US attempts to keep lid on Kirkuk

This ia an area to be watched as it is a powder keg waiting to blow. There are significant Turkomen and Arab minorities who are not about to allow Kurds just to bowl them over.

Assyrian International News Agency
U.S. Scrambles to Keep Kirkuk From Igniting

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Posted GMT 5-15-2007 14:56:18

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KIRKUK, Iraq -- When a bomb goes off here, Lt. Col. Michael Browder's job is to make it seem like the attack never happened.

Minutes after a truck exploded near a police station last month, Browder and his unit immediately went to work removing the bodies of the 13 victims, among them a U.S. soldier. By nightfall, wrecked buildings were bulldozed, charred cars towed away, and water and power restored.

By making an extraordinary effort to repair damage after such explosions, the U.S. military hopes to soothe public anger and keep Kirkuk from becoming Iraq's next big flash point for violence. Otherwise, Browder says, revenge killings could quickly overwhelm a city that has been called "Iraq's Jerusalem" because of its patchwork of rival sects, competing claims over who should control it, and its importance to the nation's future.

Tensions already are so high in Kirkuk that Browder says just one bomb with mass casualties might be enough to unleash a massive bloodletting. "Everybody's right on the envelope," he says.

Such a scenario would significantly worsen problems throughout Iraq and beyond. The Kurds, the largest ethnic group in Kirkuk, could clash with already-warring Sunni and Shiite Arabs, essentially turning Iraq's sectarian conflict into a three-way affair. Neighboring Turkey could invade to protect its ethnic kin. Turmoil in a region that accounts for about 40% of Iraq's oil production could damage the economy for years to come.

So the U.S. military again finds itself in a peacekeeping role it never envisioned when it invaded Iraq four years ago. Eager to avoid mistakes made in Baghdad, commanders are leading negotiations between an overlapping, often confounding mix of Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and Assyrian-Christians. The groups speak different languages, have different customs and have been battling each other for control of Kirkuk practically since the city was first settled.

"It's a long-term, 1,000-year distrust of each other," says Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq. "We have to try to build some bridges (as) best we can. But at the end of the day, it's going to be up to (them) to figure out how to make it work."

The main source of tension is the desire of the city's Kurds to break from the control of Baghdad and join the largely autonomous region of Kurdistan just to the north. The city's other ethnic groups fear such a move would make them second-class citizens.

Meanwhile, insurgent groups such as al-Qaeda are seeking to create further violence they hope ultimately would bring down Iraq's government.

The police station bombing on April 2 was just the type of incident the U.S. military fears could ignite a broader conflict. The bomb exploded near an all-girls school, injuring some students, Browder says. TV images that night showed crying, blood-splattered little girls at the hospital.

At first word of the blast, Browder ordered 300 Iraqi police to cordon off a six-block radius from the blast site. He also called the police chief and other Kurdish leaders in for a meeting. He told them a group tied to al-Qaeda was believed responsible for the attack.

"I brought them all in and told them, 'This is what happened, this is why it went down, these are the people responsible, and we're going to get this fixed,' " he says.

Browder's unit then tried to anticipate what groups might try to retaliate, and how to stop them. "That's how we keep the lid on it," Browder says.

Oil at the heart of struggle

At first glance, it is difficult to see why so many groups covet Kirkuk.

Piles of garbage mix with sewer sludge in abandoned lots, while butchers hang skinned sheep carcasses from crumbling storefronts. The Kurdish neighborhoods to the north of the city are visibly cleaner, but the garbage piles grow further south, in the Arab districts.

The reason for Kirkuk's importance lies deep beneath the ground. Iraq's first major oil find was just outside the city in 1927, and oil has been at the heart of the struggle for Kirkuk ever since.

In the 1970s, Saddam Hussein began forcibly removing about 250,000 Kurds from Kirkuk and surrounding villages. He replaced them with Arab families, mostly Shiites from Iraq's south, in an effort to "Arabize" the city and control its oil.

After the U.S.-led invasion, as Kurdish leaders sent thousands of Kurdish families back to the city, Kurds quickly took control of key government posts. Today the provincial governor, provincial council chairman and chief of provincial police are Kurds.

Iraq's constitution says Kirkuk's residents must vote by the end of 2007 on whether to join Kurdistan or remain under control of the government in Baghdad.

However, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has refused to set a date for the vote, angering Kurds who believe they form a majority in Kirkuk and would win the referendum.

"National reconciliation can never be reached unless the status of Kirkuk is resolved," Qubad Talabani, Kurdistan's representative to the USA, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February.

A delay "will only raise the risk of a situation erupting out of control," Talabani said.

"The grim reality is that whether we tackle this issue now, or 10 years from now, the final outcome will still be messy," he said. "The longer we delay the process, the greater the tensions will become and the uglier the fallout will be."

Kurds have longed for their own territory for decades, a desire that intensified after Saddam Hussein ordered chemical weapons used against them in the 1980s, killing thousands.

Baghdad has little control in the Kurdish north, where daily life seems entirely different -- and more peaceful.

Foreign investment has streamed into Kurdistan, and direct flights ferry businessmen between Irbil, its capital, and western Europe. Before a truck bomb last week, Irbil had gone nearly three years without a major attack.

Kirkuk's Kurds say joining Kurdistan would mean a better, safer life for everyone. Non-Kurdish groups worry they would become targets for discrimination, unwelcome in their own homes.

Sheik Hussein Ali Salih, a Sunni Arab leader from the western part of Kirkuk province, says a referendum would result in "apartheid."

"We will never accept it," he says. "We will stand very strongly against it with all the means we have."

Heading off a broader war

The Turkmen, a Turkish-speaking minority with ethnic ties to Turkey, consider Kirkuk to be their ancestral capital and cultural center.

"We are still not living in harmony in Kirkuk," says Tahsin Kahya, a Turkmen council member. "We've been marginalized here."

Daniel Serwer, an Iraq expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, says, "The issue is clear: The Kurds want Kirkuk, and not just for the oil. They say it's their capital. Unfortunately, the (Turkmen) feel the same way."

U.S. soldiers are left to somehow resolve these competing claims. Army Lt. Col. Sam Whitehurst, deputy commander of the 3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, which oversees the Kirkuk area, says he spends the bulk of his time at the downtown government building meeting with Turkmen, Arab and Kurdish leaders.

Whitehurst says he often wonders whether the talking will stop and warfare will begin.

Are tensions "going to continue to mount? Is this discussion going to turn into something more open?" Whitehurst asks. "I really don't know. That's a question we ask ourselves every day."

Meanwhile, Sunni-based insurgent groups want to exploit the tension and ignite a broader war, Browder says. The groups operate from nearby Arab villages and often target police patrols or offices of the two main Kurdish parties, he says.

Browder's biggest concern is a large-scale bomb attack on a civilian Kurdish area, such as a market, he says.

That likely would trigger Kurdish leaders to send battalions of the well-armed Kurdish militia, the peshmerga ("those who do not fear death"), into Arab areas of Kirkuk. A sectarian battle similar to the Shiite vs. Sunni violence in Baghdad then could erupt, further complicating efforts to stabilize the country.

Sunni insurgents have been hesitant to cross that line, Browder says. The reason is a mystery, but he says they might be scared of peshmerga reprisals.

"The terrorist organizations know what buttons to push," he says. "They understand what the no-penetration line is."

To avoid a bloodbath, Whitehurst says, one of his duties is also making sure all sides are working toward agreement and preventing retaliatory attacks after the kidnappings, killings and bombings that continue to plague the city.

Late last month, after a Kurdish family of four, including two girls, ages 8 and 18, were killed in their home, Whitehurst called a meeting with Abdullah Rahman Fatah, the Kurd who is the provincial governor, to assure him his troops were helping with the investigation and head off any Kurdish retaliation.

The Kurds have been restrained so far, Whitehurst says. For the most part, Kurdish leaders understand that Kirkuk is a very rich prize.

Any large-scale retaliatory kidnappings and killings, such as those seen in Baghdad, would turn the international community against the Kurds and hinder their ability to claim control of Kirkuk as part of Kurdistan, Whitehurst says.

"For us, the worst thing that can happen is if that restraint would go away," he says.

Conflicting stakes in Kirkuk

Every country in the region has a stake in Kirkuk.

If violence breaks out, Turkey could intervene militarily to protect the Turkmen minority, said Mark Parris, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey now at the Brookings Institution.

Turkey also fears that Kirkuk's oil wealth could put Kurdistan closer to breaking away from Iraq entirely and becoming an independent nation.

Turkey has been battling a Kurdish insurgency within its own borders for years and worries that its own Kurds might be tempted to join a sovereign Kurdistan.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have urged Iraq's government to protect the country's Arab Sunnis. For now, the government in Baghdad seems content to delay the issue.

Al-Maliki probably will not set the referendum this year, despite what the constitution says, according to Sami Alaskary, a Shiite lawmaker close to the prime minister.

"In principle, he's committed to the constitution and to this referendum," Alaskary says. "But the reality on the ground is we can't do it in the short time we have left. It's impossible."

A delay carries its own risks. Some Kurdish leaders have threatened to withdraw from the federal government in Baghdad if the referendum is not conducted on time. Al-Maliki's coalition depends on Kurdish support to keep its majority in parliament and could collapse if the Kurds leave.

Mahmoud Othman, a leading Kurdish member of parliament, says any delay is unacceptable. "We're not flexible. It has been four years," Othman says.

In the meantime, Iraq's government is trying to avoid violence in Kirkuk by compensating Arabs who choose to leave the city.

Last month, al-Maliki's government agreed to pay $15,000 and a plot of land to each relocated Arab family. Thousands of families have applied for the compensation package but none has received payments, according to the U.S. military. Some Kurds believe that such efforts will guarantee their victory in an eventual referendum -- and that Kirkuk finally will be theirs.

Col. Katab Omer is the commander of a 600-member anti-terrorism squad of the Iraqi police trained by U.S. special forces. His force includes Arabs and Turkmen, though most of the commanders are Kurds.

"Look at the cities inside Kurdistan: They're safe, the streets are clean, services are good," says Omer, a smile stretching across his bushy mustache.

"When this city becomes part of Kurdistan," he says, "it will improve as well."

By Rick Jervis
USA TODAY

Contributing: Barbara Slavin in Washington.

Civil War in Iraq

This is an article from Foreign Affairs Magazine. The whole article is available here.

It is not clear to me that Bush is siding with the Shiites except insofar as part of the surge is targetting Sunni areas. Other operations are targetting Shia's. At most the US is siding with some Shias. This article is interesting in recognising explicitly that civil war is already started and that it is probably not stoppable by US and allied action. Bush would like both Kurds and Shias to recongise Sunni rights to some oil revenues and to share power with them as a way of creating a more stable government, but of course one strongly influenced by the US.

Iraq's Civil War
James D. Fearon
From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007







Summary: The White House still avoids the label, but by any reasonable historical standard, the Iraqi civil war has begun. The record of past such wars suggests that Washington cannot stop this one -- and that Iraqis will be able to reach a power-sharing deal only after much more fighting, if then. The United States can help bring about a settlement eventually by balancing Iraqi factions from afar, but there is little it can do to avert bloodshed now.

James D. Fearon is Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.



NO GRACEFUL EXIT

As sectarian violence spiked in Baghdad around last Thanksgiving, Bush administration spokespeople found themselves engaged in a strange semantic fight with American journalists over whether the conflict in Iraq is appropriately described as a civil war. It is not hard to understand why the administration strongly resists the label. For one thing, the U.S. media would interpret a change in the White House's position on this question as a major concession, an open acknowledgment of dashed hopes and failed policy. For another, the administration worries that if the U.S. public comes to see the violence in Iraq as a civil war, it will be even less willing to tolerate continued U.S. military engagement. "If it's a civil war, what are we doing there, mixed up in someone else's fight?" Americans may ask.

But if semantics could matter a lot, it is less obvious whether they should influence U.S. policy. Is it just a matter of domestic political games and public perceptions, or does the existence of civil war in Iraq have implications for what can be achieved there and what strategy Washington should pursue?

In fact, there is a civil war in progress in Iraq, one comparable in important respects to other civil wars that have occurred in postcolonial states with weak political institutions. Those cases suggest that the Bush administration's political objective in Iraq -- creating a stable, peaceful, somewhat democratic regime that can survive the departure of U.S. troops -- is unrealistic. Given this unrealistic political objective, military strategy of any sort is doomed to fail almost regardless of whether the administration goes with the "surge" option, as President George W. Bush has proposed, or shifts toward a pure training mission, as advised by the Iraq Study Group.

Even if an increase in the number of U.S. combat troops reduces violence in Baghdad and so buys time for negotiations on power sharing in the current Iraqi government, there is no good reason to expect that subsequent reductions would not revive the violent power struggle. Civil wars are rarely ended by stable power-sharing agreements. When they are, it typically takes combatants who are not highly factionalized and years of fighting to clarify the balance of power. Neither condition is satisfied by Iraq at present. Factionalism among the Sunnis and the Shiites approaches levels seen in Somalia, and multiple armed groups on both sides appear to believe that they could wrest control of the government if U.S. forces left. Such beliefs will not change quickly while large numbers of U.S. troops remain.

As the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad proceeds, the weak Shiite-dominated government is inevitably becoming an open partisan in a nasty civil war between Sunni and Shiite Arabs. As a result, President Bush's commitment to making a "success" of the current government will increasingly amount to siding with the Shiites, a position that is morally dubious and probably not in the interest of either the United States or long-term regional peace and stability. A decisive military victory by a Shiite-dominated government is not possible anytime soon given the favorable conditions for insurgency fought from the Sunni-dominated provinces. Furthermore, this course encourages Sunni nationalists to turn to al Qaeda in Iraq for support against Shiite militias and the Iraqi army. It also essentially aligns Washington with Tehran against the Sunni-dominated states to the west.

As long as the Bush administration remains absolutely committed to propping up the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or a similarly configured successor, the U.S. government will have limited leverage with almost all of the relevant parties. By contrast, moving away from absolute commitment -- for example, by beginning to shift U.S. combat troops out of the central theaters -- would increase U.S. diplomatic and military leverage on almost all fronts. Doing so would not allow the current or the next U.S. administration to bring a quick end to the civil war, which most likely will last for some time. But it would allow the United States to play a balancing role between the combatants that would be more conducive to reaching, in the long run, a stable resolution in which Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish interests are well represented in a decent Iraqi government. If the Iraqis ever manage to settle on the power-sharing agreement that is the objective of current U.S. policy, it will come only after bitter fighting in the civil war that is already under way.

WAR RECORDS

A civil war is a violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change government policies. Everyday usage of the term "civil war" does not entail a clear threshold for how much violence is necessary to qualify a conflict as a civil war, as opposed to terrorism or low-level political strife. Political scientists sometimes use a threshold of at least 1,000 killed over the course of a conflict. Based on this arguably rather low figure, there have been around 125 civil wars since the end of World War II, and there are roughly 20 ongoing today. If that threshold is increased to an average of 1,000 people killed per year, there have still been over 90 civil wars since 1945. (It is often assumed that the prevalence of civil wars is a post-Cold War phenomenon, but in fact the number of ongoing civil wars increased steadily from 1945 to the early 1990s, before receding somewhat to late-1970s levels.) The rate of killing in Iraq -- easily more than 60,000 in the last three years -- puts the conflict in the company of many recent ones that are routinely described as civil wars (for example, those in Algeria, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Sri Lanka). Indeed, even the conservative estimate of 60,000 deaths would make Iraq the ninth-deadliest civil war since 1945 in terms of annual casualties.

Turkey warns of civil war in Kirkuk

This is another potential trouble spot in Iraq unless there is some agreement between factions in the city and that seems unlikely. The Kurds are no doubt determined to prevail. THe region is rich in oil.


Turkey warns of "very big civil war" in Kirkuk
Jan 27, 2007, 12:55 GMT




Istanbul - Turkey warned Saturday against integrating the multiethnic city of Kirkuk, northern Iraq, into an autonomous Kurdish region.

'I fear that it could come to a very big civil war,' said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergodan in a television interview.

'Kirkuk belongs to all Iraqis,' he said. 'It would be wrong to give the city to only one ethnic group.'

Turkey fears that Kurdish control of the oil-rich city could lead to the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq and one which is capable of surviving economically.

Erdogan called for Kirkuk to be given a special status, and said the referendum scheduled for late 2007 on the future of the city as foreseen by the Iraqi constitution, was a mistake.

The referendum should at least be postponed, he said. Resolving the problem would be an important step towards peace and for the future of the city.


© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Turkey warns of civil war in Kirkuk

This is another potential trouble spot in Iraq unless there is some agreement between factions in the city and that seems unlikely. The Kurds are no doubt determined to prevail. THe region is rich in oil.


Turkey warns of "very big civil war" in Kirkuk
Jan 27, 2007, 12:55 GMT




Istanbul - Turkey warned Saturday against integrating the multiethnic city of Kirkuk, northern Iraq, into an autonomous Kurdish region.

'I fear that it could come to a very big civil war,' said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Ergodan in a television interview.

'Kirkuk belongs to all Iraqis,' he said. 'It would be wrong to give the city to only one ethnic group.'

Turkey fears that Kurdish control of the oil-rich city could lead to the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq and one which is capable of surviving economically.

Erdogan called for Kirkuk to be given a special status, and said the referendum scheduled for late 2007 on the future of the city as foreseen by the Iraqi constitution, was a mistake.

The referendum should at least be postponed, he said. Resolving the problem would be an important step towards peace and for the future of the city.


© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur