In Chaos, Iraq’s Kurds See a Chance to Gain Ground
KIRKUK, Iraq — The chair Col. Imad Muhammad sat in belonged to a commander in the Iraqi Army. So did the tiny cup from which he was drinking his tea, the ashtray where he snuffed out his cigarettes and the Ping-Pong table and treadmill outside his office.
“They left everything behind,” said Colonel Muhammad, of the Iraqi soldiers who fled last week after Islamist extremists besieged northern Iraq.
Colonel Muhammad is an officer in the pesh merga, the Kurdish security forces that have occupied an air base, once home to the American military and then the Iraqi government, here in Kirkuk. In doing so, they claimed for the Kurds a divided city that many of them regard as their spiritual homeland. It is rich in oil, too, which could accelerate the Kurds’ longstanding drive for economic independence and eventual statehood.
But as he spoke in an interview this week, subordinates kept rushing into the room, their urgency helping explain why the Kurds, for the most part, have not celebrated yet: There is still too much uncertainty, too much fighting ahead.
Earlier in the day, Colonel Muhammad sent a unit to defend a Kurdish village on the rural outskirts of Kirkuk that had come under attack by Sunni militants. His fighters were facing tough resistance; they needed backup and asked for heavier arms, big truck-mounted weapons that fire armor-piercing rounds.
“There are dangerous days ahead, and more fighting,” he said.
By every measure, the Sunni militants’ lightning advance through Mosul and on south toward Baghdad has been a disaster for Iraq. But it raises possibilities, many of them good ones, for the Kurds, who already have a great deal of autonomy in the north. If they can defend their borders and not get dragged into a bloody stalemate between the Iraqi Army, along with its Shiite militia allies, and the Sunni militants, the Kurds could emerge empowered, even, perhaps, with their centuries-old dream of their own state fulfilled.
As the Sunni militants seek to erase the border between Iraq and Syria that the colonial powers drew after World War I, the Kurds want to draw a new one, around a stretch of territory across northern Iraq. The ultimate goal is even more ambitious: to unite the Kurdish minorities from four countries — Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
For now, Kurdish officials say they are still part of Iraq, but they claim it is their right to be independent if they choose.
“I call it Iraq, pre- and post-Mosul,” said Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff to Masoud Barzani, the president of the autonomous Kurdish region. “It’s two different periods. For us, it is a new situation, a different era.”
He added, “Until this moment, as I’m talking to you, we are committed to the Constitution of Iraq.”
But how much longer that commitment lasts is the question.
With Kirkuk, the events have appeared to resolve, for better or worse, one of the thorniest problems the Americans tried, and failed, to resolve: whether the city belonged to the central government or the Kurdish region. Now that the Kurds are fully in control here, they say they will never give it up, a position that could presage a new conflict should Iraqi government forces return.
Najmaldin Karim, the governor of Kirkuk, is trying to manage the crisis, consolidating Kurdish control but reaching out to the city’s other groups, mainly Sunni Arabs and Turkmens. He also needs to maintain good relations with the central government because Iraq has essentially one source of revenue, oil, which is controlled by Baghdad and parceled out to the provinces. He said the government promised to keep the money coming for now, and that means he can keep paying local police officers to secure the city.
Mr. Karim, who holds American citizenship and once lived in Maryland, working as a neurosurgeon — he was in the emergency room when President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 — is firm about not letting Kirkuk revert to its uncertain status as a divided city. But he also maintains that Arabs and Turkmens will “have to have a say in this.”
“The whole of Iraq cannot go back to the way it was before, not only Kirkuk,” he said. “Whatever was done since 2003 has not worked.”
Kirkuk holds a prominent place in the collective Kurdish consciousness, not only for its oil but also because it is a historical place of suffering for Kurds. In the late 1990s under Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, nearly a quarter of a million Kurds were displaced from the city and replaced with Arabs, part of the government’s so-called Arabization policy.
But Kirkuk’s minorities are already on edge. “We are scared now for our city because after 10 years we have turned back to the zero point,” said Mijbel Adbulrahman, a 52-year-old Arab. “We have turned back to the conflict between Arabs and Kurds.”
Even before this crisis, the Kurds, with their own security forces, diplomats and a booming economy, were steadily moving toward independence by securing deals with Turkey and international companies to pump oil out of the region, without the approval of Baghdad. Baghdad and the United States regarded those deals as illegal, contending that any oil within Iraq belongs to the nation, not to a part of it.
But the Kurds pushed on anyway, and two tanker ships filled with Kurdish oil are sailing around the Mediterranean Sea, having left in recent weeks from a port in Turkey, but with nowhere to dock because of threats of legal action by Washington and Baghdad.
Before the seizure of Mosul, preventing that oil from hitting international markets had been a centerpiece of Washington’s Iraq policy for the past two years, and American officials had believed that the sale of Kurdish oil, without Baghdad getting its cut, was a greater threat to the cohesion of Iraq than surging militants in Syria who had their sights set on bringing the fight to this country.
Now, however, Baghdad is focused more on the Kurds’ renowned battlefield prowess and how the pesh merga can help turn back the militants’ thrust. Falih al-Fayadh, Mr. Maliki’s national security adviser, said in a news conference recently that the central government was working with the Kurds, calling the fight against the militants a “joint battle.”
But Jabar Yawar, the spokesman for the pesh merga, said: “It is all talk. We have a relationship, but there is no cooperation.” The Kurds’ interests lie in expanding their territory to take in all the predominantly Kurdish areas of Iraq, while mostly keeping out of the larger fight.
Mr. Yawar laid out a map that showed the expanding positions of Kurdish forces in Iraq, across an area stretching from the Syrian border in the west to the Iranian border in the east. The territory along a blue line, much of which the Kurds previously controlled jointly with the Iraqi Army, is now theirs, after Iraqi soldiers either deserted or fled south toward Baghdad.
A red line shows areas where the pesh merga moved forward, in Diyala Province in the east, to take over cities that were formerly disputed between the Kurds and Baghdad, and in the west, where in recent days they took a border crossing with Syria.
Mr. Yawar showed where the pesh merga are and where he believes the militant groups are positioned, and he said he gave the same presentation in recent days to officials from the American government, which is considering airstrikes to stop the militants’ advance.
He said that statehood would be determined by the international community, and that Turkey and Iran, because they share borders, would have to consent. That is a long shot, given that both Turkey and Iran have sizable Kurdish populations, whose ambitions for independence could be inflamed if a Kurdish state were carved from Iraq.
Even if statehood does not immediately beckon, the Kurds have been emboldened in other ways by the chaos gripping the country. For example, with a professional and loyal security force, they could reach a security pact with Baghdad in exchange for concessions in the dispute over oil, accelerating the drive for economic independence.
But they are fighting for their own borders, which are shifting and not exactly clear. On any given day, they might be fighting the Sunni extremist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS; other militant Sunni groups; or tribal gunmen.
Back at the air base Tuesday afternoon, the backup unit readied itself, stuffing body armor plates into vests, checking weapons and getting those big guns ready on its pickup trucks.
“We are going to the front line to kill ISIS people,” one soldier said.
Another corrected him. “It’s not ISIS,” he said. “It’s just the tribe over there.”
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