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CHAMCHAMAL · A cane leans on the door and the
old tribal leader sits in the sun below the citadel.
With a whisper, he could summon 1,000 armed men. He
chooses not to.
But make no mistake, he says, the time has come for
the Kurds to grab the oil fields, seal the northern
mountain passes and seize their independence.
Karim Agha is a proven ally of the United States,
but he is also part of a growing number of Kurds
whose push for an independent state could splinter
Iraq and undermine U.S. policy in the region.
Despite a strong showing in Sunday's election that
would give them unprecedented influence in a new
national government, Kurds are debating whether it's
time for them to declare their own state.
"The war against Saddam Hussein is over, and
everyone has their freedom except the Kurds," Agha
said, a gun resting against his wall, prayer beads
lacing his fingers. "We are surrounded by enemies,
and we can wait no longer for our own nation. It
would be a great shame for the U.S. to abandon us."
Fearing that a bid for independence would draw the
fury of neighboring Turkey and Iran, which have
their own restive Kurdish populations, the main
Kurdish political parties say they are committed to
a unified Iraq.
But many Kurds think the chaos across the country
creates a prime opportunity for them to claim the
oil city of Kirkuk and break away. More than 1.7
million Kurds, or about 45 percent of their
population, signed a petition for independence that
was recently delivered to the United Nations.
The struggle is between pragmatism and a
centuries-old dream. It suggests that the influence
held by Kurdish politicians and U.S. allies such as
Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani may be
diminishing. Men like Agha, chief of the Hamawand
tribe, are more willing to fight than to equivocate
in the face of international pressure, especially
when it comes to independence and the fate of Kirkuk.
"Talabani and Barzani must not give up Kirkuk," Agha
said. "If they do, the people will split with them.
We won't accept that. We want it to be solved
peacefully. But if not, we've already lost a lot of
lives over Kirkuk, and we're willing to lose a lot
more. The oil of Kirkuk will sustain us, and we will
not abandon it."
What unfolds in Kirkuk in coming days and weeks is
as crucial to the stability of Iraq as the struggle
between Shiite and Sunni Muslim Arabs to the south.
The Kurds' goal had been to win a majority in
Sunday's local elections in Kirkuk and claim the
multi-ethnic city as part of their semiautonomous
state in the north.
The next step, men like Agha say, would be for the
Kurds to demand independence.
The Kurds are hoping that the votes of about 70,000
of them, expelled from Kirkuk under Hussein and now
seeking to return, will give them the edge in a
local council now balanced among Kurds, Arabs,
Turkmens and Assyrian Christians.
They appear close to that aspiration: Arab voter
turnout in Kirkuk was between 25 percent and 40
percent, and Kurdish participation was more than 70
percent, according to local political parties.
A surge in Kurdish power would anger Turkey, which
is worried that Kurdish control of Kirkuk and its
oil reserves would embolden and create instability
among Turkey's disadvantaged 13 million Kurds.
Such a scenario could create regional problems if
Kurds in Iran and Syria also demanded more autonomy.
Washington has been pressuring Kurds not to break
from Iraq.
The two mainstream Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan
Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, want to avoid angering their most
powerful ally.
They say the political reality is simple: The United
States will side with its NATO partner Turkey over a
mountain people who have been denied independence
for generations.
Kurdish leaders such as Talabani, who fought for
decades in the mountains against Baghdad's armies
and is now a contender for president of Iraq, have
made spectacular progress in the country. But
strides in recent years have made other Kurds more
determined to break away.
Sherko Bekas, a poet, is one of them.
His cigarette ash lengthens as he speaks of his
people's history of suffering.
Bekas tells how the Kurds were forced into Iraq by
the Allies after World War I, more than 80 years
ago.
Since then, he said, the Kurds have been politically
oppressed and massacred by successive Iraqi regimes.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
www.latimes.com
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