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Kirkuk in the Wake of the Withdrawal
30.11.2011
By Joost R. Hiltermann - The National Interest |
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November
30, 2011
The ethnic fault line that bisects northern Iraq,
imperfectly dividing Arabs and Kurds, might as well
have been geological: the temblors it occasionally
produces are as destructive as anything measured on
the Richter scale. Yet, since 2003 at least, things
have been surprisingly quiet along this line, even
if the local population is frequently roused by
disquieting rumblings. Arguably, relations between
Arabs and Kurds—and between their political
capitals, Baghdad and Erbil—have been better than
they have been since the turmoil that attended the
Ottoman Empire’s disintegration almost a century
ago. Subsequent decades witnessed an endless cycle
of repression, upheaval and uneasy accommodation,
followed once again by repression.
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Joost Hiltermann, Deputy Program
Director for the Middle East and North Africa,
International Crisis Group |
One reason for this unlikely turn of events may be
that the United States, for all its post-2003
blunders and missteps in the rest of Iraq, found a
way to keep things relatively calm in the north. In
2003, it created a local government in Kirkuk that,
while pleasing no single ethnic group, displeased
everyone somewhat equally (though for different
reasons), and thus focused people’s ire on
Washington rather than on each other. Subsequent
elections allowed the Kurds to gain political
prominence, but the U.S. presence and the area’s
multi-ethnic character encouraged a degree of
pluralist politics and power sharing—even if
Kirkuk’s Arabs and Turkmen chronically grumble about
Kurdish domination. Moreover, in late 2009, in
response to violent incidents that held the threat
of military escalation, the U.S. military created
joint Arab-Kurd checkpoints and patrols along the
tenuous fault line, often referred to as the
“trigger line” because of its potential to set off a
cataclysm.
In another month, however, U.S. troops will have
fully withdrawn from Iraq. Soldiers embedded with
the joint patrols and checkpoints have already
pulled out. The only U.S. remnant in the north will
be a Kirkuk consulate staffed by diplomats and a
small number of military officers operating under
the Baghdad Embassy’s Office for Security
Cooperation. They will continue to be part of the
Joint Coordination Center in Kirkuk, which monitors
the Arab-Kurdish peacekeeping effort. Whether this
sharp reduction in military personnel will trigger
an outbreak of violence is the question all Kirkukis,
and their friends abroad, now ask themselves.
The United States has been a better friend to the
Kurds than to any other group in Iraq thanks to
their loyal support since the invasion, and the
Kurds have reciprocated. Yet their leaders are wary
of superpowers. The Kurds have never had a protector
as mighty as the United States, but they have
learned from previous short-lived alliances not to
trust any outside powers, who inevitably yoke the
relatively weaker Kurds to the pursuit of their own
geostrategic interests. Recall Henry Kissinger and
his demurral that Washington was not engaged in
missionary work after the United States left the
Kurds to their fate in 1975,www.ekurd.net
having first led them to believe they were safe to
rise up against the regime in Baghdad. Recall also
the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, when President
George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqis to divest
themselves of that same regime, then declined to
intervene when Saddam turned his tanks, mortars and
helicopter gunships on them.
For this reason, Kurdish leaders, taking advantage
of the U.S. invasion, spent the next eight years
diversifying their foreign sponsors and roping them
in with promises of riches—access to Kurdistan’s
hydrocarbon wealth. The aim was future protection
when needed.
The government of Nuri al-Maliki has not been able
to prevent the Kurds’ creeping control over an area
the previous regime felt so strongly about that it
engaged in wholesale Arabization, dispossessing
Kurds and Turkmen alike and systematically killing
ten of thousands of rural Kurds in the 1988 Anfal
counterinsurgency campaign. At most, Baghdad has
only slowed the Kurds’ political advance and drawn a
physical line, entrenching its forces along the
length of it. But even that line is no longer the
Green Line, the Kurds’ pre-2003 border, but rather a
new de facto “trigger line” boundary to what has
become a significantly enlarged and enriched
Kurdistan.
The latest flare-up took place earlier this month.
Government troops took control of Kirkuk’s military
airfield from U.S. forces over the objections of the
Kurdish governor and his supporters, who have long
wanted to turn it into a civilian airport. As in the
past, the embassy intervened, and a compromise was
reached, keeping in place the current shaky balance
of power: government troops will stay in exchange
for Maliki’s promise that the airfield will be
turned to civilian use one day.
A declining U.S. military presence will diminish
Washington’s ability to dampen passions when one
side or the other crosses the line—as the Kurds did
when they deployed military forces to Kirkuk city in
February 2011. Neither Baghdad nor Erbil will likely
pause if and when it sees its adversary advancing on
the trigger line. Yet U.S. influence will be
relatively more effective in restraining the Kurds,
as Washington has undercut its ability to pressure
Baghdad by its own obvious interest in keeping Iraq
tightly bound within a strategic security framework
facing Iran. For the Kurds, this means they need to
make their diversification efforts work by seeking
solace with neighboring Turkey, an erstwhile
adversary with which they have kissed and made up,
as well as the home governments of many companies
that have descended on Kurdistan to feast upon its
oil and gas wealth.
Kurdish leaders expect their new patrons to provide
protection and hopefully also diplomatic support for
an independence bid they are sure to make one day.
Turkey’s role in this scheme is ambiguous. A rising
power, it has every interest in buying or
transporting Kurdistan’s oil and gas but also,
somewhat contradictorily, in keeping the Kurds weak,
lest they give their ethnic brethren in southeastern
Turkey ideas about autonomy—or, more ominously, the
now-latent notion of forging a Greater Kurdistan. If
Iraqi Kurds are to achieve statehood, it would have
to be, in Ankara’s eyes, under Turkey’s strict
control.
But in the meantime, Turkey needs the Kurds more and
more because its influence in Baghdad has waned
after it bet on the wrong horse in the 2010
parliamentary elections. Ankara invested heavily in
Ayad Allawi’s secular Iraqiya list as a barrier
against Iranian influence, but Maliki prolonged his
tenure as prime minister with help from Iran and
Syria. Maliki was not amused by Turkey’s
manipulations, and relations have suffered as a
result.
Attention is focused now on Damascus, where the
regime’s collapse would reshape alliances throughout
the region. Iran’s star would decline, and so would
Maliki’s. But the Kurds would gain relative strength
and thus might sniff the chance to push ahead in
Kirkuk. Would Maliki still be able to curb their
advance? And, if so, at what cost? Should violence
break out along the trigger line as it shifts, it
could be the birth pangs of a nascent, Kurdish-run,
energy-rich, Turkish vassal state in the north that
would enjoy significant international support.
Joost R. Hiltermann is deputy program director
for the Middle East and North Africa at the
International Crisis Group.
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author or news agency,
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