Arab-Kurd tensions rise as US pulls out

MOSUL - It is called the "trigger line", a 480km-long swathe of disputed territory in northern Iraq where Arab and Kurdish soldiers confront each other, and which is at risk of turning into a battlefield.

Arabs and Kurds in Iraq have been getting closer to an all-out war over control of the oil-rich lands stretching from the borders of Syria in the west to Iran in the east.

The risk of armed conflict is acute because the zone in dispute is a mosaic of well-armed communities backed by regular forces. Kurdish and Arab soldiers here watch each other's movements with deepest suspicion in case the other side might attempt to establish new facts on the ground.

It is to avert a new armed conflict breaking out between the powerful military forces on both sides that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki travelled to Kurdistan for crisis talks last week with Kurdish leaders, Iraqi (Kurdish) President Jalal Talabani, and the President of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Massoud Barzani. Maliki and Barzani had not met for a year, during which time their exchanges were barbed and aggressive.

The 26th Brigade of the 7th Division of the Iraqi Army, an Arab unit, recently tried to move from Diyala province northeast of Baghdad through Makhmur, to reach the mainly Sunni Arab city of Mosul.

Fearful this might be a Baghdad government land-grab for Makhmur, Kurdish civilians blocked the road. Khasro Goran, a senior member of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), says the Army advance would have been resisted if it had gone on.

"Our forces had taken up positions on higher ground and if the Iraqi Army brigade had come on, they were under orders to open fire."

President Barack Obama's administration is alarmed by the prospect of Iraq splitting apart just as the US pulls its troops out. But Washington can also see the danger of becoming more deeply enmeshed in the Arab-Kurdish conflict.

US withdrawal also frightens the Kurds, the one Iraqi community that supported the US-led invasion. They can see the political and military balance is swinging against them just as they are faced by Maliki's rejuvenated Iraqi Government commanding the increasingly confident 600,000-strong Iraqi security forces.

A report by the International Crisis Group concluded recently that "without the glue that US troops have provided, Iraqi political actors are otherwise likely to fight all along the trigger line following a withdrawal, emboldened by a sense that they can prevail, if necessary, with outside help."

Anti-Kurdish feeling is running high in the rest of Iraq, as is fear of Iraqi Arab revanchism in Kurdistan. Ethnic and sectarian hatred is strongest in the disputed territories where different communities live side by side.

Asked about the prospect of an Arab-Kurdish civil war, people from Mosul say that for them it started six years ago. Some 2000 Kurds from the city have been killed and another 100,000 have fled.

In the latest election, the anti-Kurdish al-Hadba party won and its leader, Atheel al-Najafi, is the new provincial governor, though this does not mean he can enter Kurdish areas. When he tried, on May 8, to enter Bashiqa, a Yazidi-Chaldean town on the main road from Mosul to Arbil, at the head of a convoy of 40 police cars, Kurdish peshmerga said they would shoot to kill if he tried to go on.

Moderation is not in fashion along the trigger line. At Altun-Kupri, a Kurdish-Turkoman town which occupies an important position on the road between Arbil and Kirkuk, an Iraqi Army patrol had suddenly appeared in town and local Kurds and Kurdish police immediately took to the streets to protest.

Violence was only averted because the battalion commander, now sacked for his moderation, ignored orders from his high command to open fire.

In the disputed areas, people say they will fight for dilapidated villages and infertile stretches of semi-desert which hardly seem worth dying for. But the land here is more valuable than it looks.

One of the reasons for sensitivity about the exact position of the border separating Arabs from Kurds is that the disputed territories lie on top of Iraq's northern oil and gas fields centred on Kirkuk. The forays by the Iraqi Army towards Makhmur and Altun Kupri had extra significance for the Kurds because both towns are so close to these oilfields.

Differences over Kirkuk, the disputed territories and control of oil run too deep to resolve quickly, but after his long-delayed meeting with Kurdish leaders, Maliki needs at least to stop a further escalation of the Arab-Kurdish conflict.

REBELLIOUS PAST: IRAQI KURDS

* The Iraqi Kurds started revolting in 1919 after the British had seized what was to become modern Iraq. The British wanted to include Kurdistan in Iraq to create a defensible military line for the new country.

* From 1960-1975, the Kurds rebelled under the leadership of Mullah Barzani. Saddam Hussein defeated them in 1975 when he convinced the Shah of Iran to abandon his support for the Iraqi Kurds.

* Resistance resumed in 1980 when Hussein invaded Iran. In the al-Anfal punishment campaign in 1988, the Iraqi Army massacred 180,000 Kurds and destroyed 3500 out of 4000 villages.

* Days after Iraq's defeat in Kuwait in 1991, the Kurds, under Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, recaptured most of Kurdistan. An Iraqi counter-attack led to US protection.

* The Kurds established an autonomous enclave but fought a civil war. In 2003 they captured Kirkuk and Mosul and areas with a Kurdish majority before ethnic cleansing.

- INDEPENDENT