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Fleeing violence, Iraq's Arabs flock to Kurdistan

Fed up with car bombs and death threats, Lazem Hamid, an Iraqi doctor from one of Baghdad's most violent neighbourhoods, decided one day to pack his bags and take his family north to Kurdistan. "I had to leave it all and come here. There was no chance for us in Baghdad. The day we left, our neighbours came out to congratulate us. Life is good here. I have made Kurdish friends," said the 50-year-old microbiology specialist. In June, Hamid set up a private clinic in Sulaimaniya, in partnership with a cardiologist and an orthopaedics specialist both of whom are also from Baghdad, 330km to the south.

Thousands of Arabs like Hamid have arrived among the ethnic Kurds of the soaring northern mountains, fleeing the violence gripping much of Iraq since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February pushed the country to the brink of civil war. The trend is a stunning reversal for Iraq's Kurdistan, home mainly to non-Arab Kurds. During the 1980s, tens of thousands of Kurds were killed in the region during Saddam Hussein's military campaign, which emptied entire villages.

It is not only doctors and academics who have fled north, leaving once-prestigious hospitals and universities in Baghdad without qualified specialists and scholars. Arab labourers from the Shiite south and the Sunni heartland have also sought refuge from the violence. Now, hundreds sleep on cardboard boxes in Suleimaniyah's public parks, scratching out a living in the booming construction sector or working as porters for Kurdish merchants. There are no official figures for the number of Arabs who have resettled in Kurdistan, but anecdotal evidence suggests it has become a magnet for those who can't afford to go abroad.