Ethnic Divide in Iraqi City a Test for Nation

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 20, 2008

KIRKUK, Iraq -- Darawan Salahadin, dressed in a black shirt and blue jeans, strolled out of his home in the Kurdish part of his ethnically fragmented neighborhood, passing concrete barriers and a checkpoint guarded by a Kurdish fighter. He entered the Arab section and walked swiftly to his tan, flat-roofed school.

In the classrooms were only Kurdish students. The Arabs would arrive as Kurds left, and then the Turkmen students would get their turn. The school has three names, one in each community's language, and three sets of teachers and principals.

"I have no Arab and Turkmen friends. I have only Kurdish friends," said Salahadin, a slim 17-year-old with thick, gelled black hair. "I can't speak Arabic or Turkmen. So I don't know them."

The school's divisions illustrate the tensions rippling through this neighborhood and all of Kirkuk, ground zero of Iraq's most vexing conflict over land, oil and identity. The battle over who will rule Kirkuk is a significant test of whether the Iraqi government can solve the country's internal disputes as the U.S. military draws down.

In contrast to security improvements elsewhere in the country, Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen residents of Kirkuk remain targets of political violence as their leaders vie for control of what they see as their ancestral lands. Last week, at least 57 people died in a suicide bombing on the outskirts of the city, the deadliest assault in Iraq in six months.

"Kirkuk could be the capstone in the house of freedom, or it can be the cheap thread that when you pull out unravels the entire suit," said Lt. Col. David Snodgrass, deputy commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, which oversees the city.

Kurdish political parties, citing historical claims to the city, want to expand their autonomous region in northern Iraq to include it. Iraq's predominantly Arab central government opposes Kurdish control over Kirkuk, whose oil fields produce 40 percent of Iraq's output, as does Kirkuk's minority Turkmen community and its backers in Turkey.

Iraqi leaders and the United Nations are struggling to reach at least a temporary solution to the question of who should control the city. At a time when the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Kurdish leaders are increasingly at odds over the disposition of oil revenue and other issues, Kurdish parties have deployed forces in the city and the surrounding area in what they say is an attempt to protect Kurdish civilians from attack.

Even the name of Salahadin's neighborhood is contested. Arab and Turkmen residents call it Hay al-Wasiti, as it was known before the 2003 U.S-led invasion of Iraq. The Kurds have renamed it Nowruz, after the Kurdish New Year.

Politics infuses virtually every discussion in this neighborhood -- a sprawling jumble of houses, shops and mosques connected by dusty, unpaved roads in the southern part of Kirkuk. About 120 Kurdish families are clustered inside sand berms, blast walls and checkpoints. Arab and Turkmen houses surround them.

For decades, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens mingled freely, intermarried and ran businesses together. Today, the communities rarely mix.

The separation is not just physical. In geography class, Salahadin learns that Kirkuk is a part of Kurdistan, as Kurds refer to their autonomous region and, more broadly, the independent state they have never had. His favorite subject is Kurdish because, he said, "it is our language," and he studies ancient Kurdish cities and Kurdish heroes.

When he and other Kurdish students leave the school, as the Arabs enter, they greet each other by saying, "Salaam" -- peace. Then they part ways.

For Arabs, Fear and Doubt

On Nov. 24, across the road from Hay al-Wasiti, a red pickup truck waited over a splatter of fresh blood for a final journey. Forty minutes had passed since a gunman had pumped a single bullet into the head of Khalaf Hamoud al-Jubouri, an Arab lawyer, as he pulled out of his driveway. His daughter found him slumped over the steering wheel.

Now, his body lay inside his dun-colored house, covered with a thick red blanket, awaiting the rituals of burial. His wife and daughters wailed, their anguish piercing the walls.

"Damn the Kurds," screamed one of Jubouri's sons. "I know it was the Kurds who killed my father."

Jubouri, a 58-year-old father of five, worked in the crucible of the conflict, pressing Arab legal claims to disputed lands.

The assassination did not surprise Abid al-Jubouri, an Arab resident of Hay al-Wasiti. "A lot of Arab figures have died in mysterious ways," said Jubouri, a short man with a thin moustache and a serious demeanor who was not closely related to the lawyer.

A former colonel in Saddam Hussein's military, Jubouri has lived in the neighborhood since 1995. He is sensitive to Kurdish charges that Arab claims to Kirkuk are illegitimate and that most Arabs in the city arrived as a result of Hussein's efforts to "Arabize" it. "The government gave me the land, because I am originally from Kirkuk," said Jubouri, a father of 11, who owns a real estate agency .

Jubouri sees Kirkuk as a rallying point for Iraqi unity, fearing discrimination if the city were to be placed under Kurdish control. Many of the newly arrived Kurds, he charged, have fake Iraqi identification cards that allow them to vote and receive services.

"The goal is trying to make Kirkuk a Kurdish city," said his son Laith al-Kabi.

"We are completely surrounded by them," added Jubouri. "They control everything."

Many Arabs in the neighborhood have moved to Arab areas or to their villages. This year alone, Jubouri has rented out 20 Arab houses, mostly to Turkmens displaced from Kurdish areas.

Kurds hold senior posts in the police, dominate the city council and have U.S. allies. "If we complain, the Kurds go to the Americans and tell them that those Arabs are terrorists. And Americans come and arrest them," Kabi said.

Kurdish officials said they conduct raids with U.S. troops but only against suspected insurgents, who are mostly Arabs. "We didn't come here to treat anyone unfairly," said Ibrahim Mardan, a senior official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political party led by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, speaking inside his party's fortified base in the neighborhood.

Senior non-Kurdish police commanders complain that Kurdish intelligence agencies were opening offices in many enclaves, mirroring Hussein's security apparatus.

"We have a law: Any armed group for a specific party should be considered as a militia. So their existence here is illegal. But they have become a reality on the ground," said Maj. Gen. Torhan Yousef Abdul Rahman, Kirkuk's deputy police chief.

His men, he said, cannot even enter the neighborhood to respond to any complaints against Kurds because "they control the area." When asked why not, Abdul Rahman faintly smiled and said, "Political issues."

Jubouri never visits the Kurdish section of his neighborhood. And the tensions have poisoned his relationship with his longtime Kurdish neighbors, whom he calls the "original Kurds."

"I am scared of them. I do not trust them," Jubouri said. "I stay friends with them to protect myself."

Under an orange tree in the courtyard at the dead lawyer's home, two men in white skull caps dipped a white cloth in water and with gentle strokes cleaned his pale, bloodless body.

Jubouri's tribesmen placed the corpse inside a simple black coffin and carried it to the red pickup truck. They drove away, kicking up dust, toward an Arab cemetery.

For Kurds, 'Our Jerusalem'

At one entrance to Nowruz, Kurdish fighters overlook a road dubbed the "roadside bombs" street. On the other side are Arab and Turkmen houses.

"We are surrounded by them," said Salahadin Mahadeen, Darawan's father. Unlike his son, he never crosses the street.

He fled Kirkuk in 1991, after Hussein's forces suppressed a Kurdish uprising in the wake of the Persian Gulf War. For the next dozen years, he lived in the mountain town of Rania in Iraq's northern Kurdish region. On June 20, 2003, Mahadeen arrived here with his family, joining thousands of Kurds who entered Kirkuk after the invasion to claim land they considered theirs.

He said Arabs of the former regime had tortured and killed his father. And his Turkmen neighbors had accused him of supporting the Kurdish resistance, forcing him to flee.

When he returned, the father of five with the thick glasses and gravelly voice occupied the house of a military officer of the government that had forced him to leave Kirkuk.

"It was like being reborn," said Mahadeen, seated on a Kurdish carpet in his living room, sipping sweet tea. Outside, his manicured front lawn gleamed with roses.

In 2006, two massive truck bombs detonated near his house. Flying shrapnel blinded his right eye. Since then, violence has fallen, but persists: Ten days ago mortar shells struck the Kurdish section. "This area was once for Saddam's officers, and now the Kurds live here. That's why they are attacking us," said his wife, Zaitoon Sharif, 43.

Two Arab families still live in their section. Socializing is limited to cordial greetings. "They are Muslims, like us," Mahadeen explained.

"I don't trust them," Sharif said. "They are living among Kurds. So they have to be nice to us. But if they become powerful again, they will treat us differently."

Mahadeen is worried about Maliki's plan to create tribal councils to support the central government, seeing similarities to Hussein's nurturing of Iraq's tribes. "Now, there is a new dictator, but with a different name," said Mahadeen. "He wants to make the Arabs more powerful."

"Kurds lost much blood for Kirkuk -- all what happened under Saddam, the executions, the jail sentences, the rapes, the blood -- all of this was for Kirkuk," Mahadeen said. "If the problem is oil, then we will give them the oil. We want the land."

"How can we live without our Jerusalem, without our heart?"

A few minutes later, a crashing mortar shell shook the windows.

Turkmens Displaced

Abu Amjad al-Najafi, 61, a Turkmen, was sitting in a coffee shop when he heard the news of Khalaf Hamoud al-Jubouri's death. He was a friend, and once lived in Jubouri's area.

In 1983, Hussein's government displaced Najafi and thousands of Turkmen families under the pretext of building a railway station. Their neighborhood was repopulated with Arabs from other parts of Iraq.

"Now, the same policy is happening by the Kurds," said Najafi, tall and broad-faced with a hulking physique.

A Turkmen Shiite, Najafi said he believes the Turkmens are the original residents of Kirkuk. In fact, the Kurdish enclave -- and all of Hay al-Wasiti, he adds -- was owned by Turkmens. "It's all Turkmen land, 100 percent."

Najafi lives near the local office of Kurdish intelligence, across the street from the Kurdish party's base and Mahadeen's house. The street is lined on both sides with concrete barriers. Friends and relatives rarely visit, fearing Kurdish scrutiny.

"If there is tension between Arab and Turkmens against Kurds, or political issues, at the end of the day they are Kurds," said Najafi. "If you make any wrong move, they will kill you right away."

In July, clashes broke out between Kurds and guards of a Turkmen political party after a suicide bomber attacked a rally. Two dozen people died. Najafi stayed locked inside the house for a week.

Najafi asserts his Turkmen identity and proudly claims that some of the greatest philosophers in the Arabic language were Turkmens. He cringes every time he sees a map of Kurdistan, a hot seller in markets here, which portrays Kurdish aspirations: The borders include much of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran.

"We have a saying here: If you give the Kurds Kirkuk, they will claim Iraq," Najafi said. "If you give them Iraq, they will claim the entire Arab world.

"And they want the oil of Kirkuk to establish their future."

He never goes to the Kurdish section across the street. "If they see a stranger, they wouldn't let me in," he said.

He's also wary of some Arabs. "We have terrorists in our neighborhood. Most of them are Arabs," Najafi said. "One day, I might be targeted because I am Shiite."

Kurds 'Will Never Leave'

Abid al-Jubouri and Najafi are not optimistic about the Iraqi government's plans to resolve the impasse over the city. "As long as this central government is weak and the Kurds are stronger than them, nothing will change," Najafi said.

Iraq will hold provincial elections next month, but not in Tamim province, of which Kirkuk is the capital. Kurdish leaders and lawmakers in Baghdad refused to accept a power-sharing deal in Kirkuk that would have allowed the balloting to take place.

"The Kurds are living in a big dream, and this dream is fueled by American forces," Jubouri said. "If Americans withdraw, they will be weakened and leave."

At the Kurdish party's base, fighter Luqman Majid stood sentry near the charred wreckage of a truck used in a 2006 bombing. "They have to walk over our bodies to make us leave this area," Majid said. "We will never leave, even if this place becomes our grave. This is Kurdistan."