"This is what I think: I can sit around with my hand out waiting for the federal government or I can spend the money myself," said Rizgar Ali, the provincial council president and a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan official. Referring to Ibrahim Jafari, Iraq's Shiite Muslim prime minister, he said: "I'm not going to wait around for Jafari to sign a piece of paper. That time is gone, where the central government rules." He added that the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan would spend "every last dollar in the till" to bring Kurds back to Kirkuk.
Kurdish frustration over the government's sluggish progress to resettle Kirkuk surfaced earlier this month when a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani, called for Jafari's resignation.
Abdul Rahman Mustafa, the Kurdish governor of Kirkuk province, said the central government had failed to help the Kurds with a growing humanitarian crisis. With thousands of people still without access to city services, Mustafa said, "We have been asking the central government to help us, but they haven't. This is this problem: Kids are dying, women and children are dying."
"They're trying to change the demography of Kirkuk," said Tahseem Mohammed Ali, a Turkmen on the council. "I see no problem as long as there are negotiations between the various ethnicities and they go about it in a legitimate way. But they are working now to move people from outside the province and increase the percentages to realize their dream."
"The Kurds are extremists," Ali said. "They make excuses for that. They say that they were oppressed for a long, long time, and they don't want to let that happen again."
The success of the integration of the displaced Kurds appears to vary by village.
Dreams for the Future
In Qoshqayah, known to Arabs as Amsha, villagers said tensions emerged shortly after the fall of Hussein's government in April 2003. Kurds flooded into village, aided by the two parties and backed by the pesh merga , the Kurdish militia.
"The Kurdish people are supported by the Kurdish parties, and no one supports the Arabs," complained Hamad Hammoudi Ishaqi, a Sunni Arab from Qoshqayah.
Hammoudi said the Kurds combined intimidation with financial incentives in an effort to persuade the Arabs to vacate the land. Armed groups killed off the Arabs' sheep, he said; many farmers remained in the area but decided to take jobs as taxi drivers in Kirkuk to make ends meet.
In August, said Hussein Ali Hamdani, the Sunni tribal leader, the Kurdish official showed up with officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Iraqi security forces. The group was marking off plots for new Kurdish settlements when one of the Kurds swore at a group of Arab women who were trying to stop them, Hamdani said.
Hamdani said a group of Arab men then attacked the Kurds, killing the agricultural official and a soldier. U.S. military officials said that after American and Iraqi troops restored order, the Kurdish parties halted plans for further building in the village.
The process has proceeded more smoothly in Alu Mahmoud, a few miles down the road from Qoshqayah. After several returning Kurds threatened violence, Sultan, the village chief, said many Arabs agreed to leave peacefully in exchange for compensation from various Kurdish sources. They received between a few hundred and several thousand dollars for their houses, some of which were once occupied by Baath Party leaders.
One recent afternoon, on a plot just off the dirt road leading into the village, dozens of men worked quietly on their modest concrete dwellings, which were in various states of completion.
Ibrahim Khalel, 34, offered a tour of the home he plans to share with his wife, Joana Ali, and their 4-year-old son Abdullah. With 3,000 cinderblocks, the gray foundation and walls had been completed. Khalel had received $2,500. "This is our bedroom," he said, walking through the roofless home with a hammer looped through his belt. "This is where the bathroom will go."
In 1987, Khalel fled to Ramadi, a city about 200 miles south of Kirkuk, after the government ordered him out of the village. He returned a few months ago. He said he considered himself in Kurdistan, whether or not he was technically within its borders.
"I've come back to my homeland," he said.
