Christians of Iraq
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Christians of Iraq
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Kurds Are Flocking to Kirkuk, Laying Claim to Land and Oil 12-29-2005
KIRKUK, Iraq -- Clusters of gray concrete houses dot the barren plains surrounding this city, like seedlings scattered here by winds blowing down from the mountainous Kurdish homeland to the north.
The villages are uniformly spartan, except for the red, green and white flag of Iraqi Kurdistan sprouting from many rooftops, even though this province is not officially part of the Kurdish autonomous region.
The settlements' purpose is as blunt as their design: they are the heart of an aggressive campaign by the Kurds to lay claim to Kirkuk, which sits on one of the world's richest oil fields. The Kurdish settlers have been moving into the area at a furious pace, with thousands coming in the past few months, sometimes with direct financing from the two main Kurdish parties.
The campaign has emerged as one of the most volatile issues dogging the talks to form a new national government. In this region, it has ignited fury among Arabs and Turkmens, adding to already caustic tension in the ethnically mixed city, American and Iraqi officials say.
It could also be contributing to a complex web of violence. In the past three months alone, American commanders say, at least 30 assassination-style killings have happened in the area, making Kirkuk one of the deadliest midsize cities in Iraq.
The Kurdish parties are completely open about their desire to incorporate Kirkuk into Iraqi Kurdistan. No single issue is dearer to Kurdish leaders as they negotiate with the country's Arabs to form a new, four-year government. Kurdish voters cited it as one of the main reasons they flocked to the polls on Dec. 15.
"The important issues for us are those that concern all Iraqis, but at the top of them is Kirkuk," said Fouad Massoum, a vice president in the transitional National Assembly and senior official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main Kurdish parties. "If we leave it, it will be like a time bomb ready to explode at any time."
Because the Kurdish parties are expected to get at least 40 seats in the 275-seat Council of Representatives, they will almost certainly be a key ally for any Arab bloc that wants to muster the two-thirds vote needed to form a government. Kurdish leaders will use that leverage, they say, to force the Arabs to speed the repatriation of Kurds to Kirkuk. That would put the Kurds in an extremely favorable position by the time the province holds a referendum in 2007 to decide whether it should be governed by Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Kurds say all this goes toward redressing the crimes of Saddam Hussein, who for decades evicted Kurds and Turkmens from the oil-rich region and moved in Arabs.
There is an official mechanism that is supposed to help evicted Kurds move back to Kirkuk, a city of 800,000 with a crumbling citadel and twisting market streets at its center. Article 58 of the interim constitution, drafted in early 2004 by American and Iraqi officials, established a property claims commission to review individual cases. It also created a national panel to help make policy decisions on Kirkuk.
The Kurds say that because the Shiite-led government has dragged its feet on empowering these bodies, thousands of Kurds who returned to Kirkuk after the fall of Mr. Hussein still live in squatters' camps.
The Kurds have wrested control of most of the government institutions here. They won the majority of seats in the provincial council last January, partly because of a Sunni Arab boycott of the elections. That, coupled with their political influence in Baghdad, has helped them get most of the top local ministry posts and retain control of the police force.
All the ethnic groups here appear to be caught in rampant violence, American officers say. There is the occasional suicide bombing: one in November killed at least 16 oil infrastructure guards. The targets of assassinations are commanders of Iraqi security forces, as well as politicians, doctors, professors and oil engineers. In November, six police commanders - four Turkmens and two Arabs - were killed.
No one doubts that peace would be easier to come by if it were not for the oil reserves, 10 to 20 percent of the country's total. They are the economic fulcrum of the Kurdish drive to secure virtual independence for Iraqi Kurdistan. During the drafting of the permanent Constitution last summer, Kurdish leaders in Baghdad managed to work in a clause that says this province, Tamim, will hold a referendum in 2007 to determine whether it should be ruled by the Kurdistan regional government or the central authorities in Baghdad.
"Clearly, for the Kurds, Kirkuk is a strategic prize," said Col. David Gray, commander of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, charged with securing the province. "They feel very strongly about bringing their people to Kirkuk to right the wrong that was done under Saddam's regime and the Arabization program. That does collide, of course, with the other groups in the province." Arabs and Turkmens argue that many of the Kurds moving in were not displaced by Mr. Hussein - they originated elsewhere and are settling here to ensure that the province is voted into Kurdistan in 2007.
"The Kurds are building property, houses on land they don't own," said Sangul Chapuk, a Turkmen politician who served on the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
The last accurate census showed that the Turkmens, a Central Asian ethnic group that governed this area under the Ottoman Empire, had a slight majority. That was in 1957. The numbers drastically changed under Mr. Hussein's decades-long program of ethnic displacement and further shifted after the American-led invasion.
Capt. Greg Ford, the First Brigade's intelligence officer, estimated that 85,000 to 350,000 Kurds had moved into the Kirkuk region since spring 2003. The result is a building boom in Kirkuk itself and along the main roads leading to the border of Iraqi Kurdistan. In Altun Kopri, a Kurd-Turkmen village 15 miles northwest of Kirkuk, new homes constructed in slapdash fashion line dirt tracks. White pickup trucks with Kurdistan flags roll through. "The construction is just huge," said Maj. Victor Vasquez, the head civil affairs officer for the First Brigade. "I've seen entire villages that didn't exist before spring up from rubble. It's a suburb of Kirkuk overnight."
"There's some funding from the Kurdish parties in terms of the housing," he added. "That's a fair assessment. A lot of it is also private business standing up."
The Kurds who have moved back to Kirkuk invariably say they were evicted from the area by Mr. Hussein. One, Adnan Abdul Rahman, a mathematics professor in Kirkuk, said his family was kicked out of the village of Dibis in the 1960's. "Let me tell you the honest truth," Mr. Rahman, 41, said as he stood in the courtyard of a high school on election day. "I've had 19 executions in my family, and I'll pay another 19 for Kirkuk to go back to Kurdistan."
Some Arabs say the Kurdish parties, backed by their militias, are threatening Arab families who refuse to sell their property and leave Kirkuk. Khalid al-Izzi, the Arab head of a human rights group in the city, said the Kurds had coerced Arabs into selling their property for considerably less than what it was actually worth. Kurdish leaders deny the accusations and insist it is the Kurds who are still suffering, because the repatriation process is moving so slowly. With the 2007 referendum fast approaching, the Kurds say their patience has run out.
"We've lost a lot of time," Mr. Massoum, the Kurdish politician, said. "For the Kirkuk project, there is a deadline. We insist on commitment to the deadline and implementing the Constitution."
By Edward Wong>br>New York Times
Mona Mahmoud and Ali Adeeb contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.