Kirkuk, a mirror of Iraq's schisms

Since 1998, when Iraqi officials put Inam Ismail on the back of a truck and sent her away from Kirkuk, she has been a refugee in her own country, living with six family members in two dingy concrete rooms off a muddy pathway in the Kurdish-controlled city of Arbil.

Ms. Ismail sees a war against Iraq as an opportunity to reclaim her father's home in Kirkuk, with the garden of lemon and orange trees she remembers from childhood. If the Iraqi Arabs who live in the house now won't leave, she says, "I will take out their eyes."

Ismail is a Turkmen, Iraq's third-largest ethnic group after Arabs and Kurds, and the victim of a decades-old Iraqi program of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk and other cities.

Kirkuk epitomizes the difficulties of toppling President Saddam Hussein and repairing his regime's excesses. If the US overthrows Mr. Hussein and sets up a new administration, its tasks will include sorting out relations between Iraq's ethnic and religious groups, undoing the effects of decades of repression, and fending off some of Iraq's neighbors.

Kirkuk is home to nearly a million people of several ethnicities and religions, many of whom have suffered grievously under the rule of Hussein's Baath Party. Turkey may intervene, ostensibly to protect Kirkuk's Turkmens, with whom Turks share a common linguistic and ethnic heritage.

"This is a city that symbolizes the whole future of Iraq," says Khaled Salih, a political scientist at the University of Southern Denmark who specializes in Kurdish nationalism.

Kirkuk is located in one of the richest oil fields in Iraq, making it a temptation for Iraq's neighbors. Hussein's forces are digging in and may attempt to set alight the oil wells adjacent to the city, as they did in Kuwait in 1991. US troops are expected to rush in to take the city, in part to prevent sabotage.

The Americans won't be the only ones sprinting toward Kirkuk. Tens of thousands of Kurds and Turkmens - former residents of the city like Ismail - are already anticipating their homecoming, with the encouragement of Kurdish and Turkmen leaders. These internal exiles say they will move as soon as Hussein falls.

At about this time it is possible that both Kurdish militias and Turkish forces will approach the city. Some analysts fear that a Turkish intervention as far south as Kirkuk may also draw in Iran.

Beyond the potential for conflict among these armed forces, a new administration in Iraq will immediately be faced with humanitarian and political complexities.

First, there is the possibility of violence - as Ismail's comments suggest - between returning exiles and the Arabs that occupy their land and homes. "They caused the death of my father," says Ismail, referring to the current inhabitants of her childhood home. "How can I be prevented from taking revenge against them?"

There is also some risk of conflict between Kurds and Turkmens - who have clashed in the past in Kirkuk - which is one reason why Turkey has said it will protect its ethnic kin.

But Kurdish leaders say Turkey would simply use its ethnic link with the Turkmens to mask its real goal: to prevent the Kurds from gaining control of the city. (Turkish officials fears that a Kurdish state with Kirkuk as its capital could encourage a revolt of Kurds within Turkey.)

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