Three Turkomen were shot dead in eth­nic vio­lence in Kirkuk on Sat­ur­day, end­ing months of rel­a­tive calm in the Kur­dish region of Iraq. It’s unclear exactly what’s hap­pen­ing, but that seems to have been the cap on two days of vio­lence in Kirkuk and Tuz Khar­mato to the south, with at least 10 peo­ple being killed, some of them at the hands of Amer­i­can troops. The Asso­ci­ated Press reports that in addi­tion to police shoot­ings, artillery or mor­tar fire “rocked” the city on Sat­ur­day.
While a sin­gle week­end does not an internecine con­flict make, the fall­out has reached Ankara, where a “mob” of about 100 Turks attacked the office of the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan there. Kur​dish​Me​dia​.com reports that about 23 Turk­ish police offi­cers and a num­ber of pro­test­ers were injured in the melee.
“Kirkuk is Turk­ish and it will remain Turk­ish,” shouted the pro­test­ers. “Damn Tal­a­bani, damn the pesh­merga.” (Jalal Tal­a­bani is the Secretary-General of the PUK.)
In Kirkuk, the Turk­men rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the interim Iraqi Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil called for the Kirkuk police to be dis­armed.
All this is hap­pen­ing as the Mid­dle East Newsline reports that Turkey will con­tribute 10,000 troops to patrol the Sunni Tri­an­gle extend­ing west and north of Bagh­dad. They will remain under Turk­ish com­mand and sep­a­rate from the two inter­na­tional divi­sions rumored to be en route to Iraq.
This is most alarm­ing. I wrote, dur­ing the war, that I felt the Turkomen were cry­ing wolf about the threat to their secu­rity in a bid to play Turkey and the United States off one another so as to reign in the Kurds when it came time to estab­lish a gov­ern­ment in Kirkuk.

[Salim Otrakchi, a Turko­man spokesman] said the Turkomen were espe­cially wor­ried about Kirkuk because the PUK had promised it would not go into the city with its forces and it did any­way.
At this point, it’s prob­a­bly a good idea just to tell you that I don’t believe what any­one is telling me at face value. The Kurds, deep in their hearts, really do want an inde­pen­dent Kur­dis­tan and this talk of fed­er­al­ism is the prac­ti­cal side of Kur­dish nation­al­ism. If they thought they could get away with it, they would bolt Iraq and never look back, I think. The Turkomen don’t really feel that threat­ened, but they see the Kurds with their new bud­dies, the Amer­i­cans, and worry they’ll be left out of any set­tle­ment and devel­op­ment plans in the north. So, they’re try­ing to play the Turks off the Amer­i­cans to keep the Kurds in check. And the Turks … Well, actu­ally, I believe them when they say they’re wor­ried about their secu­rity. They’re a truly para­noid bunch.

While this may be an iso­lated inci­dent, as I men­tioned, I could also be wrong in my orig­i­nal thoughts on the sub­ject. I watched with dis­may as in the days fol­low­ing the cap­ture of Bagh­dad and Kirkuk as the Kurds drove Arabs from land they felt had been taken from them under Sad­dam Hussein’s Ara­biza­tion pro­gram. Revenge was being taken and the U.S. wasn’t doing enough to stop it.
Well, now the U.S. has its hands full with the Sunni Tri­an­gle and the guer­rilla fight­ers there. Most of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan has had but a sprin­kling of Amer­i­can troops with most of the secu­rity being pro­vided by Kur­dish forces. Per­haps long-simmering ten­sions are start­ing to boil over after a bru­tally hot sum­mer.
I hope not. But — and I apol­o­gize for again refer­ring back to myself — as I wrote on Jan. 12, 2003:

Instead of a nice, clean occu­pa­tion that results in the first Arab democ­racy — and a net­work of Army bases from which to project power through­out the region — I pre­dict the United States will have years of guerilla insur­gency from nation­al­is­tic Iraqis (some of the fiercest nation­al­ism in the Arab world), the dirty job of sup­press­ing Kur­dish and Shi’ite inde­pen­dence move­ments and Sunni power grabs, the prob­lem of al Qai’da slip­ping across the bor­ders (with the help of Iran and sym­pa­thetic Saudis) into the coun­try to stike at Amer­i­can troops and med­dling in Iraq’s inter­nal affairs by Turkey, Iran, Saudi Ara­bia and Rus­sia. And don’t for­get the resent­ment in the region that will occur when the United States begins exploit­ing the Iraqi oil fields for its own pur­poses. No one will like that, least of all the Iraqis.

So far, it appears only the last pre­dic­tion hasn’t come to pass. Let’s hope this lat­est inci­dent isn’t the start of some­thing far worse.