Kurds Reclaiming Prized Territory In Northern Iraq

With the Kurds firmly in control of the provincial government, Kirkuk already shows signs of a remarkable transition. The names of many streets, buildings, schools and villages have been changed from Arabic to Kurdish. Thousands of Kurds who flooded into Kirkuk after Hussein's fall are still living in a soccer stadium, a city jail and vacant lots. The landscape is replete with ubiquitous gray concrete blocks of the new Kurdish settlements.

The city's fate has been one of the thorniest issues of Iraq's constitutional process. Under Article 136 of the document ratified by Iraqis on Oct. 15, a referendum on the status of Kirkuk will be held in the province no later than Dec. 31, 2007, but only after the Iraqi government takes measures to repatriate former Kurdish residents and resettle Arabs or compensate them. The constitution extended a March 2004 transitional law that assigned responsibility for the repatriations to the federal government.

But throughout Kirkuk and across hundreds of remote farming villages, the Kurdish political parties are doing the job themselves.

In Alu Mahmoud, 20 miles north of Kirkuk, dozens of concrete houses are under construction in three subdivisions plotted by Patriotic Union of Kurdistan engineers. Rashaad Sultan, the village leader supervising the project, said the party provides $5,000 to each repatriated family. To ensure that the houses are completed, the money is distributed in installments: $500 to lay the foundation; $2,000 when the walls are erected; $2,500 upon completion.

"Any violation and they have to give the money back," said Sultan, who was born in 1963 as his family fled Alu Mahmoud en route to another village following a bloody attack by Baath Party loyalists.

Inside the house where Sultan is living temporarily, schematic drawings of the new subdivisions are taped to a wall next to a Google Earth satellite image of the village, printed from a friend's computer. On a desk are files on the 200 families who plan to move into the village and a party directive titled: "Instructions Related to Building Homes for the Resettlement of IDPs," or internally displaced people.

"All houses shall consist of two bedrooms," reads one of the instructions. "Each bedroom shall not be smaller than 3-by-4 meters."

Outside, laborers mixed cement and hammered nails on Sultan's soon-to-be-completed two-story home.

"We're not forcing people to come back, they want to come back," he said. "Look at me: My father was born here. My grandfather was born here."

Bold Moves

Lt. Col. Don Blunck, of Meridian, Idaho, operations officer for the 116th Brigade Combat Team, which has overseen security in Kirkuk since December, said "tens of thousands" of Kurds have resettled in the city and surrounding villages over the past year, many with the help of the parties. Arab and Turkmen politicians said as many as 350,000 Kurds have been relocated into the Kirkuk region since Hussein's fall.

Kurdish officials declined to provide exact numbers, but they said the parties had taken over the repatriations because the Iraqi government had moved too slowly and failed to provide resources to Kurdish families desperate to return to their homes.

The Iraqi Property Claims Commission, the agency charged with the resettlements, has received about 35,500 claims related to Kirkuk, primarily from Kurds, and adjudicated 2,589 cases, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. But the agency has failed to provide compensation to Kurds seeking to relocate or to Arabs seeking to return to their homes in southern Iraq, as required under the transitional law and the constitution.