In Iraq's north, fears that disorder could spur ethnic strife

Amid the stress and shouting, her husband collapsed. He was not murdered, she says.

Arif's brother, Fadel Arif, says it is wrong to characterize the crime wave as anti-Turkmen. He, like his brother, is also married to a Kurd - intermarriage here is common.

"There is no hatred between us, but if they come here and destroy my house and factory, I will find hate for them," he says. But he insists that the problem is that people came here from the autonomous Kurdish areas "to make Ali Baba," as he calls the stealing spree, not to attack Turkmens. Anyone who claims otherwise is either misinformed or stirring up ethnic tensions, he says.

"We're the ones who have been living here all this time, so we should know," he says.

To be sure, there are ethnic tensions coursing through the city. Chaos errupted Sunday evening when the body of a 12-year-old Turkmen boy was paraded atop a car by Turkmen activists. The Turkmens say the boy was shot in the head while he was standing in front of the Iraqi Turkmen Front building downtown.

But Kurdish sources said he had been shot by random gunfire while traveling in a car on the road to Baghdad and that his body was being displayed to incite tensions.

"We will bring the Turkish Army to keep the peace in Kirkuk," the throng was shouting, according to a translator for Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring body.

The events punctured the gradual calming of tensions in the city, and Turkmen activists said would hold a protest Monday.

The leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Jalal Talibani, has tried to calm unrest here. Visiting over the weekend, he announced the establishment of an interim governing committee, to include an equal number of Kurds, Turkmen, and Arabs. He also encouraged people to get back to work and school as soon as possible.

Guards standing outside the city's land registry say the looters took everything of value, but they did not steal or burn records.

In fact, many Turkmen here argue that it would be hard to find any evidence of Turkmen property in the Baath Party archives. Turkmens and Kurds alike were widely discriminated against under Saddam Hussein's regime. Many say they were not allowed to buy houses or hold any property unless they changed their identity to "Arab," part of the Baath party's Arabization policy. The aim: to decrease the numbers of Turkmens and Kurds in oil-rich Kirkuk.

Many played along, feeling they had no choice. "I felt very bad about it," says a man named Omar, who filled out a form changing his identity from Turkmen to Arab. "How can you ask someone to change their essence? They made Kirkuk like a big prison."

He, like many others interviewed here, says Kurds and Turkmen lived under a common oppressor, which made them more friendly with each other than outsiders would expect. Omar, afraid to give his last name, says he hasn't heard of any Turkmens being murdered. "If something like that did happen to someone, than maybe he was a member of the Arab Baath Party and was killed for that, not because he's a Turkmen."

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