Iraqi Melting Pot Nears Boiling Point

This fabled city of muddy streets and hidden guns, where one person’s folklore is another’s atrocity, has U.S. officials concerned that ethnic tensions could ignite a civil war and spoil plans for a unified Iraq.

Rising between the mountains and the desert, Kirkuk and the surrounding region are home to 40% of Iraq’s oil reserves. The city is a strategic foothold in the north for competing Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens. History and myth here are twisted and revised daily over sugared tea. One day Kirkuk appears to be a multiethnic success story; the next it seems to be tumbling into chaos.

“Dry kindling is all over the place,” said Col. William Mayville, commander of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade overseeing Kirkuk. “So you don’t want someone coming in here with matches and making a fire.”

More than 100,000 Kurds forced from the city and replaced with Arabs during Saddam Hussein’s rule want to reclaim what was taken from them. Hundreds of Kurds are living in tents at the city’s ragged rim, resembling an army of the dispossessed. The scene conveys the passion Kurds have for Kirkuk -- they call it their Jerusalem -- and reinforces their insistence that many Arabs leave the region in what would amount to another round of ethnic relocation.

That is a troubling prospect for the Bush administration’s vision of preventing Iraq from cracking along ethnic lines. Such a failure could set off an international crisis if Turkey dispatches troops across the mountains to stop its Kurdish enemies from gaining control here. Turkey, which claims historical rights to the city, has long had designs on the region’s oil wealth.

“Kirkuk is a benchmark for how most Kurds would define their legitimacy in Iraq,” said Barham Salih, prime minister for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two main political parties controlling the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq. “We have a claim to Kirkuk rooted in history, geography and demographics.... This is a recipe for civil war if you don’t do it right.”

Violence so far has been sporadic. But many Arabs fear retribution and street battles -- like a firefight in December that left four dead and dozens wounded -- and have fled.

Said Akar, an Arab member of the Kirkuk City Council, said: “The people are worried and they’re leaving because Kurdish militias are coming to their houses and threatening them.”

Kurds were a majority in Kirkuk until the late 1970s, when Hussein’s Baath Party began expelling 100,000 to 300,000 of them from the city and outlying villages. Arabs from southern Iraq were resettled in the region to work the oil fields that account for 6.4% of the world’s known reserves. Kurdish fighters failed to capture Kirkuk in an uprising following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but they kept an elaborate intelligence network in the city throughout the 1990s.

The Kurds’ ambition is to expand their northern autonomous region -- for years protected from Hussein by U.S. and British warplanes -- south to include Kirkuk. This could upset the U.S.-proposed federalist structure for Iraq and lead to disputes between the Kurds and the country’s majority Arabs. It also threatens the city’s third major ethnic group of Turkmens, whose cultural links with Turkey hold the possibility that Ankara could become involved.

The Iraqi Governing Council is expected to delay plans on the fate of Kirkuk -- and how its oil revenue will be divided -- until after the U.S. returns sovereignty to the country June 30. Some Kurdish leaders want the matter decided through a referendum, a move that would favor the Kurds because they are the largest ethnic group.

“I cannot see how things will be stable” if Kirkuk is given to the Kurds, said one Western official in the region. “We ought to draw a circle around Kirkuk and keep it separate.”

The Kurdish desire for Kirkuk is one of the major unresolved questions since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March. In the months leading to the war, Kurdish leaders, America’s sole allies in Iraq, often reminded U.S. officials of the resonance the city has had throughout Kurdish history. The Kurds agreed to suspend efforts for independence -- which probably would have triggered a war with Turkey -- but insisted that they would not willingly relinquish the right to Kirkuk. Ankara fears any gains by Kurds in Iraq would inspire unrest among Turkey’s 12 million Kurds.

Iraqi Kurds believe that Kirkuk, sitting near the Hasa River on the ruins of a 3,000-year-old settlement, should be their reward for supporting the U.S. The Kurds lent American forces their militias during the war. They waved American flags and played John Philip Sousa marches on TV as Baghdad fell. Kurdish political leaders -- Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani -- are former mountain guerrillas who operate on a tribal code of loyalty, expecting one favor in exchange for another.

But the Bush administration is concerned with the broader map of Middle East politics and the reaction of its NATO ally Turkey. Washington has spent much of its time in recent months dealing with problems between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni Muslims, with street protests supporting demands by Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for direct elections. The fate of Kirkuk has simmered beneath these dilemmas and is emerging as a potentially serious setback to U.S. plans for the region.

“People feel sympathy with the Kurds and share a partnership with them,” said Emma Sky, the Kirkuk coordinator for the Coalition Provisional Authority. “But there are other partnerships in the Middle East and that’s what the Kurds have to understand.... We don’t want one ethnic cleansing replaced by another ethnic cleansing.”

Kirkuk’s complexities are in its neighborhoods. Kurds are about 40% of the population, including thousands who have returned since March. Arabs account for about 35% and Turkmens roughly 20%. Rival Sunni and Shiite Arabs have joined the Turkmens -- who have received weapons and assistance from Turkish special forces operatives -- in opposing what they view as an attempted Kurdish conquest of the city.

Mohammed Kareem doesn’t see it that way.

A Kurd, he was born 50 years ago in Kirkuk. He is a short, muscular man. He has lived in a tent since the Hussein regime expelled him from the city in 1995. He has a dent in his skull from an Iraqi army rifle butt, and his pockets are full of expired identity cards, as if to remind him that he was once from Kirkuk. The World Food Program lists him as displaced person No. 754.

“Why don’t the Arabs go back to the south and we can replace them?” said Kareem, standing outside his tent waiting for a truck that will bring him kerosene and a donkey cart that will deliver bread and flour. “This land belongs to our grandfathers. We swear by God, Kirkuk is a Kurdish city.” He walks past his small vegetable garden and past his wife, who keeps wondering when they can leave these dirty outskirts and move back to their home, if it’s still there.

His tent-city neighbors arrive and listen. Many of them refused to join Hussein’s army and were forced into exile. They roamed here and there, living in the shells of destroyed villages and pitching tents beside cemeteries and junkyards.

“Why are we in tents in the winter?” asked Mohammed Ahmed, as boys gathered at his elbow.

“Our land is rich in oil,” said Sherzad Talib. “How can we be living like this? I think about it all the time.”

“We don’t want to fight the Arabs,” Kareem said. “We just want our rights. They can go voluntarily.”

Jasim Ismail Jbra doesn’t want to leave.

An Arab, he lives in a house about 500 yards from Kareem’s tent. He is a former deputy lieutenant in Iraq’s Interior Ministry. He was living in a rented apartment in Baghdad five years ago when his superiors informed him that he could have a house of his own if he moved to Kirkuk. He arrived and found the land had been taken from a Kurdish family. He paid nothing and renovated the house, which sits across an alley from a mosque and a soccer field.

“We don’t have any problems with the Kurds. We want to live in peace,” said Jbra, fidgeting his amber prayer beads. “If the Kurds take Kirkuk, what can we do? It will be out of our hands.”

“If I am expelled, what will happen?” asked his friend, Hammad Karim, who listened from beneath a black and white kaffiyeh and stood near the rubble of a Kurdish house torn down by the former Baathist regime. “Will the new government compensate me? What will become of me? We will become victims of politics. Should this government make the same mistakes as Hussein’s government?”

Jbra and Karim were frightened in April when Kirkuk fell to U.S. forces and the Iraqi army, many of its soldiers peeling off their uniforms, disappeared amid date palms and shepherds’ fields. Kurdish militias stormed the city on a two-day looting spree as several Baath Party members were executed. Mayville’s 173d Airborne secured Kirkuk, formed a multicultural city council and kept ethnic tensions from spinning out of control.

Local leaders say the city’s peoples get along with each other, and blame outside forces for instigating trouble. The Kurds claim they are not out to expel the Turkmens, or Arabs who have lived in Kirkuk for generations. The Kurdish proposal is to force the Arabs brought in by Hussein over the last 20-plus years off the property and out of the villages seized from Kurds. But many of those Arabs have no money and nowhere to go.

“We should accept a democratic and peaceful way of settling this dispute,” Salih said. “We want to treat the [Arab] settlers as victims of Arabization.... These people were tools of Hussein’s vile policy.”

M. Kemal Yaycili doesn’t trust the Kurds.

A Turkmen, Yaycili is a member of the Turkmen Front political party and a city councilman. He has a book -- translated into English -- detailing the history of his people in the region. The Turkmen desire not to be marginalized is intense. In April, as Kurdish gunmen fired celebratory shots into the air, a group of Turkmens carried the body of a boy down a street.

They yelled that Kurds had murdered the boy. It turned out the child had died in a car accident and the Turkmens were using the body to evoke sympathy for their goal of preventing Kurds from controlling Kirkuk.

Yaycili complained that U.S. forces have favored the Kurds over the Turkmens and the Arabs. He added that the Turkmens would share Kirkuk with the Kurds providing the city didn’t become part of the Kurdish autonomous region known as Kurdistan.

“Kurdistan means a Kurd homeland,” said Yaycili, sipping tea in a municipal building surrounded by razor wire and American soldiers.

“The Kurds would be the first class and we would be the second class. They’ll be the leaders and chiefs. So far, the Kurds have failed to instill democracy in Kirkuk.... If the coalition forces leave Kirkuk, we’ll have a civil war.”