Interesting scenes from Iraq

KIRKUK, Iraq - U.S. military officials are concerned that ethnic tensions could turn into widespread violence and, perhaps, civil war in Iraq's northern city of Kirkuk, setting a dangerous pattern for rest of the country.

Kirkuk oil fields hold around 9 million barrels of proven reserves and Kurdish talk of secession is at a fever pitch.

A bloc of Kurdish-led politicians received the majority of seats on the provincial council after January elections and is now threatening to fill most key positions with Kurds. Arab and Turkmen (also known as Turkomen) politicians protested with a series of walkouts and now refuse to show up at council meetings, where Kurdish leaders insist on speaking in their mother language.

The Kurds are also accelerating efforts to bring back families pushed out of Kirkuk and the surrounding province by former dictator Saddam Hussein during his massive resettlement campaigns aimed at weakening Kurdish opposition. The Kurds hope the influx will help make Kirkuk a part of the Iraqi region of Kurdistan and possibly provide an economic engine for an independent Kurdish nation. Breaking away from Iraq, though, would be difficult for the Kurds because of pressure from neighboring countries such as Iran and Turkey, which oppose an independent Kurdistan.

"We're worried about the domino effect of the Kurds getting the senior leadership positions and the Arabs and Turkomen going back to their constituencies and saying the Kurds have taken over, and the Turkomen and, to a greater extent, the Arabs rise up," said Lt. Col. Anthony Wickham, the U.S. Army's liaison to the Kirkuk council.

"Worst-case scenario is a civil war," he said. "The threat is out there. There are armed Arab groups, Turkomen groups that say they need to arm themselves, and the Kurds say, `We know how to keep the peace, we'll deploy the Peshmerga,'" a militia that numbers in the tens of thousands.

Wickham is worried not only about potential havoc in Kirkuk, but also about the destabilizing effect it would have across ethnically divided Iraq as it makes its way toward democracy.

Saddam used savage military might to suppress ethnic and religious groups that opposed him. With him gone, many of those groups are sorting out long-simmering tensions.

Rizqar Ali Hamajan, a Kirkuk council member and a senior official in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a political party, said his party estimates that Saddam pushed about 600,000 Kurds out of the Kirkuk area. Not only should those people be able to return to the province - which has an estimated population of 1.5 million - but they should be able to bring their families with them, Hamajan said.

The province is about 40 percent Arab and 35 percent Kurd, according to U.S. officials in the area. The return of even a small percentage of those 600,000 and their families to Kirkuk would give Kurds a decisive numerical advantage.

Many in Iraq consider Kirkuk key in the effort to keep ethnic differences from tearing the nation apart. Kirkuk, as elsewhere in Iraq, has seen its share of battles between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi forces, and, as ethnic tensions rise, the danger of individual attacks triggering wider violence has increased.

On March 19, for example, a yellow taxi pulled up in front of a police station and a passenger threw out a soda can. When an officer came out to inspect the can, it blew up, killing him. The next day, a roadside bomb at a traffic roundabout exploded near a truck full of police officers on their way to their comrade's funeral. Four officers were killed.

When police failed to find any leads, they returned to the traffic circle the following day and rounded up potential witnesses. Among them were two Turkmen vegetable vendors. While in custody, both vendors were beaten and tortured by a Kurdish officer who pushed lit cigarettes into their bodies, lashed them with cables and punched and kicked them in their faces, according to family accounts verified by U.S. military officials.

The two vendors were cousins of Tahsin Mohammed Kahya, a Turkmen who's the chair of the Kirkuk council and an immensely popular local politician.

His tribe called for massive protests and violence. The city stood on the brink.

"It could have been the spark," Wickham said.

Kahya asked his tribe to keep its guns away and to let the political process take its course. But he's far from certain that the peace will hold, especially given the provincial council's inability to appoint government leaders and the prospect of a Kurd-dominated government.

"If the decision-makers cannot agree, then it will go to the streets," he said. "If we fail, we will tell the people we have failed, and it's up to them to decide what they want to do - maybe then we would have a bad situation."

Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto, who commands Task Force Liberty, the U.S. Army element stretching from just north of Baghdad to Kirkuk, also worries about the tensions. "As the politics goes down lower, I think the level of understanding (between ethnic groups) becomes less," and the result, he said, is bombs sometimes being placed on the road.

While U.S. officials used to intervene in local governmental affairs, choosing council members and making sure they all spoke with one another, they remained in the background after the Iraqi elections in January, letting Iraqis for the most part succeed or fail on their own accord.

The need for ethnic groups in Kirkuk to negotiate their differences is probably the most important issue facing Iraq today, Taluto said.

"What can Task Force Liberty do about that? Not a hell of a lot, frankly," he said.

Many Arabs and Turkomen say the Kurds are using force, when necessary, to push them out of Kirkuk. They accuse Kurds, who say they left the Peshmerga militia before joining the Iraqi army and police, of using their positions to intimidate people into leaving.

Hamajan, the Kurdish council member, denied there were any Peshmerga present in Kirkuk. He then added, smiling, that "the leader of the Peshmerga is about to become president of Iraq," referring to Jalal Talabani, a former Peshmerga commander who was elected president on Wednesday by the national assembly.

Outside Hamajan's office, Kurdish men in military fatigues holding AK-47s patrolled the gate.

U.S. officials confirmed that at least half the Iraqi army troops in Kirkuk are Kurds. Wickham said he knows of Arabs being taken from Kirkuk and put into a Kurd-controlled prison in nearby Sulaimaniyah, but he didn't know the specifics of who took them there or why.

Khalaf Farhan, a Sunni Arab and former army general in Saddam's army, said Iraqi soldiers raided his house last week. Just before he was blindfolded, Farhan said, he saw a large Kurdish-looking man who was speaking Kurdish.

Farhan, whose face was bruised and scratched and whose left eye was badly swollen days later, said he was beaten in the face with a rifle butt, punched and kicked.

When he was shoved into a vehicle outside, Farhan said, one of the soldiers leaned toward him and said, "OK, do you want to sell the house?"

In one area, at least 40,000 Kurds have returned to rebuild a series of small villages demolished by Saddam. Those families were given $1,000 each and building supplies by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan operating out of Sulaimaniyah, a neighboring province.

The resettlement of Kurds in Kirkuk is provided for by Iraq's transitional law, which also says that the decision about Kirkuk becoming a part of Kurdistan will "take into account the will of the people."

The Kurds interpret this to mean that a provincial referendum will decide the matter.

Many Arabs and Turkomen said the Kurds are pushing for resettlement not just out of a sense of historical justice, but to stack the chips in their favor for the referendum, and, ultimately, to break away from Iraq.

One of the few things that U.S. and Iraqi officials interviewed in Kirkuk agreed about was that if the Kurds went down that path, it would be a bloody one.

By the way what ever happened to the threat levels we used to see on CNN all the time before the US presidential election?   (Remember the orange, yellow, red colors and so forth)

I watch CNN everday for a few mintues, the threat level has been there and its been yellow for awhile now.

 It seems that you have fallen for the myths from the Bush propaganda machine.

Fox news I think is the only news station that gives any kind of propaganda and thats because the owner is pro Bush, I could be wrong I'm trying to remember where I heard he was, but fox news usually only gets pro bush people. The other stations I see sometimes criticize the Bush adminstration and sometimes show the good which a news station should do, show both sides of the coin.

But all I reallly hear from CNN is the bad news of the war, all the car bombs and soldiers being injured and hurt, whats going on with the Iraq gov't, and the whole palistinian and isreali conflict or whatever you want to call it.

What won't work for Turkey then? More info please!

Ok my lack of observation then. Yellow huh. Does that mean the threat is low now? Or does it mean that the powers that be do not need to mess with our heads as much as they recently used to?

Not sure what it means exactly, it usually says Terror Alert:Yellow/Elevated. Its always on the ticker at the bottom.