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There
were two days left before election day, and Gen.
Rostam Hamid Rahim, guerrilla war hero and a member
of Iraqi Kurdistan's regional Parliament since 1992,
was determined that every Kurd vote. Known as Mam
(Uncle) Rostam, he told me he had joined the Kurdish
nationalist militia, or peshmerga (''those who face
death''), at age 15, in 1968. In 2003, he led the
peshmerga into the northern city of Kirkuk -- the
fourth-largest city in Iraq and its most ethnically
mixed and contested -- following the American-led
invasion of Iraq. Now 51, he still wore an olive
shirt tucked into baggy olive pants, with a sash
wrapped around his waist and a khaki vest: the
traditional Kurdish garb. A black-and-white-checkered
scarf encircled his head; he moved it back every so
often to scratch his closely cropped hair.
On this Friday afternoon, Rostam had already visited
a polling station around the corner from the
headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
the Kurdish party Rostam belonged to, led by Jalal
Talabani. (Rostam is the union militia's field
commander for Kirkuk.) His next stop was the Panja
Ali refugee camp, next to the Shorja neighborhood
where Rostam was born. Saddam Hussein destroyed the
neighborhood with bulldozers in 1991 to punish
rebellious Kurds and expel them north to the three
provinces of Iraq (Erbil, Sulaimaniya and Dohuk)
that Hussein had earlier cordoned off as Iraqi
Kurdistan. Hussein's Kurdistan was intended to give
the Kurds some autonomy -- and to provide a dumping
ground for Kurds pushed out of the wealthier areas
bordering it, above all the city of Kirkuk and the
oil-rich province, also called Kirkuk, for which it
serves as a capital. Hussein had even renamed the
province Tamim, Arabic for ''nationalization.''
Now, in the wake of the invasion and occupation of
Iraq, hundreds of Kurdish families had returned to
Kirkuk, some living in tents, others in hastily
constructed houses. In the camp, Rostam sat down
along with other local Kurdish officials, including
the deputy head of security for Kirkuk, who fought
with Rostam against Hussein years before. Surrounded
by a hundred men from the refugee camp and its
nearby polling station, gesticulating for added
emphasis with his broad thick shoulders and arms,
Rostam repeated the same message he had been telling
Kurds throughout the city whenever he campaigned:
''You have to vote, for the sake of our future.''
Rostam exhorted his audience to vote for the party
representing the Kurds and, taking their victory for
granted, asked that ''when the election results are
announced, please don't shoot in the air.''
Members of Rostam's peshmerga entourage were dressed
in Iraqi National Guard uniforms; some wore flak
jackets that said ''Police.'' The convoy of pickup
trucks soon left the camp and continued on to
another Patriotic Union of Kurdistan office. Rostam
marched into the office and took a seat behind a
large desk. Tea was brought out, and minor officials
greeted him with hugs and kisses.
He directed his gaze to the leader of the union's
neighborhood committee. ''Tell everybody to be quiet
and calm on election day, and tell people not to
shoot in the air when the results come, because it
will make other ethnic groups nervous,'' Rostam
said. He was certain of the Kurds' triumph and told
the men: ''We've done what we have to do. People
should just go and vote.'' Before leaving, he added
that signs giving people directions to the polling
locations should be written in Kurdish, not Arabic.
In 1984, Rostam accompanied his party chief, Jalal
Talabani, to Baghdad for negotiations with the
government of Saddam Hussein. The status of Kirkuk
proved to be a stumbling block. According to Rostam,
Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz warned them: ''You will
never get Kirkuk. You can only pass through it and
weep for it.''
In campaigning, Rostam was, in a sense, having his
revenge. ''Sixty-five to 70 percent of Kirkuk is
Kurdish,'' Rostam assured me. ''So if there was a
referendum to join Kurdistan, we could join
easily.''
Rostam went on to say: ''Kirkuk is part of
Kurdistan. When we win, we'll make Kirkuk the safest
and richest city in the Middle East. We have
struggled for more than 35 years for Kirkuk. Next
year we'll have new elections in Kirkuk, and we'll
return Kirkuk to Kurdistan.'' He meant the
three-province Iraqi Kurdistan Hussein had created,
but he also meant, beyond that, the ancestral lands
of the Kurds, which stretch from Syria across much
of eastern Turkey and into Iran, as well as a large
portion of Iraq.
The liberation of the Iraqi Kurds, for which they
have paid a heavy price, seemed within reach, and
with the Iraqi election it looked as if an
altogether new kind of Iraqi politics might be born
at last. Yet, listening to Mam Rostam, it also
seemed possible that this election might be the
beginning of the end for a unified Iraq. Thanks to
multiple accidents of history -- the uneasy presence
of Sunni and Shiite Arab minorities; an embittered
local ethnic group, the Turkmens; meddlesome
neighboring countries with their own restive Kurdish
populations; and, not least, control of about 40
percent of Iraq's known oil reserves -- the city of
Kirkuk, population about 850,000, is where all the
pieces of Iraqi politics come together, or where
they may well fall apart.
Top
Being
situated near some of the country's main oil fields
might have made Kirkuk a wealthy city, but that
never came about. It is grim and dilapidated; its
roads are crumbling; and traffic crawls around the
roundabouts as boys sell bananas and boxes of
perfumed tissue paper at intersections. Humvees with
masked American gunners rumble by. Civilian drivers
wait all day for gas as flames from sabotaged oil
pipelines light the western horizon like monuments
to Kirkuk's misfortune.
The winter rains in the days leading up to the
election seemed to make the city dirtier, washing it
with gray soot and mud: passing cars would leave a
brown wake, and little waves crested over the
sidewalks and onto the gates of shops and homes.
Wires and cables crisscrossed above the city, trying
to carry what little power was available a few hours
a day. Inside stores and offices, Kirkukis of all
backgrounds seemed to be watching Egyptian comedies
when the electricity was on, grumbling about having
to look up when customers appeared.
Kirkuk was historically a cosmopolitan center where
Jews, Arab Sunnis, Christians and Shiites, Turkmens
and Kurds lived and worked side by side and attended
one another's religious celebrations. As nationalism
spread throughout the region in the 20th century,
replacing the relative tolerance that characterized
the Ottoman Empire, the Jews fled, mainly to Israel,
and Turkmen and Kurdish identities were forcibly
suppressed.
Kurds, who are Muslims but not Arabs (or Persians),
speak their own distinct language. (It is fast
becoming the lingua franca in the north.) The
origins of the Kurds are nebulous, but by the time
of the Arab conquest in the seventh century, the
word ''Kurd'' was used to describe people living in
the region of the Zagros Mountains. The Kurds say
they have been in the region for 3,000 years,
surviving the empires of the Assyrians, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Byzantines and
finally the Ottomans. By the 19th century, there was
a Kurdish nationalist movement. In 1918, Kurds
pinned their hopes on the 12th point of President
Woodrow Wilson's famous 14-point plan for world
peace: that the nationalities of the collapsing
Ottoman Empire should be given autonomy. In the
1920's, however, the presence of oil in Kirkuk led
the British to attach the area to Iraq, which
Britain controlled at the time. Other Kurdish lands
were divided among the larger countries of the
region, and not long after the Kurds began rising up
in rebellion.
Of course, if Kirkuk had indeed been given autonomy
after the Ottoman breakup, it would not necessarily
have led to Kurdish rule. Under the Ottomans, the
city had been governed by a Turkmen (or Turkoman)
nobility, and the majority of the city's population
were Turkmens. They are said to be, in the prevalent
view, descendants of migrant Turkic tribes who came
to the region during the reign of the Seljuk Turks,
which began in the 11th century.
Turkmens and Kurds alike were suppressed by the
aggressive Arabism of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.
Official ''Arabization'' began in the 1960's and
accelerated significantly in 1975, when the Iraqi
regime began forcibly removing tens of thousands of
Kurds, Turkmens and Assyrian Christians from Kirkuk
and bringing in Arabs to take their place. This
Arabization was chiefly motivated by the
government's wish to consolidate its grip on the
oil-rich and fertile region -- and to pre-empt a
gradual demographic takeover of the city by the
Kurds. Under Arabization, as many as 250,000
non-Arabs, mostly Kurds, were expelled north into
Iraqi Kurdistan. Their former land titles were
declared invalid, and ownership was assumed by the
government, which rented the land to Arabs.
In 1987, in retaliation for Kurdish rebellions
during Iraq's long war with Iran, Hussein began the
Anfal campaign. Human Rights Watch has estimated
that up to 100,000 Kurds were killed and some 4,000
villages destroyed in what is widely considered a
genocidal offensive. This hardly dampened Kurdish
militancy, and when the Kurds saw an opening after
the 1991 Persian Gulf war, they took it, rising
against Hussein. The uprising was crushed; the
United States and Britain, principally, responded by
establishing a no-flight zone above the 36th
parallel, and Kurds fled their lands and retreated
to the protection of Western air power.
A Kurdish experiment with self-rule began in the
no-flight zone. It was not entirely successful,
because the two main parties, the Kurdistan
Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, fought for control of the region. By
1996, the two sides had ironed out their
differences, but this did little to settle the
question of Kirkuk. There, the repression continued;
during the 1990's, the Baghdad government expelled
more than 100,000 people from Kirkuk. In 2001, the
United Nations estimated that 805,505 displaced
people were living over the border in Iraqi
Kurdistan.
During the war to oust Saddam Hussein that began in
March 2003, United States Special Forces soldiers
fought alongside Kurdish guerrilla fighters.
Together they descended on Kirkuk on April 10, and
the vengeful Kurds -- with Mam Rostam as their
commander -- looted many of the city's government
buildings and shops, and convoys of Kurdish vehicles
could be seen carrying the booty back to the north.
Thousands of Arabs fled in advance of the Kurdish
and American-led coalition forces; those who
remained were subject to a campaign of intimidation.
Many were warned to abandon their homes, which the
Kurdish militias were seizing for themselves or
awarding to the families of peshmerga casualties.
The United States military eventually established a
provincial council, painstakingly divided among
Kurds, Christians, Arabs and Turkmens. Such a
delicate arrangement was not likely to survive a
free election.
Top
In the
days before the election, Kirkuk was festooned with
posters and banners for the three main lists of
candidates competing in Kirkuk: the Kurdish Kirkuk
Brotherhood List, showing an oil well and the
Kurdish national colors; the Iraqi Turkmen Front,
signified by a light blue crescent and star; and the
candle of the United Iraqi Alliance, the so-called
Sistani list named for Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
of Najaf, who had endorsed it. All over town,
Kurdish and Turkmen flags competed for attention,
with the blue of the Turkmens standing out against
the yellow, green and red of the Kurds. Only in the
Arab neighborhoods were there no signs of politics
-- no graffiti, no election posters or banners, no
sign that any political event was taking place --
only mud. The leading Arab electoral list had
decided to boycott the election.
In the Turkmen and Kurdish neighborhoods and in the
center of town, along the mixed shops of the main
market on Jumhuriya Street, a war of signs was
taking place. For decades, except at the height of
Arabization, the Turkmen and Kurdish populations
each had roughly equal shares: enough to make them
the city's dominant groups but not enough to make
either one the clear winner. Each party's poster or
banner had a national symbol or religious code to
let the target audience know it was meant for them,
followed by the appropriate number of the party on
the ballot so that Kurds would recognize the Kurdish
symbols and associate them with only one ballot
number and Turkmens would do the same.
In one Turkmen neighborhood in the week before the
election, I found three Kurds -- two wearing
American-issue military uniforms and slinging
Kalashnikovs, one wearing a business suit -- putting
up posters for the Kirkuk Brotherhood List, all next
to one another, above Turkmen signs. Another Kurdish
soldier, with extra magazines for his weapon stuffed
into his vest, angrily kicked a Turkmen banner onto
the curb and then pushed it into the mud. Elsewhere
I saw two Kurdish youths -- also in American-issue
uniforms with flak jackets and Kalashnikovs --
putting up posters on the concrete barriers of the
United States Army's civil-military operations
center. In the Sari Kahiya neighborhood, which is
mostly Turkmen, I was stuck behind a convoy of cars
covered in Kurdish flags and banners. A loudspeaker
on one blasted Kurdish music, while a man with a
microphone in the lead car recited a litany of
crimes the Kurds had suffered. The cars were full of
armed men, hunched over with their rifle barrels
just visible over the windows.
In the Taseen neighborhood, another predominantly
Turkmen area, new all-Turkmen schools could be found
with the Turkmen word for school, ''okul,''
revealing their ethnic identity. ''The burial of
democracy in Iraq began with the I.E.C.I.,''
announced a banner hung on a little kiosk just
across from the Turkmen sports center of the
National Turkmen Movement, No. 177 on the national
election ballot. The I.E.C.I. was the Independent
Electoral Commission of Iraq, and the Turkmens
charged it was locally dominated by the Kurds, who
were in turn supported by the Americans. The
Turkmens also claimed that the Kurds overcounted
themselves (and, when necessary, the Arabs) and
undercounted the Turkmens. Therefore, the election
was, in the eyes of the Turkmens, doomed to
fraudulence.
In the National Turkmen Movement's sports center, I
passed by many armed guards on my way up to an
office on the second floor. There, Munir al Kafiri,
secretary of the movement, greeted me, as did Husam
Edin, manager of the movement, who sat behind a
desk. A dozen men in elegant suits had been in a
meeting when I showed up uninvited. On the wall
behind Husam, I recognized a faded picture of a gray
wolf, baying at the moon. It was a symbol of
Turkey's Gray Wolves, a paramilitary organization
founded in Turkey in the 1960's. The Gray Wolves
sought to establish a greater Turkey that would
include Kirkuk and its oil fields. They battled
leftists and opposed any recognition of the Kurds in
Turkey.
''We belong to the Turkish Gray Wolves because we
believe that anything taken by force can only be
taken back by force,'' one of the men told me. It is
their rights that the Turkmens want back, I was
told, though their politics came to a sudden stop
when they were asked to explain what those rights
were. ''The Turks have lived here for 4,000 years,''
another of the men said, in a historical addition of
about 3,000 years, and ''governments considered us
relics of the Turkish occupation, all governments
ignored our rights.'' Now, I was told, the interim
Iraqi government ''has started taking sides.'' The
men claimed that the independent electoral
commission had registered an additional 108,000
internally displaced Kurds. ''This was a gift to the
Kurds,'' one said.
The National Turkmen Movement had sent its own gift
to the I.E.C.I. the day before. ''Yesterday we gave
black roses to the I.E.C.I. to tell them they had
died,'' one of the men said.
Husam Edin, the Turkmen movement's manager,
explained: ''According to our documentation,'' which
I was never shown, ''only 11,000 Kurdish families
were expelled from Kirkuk, so if you multiply it by
5, it's only 55,000, still less than 108,000.'' The
men denied that the returning Kurds had ever lived
in Kirkuk. ''Saddam kicked them out because they had
no Kirkuk residency and Saddam was trying to
preserve the demography of Kirkuk,'' Husam Edin
said.
It was a very curious argument, given that Hussein,
through Arabization, had expelled thousands of
Turkmens, too, in his attempt to alter the
demography of Kirkuk. Now, paradoxically, the
Turkmens were making common cause with Kirkuk's
Arabs against the Kurds. This was, of course, an
alliance of convenience.
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The
Iraqi Turkmen front is the parent party from which
the National Turkmen Movement had split. I stopped
by the offices of the front's innocuous-sounding
humanitarian-aid society one afternoon in the Taseen
neighborhood. Walking past gun-wielding guards whose
uniforms bore an eagle patch that said ''Hayat
Security Company,'' I entered an office and found
several young men seated on a couch struggling to
clean two Kalashnikovs and put them back together.
Four more rifles were leaning against the wall in a
corner. A poster of the founder of the modern
Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was on the
wall above them, and on several shelves were various
images of the Gray Wolves.
Omar Khattab, manager of the office, sat watching a
Jackie Chan movie, a pistol on his desk. Like Saddam
Hussein before him, Khattab, now 43, started out as
a violent activist. As a teenager, he joined an
underground nationalist movement. He was one of its
assassins, shooting at Baathists. ''We succeeded in
assassinating some of them, praise God,'' he said.
He was jailed 11 times. In 1979 he was sentenced to
be executed, but he bribed his way out of it by
paying 1,000 dinars to change his birth certificate,
making him a minor and ineligible for execution. In
1991, he said, the Kurds jailed him on charges of
working with Turkish intelligence. ''Every political
organization that wants to start begins with
leaflets,'' he explained, ''then begins
assassinations so its voice is heard.''
I asked Khattab why he had a small army in his
office. Was he expecting violence during the
election? ''God willing,'' he said, ''there will be
violence. We are expecting it. You think we will
keep silent about the 108,000 Kurds? Civil war has
to happen, but we won't start it. Why do you think
we were cleaning our weapons? Today there was a
demonstration of Kurds -- all of them armed, a
provocation -- and where were the Americans? How can
you come here to teach us about democracy, and you
don't give us freedom?''
He continued: ''We are ready for anything. Maybe
after an hour, after a day, after a week, but civil
war has to happen. The Kurds are four million, and
we are three million. Our young men are ready to
defend us.'' He did not expect Turkey to come to
their rescue. ''Turkey will pursue its own
interests, and if the Kurds give Turkey oil, then
the Turks will support the Kurds,'' he said.
On election day in Kirkuk, two elections actually
took place. The first was for a 275-seat National
Assembly in Baghdad that would appoint a government
and draft a constitution. The second was for the
Kirkuk provincial government. Though initially
confident of victory in Kirkuk, Kurdistan Democratic
Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leaders began
to fear registration was not high enough to give
them a sufficient margin to claim Kirkuk as
decisively Kurdish. The two parties threatened to
boycott the election if the 100,000 Kurds they
claimed were Kirkuki refugees were not allowed to
vote in Kirkuk. In a compromise that infuriated the
Arabs and Turkmens of Kirkuk, the national election
commission allowed about 60,000 new voters onto the
Kirkuk rolls, most of them Kurds.
The division of the vote along ethnic or religious
lines marked the election not only in Kirkuk but
nationwide. Because the electoral ''lists'' had to
compete on a national basis, they could not appeal
to particular local needs or issues. This meant that
the political appeal of any particular list almost
had to be much less than the sum of its candidates;
in effect, the national lists became reflections of
ethnicity or religious belief. During the campaign,
this had the result of solidifying the connection
between religion or ethnicity and political power.
And the problems of Kirkuk became less and less
distinguishable from the problems of Iraq as a
whole.
Across town from the Turkmen neighborhood of Taseen
was Uruba, or ''Arabdom,'' constructed by Saddam
Hussein to house Arabs he imported into Kirkuk. The
muddy lots and rocky paths between homes were full
of children playing and garbage strewn about, as
goats and herds of sheep picked through the refuse
for scraps. Uruba was nicknamed Resistance City by
American soldiers, who rarely ventured in. Women in
purple and green robes with head scarves chatted or
mopped the spaces in front of their homes. Men
lolled about silently, staring at our car as it
struggled to traverse the pitted and broken streets:
a new vehicle with new faces inside.
A trickle of Sunni men, alone or in couples, slowly
made their way to the Al Tawhid Mosque, whose white
walls and green towers were surrounded by mud and
sewage. Donkeys stood outside, while before the
mosque's gate children played with birds they had
caught, holding their feet and attacking one another
with the screeching birds spreading their wings.
I approached the mosque's guardians and was allowed
to enter. A hundred men stood barefoot in rows on
carpets in the outer courtyard because the interior
of the mosque was full. Sheik Mahmud Husein Ahmad
al-Ubeidi began his khutba -- the Friday sermon --
and loudspeakers outside echoed his shrill fury
against the walls of the neighborhood. As is the
tradition, Mahmud began by retelling stories of the
early Muslim leaders and spoke of how they worked
heroically to help their flock. He contrasted them
with today's leaders and ended with a warning
against the election. ''The occupier wants us to
participate in these elections,'' he said, ''but we
know they are a fraud.'' After prayers were over, I
stood in line with other well-wishers to greet the
sheik, and he invited me for lunch; we drove off to
his nearby home. In his dark guest room, paint
peeled off the walls against which some 20 boys and
old men in dishdasha robes were leaning. Sheik
Mahmud invited me to sit with him and others on thin
mattresses placed on the floor.
''We fear Iraq will have a sectarian war,'' the
sheik began to tell me, only to be interrupted by
his 3-year-old son running to embrace his father. I
was told the boy's name was Osama. ''I named him
after Osama bin Laden,'' the sheik said, smiling.
''Bin Laden is a good man.''
Mahmud has led the neighborhood mosque for two
years, and a steady stream of men entered his home
to congratulate him upon his return from his first
hajj. When a man entered, the seated men all stood
up -- despite the newcomer's protests -- and he
shook each man's hand, embracing and kissing and
exchanging wishes of peace and God's blessings. Then
the conversation would resume until the next
interruption, which included lunch, a large tin bowl
of rice with pieces of boiled meat on top.
Top
''All
the Sunni Arab leaders have banned the elections,''
the sheik now said, adding that ''we don't have
faith in the elections -- these are secular
parties.''
Mahmud acknowledged that he was a member of the
Sunni Council of Islamic Scholars, a radical
coalition of sheiks in Iraq who support the
insurgency and oppose both the occupation and the
election. Though the scholars' council did not have
an office in Kirkuk, as it did in most Arab Sunni
areas of the country, it was represented by the
sheik, who relayed its orders from Baghdad to
Kirkuk's Sunnis. ''The council said we should not
participate in the elections,'' he said. ''We should
have the elections after the occupation is over,
otherwise the Americans will install whomever they
want and the elections will fail.'' He repeated
propaganda heard in Sunni areas from Falluja to
Mosul: ''We heard that 700,000 Iranians were brought
into the south, and here foreign Kurds were brought
in.'' Mahmud and his seated supporters did not think
Sunnis would be weakened by their intended boycott.
''If we support the elections, we have to accept the
results,'' he said. ''But if we reject them, we stay
strong.''
The men in Mahmud's room feared both the Kurds and
the Americans, who had altered the balance of power.
The sheik explained that ''the Americans arrested
many of our youth, so did the Kurds. The Kurds have
hated Arabs for a long time. They see an Arab and
say he is Saddam Hussein.'' An older sheik, who was
visiting, cut in: ''They are trying to provoke us
and attack Arabs in the market, beating them up. The
Americans support the Kurds.'' He and others
finishing their lunch denied that many Kurds had
been expelled by Hussein. ''The government only
expelled 3,000 Kurds,'' said one of the men.
Another, a round man seated beside the sheik, denied
living in Kurdish homes. ''We bought our homes,'' he
said. ''If Arabs stole the homes of Kurds, then they
deserve to get them back, but we took government
land.'' The older sheik interjected again: ''They
want to take Kirkuk. We are sitting here waiting. If
anything happens we will react.''
When Hussein sought to Arabize Kirkuk, he used
Shiite Arabs as well as Sunnis. As with Turkmens and
Arabs, Sunni and Shiite Iraqi Arabs, at odds
elsewhere in the country, have found common cause in
Kirkuk against the Kurds. For many Shiites, of
course, particularly those inspired by the young
cleric Moktada al-Sadr and the exploits of his Mahdi
army, there is also common cause to be found in
opposing the American-led occupation and all its
works.
At another mosque in Kirkuk -- a Shiite huseiniya --
I heard a different sermon given. The modest
building was obscured by the taller homes in the
area, and inside its courtyard men were washing
their feet, arms and faces in the ritual ablutions
before prayer. The inner walls were lined with
posters featuring a who's who of radical Shiism:
Ayatollah Khomeini, Moktada al-Sadr and his revered
martyred uncle, Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, the father of
political Shiism in Iraq. One poster, showing
Moktada al-Sadr beside a masked man wielding a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher, announced, ''The
Mahdi army supports Muslims and protects the
religious sites for Iraqis.'' Another declared that
al-Sadr was on the battlefield against the
Americans; yet another warned the Americans, ''Oh,
infidels, I don't worship what you worship''; and
still another said of those infidels, ''Fight these
people by day and by night, secretly and openly, and
I call on you to attack them before they attack
you.''
Beneath the posters, on a bulletin board, al-Sadr's
latest announcements were posted. One from December
declared that al-Sadr's movement was boycotting the
election, though it did not say that he was quietly
fielding candidates at the same time.
The men in the mosque gathered on the green carpet
beneath plastic chandeliers and spoke to one another
in a murmur. They spoke in the southern Iraqi Shiite
dialect; they were among the Arabs from southern
Iraq that Hussein had encouraged (or forced) to
migrate to Kirkuk to replace expelled Kurds.
The prayer was interspersed with the traditional and
ubiquitous Shiite chant -- ''Our god prays for
Muhammad and the family of Muhammad'' -- but
appended to it was a remarkable innovation that
supporters of al-Sadr had added, changing accepted
Shiite practice. The chant requested that God speed
the return of the Mahdi, or Shiite messiah, damn his
enemies and make his son al-Sadr victorious. Then
the congregants shouted: ''Oh, Allah! Oh, Ali! Oh,
Mahdi,'' and placed their hands on their bowed
heads, finishing in a more subdued tone, ''Make us
victorious.''
The huseiniya's imam, Mahmud, stood up. He wore a
white turban that made his narrow face look even
thinner. Mahmud began with stories about the heroes
of early Islam and, uncharacteristically for a
Shiite, praised the early Sunni leaders and
commended their friendship with the prophet. The
sheik then spoke about the importance of choice and
the responsibility that comes with it. ''It's
important to apply your freedom,'' he said. He
called upon his audience to choose the best marja,
or religious source, as high-ranking Shiite clerics
are called. After prayers, posters of Moktada al-Sadr
and copies of his publication, Al Hawza, were put on
sale.
Of course, not all Shiites were hostile to the
election. The United Iraqi Alliance -- the Shiite
''list'' endorsed by Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani --
also had a presence in Kirkuk. Posters of Sistani
and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri)
and a major figure in the United Iraqi Alliance,
covered Sciri's extremely humble headquarters. Three
middle-aged men were sleeping in a room there when I
arrived. They hobbled out in a daze. Their Arabic
was poor; they were all Shiite Turkmens who spent
nearly two decades in Iranian exile with Sciri and
its militia, the Badr Brigade. They fought in the
south and in northern Iraq. I asked them who their
candidates were in Kirkuk. ''There are candidates
here for the list,'' one of them said, ''but I don't
have their names or phone numbers here.'' He
rummaged through the desk until he found the list of
their 17 provincial candidates.
They sent me to a mosque sympathetic to their cause.
The walls were covered with posters showing mass
graves and depicting Saddam Hussein's soldiers
attacking Najaf. Inside, Seyid Sadiq al-Batat spoke
to a room filled with 150 men and, sequestered in
the front, 50 women. He spoke about Islam for 90
minutes and finally got to the election. ''Elections
are an important day for the followers of Ali,'' he
said, referring to the Shiites, ''and we say to the
occupier, No to occupation for a day, for a week,
for a year. Sistani refused the American request to
postpone the elections. People think that the
elections are a gift from the occupier. But they are
a trick to let them stay here to use our oil and
natural resources. They were refusing elections, but
we forced them. We won't have a secular
constitution. We'll have an Islamic constitution.
The majority in this country is Shiite. Anybody who
wants to liberate Iraq should vote for this list.''
The night before the election, in the deserted
headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, I
found Muhammad Kamal Salih, deputy director of the
party in Kirkuk. Only the flag of Kurdistan was on
his desk. Above him were posters of Mustafa and
Massoud Barzani -- the patriarch of Kurdish
resistance and his son. Salih's cellphone rang
constantly with a Kurdish national song. No. 2 on
the Kirkuk slate, he was guaranteed a position after
the election. He did not seem particularly thrilled
about this. Maybe it was not in his nature.
''We hope to have more Kurds on the council after
the elections, more than half,'' he said. ''Kurds
are 47 or 48 percent of Kirkuk. It's low because the
imported Arabs have not yet been returned to the
south.'' He was confident that the unwanted Arabs
would leave. ''They came for their personal
interest, so if you offer them incentives, they will
go,'' he said. ''About 300,000 Arabs should go.
About 50,000 have already left Kirkuk. Ninety
percent of them are only waiting to receive
incentives to leave. They will be given jobs,
transportation, land, homes in the south.'' He
expected Kirkuk's oil revenues to pay for their
transfer. Salih's own responsibility was not oil but
education, in regard to which he complained of
facing logistical problems turning Arab schools into
Kurdish ones.
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I went
to spend election eve with Mam Rostam at his home in
the formerly all-Arab Qadisiya neighborhood, which
is the front line of Kurdish-Arab tension. His newly
confiscated home had belonged to Shiite Arabs. They
were gone now, and Rostam had renovated.
That night I told Rostam about the Friday prayer in
the Tawhid Mosque and how the imam urged everyone
not to vote. Rostam laughed and slapped his thighs.
''This is great for us!'' he said. He laughed when I
told him how I had cautioned the sheik that Sunnis
would lose out if they did not vote. ''No, you
should have told them: 'You're right, don't vote.
It's for the infidels!'''
Rostam went into the kitchen and emerged with
bottles of whiskey, ouzo and beer. Soft drinks were
not an option. His guests began arriving. Gen. Salar
Ahmad Faqi, the rotund and eternally tired chief of
the traffic police, settled into a chair, removing
his Israeli automatic pistol, which he said was a
special gift from a benefactor he refused to name.
The chief of security for this neighborhood, a
handsome man, freshly shaved and with a permanent
smile, refused to give his name or have his picture
taken. Asked about reports that Israeli intelligence
agents were training the Kurds, he said Iraqi Jews
have the right to return to Kurdistan.
''Better to have Israelis than Arabs!'' Rostam
shouted. ''We think that the Kurds and Israel are
the best allies the Americans have in the Middle
East.'' There was a radio on, tuned to a Kurdish
station, and when reports of threats to Kurds were
broadcast, Rostam, well into his ouzo, began
complaining. ''Muslims are bad,'' he said. ''Islam
is dictatorial. Look at Europe: you can see real
democracy; you can see a mosque, a church and
nightclub all together.'' His friend Adil, deputy
chief of security for Kirkuk, who wore a black suit,
black shirt and red tie, added, ''I am an example of
democracy. I pray, then I drink.''
''The [Saddam] regime killed 182,000 people in the
Anfal campaign and destroyed more than 5,000
villages,'' Rostam declared, ''and no Muslim cleric
said anything.'' Voicing a frequent Kurdish refrain,
he mourned the loss of the Kurds' pre-Islamic
religion. ''Our original religion was Yazidi, and
they came by the sword to make us Muslims,'' he
said. Then he added, ''We should replace mosques
with discotheques.''
Shy young peshmerga in green fatigues and plastic
slippers brought in courses of salad, rice and meat
as Rostam's well-fed comrades ate and listened.
Their cellphones rang often, each one with a
different pop melody. Atta, a local police
commander, had a phone that trilled ''Jingle
Bells.'' That night he took me with his police
patrol into an Arab district, where his men blared
their sirens and fired their heavy machine gun into
the air.
Mam Rostam awoke on election day and switched on the
Kurdish satellite channel, where music videos from
Sulaimaniya were playing. ''Isn't this better than
praying at a mosque?'' he asked. It was a theme with
him.
The school two houses down from his served as a
voting center. Men and women lined up in the
hundreds on opposite sides of the school, squeezed
between walls and barbed wire. The sounds of heavy
gunfire cut through the chatter. People came early,
starting at 7 when the center opened, as Black Hawk
helicopters circled above. Many of the women wore
shiny new clothes, their finest, full of color and
glitter. People came holding sample ballots and
their registration cards. A sign at the entrance
said, ''Vote for who you want and only for who you
want.'' The school was decorated with Kurdish colors.
Though it was early in the morning, the feeling was
of great excitement. People moved quickly and in
remarkable order. Men and women were eager to vote,
smiling as they walked out of booths, seemingly
disappointed that it was over so soon.
Rostam's convoy set out for his childhood
neighborhood, Shorja, where voting was held at a
school. He was accompanied by two dozen peshmerga
members and his personal cameraman. The young
cameraman leapt off the back of the pickup truck
from where he had been filming Rostam's lead car and
never stopped filming, sprinting around everybody in
a panic, pressing his video camera close to Rostam's
face. Thousands of people were on the street. Rostam
circumvented the entire line and its security
procedures and entered with his cameraman and
gunmen. Other voters were made to wait as he put on
his reading glasses and made a show of studying the
ballot. He was shown how to fold it, and the staff
was very impressed, or made it seem so. Outside the
mood was celebratory; some men beat drums, singing
and dancing, while others danced with the flag of
Kurdistan. They appeared to be celebrating a Kurdish
victory much more than an Iraqi one.
Rostam's convoy continued to another neighborhood.
As a large crowd encircled him, he announced:
''Today is a historic day. Today our geography,
history and blood will bear fruit.'' Women
approached him to shake his hand. One old woman
hugged him. She had been his nanny as a child. ''Do
you still want to wash me in a basin?'' Rostam
roared. Everybody laughed. News arrived of a mortar
shell hitting the Kirkuk stadium, which Rostam
visited two days earlier to greet the 2,000 Kurdish
refugees who had set up a shantytown there. A
teenager had been killed by the mortar round. Rostam
drove to the hospital to soothe the stricken family
and friends, whose clothes were stained with the
victim's blood. Soon Rostam continued on to the
Iskan neighborhood. Thousands danced in the streets
and greeted Rostam with embraces. As he spoke to
them, the men laughed and clapped. ''Did everybody
here vote?'' he demanded.
Once you left the Kurdish neighborhoods, the dancing
stopped. Taseen was quiet, though not as quiet as
the city's Arab slums, which seemed almost deserted
until Iraqi policemen began firing on our car. After
surrounding the car, dragging us out and
interrogating us at gunpoint, they decided we really
were journalists rather than terrorists, and we were
able to enter a girls' school that was serving as an
election site. There were six policemen on the roof.
Occasionally one or two people strolled in to vote.
Some of the election workers wore masks to avoid
reprisals as collaborators.
Back in the Kurdish Shorja neighborhood at 2 that
afternoon, we found the festivities unabated.
Hundreds of people were still lined up to vote,
while around them people danced and sang. Rostam
remained in a celebratory mood. ''The ballot boxes
are empty in Baghdad!'' he said. ''It means we are
going to win!''
But what had the Kurds won? At the very least, they
seemed ready to begin another round of forced
deportations. Kirkuk's Kurdish assistant governor
for resettlement and compensation, Hasib Rozbayani,
told me the day before -- after waving me into his
house with a pistol, a house that had been taken
from an Arab -- that he hoped to expel 300,000 Arabs
and welcome the return of the same number of Kurds.
Of the Arabs, he said: ''They should prefer to live
in peace and not be in conflict every day. Their
presence leads to conflict.''
There is little reason, however, to think that their
absence will lead to peace. When Kurdish voters left
the polling places, they were often directed to
tents to vote once more, this time in an informal
referendum on whether they wanted to live in an
independent Kurdistan or in Iraq. According to the
referendum's organizers, the vote went 98.76 percent
for independence.
However primitive this straw poll was, the prospect
of Kurds not resting until they have created a state
from northern Iraq -- a state that would include
Kirkuk -- is very real. For now, the two leading
Kurdish parties remain officially opposed to an
independence referendum. But within days of the
vote, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, was saying of independence: ''When
the right time comes it will become a reality.
Self-determination is the natural right of our
people.'' Peter Galbraith, a former American
diplomat who had watched the breakup of Yugoslavia
and was monitoring the voting in Kurdistan,
concluded that the breakup of Iraq was inevitable,
too, because the Kurds had finally got close to
independence and were in no mood to stop now. One of
the Kurds' chief representatives in Baghdad, Faraj
al-Haideri, began calling for a referendum in the
summer on whether Kirkuk should merge with the three
neighboring Kurdish autonomous provinces.
Two weeks after the election, I phoned Mam Rostam,
and he seemed to be in a statesmanlike mood.
Preliminary national results showed the Kurds with
an outsize share, thanks to Sunni Arab
nonparticipation. Locally, Rostam considered the
election a success, ''despite the deep aversion the
Turkmen and the Sunni Arabs had for democracy and
the will of the people.'' He predicted that Kirkuk's
provincial council, with a fresh Kurdish majority,
would ''try to remain part of Iraq.'' He said,
however, that ''once they realize that the Iraqi
government does not help them, or, let's say, does
not do enough to help Kirkuk stand on its feet, they
will ask to join Kurdistan and enjoy the privileges
the Kurds enjoy at the moment.''
Once that happened, Rostam, too, foresaw
independence. ''Kurdistan is not yet an independent
state,'' he told me, ''but why should we not have
the right to have an independent state of our own
like all the other small countries?''
Rostam said he was being considered for the post of
''chief commander of the oil fields of Kirkuk.'' It
appears that Kirkuk has become a place where an oil
field has to have a ''commander'' and where that
commander thinks of himself not as an Iraqi, but as
a Kurd.
Nir Rosen has reported from Iraq and Afghanistan
for The New Republic, The New Yorker and other
publications. This is his first article for The
Times Magazine. He is working on a book about
contemporary Iraq.
www.nytimes.com
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