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KIRKUK,
Kurdistan-Iraq - Clusters of gray concrete houses
dot the barren plains surrounding this city, like
seedlings scattered here by winds blowing down from
the mountainous Kurdish homeland to the north.
The villages are uniformly spartan, except for the
red, green and white flag of Iraqi Kurdistan
sprouting from many rooftops, even though this
province is not officially part of the Kurdish
autonomous region.
The settlements' purpose is as blunt as their
design: they are the heart of an aggressive campaign
by the Kurds to lay claim to Kirkuk, which sits on
one of the world's richest oil fields. The Kurdish
settlers have been moving into the area at a furious
pace, with thousands coming in the past few months,
sometimes with direct financing from the two main
Kurdish parties.
The campaign has emerged as one of the most volatile
issues dogging the talks to form a new national
government. In this region, it has ignited fury
among Arabs and Turkmens, adding to already caustic
tension in the ethnically mixed city, American and
Iraqi officials say.
It could also be contributing to a complex web of
violence. In the past three months alone, American
commanders say, at least 30 assassination-style
killings have happened in the area, making Kirkuk
one of the deadliest midsize cities in Iraq.
The Kurdish parties are completely open about their
desire to incorporate Kirkuk into Iraqi Kurdistan.
No single issue is dearer to Kurdish leaders as they
negotiate with the country's Arabs to form a new,
four-year government. Kurdish voters cited it as one
of the main reasons they flocked to the polls on
Dec. 15.
"The important issues for us are those that concern
all Iraqis, but at the top of them is Kirkuk," said
Fouad Massoum, a vice president in the transitional
National Assembly and senior official in the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main
Kurdish parties. "If we leave it, it will be like a
time bomb ready to explode at any time."
Because the Kurdish parties are expected to get at
least 40 seats in the 275-seat Council of
Representatives, they will almost certainly be a key
ally for any Arab bloc that wants to muster the
two-thirds vote needed to form a government. Kurdish
leaders will use that leverage, they say, to force
the Arabs to speed the repatriation of Kurds to
Kirkuk. That would put the Kurds in an extremely
favorable position by the time the province holds a
referendum in 2007 to decide whether it should be
governed by Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Kurds say all this goes toward redressing the
crimes of Saddam Hussein, who for decades evicted
Kurds and Turkmens from the oil-rich region and
moved in Arabs.
There is an official mechanism that is supposed to
help evicted Kurds move back to Kirkuk, a city of
800,000 with a crumbling citadel and twisting market
streets at its center. Article 58 of the interim
constitution, drafted in early 2004 by American and
Iraqi officials, established a property claims
commission to review individual cases. It also
created a national panel to help make policy
decisions on Kirkuk.
The Kurds say that because the Shiite-led government
has dragged its feet on empowering these bodies,
thousands of Kurds who returned to Kirkuk after the
fall of Mr. Hussein still live in squatters' camps.
The Kurds have wrested control of most of the
government institutions here. They won the majority
of seats in the provincial council last January,
partly because of a Sunni Arab boycott of the
elections. That, coupled with their political
influence in Baghdad, has helped them get most of
the top local ministry posts and retain control of
the police force.
All the ethnic groups here appear to be caught in
rampant violence, American officers say. There is
the occasional suicide bombing: one in November
killed at least 16 oil infrastructure guards. The
targets of assassinations are commanders of Iraqi
security forces, as well as politicians, doctors,
professors and oil engineers. In November, six
police commanders - four Turkmens and two Arabs -
were killed.
No one doubts that peace would be easier to come by
if it were not for the oil reserves, 10 to 20
percent of the country's total. They are the
economic fulcrum of the Kurdish drive to secure
virtual independence for Iraqi Kurdistan. During the
drafting of the permanent Constitution last summer,
Kurdish leaders in Baghdad managed to work in a
clause that says this province, Tamim, will hold a
referendum in 2007 to determine whether it should be
ruled by the Kurdistan regional government or the
central authorities in Baghdad.
"Clearly, for the Kurds, Kirkuk is a strategic
prize," said Col. David Gray, commander of the First
Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, charged with
securing the province. "They feel very strongly
about bringing their people to Kirkuk to right the
wrong that was done under Saddam's regime and the
Arabization program. That does collide, of course,
with the other groups in the province." Arabs and
Turkmens argue that many of the Kurds moving in were
not displaced by Mr. Hussein - they originated
elsewhere and are settling here to ensure that the
province is voted into Kurdistan in 2007.
"The Kurds are building property, houses on land
they don't own," said Sangul Chapuk, a Turkmen
politician who served on the American-appointed
Iraqi Governing Council.
The last accurate census showed that the Turkmens, a
Central Asian ethnic group that governed this area
under the Ottoman Empire, had a slight majority.
That was in 1957. The numbers drastically changed
under Mr. Hussein's decades-long program of ethnic
displacement and further shifted after the
American-led invasion.
Capt. Greg Ford, the First Brigade's intelligence
officer, estimated that 85,000 to 350,000 Kurds had
moved into the Kirkuk region since spring 2003. The
result is a building boom in Kirkuk itself and along
the main roads leading to the border of Iraqi
Kurdistan. In Altun Kopri, a Kurd-Turkmen village 15
miles northwest of Kirkuk, new homes constructed in
slapdash fashion line dirt tracks. White pickup
trucks with Kurdistan flags roll through. "The
construction is just huge," said Maj. Victor
Vasquez, the head civil affairs officer for the
First Brigade. "I've seen entire villages that
didn't exist before spring up from rubble. It's a
suburb of Kirkuk overnight."
"There's some funding from the Kurdish parties in
terms of the housing," he added. "That's a fair
assessment. A lot of it is also private business
standing up."
The Kurds who have moved back to Kirkuk invariably
say they were evicted from the area by Mr. Hussein.
One, Adnan Abdul Rahman, a mathematics professor in
Kirkuk, said his family was kicked out of the
village of Dibis in the 1960's. "Let me tell you the
honest truth," Mr. Rahman, 41, said as he stood in
the courtyard of a high school on election day.
"I've had 19 executions in my family, and I'll pay
another 19 for Kirkuk to go back to Kurdistan."
Some Arabs say the Kurdish parties, backed by their
militias, are threatening Arab families who refuse
to sell their property and leave Kirkuk. Khalid al-Izzi,
the Arab head of a human rights group in the city,
said the Kurds had coerced Arabs into selling their
property for considerably less than what it was
actually worth. Kurdish leaders deny the accusations
and insist it is the Kurds who are still suffering,
because the repatriation process is moving so
slowly. With the 2007 referendum fast approaching,
the Kurds say their patience has run out.
"We've lost a lot of time," Mr. Massoum, the Kurdish
politician, said. "For the Kirkuk project, there is
a deadline. We insist on commitment to the deadline
and implementing the Constitution."
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