The old two-story house -- six rooms built around a big courtyard -- has been home to Shirwan Yousef, his three brothers and their families for seven years.
But Yousef, who paid 1.25 million dinars -- about US$700 at the time -- for the house, doesn't officially own it. The law back then, when Saddam Hussein's Baath Party ran things, prohibited Kurds from buying property unless they renounced their Kurdish ethnicity and declared themselves Arabs.
So thousands of Kurds solved the problem by buying property in the name of a trusted Arab friend or neighbor.
Given years of repression by Saddam and widespread ethnic cleansing of Kurds to make room for Sunni Muslim Arabs -- such trust among the two groups might seem surprising.
Yousef, who owns a barbershop, used all his savings to buy the house in the poor, mixed Kurdish-Arab neighborhood called Atshaneh. He put the dwelling in the name of his childhood Arab friend, Tarek Younis Ahmed.
"I know that the milk he drank as a child was pure," Yousef, 35, said, explaining the trust he put in an Arab who was also a strong Saddam backer and a member of his ruthless Baath Party.
"Arabs are our brothers. It was Saddam who caused rifts and hatred between ethnic groups," Yousef said.
Ahmed, a 37-year-old businessman, still proclaims loyalty to the ousted dictator.
"I love Saddam. He's my president," he said.
Regardless, Ahmed said, the law on property ownership was wrong. Beyond that he was flattered by Yousef's trust.
"I consider him like a brother. It was a wrong law. We are Iraqis and ought to be able to buy property in any part of Iraq. His family has been in Mosul since 1950. My family has been in the city since 1960," said Ahmed, a shy man.
When asked about Saddam's treatment of the Kurds, Ahmed sidestepped the question.
"All I cared about was that he provided me with security, money and employment," he said.
With Saddam gone, Kurds must now wait until a new central government issues laws to facilitate the transfer of property to its rightful owners.
In the meantime, people like Yousef and Ahmed are drawing up their own documents transferring property from Arab ownership to Kurdish.
Some Kurds also have begun buying property in their own names even though the deeds cannot yet be registered. Kurds have prospered over the past 12 years since they gained semi-autonomy in the nearby Kurdish areas in the far north of the country. They set up the region under the protection of US and British air patrols to keep Saddam's army out after the first Gulf War.
With their new-found prosperity, Kurds are looking to invest and Mosul property looks good. That, however, is making many of the city's Arabs uneasy, fearful that the ethnic balance could tilt in favor of the Kurds.
US Army commanders and Kurdish officials here say there is no cause for alarm.
"It's a matter of perspective," said Colonel Joe Anderson, commander of 101st Airborne's 2nd Brigade, which is in charge of Mosul. "If 10 families did it [in one neighborhood] ... that would be a lot because they [the Arabs] didn't have any [Kurdish neighbors] before."
Besides, he asked, how can the Arabs complain since they were the ones selling the property. "Everything here is about money."
General David Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, said the "rumors" that Kurds are trying to encroach on Arab lands "are spread by those who have a residual dislike for Kurds."
"There's no grand scheme to take over Mosul or something like that," Petraeus said.
But even some liberal Arab intellectuals remain skeptical.
"Kurds are buying property in order to turn Mosul into a Kurdish city," insisted Taher Hamed Mohammed, lecturer of Islamic History at Mosul University. He said the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two Kurdish factions, was buying residential property in Mosul.
In Mosul Kurds live predominantly on the west bank of the Tigris River. The Arab majority is on the east -- the old town and the financial pulse of the city.
Arabs and Kurds, not surprisingly, differ about the size of various ethnic groups in the town and the province of which it is capital. Census figures done under the Saddam regime are seriously questioned.
According to the governor, Ghanem al-Basso, an Arab, the population of Nineveh Province is 4 million. Mosul, he says, is about 2 million. Altogether, he claims, the population is 90 percent Arab. Kurds, he says, total just 150,000.
But his Kurdish deputy, Goran, says the provincial population is only at 3 million and the Mosul count is 1.7 million. He claims the city is between 50 and 55 percent Arab and 35 to 45 percent Kurdish, with Assyrians making up 8 percent. Other ethnic groups, including Turks make up the balance.
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