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KIRKUK,
Kurdistan-Iraq -- Hundreds of Shiite Muslim
militiamen have deployed in recent weeks to this
restive city -- widely considered the most likely
flash point for an Iraqi civil war -- vowing to
fight any attempt to shift control over Kirkuk to
the Kurdish-governed north, according to U.S.
commanders and diplomats, local police and
politicians.
Until recently, the presence of the militias here
was minimal. U.S. officials have called the Shiite
armed groups the deadliest threat to security in
much of the country. They have been blamed for
hundreds of killings during mounting sectarian
violence in central and southern Iraq since the
bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in February.
The Mahdi Army, led by firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
has sent at least two companies, each with about 120
fighters, according to Thomas Wise, political
counselor for the U.S. Embassy's Kirkuk regional
office, which has been tracking militia activity.
The Badr Organization, the armed wing of Iraq's
largest Shiite political party, has also boosted its
presence and opened several offices across the
region, military officers here said.
Although still in its early stages, the militia
buildup "is something that definitely concerns us,
and something that we are watching very carefully,"
said Col. David R. Gray, 48, of Herscher, Ill.,
commander of the 101st Airborne's 1st Brigade Combat
Team, based in Kirkuk. "So far they haven't been
that violent, but does it add to the tension,
putting them into this maelstrom? Absolutely."
The fate of oil-rich Kirkuk -- Iraq's third-largest
city with about a million residents and sizable
ethnic Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen communities -- has
been a pivotal and divisive issue since long before
the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq's
constitution, endorsed in nationwide balloting in
October, calls for a referendum on the future of the
region by the end of 2007, but many key details are
in dispute, such as who will be permitted to vote.
Kurdish leaders speak openly of their intention to
use force if necessary to gain control of the city,
which they consider the historical capital of a vast
Kurdish nation also extending into Iran and Turkey.
During the rule of President Saddam Hussein, Arabs
brought in from elsewhere in Iraq displaced
thousands of Kurds. As many as 300,000 Kurds who
were pushed out have returned to the area, according
to U.S. estimates, establishing vast settlements on
the outskirts of the city and making them its
largest ethnic community. Kurds also occupy most of
the top provincial political and security jobs.
Many Iraqi Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite, are
adamantly opposed to relinquishing Kirkuk, among
them Sadr and his political followers.
Operating within and alongside Iraq's police and
army, Shiite militias have grown politically more
powerful and boosted their membership, despite being
outlawed under Iraq's new constitution. U.S.
officials have called on the Shiite-led government,
whose leading parties are tied to Badr and the Mahdi
Army, to rein them in, but few if any such steps
have been taken.
Gray said the militias used the bombing of the
Askariya shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, as a
pretext for expanding into Kirkuk, ostensibly to
protect their mosques and people. Shiite residents
of Kirkuk, most of whose families were transferred
here by Hussein decades ago, are believed to make up
less than 5 percent of the local population.
For the most part, however, the militias have
maintained a low profile, U.S. military officials
said. Shortly after they arrived, an Iraqi police
unit told them to stow their guns and promised that
the mosques would be protected. The militias
complied. They have held at least three large but
peaceful street demonstrations, including two by
Badr that attracted more than 2,000 people. Wise
said Badr is less troubled by the prospect of
Kurdish control of Kirkuk.
"We know they are here, but they are not patrolling
in the streets publicly, not yet," said Brig. Gen.
Sherko Shakir, the provincial police chief.
A few hundred Shiite militiamen would be no match
for the tens of thousands of Kurdish fighters either
serving in Iraqi army units in Kirkuk or stationed
outside the city in Kurdish-controlled provinces.
In a meeting here last week, Sadr's representative
in the city, Abdul Karim Khalifa, told U.S.
officials that more armed loyalists were on the way
and that as many as 7,000 to 10,000 Shiite residents
were prepared to fight alongside the Mahdi Army if
called upon. Legions more Shiite militiamen would
push north from Baghdad's Sadr City slum, he said,
according to Wise.
"His message was essentially that any idea of Kirkuk
going to the Kurds will mean a fight," Wise said.
"He said that their policy here was different from
in other places, that they are not going to attack
coalition forces because their only enemy here is
the Kurds."
U.S. officials said the Shiite armed groups had not
disrupted security here, but local police and
government officials, many of them Kurds, have
accused them of a wave of crimes.
"We fear the expansion of the role of Shiite armed
men in Kirkuk," said Yadgar Abdullah, commander of
the police emergency operations center in Kirkuk and
an official with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
which administers the Kurds' decades-old militia,
the pesh merga . He said the number of kidnappings
for ransom in Kirkuk has surged since the militias
arrival.
Another Kurdish security official, who spoke on
condition he not be named, said Shiite militias are
thought to have conducted at least five killings of
Kurds in Kirkuk and the surrounding area.
"We are dealing with anybody that carries weapons
and stands against the Iraqi government to disturb
security," Abdullah said. "They will be considered
terrorists that must be fought and disarmed."
In a recent interview, Khalifa, the Sadr
representative, said the Mahdi Army -- which battled
U.S. troops across southern and central Iraq in 2004
-- was responding to a power play by Kurdish
politicians, whom he accused of plotting "to
marginalize us in the political process and trying
to force the Shiite Arabs out" by seizing control of
Kirkuk.
Despite intense competition among Iraqi factions for
control of the city, U.S. forces here have been
largely successful at limiting violence. But the
influx of Shiite militias poses a new challenge for
American troops, who have long considered the
primary threat to be the Sunni Arab-led insurgency.
Last week about two dozen U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi
SWAT team launched a midnight raid in search of 12
men accused of planting a deadly roadside bomb last
month. They crammed into a dozen Humvees and, with
helicopters buzzing overhead, swarmed a quiet
neighborhood in central Kirkuk, kicking down doors
and rummaging through a half-dozen houses.
The six suspects they detained, whose names were
provided by local informants, were believed to be
members of the Mahdi Army, accused by U.S. and
British forces of recent attacks on coalition troops
in Baghdad and several southern cities. Photographs
of Sadr were plastered on virtually every wall of
every raided home.
"I had never heard of these Mahdi guys being up here
until tonight," said Lt. John Reynolds, 23, of
Ararat, Va., a platoon leader, as he rifled a
cabinet full of Shiite prayer flags, posters
depicting Imam Ali, and portraits of the youthful
Sadr and his white-bearded father.
In a courtyard outside, a woman in a head scarf
clutched three weeping children to her chest. Two
men arrested inside sat blindfolded and bound in
plastic handcuffs, one a soldier in the Iraqi army,
the other a local policeman.
"Just what we need in a place like this," Reynolds
said, "something new to worry about."
In response to the Shiite buildup, the Kurdish pesh
merga militia has boosted its already substantial
presence in Kirkuk and in the city of Tuz, where
nearly 100 Kurdish gunmen arrived in recent weeks,
Wise, the State Department representative, and U.S.
commanders said.
The Kurds have also increased to about 15,000 the
number of private security workers guarding offices
and government buildings in the Kirkuk region,
according to a Western official here, who said they
could be called upon to fight if ethnic conflict
escalated.
Tuz, a city of about 200,000 south of Kirkuk, was
considered so peaceful in January that U.S. forces
transferred out almost all their soldiers, with
about 40 remaining as advisers to the Iraqi troops
remaining behind.
"Now you are seeing lots of attempts by the militias
to intimidate Iraqi soldiers there," said Lt. Col.
Bob Benjamin, 42, of Chicago, deputy commander of
the 1st Brigade Combat Team. "We found bombs near
some mosques. There is definitely the potential for
increased violence, but the Iraqis so far have kept
the lid on the pot."
U.S. officers here say a further cause for concern
is that the arrival of the militias, who U.S.
officials say receive training, arms and funding
from Iran, has coincided with an influx of Iranian
sniper rifles and roadside-bomb technology in the
region.
The latter includes highly lethal Iranian-designed
"shape charges" that channel the blast to punch
through armored vehicles. Such a device killed a
U.S. soldier this month, the first U.S. fatality in
the city of Kirkuk since the 101st Airborne returned
to Iraq in November.
Washington Post.com
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