A knowl­edge­able friend who was in Kirkuk a few weeks ago wrote in to tell me that the Kurds — and other polit­i­cal par­ties such as the Turko­man Front — had been fly­ing their flags since at least the begin­ning of August. Three days ago, when the Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity instructed the flags be taken down, Kurds pelted U.S. sol­diers with stones. The CPA soon reversed itself, the rea­son for the pre­vi­ous entry.
As my friend wrote: “When I was there [in early August], the city was FILLED with Kur­dish flags. It is truly unbe­liev­able, and quite beau­ti­ful. Every sin­gle build­ing had a Kur­dis­tan flag fly­ing. Many walls had Kur­dish flags painted on them. Even the light­posts had Kur­dish flags painted on them.“
The fla­grant flag fly­ing was news to me. I had heard from friends in the area that the Iraqi flag (minus Saddam’s post-1991 Ara­bic addi­tions) had been fly­ing since the early sum­mer or so. In fact, when I was there in April on the day of Kirkuk’s lib­er­a­tion, there were many old-style Iraqi flags being waved about — in addi­tion to the polit­i­cal par­ties’ flags. When did the Kurds and oth­ers begin putting up their own flags? I don’t know.
Any­way, the deci­sion to let the Kurds wave their ban­ner high in Kirkuk seems to be a revert­ing to the sta­tus quo, although one that I still think is decid­edly shaky. Regard­less of the valid­ity of the Kurds’ claims on Kirkuk (and I think they’re pretty damn valid), flaunt­ing the Kur­dish nature of the city in the face of Turkey and its Turko­man brethren is ask­ing for trou­ble.
Any­way, this flag lag reveals a source of major frus­tra­tion for me. My sources com­mu­ni­cate too slowly to allow for time­li­ness. Try­ing to parse Kur­dish and Ara­bic English-language media over the net is a bit of a fool’s game. In short, there’s no good way to cover Iraq from New York, and I have no way to get to Iraq any time soon.