This Land is My Land
The big stakes-and bubbling tensions-over who will control Iraq's oil capital
For these reasons, U.S. military officials are keeping an increasingly close eye on Kirkuk. "How long can the rest of the country continue to play second fiddle to Baghdad?" asks one senior U.S. official in the embattled Iraqi capital. "There are some big cities up there [in northern Iraq], and you can't keep on ignoring them forever."
Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, who last week took the reins as the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq-was responsible for Kirkuk on a previous tour. "We've got to pay close attention to it," he tells U.S. News. "It's got the oil, and it's always been very representative of Iraq itself." U.S. military officials here agree, and add a note of caution. "This place is a powder keg," says one.
"Pretty not good." In the office of Kirkuk Province Gov. Abdul Rahman Mustafa, among the more prominently displayed objects is a painting, just to the left of his desk. It is an abstract portrait of a mother lying on the ground, cradling her baby. Both are dead. It is a ubiquitous item in Kurdish party offices here, a reminder of the slaughter that Kurds suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein-a stark warning that they plan never to let it happen again.
Today, Mustafa describes the security situation here as "not too bad, but pretty not good." He has survived multiple assassination attempts, most recently when a suicide bomber wearing an explosives-laden vest threw himself on the hood of his car-the work, he believes, of Syrian-backed insurgents. It is one of many assassination attempts that this city sees each month. The soccer stadium, filled with Kurdish refugees, has been hit by mortars repeatedly, and car bombs are a daily fear among U.S. soldiers patrolling the city streets.
What's more, there are indications as well that members of the Mahdi Army militia-known as the Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM)- have been moving into town to back the city's Shiite Arab communities. "We're very sensitive to JAM presence here," says Colonel Stackpole. Shiites, who make up the majority in the oil-rich southern part of Iraq, tend to have less opposition to federal control of regions than the Sunnis, who stand to be largely disenfranchised with their populations centered in the west, with no oil resources. "For the most part, they [Mahdi Army] are coming to reassure [Shiite Arabs] that they are going to be protected, that JAM is going to look out for their interests," he adds. "It's a toe in the water to make sure the population they represent up here isn't being mistreated, and no more than that. It hasn't been a concern for me yet."
What is a concern among Iraqi and some U.S. military officials here is the lack of speed with which the central government in Baghdad-led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki-is making decisions that would allow Kirkuk to move forward on its referendum vote, a decision wrapped up in a clause of the Constitution known as Article 140.
"Double faces." It was Article 140 that brought the Kurds to the table in the first place, when Kurdish politicians agreed to support the prime minister in exchange for the guarantee of a vote to determine whether Kirkuk would become part of the Kurdish regional government. In advance of that vote, the first order of business called for in the article is a phase referred to as "normalization," which is taken to include the resolution of property disputes-namely, houses. That includes bringing Kurds back to their ancestral homes. "Arabs will be compensated, treated very respectfully-and moved," says Mustafa. "It is not forcing or kicking them out of Kirkuk, but moving them back to their homes." Normalization is to be followed by a census and a referendum.
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