An informed source in the Nineveh Provincial Council revealed, last Tuesday evening, that a verbal altercation took place between members of the council and the director of the Mosul municipality due to the political conflict over the lands surrounding the city of Mosul .
The source said that the Nineveh Council held a session this evening that included opening the file of preventing construction on residential lands around the city of Mosul by influential armed groups .
He said, “The session included hosting the Director of Mosul Municipality, Abdul Sattar Al-Habou, to discuss the issue of building on residential and agricultural lands around Mosul .”
The source explained that “the session began by discussing the issue of preventing influential parties, including armed factions, from building on the lands surrounding Mosul from the eastern, northeastern, and southeastern sides, under the pretext of preventing any demographic change operations in the Nineveh Plain areas .”
He pointed out that “a verbal altercation took place between Al-Habou and Nineveh Council member Aref Al-Shabaki on the background of the session, where Al-Shabaki, who is close to the Shabak Mobilization faction (Brigade 30), denied that the factions had prevented construction on those lands .”
In turn, the Director of Mosul Municipality, Abdul Sattar Al-Habou, said: He attended the council’s hosting and discussed the issue of lands, stressing that “the number of lands that are prohibited from being built upon by the residents of Mosul exceeds nine thousand plots of land granted by the state .”
He stressed that “all these lands are located within the borders of the city of Mosul, and building on them does not represent any threat or demographic change to the Nineveh Plain region, as some political and armed groups in the plain region claim .”
Al-Habou pointed out that “the people of Mosul who are prevented from building are from different religious, ethnic and sectarian components of Mosul, and therefore their building on it does not mean causing any demographic change in the region .”
Earlier, a responsible source in Nineveh revealed that two armed factions in the Nineveh Plain area were preventing residents from building on lands in the areas of Zayouna, Jaliukhan, Qazah Fakhra, Al-Taalim, Al-Kindi, Sada, and Baawiza, which are areas affiliated with the city of Mosul and fall within its administrative borders .
The source also confirmed that one of these two factions imposes “taxes” on the residents in order to grant them approval to build, as it imposes on them an amount of $2,000 in exchange for allowing them to build plots of land no larger than 200 meters.
