KIRKUK, Iraq: Minutes after a suicide bomber killed 25 people, hundreds of angry Kurds stormed the headquarters of an ethnic Turkish group in this northern Iraqi city and torched the building and nearby parked cars.
The Kurds blamed Turkmens, the city’s ethnic Turkish minority, for the bombing. Weeks later, the husks of eight burned out cars bear witness to the ferocity of emotions generated by the crisis over who will run Kirkuk, the center of Iraq’s northern oil fields.
The fate of Kirkuk, where an estimated 850,000 Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs uneasily coexist, is a litmus test for the ability of Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian leaders to compromise on critical issues. At stake is the country’s ability to preserve its recent decline in violence with genuine national reconciliation.
“Kirkuk is a test case for a stable Iraq,” Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Friday. “If Kirkuk remains stable, Iraq will become more stable. If Kirkuk blows up, Iraq might fracture along ethnic and sectarian lines.” The Kurds want to annex Kirkuk and surrounding Tamim province into their self-ruled region in northern Iraq.
Most Turkmens and Arabs want the province to remain under central government control, fearing the Kurds would discriminate against them.
But for the Kurds, who consider Kirkuk their ancestral capital, no issue is more important than gaining control of the province.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region has agreed to withdraw troops from a neighboring Iraqi province and hand over security in the area to forces of the central government, a Kurdish official said.
Kurdish officials have struck an agreement with the central government in Baghdad to withdraw the 4,000 Kurdish troops, known as Peshmerga, from restive Diyala province over the next 10 days, said Jaffar Mustafa, Kurdistan’s Peshmerga minister.
The Peshmerga, who evolved from guerrilla cadres fighting against Saddam Hussein into the official security force of the Kurdish autonomous region, have been patrolling ethnically Kurdish parts of Diyala for more than a year. Diyala remains one of the bloodiest areas of Iraq at a time when overall violence in the country has declined sharply.
At least 9 people were killed and 40 others wounded when a car bomb ripped through a bus station in the district of Balad in Saladdin province, a police source said yesterday. The victims were believed to have been heading to the holy city of Karbala to mark the Al-Ziyara Al-Shaabaniya or the mid of Shaaban visit pilgrimage today.
In Kerbala, security measures were tightened in preparation for the occasion in which millions of pilgrims from Iraq and neighboring countries are expected to pour into the city 110 kilometers southwest of Baghdad.
A total ban on the movement of cars has been in effect since Friday, security officials said. A total of 40,000 security personnel will be deployed.
Hundreds of policewomen to search and deal with female pilgrims have been deployed to all checkpoints inside and outside of the city.
