A New Sarajevo in The Making?

Sheik Hassan Assi could see that the burly Kurdish guerrilla leader was in no mood to bargain. The Kurd, he recalls, backed him against a wall and shook his forefinger, saying, "Shame on you, Sheik, for building a house on Kurdish land. You knew we would be back one day, even if it took us 100 years!" For Assi, an Arab, it was not just a house but a dream home, a resplendent country estate on the outskirts of Kirkuk, on which he had spent his life's fortune. The Kurd, Mohammed Abdullah, had moved into the house after the fall of Kirkuk in April, his original home nearby having been destroyed by Saddam Hussein's regime in the mid-1980s. "I told him it is sacrilegious to take someone's home," Assi says of the recent encounter as he stands outside his family's downsized new abode in downtown Kirkuk. "Then I offered that I should live in my house and he could build a new one alongside it. He refused."

Confrontations like these between Kurds and Arabs are threatening to make Kirkuk, Iraq's fifth largest city, the world's new Sarajevo, a site of ethnic cleansing and slaughter. Though Assi's encounter with Abdullah ended without bloodshed, at least two gun battles in the city have together left more than a dozen people dead. The trouble is rooted in Saddam's policy of moving fellow Arabs into the Kirkuk area to squeeze out the frequently rebellious native Kurds. The main objective was to secure Baghdad's control over Kirkuk's oil, which represents 6.4% of the world's known reserves. Now displaced Kurds are returning, sometimes routing the Arab settlers. Meanwhile, Kurdish political leaders are vowing to include the Kirkuk region, by force if necessary, in the area that they intend to continue governing autonomously in the new Iraq. Today the region's population of 1.5 million is composed of almost equal proportions of Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans.

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Though the Kurds were a key partner of the U.S. in ousting Saddam, American authorities oppose their efforts to run local Arabs out of town. "The people involved in Saddam's schemes — mostly Arabs — came here following economic incentives, and many of them moved into new homes they built themselves," says Colonel William C. Mayville Jr., the U.S. commander of coalition forces in Kirkuk. Says Britain's Emma Sky, director of the Coalition Provisional Authority in the city: "We are not here to ethnically cleanse any group. People should be able to choose where they live. These people were the pawns of Saddam's policy, not its architects." That said, coalition forces have not yet agreed to put the disheartened Sheik Hassan Assi — or others like him — back in his dream home.

Locals, in the meantime, are taking matters into their own hands. New Kurdish neighborhoods have sprung up in army barracks, government offices, Saddam's old intelligence headquarters, a youth center and beside Kirkuk's soccer stadium. A U.S. military officer says ethnic militias on all sides are adding to their already substantial arms caches. Local Turkomans, fearing domination by Kurds, have formed a new alliance with Kirkuk's Arabs. Aliya Chakmakchi, a Turkoman who works as a secretary for the U.S. Army in Kirkuk, voices a widespread fear: "If the U.S. leaves here, everyone will just murder each other."