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KIRKUK, Kurdistan
(Iraq) - Providing money, building materials and
even schematic drawings, Kurdish political parties
have repatriated thousands of Kurds into this tense
northern oil city and its surrounding villages,
operating outside the framework of Iraq's newly
ratified constitution and sparking sporadic violence
between Kurdish settlers and the Arabs who are a
minority here, according to U.S. military officials
and Iraqi political leaders.
The rapidly expanding settlements, composed of
two-bedroom concrete houses whose dimensions are
prescribed by the Kurdish parties, are effectively
re-engineering the demography of northern Iraq,
enabling the Kurds to add what ultimately may be
hundreds of thousands of voters ahead of a planned
2007 referendum on the status of Kirkuk. The Kurds
hope to make the city and its vast oil reserves part
of an autonomous Kurdistan.
Kurdish political leaders said the repatriations are
designed to correct the policies of ousted President
Saddam Hussein, who replaced thousands of Kurds in
the region with Arabs from the south. The Kurdish
parties have seized control of the process, they
said, because the Iraqi government has failed to
implement an agreement to return Kurdish residents
to their homes.
But U.S. military officials, Western diplomats and
Arab political leaders have warned the parties that
the campaign could work to undermine the nascent
constitutional process and raise tensions as
displaced Kurds settle onto private lands now held
by Arabs.
"If you have everyone participating, it'll be a
clean affair and you can accomplish your goals,"
said Lt. Col. Anthony Wickham, the U.S. military's
liaison to the Kirkuk provincial government for the
past year. "But don't go behind people's backs,
which they have a bad habit of doing," he said,
referring to the Kurds. "Does that bring greater
stability to Kirkuk? No. It brings pandemonium."
In late August, Arabs shot and killed a Kurdish
official who was chalking out settlements in
Qoshqayah, a disputed village 24 miles north of
Kirkuk. An Iraqi soldier was also killed and six
Arabs were wounded in skirmishes with Kurds before
U.S. and Iraqi troops restored order, arresting two
dozen Arabs and cordoning off the village. Arab
residents said it was the latest of several violent
incidents between security forces in the area over
the past two years.
"Our patience is about to end," said Hussein Ali
Hamdani, a 64-year-old Sunni Arab tribal leader.
"There are 137 houses in this village now and in
each there are at least five" Kurds. "We will
protect our land and not abandon it. It's our honor."
"The Arabs will not give up Kirkuk," said Mohammed
Khalil, the leader of an Arab bloc within the
Kurdish-dominated Kirkuk provincial council. "If
America really wants to help Iraq, it will try to
stop the Kurds from gaining control over Kirkuk,
which would start a civil war."
U.S. military officials said they had sought
unsuccessfully to persuade Kurdish political leaders
to avoid repatriating Kurds onto private lands, a
practice they said had inflamed tensions across the
region.
A City in Dispute
Kirkuk, a city of almost 1 million, is home to a
combustible mix of multiple ethnicities, a
contentious past and enormous potential wealth.
Kirkuk's precise demographic makeup is a source of
dispute, but Kurds are believed to represent 35 to
40 percent of the population. The remainder is
composed primarily of Arabs, ethnic Turkmens and a
small percentage of Assyrian Christians.
The Kurds, saying they have a historical claim, hope
to anchor Kirkuk to Kurdistan, their semiautonomous
region. Kirkuk holds strategic as well as symbolic
value: The ocean of oil beneath its surface could be
used to drive the economy of an independent
Kurdistan, the ultimate goal for many Kurds.
"Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan as Washington D.C. is
part of the United States," said Rizgar Ali,
president of the Kirkuk provincial council and a top
official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of
the two main Kurdish political parties. The other is
the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
With the Kurds firmly in control of the provincial
government, Kirkuk already shows signs of a
remarkable transition. The names of many streets,
buildings, schools and villages have been changed
from Arabic to Kurdish. Thousands of Kurds who
flooded into Kirkuk after Hussein's fall are still
living in a soccer stadium, a city jail and vacant
lots. The landscape is replete with ubiquitous gray
concrete blocks of the new Kurdish settlements.
The city's fate has been one of the thorniest issues
of Iraq's constitutional process. Under Article 136
of the document ratified by Iraqis on Oct. 15, a
referendum on the status of Kirkuk will be held in
the province no later than Dec. 31, 2007, but only
after the Iraqi government takes measures to
repatriate former Kurdish residents and resettle
Arabs or compensate them. The constitution extended
a March 2004 transitional law that assigned
responsibility for the repatriations to the federal
government.
But throughout Kirkuk and across hundreds of remote
farming villages, the Kurdish political parties are
doing the job themselves.
In Alu Mahmoud, 20 miles north of Kirkuk, dozens of
concrete houses are under construction in three
subdivisions plotted by Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
engineers. Rashaad Sultan, the village leader
supervising the project, said the party provides
$5,000 to each repatriated family. To ensure that
the houses are completed, the money is distributed
in installments: $500 to lay the foundation; $2,000
when the walls are erected; $2,500 upon completion.
"Any violation and they have to give the money
back," said Sultan, who was born in 1963 as his
family fled Alu Mahmoud en route to another village
following a bloody attack by Baath Party loyalists.
Inside the house where Sultan is living temporarily,
schematic drawings of the new subdivisions are taped
to a wall next to a Google Earth satellite image of
the village, printed from a friend's computer. On a
desk are files on the 200 families who plan to move
into the village and a party directive titled:
"Instructions Related to Building Homes for the
Resettlement of IDPs," or internally displaced
people.
"All houses shall consist of two bedrooms," reads
one of the instructions. "Each bedroom shall not be
smaller than 3-by-4 meters."
Outside, laborers mixed cement and hammered nails on
Sultan's soon-to-be-completed two-story home.
"We're not forcing people to come back, they want to
come back," he said. "Look at me: My father was born
here. My grandfather was born here."
Bold Moves
Lt. Col. Don Blunck, of Meridian, Idaho, operations
officer for the 116th Brigade Combat Team, which has
overseen security in Kirkuk since December, said
"tens of thousands" of Kurds have resettled in the
city and surrounding villages over the past year,
many with the help of the parties. Arab and Turkmen
politicians said as many as 350,000 Kurds have been
relocated into the Kirkuk region since Hussein's
fall.
Kurdish officials declined to provide exact numbers,
but they said the parties had taken over the
repatriations because the Iraqi government had moved
too slowly and failed to provide resources to
Kurdish families desperate to return to their homes.
The Iraqi Property Claims Commission, the agency
charged with the resettlements, has received about
35,500 claims related to Kirkuk, primarily from
Kurds, and adjudicated 2,589 cases, according to
U.S. and Iraqi officials. But the agency has failed
to provide compensation to Kurds seeking to relocate
or to Arabs seeking to return to their homes in
southern Iraq, as required under the transitional
law and the constitution.
"This is what I think: I can sit around with my hand
out waiting for the federal government or I can
spend the money myself," said Rizgar Ali, the
provincial council president and a Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan official. Referring to Ibrahim Jafari,
Iraq's Shiite Muslim prime minister, he said: "I'm
not going to wait around for Jafari to sign a piece
of paper. That time is gone, where the central
government rules." He added that the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan would spend "every last dollar in the
till" to bring Kurds back to Kirkuk.
Kurdish frustration over the government's sluggish
progress to resettle Kirkuk surfaced earlier this
month when a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani,
called for Jafari's resignation.
Abdul Rahman Mustafa, the Kurdish governor of Kirkuk
province, said the central government had failed to
help the Kurds with a growing humanitarian crisis.
With thousands of people still without access to
city services, Mustafa said, "We have been asking
the central government to help us, but they haven't.
This is this problem: Kids are dying, women and
children are dying."
"They're trying to change the demography of Kirkuk,"
said Tahseem Mohammed Ali, a Turkmen on the council.
"I see no problem as long as there are negotiations
between the various ethnicities and they go about it
in a legitimate way. But they are working now to
move people from outside the province and increase
the percentages to realize their dream."
"The Kurds are extremists," Ali said. "They make
excuses for that. They say that they were oppressed
for a long, long time, and they don't want to let
that happen again."
The success of the integration of the displaced
Kurds appears to vary by village.
Dreams for the Future
In Qoshqayah, known to Arabs as Amsha, villagers
said tensions emerged shortly after the fall of
Hussein's government in April 2003. Kurds flooded
into village, aided by the two parties and backed by
the pesh merga , the Kurdish militia.
"The Kurdish people are supported by the Kurdish
parties, and no one supports the Arabs," complained
Hamad Hammoudi Ishaqi, a Sunni Arab from Qoshqayah.
Hammoudi said the Kurds combined intimidation with
financial incentives in an effort to persuade the
Arabs to vacate the land. Armed groups killed off
the Arabs' sheep, he said; many farmers remained in
the area but decided to take jobs as taxi drivers in
Kirkuk to make ends meet.
In August, said Hussein Ali Hamdani, the Sunni
tribal leader, the Kurdish official showed up with
officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and
Iraqi security forces. The group was marking off
plots for new Kurdish settlements when one of the
Kurds swore at a group of Arab women who were trying
to stop them, Hamdani said.
Hamdani said a group of Arab men then attacked the
Kurds, killing the agricultural official and a
soldier. U.S. military officials said that after
American and Iraqi troops restored order, the
Kurdish parties halted plans for further building in
the village.
The process has proceeded more smoothly in Alu
Mahmoud, a few miles down the road from Qoshqayah.
After several returning Kurds threatened violence,
Sultan, the village chief, said many Arabs agreed to
leave peacefully in exchange for compensation from
various Kurdish sources. They received between a few
hundred and several thousand dollars for their
houses, some of which were once occupied by Baath
Party leaders.
One recent afternoon, on a plot just off the dirt
road leading into the village, dozens of men worked
quietly on their modest concrete dwellings, which
were in various states of completion.
Ibrahim Khalel, 34, offered a tour of the home he
plans to share with his wife, Joana Ali, and their
4-year-old son Abdullah. With 3,000 cinderblocks,
the gray foundation and walls had been completed.
Khalel had received $2,500. "This is our bedroom,"
he said, walking through the roofless home with a
hammer looped through his belt. "This is where the
bathroom will go."
In 1987, Khalel fled to Ramadi, a city about 200
miles south of Kirkuk, after the government ordered
him out of the village. He returned a few months
ago. He said he considered himself in Kurdistan,
whether or not he was technically within its
borders.
"I've come back to my homeland," he said.
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