KIRKUK, Iraq, 19 May 2003 — Midway through the US commanding general’s proclamation of peace and brotherhood here Saturday, gunfire erupted outside the heavily fortified government compound where he was addressing town leaders.
“Get back! Get back!’’ US soldiers shouted at hundreds of Iraqi civilians, mostly Kurds, gathered between coils of concertina wire to plead for jobs or help getting back homes and land taken away during the Saddam Hussein regime. In a frantic attempt to escape the gunfire behind them, the crowd had pushed forward, prompting US sentries to fire machine-gun salvos in warning. The panicked throng then rushed off, snagging skin, clothes and clutched documents on the barbed wire protecting the US troops who are still the only authority in this oil-rich city that is the size of Denver.
Minutes later and a few blocks away, running street battles broke out between knife-wielding Kurdish youths and Arabs who witnesses said were behind the city hall shooting incident. By midafternoon, shops were shuttered and streets that had been teeming with commerce in the morning were empty except for broken glass and boulders.
It was clearly the wrong day to declare victory in the coalition’s fight here against the enemies of law and order.
But Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of US troops in northeastern Iraq, carried on with his address to the civic leaders, insisting the disturbances were the work of a criminal few and that the resuscitation of Kirkuk would go on undaunted.
Conditions in Iraq’s most important oil city have indeed improved dramatically in the mere five weeks since US troops of the 173rd Airborne Brigade arrived on April 10. Water, power, banks, schools and a fledgling police force are up and running and the US troops are paying public workers their salaries from seized government coffers.
But the panic incited outside the government building and its spillover across the Khasa River was an ominous reminder of the work yet to be done to secure the peace even though the war is over.
It was also a pointed reminder that the Pentagon-run Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance has yet to put its oar into the postwar rebuilding effort here, leaving the 2,500 US troops of the 173rd Airborne to shoulder peacekeeping and restoration of public service.
“ORHA is not functioning yet. They’re here, but they’re remodeling their offices,’’ Ali N. Salhi, chairman of the Free Officers and Civilian Movement long opposed to Saddam’s Baath Party regime, observed caustically. An exile who spent the past quarter century in Washington, D.C., and Sioux Falls, S.D., Salhi came back to his hometown here in March to help in the fight against Saddam’s forces and has been working as an adviser to the US troops.
Col. William Mayville of the 173rd Airborne swiftly deployed his troops to restore essential services and has single-handedly put together an ethnically balanced 500-member police force that is slowly earning the respect of the 1.2 million people of Kirkuk and its surroundings, Salhi said. But he estimated there are 250,000 guns in the city and urged Mayville’s troops, recently augmented by Odierno’s 4th Infantry Division, to conduct house-to-house searches to disarm the public.
Sweeping the city for weapons is possible now that military reinforcements have arrived, said Mayville.
The fragility of the US troops’ accomplishments became disturbingly clear with the clashes in the Shorja neighborhood that was a particular focus of Saddam’s “Arabization’’ process. The now-deposed Iraqi leader expelled thousands of Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrians after the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent Kurdish uprising. Arabs were then moved into the emptied homes to redefine Kirkuk as a predominantly Arab city.
Odierno insisted the various ethnic communities have pledged to work together to put their common suffering under dictatorship behind them. Mayville’s fighters-turned-mediators have even negotiated a deal between Kurds and Arabs in the countryside to share the proceeds from this year’s harvest of contest crops planted by Arab farmers resettled on Kurdish land.
But the continuing presence of Saddam backers and the prevalence of weapons leave the troops and Kirkuk’s population vulnerable to provocations and to manipulation of social strains inflicted by Saddam’s application of demographic engineering.
A cut-to-the-chase kind of soldier, Mayville said he recognized as soon as his brigade arrived that there was no time to waste in waiting for the postwar reconstruction forces to restore essential services to a shell-shocked public.
“We saw that if we don’t fix these problems, they’re not gonna get fixed,’’ the colonel said of the broken water system, power failures, empty schools and workplaces.
While it wasn’t the troops’ responsibility to perform the civil engineering and administration tasks that have allowed some semblance of order to return here, Mayville said soldiers are used to doing what they are told and were a ready resource to stave off public anger over the disruptions. Most of the civil service that comprised as much as 70 percent of Iraq’s work force has gone unpaid for three months or longer. In Kirkuk, however, US troops began paying salaries last week to health care workers, teachers and, on Saturday, to the fledgling police force.
Mayville and Odierno sought to convince the assembled civic leaders that Kirkuk is relatively safe and ready for the next step on the road to democracy and freedom: An interim government to take over the public administration reins from the armed forces. The officers have invited about 300 politicians and professionals to gather in a week and choose a 24-member city council, a mayor, a deputy mayor and three assistants.
On Saturday, Odierno told a crowd of politicians and professionals, including some said to have been Saddam supporters, “It’s the coalition’s intention to make sure criminals and members of the Baath Party do not return to power.’’
The two-star general complimented Kirkuk residents on their “tolerance, cooperation and commitment to improvement of your city,’’ understating that “this is not happening everywhere.’’
It was at the mention of next Saturday’s planned convention that gunfire outside the building punctuated the general’s litany of civic successes that he attributed to the collaboration of US troops and Kirkuk’s multiethnic population.
