Baghdad - Hundreds of Kurds took the streets in Mosul on Monday calling for the inclusion of the province in the northern Kurdish Autonomous Region. Demonstrators in the heavily Kurdish populated villages of Shekhan and Singar carried signs calling for Mosul, 400 kilometres north of Baghdad, to join the federally recognized, autonomous region in the north that is home to the majority of Iraq's Kurdish minority.

The Kurds complain that they have not had enough representation in the provincial council since they lost against liberal and Islamic blocs, who dominate the provincial seats.

Iraq's provincial elections took place last January in 14 out of Iraq's 18 provinces.

Mosul, one of Iraq's most violent places, has long suffered from an ethnic dispute between Kurds and Arabs. In 1958, Iraq's then prime minister Abdel Karim Qassim encouraged Kurds to move to Mosul and other cosmopolitan parts of Iraq.

But decades later, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein forced the Kurds to move north to the Kurdish region.(dpa)