Where Iraq Works

(2 of 2)

When I first traveled to the Kurdish North in August of 2004 to escape the heat and violence of Baghdad, the so-called "Switzerland of Iraq" was disappointing in just one respect: summers on the high plains of Erbil are almost as scorching. Otherwise, Kurdistan was a refuge. In Baghdad, journalists had begun hiring security entourages and erecting guarded compounds. Up north in Erbil, as a visiting American, I was practically given keys to the city. I did my reporting by foot or hailed taxis from the street, spent my evenings in beer gardens or pizza parlors, and slept on the roof of my apartment with the sound of crickets rather than Kalashnikovs in the cooling night air.

Since then the differences between Kurdistan and Iraq proper have become even more dramatic. The plains around Erbil—once a glaring semidesert wasteland—are exploding with luxury housing developments, such as a "British Village" that looks like a gated California suburb, and Dream City, which will supposedly have its own conference center, supermarket and American-style school. The Turkish developers of Naz City, a high-rise condominium complex, are trying to sell house-proud Kurds on modern apartment living. An American company wants to build Iraq's first ski resort in the mountains near the Turkish and Iranian borders. While citizens in Baghdad struggle to survive, a sign in Erbil declares that the city is "Striving for Perfection."

The Kurds' most important achievement has been to keep their region free of Iraq's insurgency and sectarian warfare with their army of 70,000 peshmerga soldiers. Not a single American soldier has been killed in Kurdistan since the start of the war in Iraq, and there hasn't been a major terrorist attack in Erbil since June 2005.

Take a walk, however, in any one of this city's safe and prosperous neighborhoods and you'll quickly see that the other Iraq isn't so far away. Some 150,000 displaced Iraqi Arabs have taken refuge in Kurdistan from the conflict in the central and southern parts of the country. Kurdish officials require Arab Iraqis trying to enter Kurdistan to have a Kurdish resident vouch for their character. As a result, the Arab refugee population is largely middle class, with a glut of doctors, lawyers and other professionals. But as the number of newcomers swells, tensions are rising. Not many Kurds forget the years of repression from Iraq's Arab majority, and many now blame Arabs for rising home prices. While I was waiting to speak to the president of Salahaddin University in Erbil, which recently added around 200 Arab professors to its faculty, a visiting Kurdish archeologist offered his expert opinion on the subject: "From Muhammad until now, Arabs are rotten to the bone," he said. "Even when they are being friendly to you." Non-Kurdish Iraqis, for their part, resent being treated as second-class citizens in Kurdish Iraq. "Why do I need permission to live in my own country?" said Walaa Matti, an Assyrian Christian who recently fled his home in Mosul and now works in the business center of a hotel in Erbil. "I'm Iraqi and this is my country, but I feel like a stranger."

Kurdistan's tenuous relationship with Arab Iraq is even more evident some 75 km south, in Kirkuk. The city is less than a two-hour drive from Erbil, but the road trip into the other Iraq is a spooky one. To the left, there's a chain of forts left over from the Iran-Iraq war, crumbling masonry monsters that look like they were built according to World War I specifications. The Hamreen mountains to the right are practically deserted save for a series of sentry posts silhouetted along the ridgeline. And waiting straight ahead at the gates of Kirkuk is a natural-gas flare, an eternal flame that the locals call Babagurgur—which is the symbol of this oil-rich city.

Kirkuk, with its mixed population of Kurds, Arabs and Turkomans, has long had the potential to be a sectarian powder keg. Under Saddam's Baathist regime, the Iraqi government forced out a large number of the city's majority Kurdish population, and resettled the city with Arabs from the south. Now ethnic tensions have flared as Kurds are demanding the return of Kirkuk to their control. The day I visited last month, a series of two car bombs and three roadside bombs killed 18 people. On April 1, at least 15 people died in a suicide truck bombing.

The violence in this city of about a million people hasn't reached a level comparable to Baghdad. Infrastructure and services in the city are functional by Iraqi standards, no thanks to the central government, which delays projects by sheer inertia, say U.S. and Kurdish officials. Such neglect may soon reach a crisis point in Kirkuk. The Iraqi constitution calls for the city to hold a referendum by year's end on whether or not it should remain under control of the central Iraqi government in Baghdad or become part of Iraqi Kurdistan.

U.S. officials and Kurdish leaders know that unilateral moves by Kurds—to take Kirkuk on their own or to drop out of the Iraqi government—could not only provoke the ire of Iraq's Arab majority but also impel intervention by neighbors of Iraq such as Turkey, Iran and Syria that have restive Kurdish minorities of their own. Falah Mustafa Bakir, head of the Kurdish government's office of foreign relations, told me that declaring independence would be "political suicide." Just four years since the fall of Saddam, most Kurds may be willing to remain a part of Iraq for now, but few want their destinies to remain tied to a poor, failing state beset by sectarian carnage. Over time, the push for a free and independent Kurdistan may become irresistible. In a bid to manage expectations, the Kurdish leadership has introduced a new slogan, echoed in mosques and newspaper editorials: "Be Grateful." But eventually even gratitude runs out.