|
Security may trump ethnicity in Kirkuk
28.9.2007
By Borzou Daragahi
|
|
|
|
Kurds
have long sought the mixed city and its environs for
their semiautonomous region. Now some Arabs think
that may not be so bad.
September
28, 2007
Kirkuk, Iraq's border with Kurdistan region,
-- A staunch Arab nationalist, Ismail Hadidi once
dreaded the possibility that his ethnically diverse
city would be swallowed up by the neighboring
semiautonomous Kurdish region and cut off from the
Baghdad government.
But the provincial councilman is also a practical
man. And when he compares the chaos and violence in
the Iraqi capital with the prosperity and peace next
door in the three-province Kurdistan Regional
Government area, teaming up with the Kurds doesn't
seem like such a bad idea. He's even considering
buying some property in the Kurdish enclave.
"The people of Kirkuk were afraid of this," said
Hadidi, a Sunni Arab tribal leader. "But given the
situation, I believe most people will move toward
being part of Kurdistan, because what the people
want above all is security."
Uncertainty clouds Iraq's future, but not so much
here. The Kurdish region's exploding economic and
political power has begun to shape northern Iraq's
reality.
Oil-rich and ethnically diverse Kirkuk, the capital
of Tamim province, was billed as northern Iraq's
most contested prize in the wake of the U.S.-led
liberation of Iraq in 2003, and its fate was to be
resolved by the new Iraqi Constitution, which
instead mandated a referendum. But that hasn't
happened yet. And now, just as medieval peasants
clung to local warlords who could protect them from
looters and bandits, this gritty city's war- and
poverty-ravaged population has begun gravitating
toward the Kurds, who are hungrily reclaiming
territory lost to successive waves of Arabization.
Few doubt what will happen when U.S. forces exit.
Grown strong and rich in their enclave of more than
16,000 square miles, Iraq's Kurds will rush to annex
Tamim and other areas in Diyala and Nineveh
provinces they have laid claim to, which could
double the size of their de facto state.
"The Kurdistan region will include all parts of Iraq
that are historically and geographically part of
Kurdistan," predicted Omer Fattah, deputy premier of
the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is based in
Erbil.
Hussein and leaders of earlier Arab-dominated
Baghdad governments sought to upend the oil-rich
region's ethnic balance by forcibly evicting tens of
thousands of Kurds and other non-Arab minorities and
replacing them with Arab settlers. A referendum on
whether Kirkuk and its outlying province will join
the Kurdish region is scheduled to take place by
year's end.
However, many doubt the vote will be held.
Politicians in Baghdad said this week it can't be
held until well into 2008. Kurds blame the delays on
U.S. reluctance to address an explosive Iraqi
political issue. At the same time, Kurds say the
Americans are increasingly less of a factor in the
north. Kirkuk security officials say U.S. forces
have already moved from the city to more volatile
Baghdad and central Iraq.
A U.S. Army spokesman in Kirkuk skirted the question
of redeployment. "Our brigade remains committed to
providing security and partnering with Iraqi forces
to maintain stability in the Kirkuk province," said
Maj. Derrick W. Cheng of the 31st Brigade Combat
Team in response to an e-mail query.
Kurds say they don't mind the Americans leaving. "We
are thinking about it and preparing for it," said
Abdul-Salaam Berwari, who runs a think tank close to
the Kurdish leadership. "It's OK for us if they do
that."
Kurdish officials suggest that it might be better if
the U.S. pulled out of day-to-day operations in the
north. Without Washington's political obligations to
fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization member
Turkey, which fears Kurdish regional ambitions, many
Kurds believe they can resolve the Kirkuk dilemma
themselves.
"You'll never find a single Kurd willing to give up
Kirkuk whether the Americans are here or not," said
one official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one
of the two main Kurdish parties in Iraq. He spoke
anonymously because he said his view and that of
many others was not the official Kurdish position.
Just as Kurds exploited Iraq's chaos after the 1991
Gulf War to build their enclave, they've begun
quietly incorporating Tamim province and reversing
the Arab migration.
Kurds have also in effect taken up security duties
in other traditionally Kurdish lands and villages,
including oil-rich Makhmour, northwest of Kirkuk,
and Khanaqin, farther south in Diyala province.
Kurds emphasize that the bombings that killed at
least 400 Yazidis, a religious minority that is
ethnically Kurdish, last month fell just outside the
zone of Kurdish control.
Already at least 58,000 Arabs have left the Kirkuk
region, said Kamal Kirkuki, deputy speaker of the
Kurdish parliament. He said the Kurds have collected
a trove of documents to determine who belongs in
Kirkuk and who does not, including records of all
Arabs who arrived in Kirkuk from 1968, when
Hussein's Baath Party consolidated power, to the
Iraqi leader's ouster in 2003.
"We could solve the Kirkuk issue in one minute,"
Kirkuki said. "All we need is a political decision."
The Erbil-based regional government bankrolls the
teaching of the Kurdish language in Kirkuk schools.
New housing sprouts on the no-man's land that served
for 12 years as a buffer between Hussein's Iraq and
the three Kurdish provinces, Erbil, Dahuk and
Sulaimaniyah, that were protected by American and
British air power.
Soon, 5,000 overwhelmingly Kurdish Iraqi army troops
will begin patrolling the countryside around Kirkuk,
ostensibly to protect oil and electricity lines, but
also to form a de facto barrier between the area and
the rest of Iraq. The controversial patrols were
approved by the Baghdad government.
"Our problem is coming from the terrorists who are
outside the city," said Police Chief Gen. Jamal
Taher, a Kurd. "What we want to do is to protect
ourselves from the rest of the provinces where the
terrorists are."
The proposal has outraged some of the city's Turkmen
and Arab leaders, who see it as a ploy to extend
Kurdish control.
"This is a barrel of TNT," said Hassan Torhan, an
ethnic Turkmen politician and a member of the
Turkmen Front, which is backed by Turkey. "Saddam
Hussein tried to Arabize Kirkuk, Now the two parties
are trying to 'Kurdize' Kirkuk."
Torhan frequents Erbil's new international airport.
He drives there through newly constructed tunnels
and freshly asphalted streets and past shiny new
hotels, restaurants, office buildings and apartment
blocks.
Kurds boast that not a single non-Iraqi has been
killed in their semiautonomous region since April 9,
2003. They say they've drawn on decades of
intelligence experience from their dealings with
Western and Middle Eastern spy agencies to keep
militants at bay.
They've also incorporated into the political process
many of the Kurdish Islamist groups that share the
same extremist religious outlook as Al Qaeda.
Around Erbil, they've strengthened a gigantic
earthen berm to keep militants out. Ironically, the
trench was dug by Hussein during the 1980s to keep
the city out of the hands of Kurdish guerrillas now
running much of the north.
Meanwhile, in the 4 1/2 years since the liberation
of Iraq, life inside Kirkuk has only become more
dangerous. Grinding poverty persists. Insurgent
bombings and gunfire daily target soldiers, police
officers and civilians. Barbed wire and concrete
blast barriers line the city's unkempt boulevards as
Black Hawk helicopters hover above.
Fifteen minutes into a day-long foray into the city,
a visiting Western reporter was accosted by a burly
man who drew a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun on
him and taunted his driver. It was an off-duty
police officer venting frustration over a minor
traffic incident.
Kirkuk officials believe Kurds can do a better job
of providing security than either the Iraqi or U.S.
security forces.
"There will be bloodshed if the Americans leave,"
said Brig. Gen. Hamid Salar, head of Kirkuk's
traffic police. "But if the Kurdish authorities
would be given responsibility, the terrorist
activity would immediately drop 50%."
Looking at life without the Americans, some Arabs in
Kirkuk whisper that at least the Kurds are mostly
Sunni Muslims, whereas the Baghdad government is
dominated by Shiite Muslims with close ties to Iran.
The Kurds also generally have a much better record
on human rights and treatment of minorities than
does Baghdad, where security forces are full of
Shiite militiamen and sectarian death squads have
run rampant.
But some worry as to how the Kurds might behave
without U.S. scrutiny. Recently, Arabs who fled to
Kirkuk to escape sectarian killings elsewhere in
Iraq have reported being rousted from their homes by
Kurdish-dominated security forces and ordered to
move again, lest they upset the city's ethnic
balance ahead of the referendum.
"We were informed that we have to leave our houses
that we have rented for over a year and a half,"
said Radhi Mohammed, who fled Baghdad's Bayaa
neighborhood for Kirkuk with 13 family members.
"Police arrested one of my sons and told us to leave
or they will detain my son until we do so."
latimes com
* Kirkuk city is a
Kurdish city and it lies just
south border of the Kurdistan autonomous region and
it is not under the full control of Kurdistan
Regional Government administration, its population
is a mix of majority Kurds and minority of Arabs,
Turkmen.
The former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein forced
over 250,000 Kurdish residents to give up their
homes to Arabs in the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city
and the region's oil industry.
Based on Iraq's Constitution a referendum is to be
held in late 2007 to decide whether the oil-rich
Kurdish province should be annexed to the safe
semiautonomous Kurdistan region in Iraq's north.
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 