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The struggle for Kirkuk

Oliver Poole, Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Mar 4, 2008

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.

This article originally appeared in Iraqi Crisis Report, produced by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, www.iwpr.net