Iraqi Crisis Report
IWPR Comment
The
Struggle for Kirkuk
By Oliver Poole
(3-Mar-08)
Oliver Poole
Former Iraq Correspondent of the Daily
Telegraph
You might have missed it as in most of
the world it was not front page news but a
NATO member attacked a sovereign state last
week. Troops were amassed, as many as a
10,000 of them in some reports, and then
poured across the border supported by combat
helicopters and fighter jets.
Turkey’s action against PKK bases in
northern Iraq may have been portrayed as a
step by Ankara in the fight against
“terrorism” but it still involved one
country sending its forces into another
without United Nations approval.
Such an act would normally expect to
generate outrage and potentially calls for
an emergency meeting of the UN Security
Council. Yet in this case, remarkably, there
was barely a flicker of protest.
The government in Baghdad voiced its
“condemnation” of a “violation” of its
borders but as Turkish soldiers fought their
way across northern Iraq’s snow-bound
mountains international reaction was notably
muted.
The European Union issued a weak statement
calling for “restraint”, and the United
States, in recent years the Kurd’s closest
ally, maintained Ankara had “the right to
defend” itself against PKK guerrillas using
Iraq as a staging post for their long
running insurgency in southeast Turkey.
Perhaps the most surprising response,
however, was that of the Kurds themselves.
Turkish forces may have pushed as far as the
Iranian border but the Kurds’ peshmerga,
those hardened mountain fighters who fought
Saddam Hussein to a standstill, stood back
to let the Turks’ armoured personnel
carriers rumble passed.
For a people who for the first time in
centuries have finally achieved some level
of self-government and have historically
made clear they their antagonism to foreign,
particularly Turkish, control it was a
remarkable act of self-control.
The reasons why not only demonstrates the
hardening of international attitudes to the
Kurds, who for so long have been viewed as a
people unfairly treated and in need of help,
but of the continuing precariousness of
Iraq’s survival as one country.
The Kurds response partly reflected the
maturing of their provisional government in
Erbil and its acceptance of the realities of
global realpolitik. The actions of the PKK
may be tacitly approved of – Turkey acted
after the Kurds made promises but took few
steps to limit PKK’s operations – but
Kurdish reaction demonstrated they were not
considered worth taking a stand over, at
least this time.
But to fully understand why Kurdish and
international responses were so muted it is
important to look south, away from Iraq’s
border with Turkey to a newer but just as
significant border that now separates Iraq’s
Kurd and Arab regions.
It is a boundary that does not appear on any
map but it is one which is unmistakable for
anyone crossing from central Iraq into the
three northern provinces the Kurds have had
semi-antonymous control over since the
ousting of Saddam in 2003.
On the Kurd side, Iraqi police and army
units are replaced by peshmerga fighters in
their green and brown camouflaged uniforms.
It is not the Iraqi flag but the stylised
sun motif of the Kurdish emblem that
flutters over government buildings.
When I recently flew into Erbil, the capital
of Iraq’s Kurdish region, Iraqi Arabs were
instructed to line up with foreign visitors
to have their passports checked and were
required to register for a residency permit
within 48 hours. They were visiting aliens
in what is still nominally part of their own
country.
Nor is this impression of growing
independence merely cosmetic. Kurdish
officials have, to the fury of the central
government in Baghdad, negotiated agreements
with oil companies, signed contracts with at
least 30 international investors and been
working on a new Kurdish constitution that,
if approved, would conflict with Iraq’s own
state constitution that was finally approved
in 2005 after months of tortuous political
negotiations.
Such moves have inevitably fuelled concerns
that the region is gradually moving towards
full independence, a position a poll showed
more than 90 per cent of Iraqi Kurds
support.
This partly explains why the position of the
Kurd-Arab border has become possibly the
greatest threat to the relative stability
achieved by the US military “surge” of last
year. Tensions focus on the border city of
Kirkuk – the status of which is of far more
importance to the Kurds than even a Turkish
military operation into their homeland.
Since the fall of the Ba’athist regime,
Kirkuk has always been one of the Iraq’s
potentially explosive places. Located 250
kilometres north of Baghdad near the Khasa
River, it is volatile mix of Kurds, Arabs
and Turkoman with its fate long seen by all
sides as a crucial issue in the debate about
whether Iraq will eventually be partitioned
among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shia Arabs.
Ba’athist policies fuelled the present
crisis. An historically mixed city,
comprising primarily Kurd and Tukoman
communities, Saddam sought to Arabise Kirkuk
by expelling Kurds and replacing them with
Arabs from Iraq’s south, often forcibly.
He wanted control of the oil fields around
the city, which are presently estimated to
have reserves of between 11 billion and 15
billion barrels. They are a key source of
revenue for Baghdad - but would be a cash
cow for any future northern Iraq independent
Kurdish state. In Kirkuk, it is not only
history and questions of ethnic identity
that fuel its volatility but an income worth
billions of dollars.
In the turbulent years that followed the
defeat of Saddam’s regime, when Iraq was
gripped first by a Sunni insurgency and then
by the sectarian civil war that broke out
after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in
Samarra in February 2006, Kirkuk’s future
was placed on hold.
Under the 2005 constitution, it was agreed
any decision over its status would be
delayed until a referendum was held in the
city. That, it was determined, would be
staged on December 31 2007, thereby delaying
the moment of reckoning.
The central government in Baghdad knew that
it was a vote that it would lose as the
Kurds, determined not to miss their
opportunity to regain a city they see as
rightfully theirs, had made sure they were
in the numerical ascendancy there.
Arabs living in Kirkuk have repeatedly
reported being forced out of their homes by
peshmerga fighters, with their houses given
to arriving Kurdish families. Around 2,000
Kurds from the north were sent to live in
the city’s football stadium, where stands
and dug-outs were turned into temporary
homes, so that they could participate in the
referendum vote.
So when the time came last year, the
referendum was never held. Citing
administrative problems, the authorities in
Baghdad risked Kurd fury and cancelled the
vote. A six-month delay was announced,
supposedly to allow the completion of the
“normalisation” policy agreed in the
constitution to restore the population ratio
in the city to the level that existed before
Saddam’s Arabisation programme.
The Kurds have not taken the delay lightly.
Aware that they could be losing their moment
to finally regain the city, recent months
have seem their more hot-headed elements
threaten violence if the referendum is
postponed again, a response that has
provoked an equally strong reaction from
Arab hardliners who insist their control of
Kirkuk must never be revoked
In January, several Shia and Sunni political
factions, among them onetime enemies such as
the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and
the former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi,
united to issue a statement calling Kurdish
demands over Kirkuk “too large and
irrational”.
In February, 90 representatives of the
Kurdish Alliance walked out of a
parliamentary session debating a new law
that would have given the federal
government, rather than the provincial
legislature, sole power to remove a
provincial governor.
At present, if a referendum is not held on
the status of Kirkuk, the local governor and
Kurdish-dominated legislature could
unilaterally call for a vote. The new
legislation would have allowed the central
government to intervene and sack the
governor, explaining Kurdish determination
not to let it pass.
Surveying the situation, the International
Crisis Group, a non-profit organisation that
seeks to prevent or resolve conflict,
warned, “No Iraqi government could ‘give’
Kirkik to the Kurds and hope to survive, in
view of broad popular opposition in Arab
Iraq.
“The Kirkik situation could therefore
trigger total deadlock, breakdown and
violent conflict, just when the Bush
administration hopes its security plan for
Baghdad will yield political dividends.”
To further fuel concern, US military
commanders have reported a spike in violence
in the city caused by al-Qa’eda fighters and
extremist Sunni insurgents driven north to
escape the surge forces in central Iraq. To
win local support, it is being reported,
they are portraying themselves as “the
defenders of Sunni interests against Kurdish
expansionism”, making a conflagration all
the more likely.
Compared to an issue of this magnitude, one
that has the potential to define not only
the future identity of Iraqi Kurdistan but
also the future composition of Iraq, it was
little wonder that a temporary Turkish
incursion was seen as a sideshow, not only
by the Kurds but the international
community.
The Kurdish leadership, determined to avoid
anything that would provide their enemies
with opportunities to claim Kurd extremism
and thereby provide an excuse for another
referendum delay, have been doing all they
can to avoid a military confrontation with
the Turks. Their restrained reaction to the
Turkish attack was intended, I have been
told, to show that they would be capable of
gaining control of Kirkuk without pursuing
the high-risk approach of demanding
independence.
The UN, only too aware of the fragility of
the Kirkuk situation, recently appointed a
special representative to Iraq, Staffan de
Mistura, in its first engagement with the
country since the bombing of its compound in
Baghdad four years ago.
He was given specific instructions to
address Kirkuk’s future. “The issue is
concrete and urgent because if the clock
ticks too long it could be a ticking bomb,”
De Mistura said of the Kirkuk situation, as
he promised technical help in finding a
compromise solution.
So far, there are few indications that he
will find an acceptable compromise. The best
answer to the Kirkuk problem would be the
creation of an independent federal regionate
specifically for the city - a region
separate from the government of Iraqi
Kurdistan but which enjoys the same broad
autonomy from the central government as the
Kurdish provinces. That would allow each
ethnic group to have its interests protected
without requiring a loss of face from any of
them.
Yet when this proposal was raised in Iraq’s
parliament by a Turkoman representative,
Pawzi Akram, it was shouted down by Arab and
Kurd hardliners.
Rather than discussing the compromise, both
sides resorted to the familiar and barren
tactic of making ever more aggressive
speeches in the apparent belief that this
would somehow cause one faction to realise
the fallacy of its own position and adopt
that of its opponents.
In justifying its Iraq incursion, Ankara
said it was necessary to stop Kurdistan from
being “a permanent and safe base for the [PKK]
terrorists and will contribute to Iraq’s
stability and internal peace”.
Unless a peaceful solution is found to
Kirkuk - and as De Mistura said the clock is
ticking - the likely subsequent
radicalisation of the Kurds, and the
certainty of increased violence, risk
turning what in recent years has been Iraq’s
most stable region into one that will become
an even more attractive home for the
region’s militant groups. Moreover, any
conflict would not be limited to Kirkuk but
would almost certainly spill over into other
disputed cities, particularly Mosul.
If that happens last week’s Turkish raid
risks being merely an indicator of what is
to come as surrounding states, concerned
about their own Kurdish minorities, seek to
limit the impact of an expanding Iraqi
Kurdistan on the delicate ethnic and
sectarian balance within their own borders.
This may well involve further military
action.
The Turkish troops withdrew at then end of
last week. However, unless a compromise is
agreed over Kirkuk, and quickly, the sight
of hundreds of foreign soldiers fighting in
northern Iraq’s mountains may not be a
one-off but a precursor of events to come.
Oliver Poole was the Iraq Correspondent of
the Daily Telegraph newspaper. His new book,
Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad, is
to be published by Reportage Press in March.
The views expressed in this article are not
necessarily the views of IWPR.
