|
The week before the
early surprise "transition of power" in Iraq, the
New Yorker magazine published a disturbing piece by
Seymour Hersh that contained news probably far more
dangerous than any coming out of Baghdad. His
report, Plan B, revealed how top Israeli officials
reached the conclusion by last August that "the Bush
Administration would not be able to bring stability
or democracy to Iraq." Fearing the consequences,
Ariel Sharon's government began freelancing a new
divide-and-conquer strategy meant, among other
things, to help ensure the fragmentation of the
Iraqi state and potentially destabilize further an
already destabilized region. They decided "to
minimize the damage that the war was causing to
Israel's strategic position by expanding its
long-standing relationship with Iraq's Kurds and
establishing a significant presence on the ground in
the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan… Israeli
intelligence and military operatives are now quietly
at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish
commando units and, most important in Israel's view,
running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of
Iran and Syria."
This (in Hersh's phrase) "politically reckless" move
-- an example of tactically brilliant short-term
thinking almost guaranteed to prove a long-term
strategic blunder and sure to blowback on the
Israelis -- is likely to be especially harmful to
the Kurds themselves. Now, like the Americans, they
will be ever more closely identified in the region
with the defense of Sharon's Israel. The training of
Kurdish militiamen may, in the short run, aid
Israel's policies in the region and bolster Kurdish
dreams of an independent state, but it will, in the
end, likely prove yet another disaster for the
Kurds. Their militias are not serious fighting
forces, if you're thinking, say, of the Turkish
military (which ruthlessly crushed its own Kurdish
population's desire for autonomy), or even perhaps
future Iraqi armies. The Kurds, a people scattered
across the region, have put their faith and fate in
the hands of states (and their intelligence
agencies) that have always betrayed them --
including the Shah's Iran, Saddam's Iraq, the United
States more than once, and now the Israelis.
If the Israeli link is dangerous for the Kurds, it
may prove hardly less so for the Americans in Iraq.
Paul Rogers, the sober and thoughtful geopolitical
columnist for openDemocracy.net, has often pointed,
as he did recently, to
"the development of closer links between the US
military and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF),
especially the Americans' procurement of specialist
Israeli equipment developed for use against the
Palestinians [for their forces in Iraq], and the
IDF's sharing their experience of urban warfare
[with the Americans in Iraq]. In pursuing these
links, US military planners believed that any
relevant experience or equipment that might limit US
casualties was greatly welcome. They did not
appreciate that news of Israeli involvement would
have a cumulative impact in Iraq and the wider
region -- confirming the widely-held view that the
US occupation of Iraq was part of an overall
Israeli-American policy to redraw the political map
of the Middle East."
The Israelis have simply added another round of
munitions to a Kurdish situation in northern Iraq
that is, as Dilip Hiro points out below, explosive.
Any such explosion could draw all sorts of states
into conflict. Hiro, a veteran Middle Eastern
analyst, surveys the Kurdish situation at this
perilous moment and suggests what the shape of a
future Iraqi civil war might look like and where it
might begin.
The Sarajevo of Iraq
Worsening Kurdish-Arab Friction Threatens the Region
By Dilip Hiro
In the ongoing crisis in Iraq, one factor has
remained unchanged: the loyalty of the Kurds to
Washington. Whereas, for most Arabs, March 20, the
first anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq, was ignored, Iraq's Kurds celebrated it with
traditional dancing and gunfire as "Iraq Liberation
Day." Unsurprisingly, when the time of "transition"
came, the Bush administration gave the Kurds two of
the top five positions in the new interim Iraqi
government -- instead of the one that would have
been their due if their percentage of the national
population were all that was taken into account.
Indeed, when Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani --
the respective leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)
-- protested Washington's failure to include a
reference to the Transitional Administrative Law
(popularly known as the interim constitution), in
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1546 that
paved the way for the "transition" in Iraq, it was
no more than a lovers' tiff. Kurdish leaders have,
in fact, doggedly maintained their loyalty to the
United States in the hope and expectation that
George Bush would set them firmly on the path to an
independent state -- even though their history,
since U.S. President Woodrow Wilson failed to
deliver such a state after World War I, should have
taught them quite a different lesson.
Sadly, to this day their perception of that history
is blinkered. The 1920 Treaty of Sevres, signed by
Damad Feird, the Ottoman Sultan's Prime Minister,
and the wartime Allies stipulated that Anatolia
would be dismembered and Turkey's southeastern
region, then containing Mosul province, turned into
an autonomous territory. The prospect of
independence, if recommended by the League of
Nations, was dangled before the Kurds, then rejected
by the Turkish parliament and, in July 1923,
superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne, which made no
mention of the Kurds.
According to the latter treaty, Turkey renounced its
claims to the non-Turkish provinces of the former
Ottoman Empire and the Allies confirmed Turkish
sovereignty over Anatolia. Two years later, at
Britain's behest, a League of Nations arbitration
committee awarded Mosul province to Iraq, then under
British mandate.
And so it went for the Kurds, though their
historical myopia persists. Only recently,
misreading the interim constitution, promulgated on
March 8, the inhabitants of Iraq's three
Kurdish-majority provinces, Dohak, Irbil, and
Suleimaniya -- since 1974 collectively called the
Kurdistan Autonomous Region (KAR) -- thought they
had been granted independence, and welcomed its
promulgation with wild celebrations. Apparently,
this was due to a popular interpretation of a
provision in the interim constitution stipulating
that if two-thirds of the voters in any three of
Iraq's eighteen provinces cast their ballots against
a draft permanent constitution in a referendum, then
it would "fail." This was seen as, in essence, an
independence veto.
It was true that Turkey found this provision
sufficiently objectionable to express its public
disapproval of Iraq's interim constitution, which
describes the Iraqi government as "republican and
federal." Ankara has repeatedly aired its opposition
to a federal Iraq, arguing that any such arrangement
would inspire its own sizeable Kurdish population to
demand a federal Turkey. The Syrian regime of
President Bashar Assad, racked by riots in its
predominantly Kurdish northeastern region in March,
has been no less alarmed by Kurdish irredentist aims
in Iraq, which, in turn, fuel Kurdish nationalism in
adjoining countries.
Turkey, uneasy with the armed Kurdish militias -- or
peshmargas ("those prepared to die") -- in northern
Iraq, noted with satisfaction that, on June 8,
soon-to-be Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Alawi announced
that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had
reached an agreement with the leaders of nine
militias to dissolve their forces by January 2005.
The erstwhile militiamen were to be given the
options of retraining, integration into the new
Iraqi security forces, or being pensioned off. Since
three-quarters of the 100,000 militiamen that fell
under this agreement belonged to the two main
Kurdish parties, the on-the-ground responses of the
Kurdish leaders were what mattered most, and they
were predictable.
Having agreed to dissolve their militias or merge
them into the new Iraqi army, Barazani and Talabani
soon postponed the agreement indefinitely. So it
came as no surprise when, in a recent interview with
a Czech newspaper, Talabani practically disowned the
CPA deal entirely. This led a senior Turkish
military commander to criticize Washington for
failing to curb the ‘terrorists' (read, KDP and PUK
militias) in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Growing Kurdish-Arab Divide
Within Iraq, there is a clear conflict between
secular Kurdish nationalism, fostered by the 12 year
long autonomous existence of the Kurdish Autonomous
Region under an Anglo-American air umbrella while
Saddam Hussein ruled the rest of the country, and
the aspirations of the recently empowered, deeply
religious Shia majority to establish a centralized
Islamic republic in Iraq through the ballot box.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has made clear his fears
that the Kurdish "veto" provided by the interim
constitution will result in drafts of a permanent
constitution bouncing back and forth indefinitely
while the interim constitution hardens into
permanency.
The situation in Kurdish Iraq threatens to draw
various regional powers into conflict. For example,
the potential for an expansive Kurdish-Shia conflict
has been noted by Israel's top leaders, who have
been increasingly worried about the rising power of
Shias in a region where Iraq and Iran are Shia-majority
countries and Syria is ruled by an Alawi, a sub-sect
within Shia Islam. In response, they decided to
upgrade their espionage network among the Kurds in
each of these countries as well as in Turkey. (The
proportion of Kurds in their populations varies from
6% in Syria to 20% in Turkey.) For Israel's Mossad
and Aman (its military intelligence), the starting
point for such an enterprise remains the
150,000-strong Kurdish Jewish community in Israel, a
fairly wide pool to tap.
In July 2003, Israel's intelligence agencies swung
into action after their political masters concluded
that the US occupation of Iraq was going badly,
wrote Semour Hersh, the prize-winning New Yorker
investigative journalist, in Plan B last month
(based on his interviews with his intelligence
sources in the United States, Israel, and Turkey). A
further impetus to Israeli planning came in December
when Washington suddenly announced that it would
hand over power to the Iraqis on June 30. Israel's
leaders decided it was only prudent to take out an
insurance policy in case the transfer of power went
badly, resulting in chaos -- to the benefit of Iran.
While evidently assigning their Kurdish agents in
Iran the task of gathering intelligence on the
government's nuclear activities, in Iraq their
agents have been encouraging Kurdish aspirations for
an independent state. This, in turn -- and to their
satisfaction -- inspired rioters in Syria's
Kurdish-majority towns of Qameshli, Amuda, Hasaka,
and Malikiya, where protestors burnt public
buildings and raised the Kurdish national flag. Some
40 people were killed before the Syrian army
restored order.
But Israel's strategy has a distinct downside, since
encouraging desires for Kurdish independence runs
dangerously counter to Turkey's long-standing policy
on the Kurds and so has the potential of undermining
Israeli-Turkish military cooperation that dates back
to 1995. "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you
give one country or component independence,
everybody will want it," a Turkish official told
Hersh. "Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If
something happens there, it will be impossible to
contain the crisis."
Kirkuk: Eye of the Storm
Lying midway between the Turkish-Iraqi border and
Baghdad, Kirkuk was the military staging post for
the Ottoman Turks, who captured it in 1534 and
settled it with the Turks -- called Turkmen -- from
Anatolia. It thrived as a garrison town. When
petroleum was discovered in the area in 1927 by the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company, its executives found that
neither Turkmen (mostly merchants and rentiers), nor
beduin Arabs were interested in working for them; so
they began to recruit workers from the Kurdish areas
to the east and north. These Kurds settled in
villages around the city.
Thus Greater Kirkuk emerged as a multi-ethnic city
-- with Turkmen at its center, surrounded by Arabs,
in turn surrounded by Kurds on the city's outskirts.
While the three communities maintained this
voluntary segregation, it was an edgy situation. In
1959, in a three-day battle between pro-Communist
Kurds and anti-Communist Turkmen, for instance, 79
people were killed.
During the Kurdish insurgency of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, the ethnic composition of Greater
Kirkuk became a point of contention between the
Iraqi government and Kurdish nationalists, with the
latter claiming a Kurdish majority in the city and
its suburbs. However, the (then-classified) census
of 1977 showed the 484,000 residents of Kirkuk
province (later renamed Tamim) being 45% Arab, 38%
Kurd, and the rest Turkmen. The 1997 census
indicated that Kirkuk's population of 370,661 was
40% Arab and 38% Kurd, with the remainder Turkmen --
little change, that is, despite Saddam Hussein's
policy of settling Shia Arabs from the south in the
area. On the eve of the Anglo-American invasion in
2003, the estimated 700,000 people then living in
Greater Kirkuk probably divided up along similar
lines: 45% Arab, 35% Kurdish, and the rest Turkmen.
Following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the
two Kurdish parties made no secret of their plans to
transform Kirkuk with its oil wealth into the
capital of an expanded Kurdish Autonomous Region.
Kurds, some pushed out of the city by Saddam, now
arrived in their thousands. The Peshmerga were
turned into the local police force and, assisted by
the occupying American military, Kurds dominated the
US-appointed city council. All this was in violation
of an initial agreement that U.S. forces would
maintain the status quo and not allow Kurds to cross
the KAR's border, 15 miles east of the city center.
Assisted by Kurdish-dominated local security forces,
tens of thousands of Kurds have forced Arabs from
their homes, creating at least 100,000 new refugees
living in squalid camps in north-central Iraq. This
has engendered widespread anti-Kurdish feeling among
Arabs in the region and beyond. Anti-Kurdish
graffiti, attacking Kurds for collaborating with the
"infidel occupiers," is a commonplace in the Shia
districts of Kirkuk. Elsewhere, the followers of
Hojatalislam Muqtada al Sadr have vocally denounced
the Kurds.
Many Sunni Arabs, though sharing the same sectarian
affiliation with Kurds, are equally critical of
them. The Sunni Arab-Kurdish divide widened when the
Arab press reported in April that Kurds were
fighting in Falluja with the Americans. These Kurds
belonged to one of the two Iraqi Civil Defense Corps
(now National Guard) battalions that had been
ordered to fight alongside U.S. Marines in the
assault on the insurgents in the city. The other
battalion, consisting exclusively of Arabs, refused
to do so. Talabani's convoluted explanation for
Kurdish actions -- "Some Kurds have joined the new
Iraqi army, and if the Coalition commanders forced
them to participate in some fighting, it was without
the knowledge of the Kurdish leaders." -- left many
unconvinced.
During her foray into Falluja in late April, Hala
Jaber of the Sunday Times found the locals speaking
of "the mercenary Kurds, accused of being Mossad
agents." She added, "Some Kurds had confessed [to
being Mossad agents], I was told, and had been
summarily executed."
The situation in Kirkuk remains tense. "The Kurdish
peshmargas [acting as policemen] are unqualified and
untrained, and this creates irritation," said
Khudair Ghalib Karim, a Turkmen leader. "If there
are clashes this is the reason." Across the Green
Line, though the Kurdish militiamen are reportedly
ready to make a major push for Kirkuk, they are
unlikely to act as long as the Americans remain in
the city.
Viewing Iraq as a whole, it is safe to say that if
the country slides into a civil war, it would not be
between Sunnis and Shias, but between Arabs and
Kurds -- and it will start in Kirkuk.
Dilip Hiro's latest book is Secrets and Lies:
Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, a sequel to
Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (both Nation Books).
Hiro is based in London, writes regularly for the
New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the
Washington Post and the Nation magazine, and is a
frequent commentator on CNN, BBC, and Sky TV.
Copyright C 2004 Dilip Hiro
Top |
® 