Shafaq News- Nineveh
Mosul and its full administrative and municipal boundaries fall outside Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution, Nineveh provincial council member Abdullah al-Nujaifi said on Tuesday, rejecting claims that recent council decisions on residential expansion zones are intended to alter the area's demographic makeup.
Article 140 sets out a process for resolving the status of territories disputed between the federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the autonomous authority governing Iraq's Kurdish north. Its scope has never been fully implemented, and which areas it covers remains politically contested.
Al-Nujaifi told Shafaq News that the boundaries of Mosul have sat outside that framework since before 2003, and that the lands of the Jliyokhan, and Qaza Fakhra areas have fallen within the Mosul municipality's limits over the same period. Neither the Article 140 committee nor its recommendations, he argued, can extend into the city's established boundaries.
The remarks follow a case brought before Iraq's Federal Supreme Court by Qusay Abbas, a member of parliament representing the Shabak community, a minority group concentrated in the Nineveh Plains east of Mosul, against the head of the Nineveh provincial council. The suit accuses the council of seeking to engineer demographic change in areas surrounding Mosul within the Nineveh Plains, after it voted to authorize the Mosul municipality to begin subdividing and distributing residential plots and issuing building permits in expansion zones.
Al-Nujaifi distinguished those rulings and the Mosul case. The Federal Supreme Court decision on demographic change, he said, was issued at the request of the Christian community to protect specific towns such as Bartella and Qaraqosh by barring outside ownership and preserving their populations, a matter he described as unrelated to municipal and service planning in central Mosul.
Read more: Nineveh Council lifts building restrictions on Mosul outskirts amid demographic dispute