekshah, on the outskirts of the northeastern Iraqi town of Khanaqin, he is responsible for measuring out 200 metre sq parcels of land and handing them over to newly arrived internally displaced families to build on. And the flood of internally displaced persons (IDPs) shows no signs of drying up. "There must be getting on for 1,000 plots of land here today," he told IRIN at Melekshah, pointing around him to the hundreds of tents dotting this flat patch of semi-desert. "Just this week, 50 more families came to claim their bit of land." The decision to found a new settlement in Melekshah was taken this summer by the municipal authorities of Khanaqin, a majority Kurdish town extensively arabised by the former Iraqi regime. It was a decision fraught with difficulties. In practice, Khanaqin is under the authority of the Arab governor in Baquba, with the newly formed Iraqi Property Claims Commission (IPCC) invested with the final word on land donation projects. But in this governorate, where hostility between Kurds and Sunni Arabs runs deep, Kurdish officials in Khanaqin freely admitted they consulted neither. "We were facing a humanitarian catastrophe," local IDP Commission head Omar Mansur Khasrow, told IRIN in Khanaqin. "What else could we do?" A little overstated, perhaps. But Khasrow has a point. Like the rest of Diyala governorate, Khanaqin has been flooded with IDPs since last year's conflict. Local officials say 300 Kurdish families have returned there from Iran. More significantly, Khanaqin has been one of the major focus points for Kurds fleeing the cities of Sunni central Iraq. A member of one of three families that have begun building a house on their new Melekshah plot, Khalil Ibrahim is one of the latter. "Saddam forced us to move to Fallujah 35 years ago," he said. "Two months back, US forces warned us we should leave Fallujah before fighting broke out. We did as they said." His original village, Kelemira, is in the middle of a minefield currently being cleared, but he admitted he saw no prospect of ever going back there. When Ibrahim and his relatives began construction work in Melekshah, the new town was supposed to be limited to 357 families on 357 plots of land. It remains unclear whether the municipality will draw the line at the present number of 1,000. IDP head Khasrow claimed that applications to his office had gone up to 10,000 since registration began, far more than the official estimates of 1,900 IDP families in the area. It is a situation that riles some in Khanaqin. They point out that, while some IDP families are in desperate need, many see Melekshah more as a business opportunity. Even among the families who have already received land at Melekshah, only a minority live full time in the tents. Most are renting accommodation in Khanaqin or staying with relatives. But there is a more important reason behind the need to rationalise the headlong growth of the new township. Until now, Melekshah's tent dwellers have neither electricity nor a fixed water supply. The municipality has taken responsibility for connecting the settlement up to the electricity network. The problem of resolving the water issue has fallen to aid agencies. At the moment, tent dwellers survive on water delivered in tankers and humanitarian assistance has been limited to handing out 200 tanks for storage purposes. Work is shortly expected to start on a US $150,000 project to build a water system for the new settlement. Geologists have already visited the site and found underground water supplies. The budget is intended to cover the building of a large reservoir to collect water and pipes spreading out across the plain.