Kirkuk: Iraq's northern tinderbox

During the day, the expelled Kurdish family can barely fit inside their makeshift A-frame tent, with its paper-thin tarp covering.

They fit better at night, when all eight members of the Karem family squeeze together like cordwood on the stone-cold floor, huddled close under eight thick woolen blankets.

These Iraqi Kurds are among the latest to be forced from the northern oil city of Kirkuk, as part of Saddam Hussein's long-standing "Arabization" campaign. Its aim is to ethnically cleanse Kirkuk and make it an Arab city.

Kirkuk looms large for US strategic planners because Kurds like the Karems claim the city - and its wealth - as their historical heritage. But Turkey warns that any attempt by Iraqi Kurds to seize control of Kirkuk - as they did briefly during a 1991 uprising - will spark a Turkish military reaction.

Turkey announced last week that it has boosted its military strength inside northern Iraq to 12,000 troops, with armor. It is concerned that any increase of Kurdish sovereignty in northern Iraq will prompt unrest among Turkish Kurds.

But it's the determination of Kurdish families - some 100,000 ethnic Kurds and Turkmen were expelled from Kirkuk during the past three decades - that is expected to present a key challenge to any American occupation of Iraq.

"In the night I can't sleep, because I worry about my children," says mother Hamdiya Abdulrahman Karem, standing outside her tent home just inside the border of the Kurdish-controlled territory of northern Iraq.

Kirkuk is the likely fulcrum of US military plans for deployment in northern Iraq. The area is one of two leading Iraqi oil sites with more than 10 billion barrels of proven reserves, analysts say. But competing claims to the city by Kurds, Turkmen, and Turkey - complicated further by decades of enforced demographic change by Iraqi governments - promise to entangle US forces.

"If the Kurds wake up one morning and find that Iraqi military checkpoints aren't there, they will be back in Kirkuk in a matter of minutes," says John Fawcett, an Iraq expert and author of a recent Brookings Institution report on displaced people in Iraq.

"It could be a race for Kirkuk ... that is prone to agent provocateur attacks," Mr. Fawcett says. "It wouldn't take too much to get Kurds fighting each other, Kurds fighting Turkmen, Turkmen calling in the Turks, and whatever remains of the Iraqi military.

"It could be quite a distraction for an invading army," Fawcett adds. "I'm not absolutely confident that these scenarios have been thought through in US military circles."

Despite Turkey's warnings about Kirkuk, the Kurds aren't backing down. "Kirkuk is an important issue for us - it embodies the suffering of Kurds and the most brutal ethnic cleansing," says Barham Salih, prime minister of one of two main Kurdish factions in northern Iraq. "Kurds can't feel safe in Iraq until the historical injustice of Kirkuk is redressed. Iraq can't be at peace without reversing ethnic cleansing."

Mr. Salih says it is "naive to think it can be solved by force only." But establishing justice after so many years of forced population shifts can be a minefield for outsiders, as the examples of Bosnia and Kosovo attest.

"Some people have been away from their ancestral homes for up to 30 years or more - do they have the same rights as those who were moved out of a home in Kirkuk last week?" says Michael Amitay, director of the Washington Kurdish Institute.

The "Arabization" of Kirkuk is only one facet in a much broader policy that Baghdad has used to control this oil-rich and fertile land, while trying to crush opposition among populations embittered by Mr. Hussein's repressive rule.

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