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The Bitter North Iraq
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It's hard to keep track of the ins and outs of Iraq's sectarian chaos. Baghdad, the seat of the government, naturally commands an outsized portion of press coverage, and even there, developments are opaque. To take one example: it took the US military command most of 2006 to realise that the Shia were pushing Sunnis almost entirely out of the east side of the city. By the time it did, the cleansing was nearly complete.

Yet the sectarian mixture in Baghdad - Sunni v Shia, with some Kurds sprinkled throughout - is pedestrian compared to that of the Iraqi north. South of the so-called Green Line - the boundary separating Baghdad-controlled Iraq from the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) - in Nineweh and Tamim provinces, Kurds and Arabs compete for the temporary allegiances of Iraqi Christians, Shabak and Yazidis. The wages of sectarian squabbling are already starting to come due, as violence escalates up north. Even the once-placid city of Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, hasn't been immune. It's bound to get worse as a controversial referendum approaches that will determine whether Kurdistan annexes huge swaths of territory up north.

When I visited Irbil in January 2006, an attack was nearly unthinkable. The interior ministry was one of the better maintained installations in the city, a perfect reflection of its influence, competence and power. The municipalities ministry, which is on an arterial road in Irbil and in the shadow of the Irbil "Sheraton" - the choice lounge for Kurdistan Democratic Party functionaries - was filled with crumbling masonry and overflowing toilets. The interior ministry, by contrast, crackled with motivated tough guys in crisp uniforms and starched business suits, communicating tersely with one another. It was the only place in Kurdistan where officials refused to talk to me for attribution. But the impression they wanted to convey was simple: they were in control, in stark distinction to the ungovernable Arab areas to the south.

Last week, a truck filled with nearly a ton of explosives - described as "cleaning supplies" by the Kurdish interior minister - detonated outside of the ministry, killing 14 and injuring 87. By some accounts, the bomb left a crater two meters deep. It was the first terrorist attack in Irbil - in nearly all of Kurdistan, for that matter - in two years. It dealt a serious blow to the ministry's reputation for control, which was surely the intent of the bombers.

It's unclear who's responsible for the attack. But the broader context emerges in the city of al-Qosh, south of the Green Line in Baghdad-controlled Nineweh province. Al-Qosh is Christian territory, part of the Nineweh Plain, where Christian churches and cemeteries date back to the eighth century. Increasingly, Assyrian Christians in al-Qosh report that the Kurds, sponsored by the Kurdish interior ministry, have grown bolder in threatening residents: some have been buying land legally, while others are accused of stealing farms and crops. An official from the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM) told me that in late February, a Kurdish notable "in military uniform, but with no rank on it" called a town meeting, in which he pledged that no services would be supplied to "until the area is part of the KRG, either by force or by referendum".

The referendum he meant is the Article 140 Process. Enshrined in Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution at the behest of the Kurds, by the end of this year, "disputed territories" like the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in Tamim Province will vote on whether to join the KRG or remain under Baghdad's control. The question is over the scope of the referendum: primarily written to resolve the acrimonious dispute over Kirkuk between Baghdad and Irbil, the Kurds want the referendum extended across the north, where Kurdish populations were displaced by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. An influx of Kurds to Tamim and Nineweh makes it a safe bet that they'll win the referendum. They promise fair compensation to any Arabs or other minorities who lose land expropriated by Kurdistan. But many minorities fear that they would face persecution in the KRG. If the Kurds win the referendum, the ADM official told me, "we will leave Iraq".

Because the Christians, Yazidis and Shabak fear the Kurds, they have become potent allies of the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) in Mosul, where, over the last several weeks, sectarian attacks in the multi-ethnic city have increased dramatically. The IIP, the premier Sunni Arab power in Nineweh, blames the increased tensions on the referendum. "It's used by terrorists for their own propaganda," an IIP official named Mohammed Shakir told me in March. "The Kurds consider Yazidis to be Kurds, and it's the same with the Christians who they're trying to join with the KRG." Shakir pays lip service to holding the referendum, but only after "a more balanced provincial council" can be elected, by which he means a Sunni-dominated one. "We know what the KRG is aiming for: independence, sooner or later, as soon they get as much land as possible," Shakir said. "But the way they're doing it is causing trouble, and will create tensions for them as well."

Almost as soon as I left Mosul at the end of March, attacks on Kurds spiked in the province. Yazidis, furious over the alleged persecution of their people in Kurdistan, burned the KDP headquarters west of Mosul, part of a pattern of targeting the KDP. Terrorists have also hit the party in Zumar, west of the city, in a suicide attack, and just this weekend a suicide truck bomb struck KDP headquarters in Makhmur.

Kurds fear that this is the opening phase of a broader anti-Kurdish effort as the referendum approaches. Khasro Goran, the Kurdish vice governor of Nineweh, accuses the IIP of collusion with terrorism. "The IIP's goal is not to delay implementation, but to kill the whole Article 140 process," Goran told me - something the Kurds won't take lying down. "If that article is not implemented, there will be another violent front, not just a Shiite-Sunni front, but a Kurd-Sunni Arab front," he said. "It's much better to just solve the problem now."

By that, Goran means it's better to let the referendum move forward, and have the Kurds redraw their frontiers. And that's precisely what the Sunnis and others say they'll fight against. "A lot of blood has been shed for this, and we don't want that to continue," Shakir said. In other words, the referendum is seen as a zero-sum contest, and whoever loses says they're prepared to fight. It's enough to make Baghdad seem tranquil.

By Spencer Ackerman
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk



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