Web | Jul 23, 2004
The Sarajevo Of Iraq
Dilip Hiro
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But Israel's strategy has a distinct downside, since encouraging desires for Kurdish independence runs dangerously counter to Turkey's long-standing policy on the Kurds and so has the potential of undermining Israeli-Turkish military cooperation that dates back to 1995. "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give one country or component independence, everybody will want it," a Turkish official told Hersh. "Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be impossible to contain the crisis."
Kirkuk: Eye of the Storm
Lying midway between the Turkish-Iraqi border and Baghdad, Kirkuk was the military staging post for the Ottoman Turks, who captured it in 1534 and settled it with the Turks -- called Turkmen -- from Anatolia. It thrived as a garrison town. When petroleum was discovered in the area in 1927 by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, its executives found that neither Turkmen (mostly merchants and rentiers), nor beduin Arabs were interested in working for them; so they began to recruit workers from the Kurdish areas to the east and north. These Kurds settled in villages around the city.
Thus Greater Kirkuk emerged as a multi-ethnic city -- with Turkmen at its center, surrounded by Arabs, in turn surrounded by Kurds on the city's outskirts. While the three communities maintained this voluntary segregation, it was an edgy situation. In 1959, in a three-day battle between pro-Communist Kurds and anti-Communist Turkmen, for instance, 79 people were killed.
During the Kurdish insurgency of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ethnic composition of Greater Kirkuk became a point of contention between the Iraqi government and Kurdish nationalists, with the latter claiming a Kurdish majority in the city and its suburbs. However, the (then-classified) census of 1977 showed the 484,000 residents of Kirkuk province (later renamed Tamim) being 45% Arab, 38% Kurd, and the rest Turkmen. The 1997 census indicated that Kirkuk's population of 370,661 was 40% Arab and 38% Kurd, with the remainder Turkmen -- little change, that is, despite Saddam Hussein's policy of settling Shia Arabs from the south in the area. On the eve of the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the estimated 700,000 people then living in Greater Kirkuk probably divided up along similar lines: 45% Arab, 35% Kurdish, and the rest Turkmen.
Following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the two Kurdish parties made no secret of their plans to transform Kirkuk with its oil wealth into the capital of an expanded Kurdish Autonomous Region. Kurds, some pushed out of the city by Saddam, now arrived in their thousands. The Peshmerga were turned into the local police force and, assisted by the occupying American military, Kurds dominated the US-appointed city council. All this was in violation of an initial agreement that U.S. forces would maintain the status quo and not allow Kurds to cross the KAR's border, 15 miles east of the city center.
Assisted by Kurdish-dominated local security forces, tens of thousands of Kurds have forced Arabs from their homes, creating at least 100,000 new refugees living in squalid camps in north-central Iraq. This has engendered widespread anti-Kurdish feeling among Arabs in the region and beyond. Anti-Kurdish graffiti, attacking Kurds for collaborating with the "infidel occupiers," is a commonplace in the Shia districts of Kirkuk. Elsewhere, the followers of Hojatalislam Muqtada al Sadr have vocally denounced the Kurds.
Many Sunni Arabs, though sharing the same sectarian affiliation with Kurds, are equally critical of them. The Sunni Arab-Kurdish divide widened when the Arab press reported in April that Kurds were fighting in Falluja with the Americans. These Kurds belonged to one of the two Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (now National Guard) battalions that had been ordered to fight alongside U.
S. Marines in the assault on the insurgents in the city. The other battalion, consisting exclusively of Arabs, refused to do so. Talabani's convoluted explanation for Kurdish actions -- "Some Kurds have joined the new Iraqi army, and if the Coalition commanders forced them to participate in some fighting, it was without the knowledge of the Kurdish leaders." -- left many unconvinced.
During her foray into Falluja in late April, Hala Jaber of the Sunday Times found the locals speaking of "the mercenary Kurds, accused of being Mossad agents." She added, "Some Kurds had confessed [to being Mossad agents], I was told, and had been summarily executed."
The situation in Kirkuk remains tense. "The Kurdish peshmargas [acting as policemen] are unqualified and untrained, and this creates irritation," said Khudair Ghalib Karim, a Turkmen leader. "If there are clashes this is the reason." Across the Green Line, though the Kurdish militiamen are reportedly ready to make a major push for Kirkuk, they are unlikely to act as long as the Americans remain in the city.
Viewing Iraq as a whole, it is safe to say that if the country slides into a civil war, it would not be between Sunnis and Shias, but between Arabs and Kurds -- and it will start in Kirkuk.
Copyright 2004 Dilip Hiro
Dilip Hiro is the author of Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm (Nation Books). His latest book is Secrets and Lies: Operation 'Iraqi Freedom' and After (Nation Books). This piece will appear in print in the Middle East International (London & Arlington) and was written before the shocking pictures of abuse of Iraqi prisoners were released. It first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing
A version of this piece will appear in print in issue #730 of Middle East International