ARBIL, Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — Inter­views with fig­ures of author­ity (FOA) in this region fol­low a pretty stan­dard pat­tern. You greet them, shake their hands and then you sit down. Then you explain what you’d like to talk about. What fol­lows is a 15 – 20 minute state­ment by the FOA bro­ken up by the trans­la­tor who never works quite quickly enough for the statement-maker, so only about every other block of speech is fully trans­lated.
After this state­ment, which is orga­nized like a col­lege term paper with points and sub-points and full of ver­bal sub­head­ings like, “Con­cern­ing the Turkomen’s posi­tion in Kirkuk.…”, then I can ask ques­tions. Inter­rup­tions or ques­tions are not tol­er­ated in the open­ing state­ment (“let me fin­ish, please,” the FOA says when I attempt to get in a ques­tion.)
This hap­pens every time, and yesterday’s chat with Kanan Shakir Uzeyrag Ali, the head of the Turkomen Inde­pen­dent Move­ment, one of the three par­ties mak­ing up the Iraqi Turkomen Front, was no excep­tion. The pres­i­dent of the Front, Sanan Ahmet Aga, was unavail­able, despite my 11 a.m. appoint­ment.
“Our God, Allah, can do things in sec­onds, but he chose to cre­ate the world in six days,” said Salim Otrakchi, a polit­i­cal advi­sor to Aga. “If you have to wait a few hours to see the pres­i­dent, you must be patient.“
Well, I got Ali instead, which was just as well, as he was the Turkomen rep­re­sen­ta­tive at the Kirkuk meet­ing on Fri­day that also included U.S. Gen. Baker and rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the PUK and KDP. The topic was the gov­ern­ing of Kirkuk, which Ali said was a Turkomen city.
Sort­ing out the com­pet­ing claims on Kirkuk and other cities in Iraq is dif­fi­cult. There hasn’t been an offi­cial Iraqi cen­sus since 1957 and pop­u­la­tion num­bers have been manip­u­lated over the years to suit the Ba’athish regime’s pur­poses. Also, Kirkuk has been heav­ily Ara­bized, with Turkomen and Kurds expelled from the city and sur­round­ing vil­lages to make way for Arabs from the south. Because of such forced demo­graphic changes and the age of the city, at the moment, no one can say — hon­estly — who has a greater his­tor­i­cal claim on the city. How far back should the claims go? The only thing that is sure, con­cern­ing Kirkuk, is that its oil fields and refiner­ies would be a plum to whichever eth­nic group — Arabs, Kurds or Turkomen — that con­trolled it.
Throw­ing more gaso­line on this oil fire is the threat of the Turks to invade if the Kurds do any­thing to alter the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the pop­u­la­tion of Kirkuk. That means if the Kurds allow the tens of thou­sands of fam­i­lies Ara­bized out of their homes since the 1920s — and the Anfal cam­paign of 1987 – 88 in par­tic­u­lar — to return, Turkey will see that as the cross­ing of a red line and send in its approx­i­mately 15,000 troops massed on the bor­der to the north.
None of this mat­ters to Ali, who por­trays the Turkomen as an oppressed minor­ity in the Kur­dish area of Iraq, who can depend on no one but their Turk­ish broth­ers to the north.
Ali said the Turkomen felt betrayed by the United States when the PUK pesh­mer­gas flowed into the city on Thurs­day, lib­er­at­ing it from Sad­dam with lit­tle blood­shed. Before order was more or less restored by a com­bined Kur­dish and Amer­i­can pres­ence, there was wide­spread loot­ing. Noth­ing like the sav­agery in Mosul, mind you, which hap­pened because the main pesh­merga forces were kept out of that city and the U.S. mil­i­tary felt secur­ing the oil fields was more impor­tant than fill­ing the power vac­uum left by the Iraqi V Corps’ van­ish­ing act. There’s a grow­ing sense of resent­ment among all eth­nic par­ties toward the U.S. because of this fail­ure to pro­vide basic secu­rity in the wake of Saddam’s ouster.
But back to Kirkuk, Ali told me that Turkomen had been tar­geted for crimes and human rights vio­la­tions.
“We have 200 doc­u­ments that show Turkomen peo­ple were robbed,” he said. “The peo­ple who have suf­fered the most are the Turkomen. Any time there is some sit­u­a­tion, the vic­tim was Turkomen.“
I asked him how this com­pared to rob­bery reports by Kurds or Arabs or even Assyr­i­ans. He said he had no idea, as they went to their own peo­ple. How do you know there weren’t 500 rob­beries of Kur­dish peo­ple or 1,000 assaults on Assyr­i­ans, I asked. Is the vio­lence against the Turkomen tar­geted or are they just get­ting caught up in the gen­eral chaos? “This point is clear,” he added. “The Turkomen are not armed peo­ple. And the peo­ple steal­ing from them are armed peo­ple.“
This claim of Turkomen paci­fism is, frankly, hard to believe. Prac­ti­cally every man in this coun­try owns some kind of firearm. Most men in the ITF office where I inter­viewed Ali car­ried a sidearm or a Kalish­nikov.
Ali said the meet­ing Thurs­day was pro­duc­tive in that Gen. Baker asked the Turkomen to take part in the secu­rity of the city, but he said the Turkomen, who have an aver­sion to guns, remem­ber, would not be able to help until secu­rity was guar­an­teed by — surprise! — the Turks.
“Our peo­ple are sit­ting in their homes and they are hav­ing their fam­i­lies taken cap­tive and their fur­ni­ture taken,” he said. “How can he be a sol­dier? We are ready to help, but other mil­i­tary peo­ple are com­ing to cap­ture us. We don’t know who they are.“
Hm. Anony­mous thugs tak­ing advan­tage of the chaos and ter­ror­iz­ing fam­i­lies I would buy. The impli­ca­tion that this is the Kurds’ fault or that Kurds them­selves are doing it is a lit­tle more prob­lem­atic. The trans­la­tor embell­ished her boss’ words with the the lovely detail that the thugs wore the green and yel­low rib­bons of the PUK and KDP, respec­tively, but Ali cor­rected her and said that wasn’t the case. So some Turkomen, at least, are will­ing to blame the Kurds.
The ITF demands these for­eign mili­tia and pesh­mer­gas removed from Kirkuk, Ali said, and it wants a shared admin­is­tra­tion of the city, includ­ing Turks, Kurds, Arabs and Assyr­i­ans. The idea, he said, is to have an admin­is­tra­tion based on pro­por­tional rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Kirkuk.
And here we come to the crux of the mat­ter. If the Turkomen can use the threat of Turk­ish inter­ven­tion to pres­sure the Kurds into pre­vent­ing the Kur­dish refugees — most of them cur­rently liv­ing in squalor in camps such as Bin­is­lawa out­side Arbil — from return­ing to their old homes, Turkomen num­bers won’t be diluted and their power in Kirkuk’s gov­ern­ment — and their share of the oil rev­enue — will be that much greater.
To accom­plish this, the Turkomen must claim oppres­sion at the hands of the Kurds in the Kur­dish enclave in the north.
“We have suf­fered under all peo­ple,” Ali said. “The Turkomen suf­fered under the KDP, polit­i­cally, secu­rity and cul­tur­ally.“
How so, I asked. In Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, the Turkomen have a news­pa­per, a radio sta­tion, a tele­vi­sion sta­tion (one of the biggest build­ings in town with a huge satel­lite dish on the top) their own schools, the right to speak their lan­guage, three polit­i­cal par­ties and rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the Kur­dis­tan Regional Government’s par­lia­ment. The Turkomen in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan have more cul­tural and polit­i­cal rights than the Kurds do in Turkey. What more do you want, I asked.
“These rights are the orig­i­nal rights of all peo­ple,” he said. “They are given from God. Other peo­ple don’t grant these rights. Arabs and Kurds have not power to grant these rights. We get these rights from our activ­i­ties. A con­sti­tu­tion would be help­ful.“
I asked for spe­cific exam­ples of how their rights have been vio­lated. The ITF has not been rec­og­nized, Ali said, and isn’t offi­cial. (But the three Turkomen par­ties that make up the ITF each have par­lia­men­tary rep­re­sen­ta­tion.) Their reporters for the var­i­ous media can’t leave the build­ing and inter­view peo­ple on the street (Not true, I’ve watched Turkomen TV and they go out and inter­view peo­ple.) The Kur­dish gov­ern­ment offi­cials won’t talk to their reporters (Well, some­times they won’t talk to me; that’s the breaks.)
Their chief of secu­rity, Amir Azad, was arrested two months ago, Ali said, and they only now were able to send him a lawyer. “We are ready to give you a dossier about it,” he said.
“Great!” I said. “I’d like to see it.“
Then some dis­cus­sion in Turkomen fol­lowed. “Oh, we have filed it with Kofi Anan at the United Nations. You can read it there.“
And then, after list­ing this litany of wrongs done to the Turkomen, Ali reversed him­self.
“But we want to for­get all and start a new page,” he said. “We don’t want to speak of past times.“
As a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a peo­ple who have allegedly suf­fered so much from the Kurds, Ali seemed awfully quick to put all these years behind them. His stated desire to move on rep­re­sents either a saint-like abil­ity to for­give, or a recog­ni­tion that Turkomen claims are exag­ger­ated.
PS: While I was typ­ing this, it appears Tikrit has fallen with­out a fight. We’re head­ing there now.

ARBIL, Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — Now that the war seems to be wind­ing down, the long knives of eth­nic pol­i­tics are com­ing out. Glad to see no one is wast­ing any time!
In Kirkuk today, rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan, the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party, the Iraqi Turkomen Front and the Amer­i­cans are meet­ing to thrash out how the city and the region will be gov­erned once the PUK com­pletes the pull­out of its pesh­mer­gas from the city. Units from the Amer­i­can 173^rd Air­borne will be tak­ing over to pro­vide order and dis­cour­age the kind of loot­ing tak­ing place in Mosul today.
The loot­ing in Mosul seemed much worse than what hap­pened yes­ter­day in Kirkuk. I bumped into Philip Robert­son, of Salon​.com, who asked me if the Amer­i­cans were mov­ing into Mosul. I said I didn’t know.
“Well, they bet­ter get there fast before they start shoot­ing each other,” he said.
The issue of secu­rity is a tricky one, as Turkey is using the issue of the safety of the Turkomen minor­ity in each city to jus­tify a mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in north­ern Iraq. So far, the Turks’ response has been to send some “mil­i­tary observers” — basically a bunch of offi­cers, near as I can tell — to Kirkuk, but they have thou­sands of heav­ily armed troops perched north of the bor­der and just inside Iraq ready to swoop south. To the Kurds, this is just more of the Turks being the Turks.
“This is not the first time they have done this,” said Anawar Omer, 32, a laborer I spoke with in Arbil’s Shekhul­lah dis­trict, one of the major mar­ket areas. “They are the ene­mies of the Kurds and they want us to be noth­ing. Kirkuk is Kur­dis­tan. It belongs to Kurds and it will always be that way.“
“We will kill the Turks if they come inside,” added Mahdi Kasab, a 30-year-old butcher stand­ing nearby. “Each of us will kill six Turks if they come here.“
But the bel­li­cos­ity of the Kur­dish masses aside, the pol­i­tics are as dan­ger­ous as any of the hun­dreds of mine­fields dot­ting the region.
“Kirkuk is del­i­cate,” said Sadi Ahmed Pire, with the PUK inter­na­tional rela­tions office and chief PUK rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Arbil. “We have to be care­ful not to make any mis­takes.“
Which brings us back to this meet­ing, which I’m sure is a big headache for the Amer­i­cans try­ing to bring this region to heel. The agenda is to bring order to Kirkuk — set­ting up traf­fic police, a tem­po­rary mayor, cur­fews — with­out com­pro­mis­ing anyone’s “inter­ests.“
But “everyone’s” inter­ests seem too con­tra­dic­tory to be rec­on­ciled. The Kurds claim Kirkuk as theirs, both for his­tor­i­cal rea­sons — the valid­ity of which I’m not even going to try to untan­gle — and eco­nomic rea­sons. The Kirkuk oil fields are some of the rich­est in Iraq, and if the Kurds were able to exploit them, their 12-year-old exper­i­ment in self-government in the north would start to look a whole lot more viable as an inde­pen­dent state.
The Turks, how­ever, see this as a direct threat to their secu­rity, both because the Kur­dish Work­ers’ Party (PKK) used north­ern Iraq as a base dur­ing its 15-year war with Turkey that left more than 30,000 civil­ians dead, and because Turkey fears an uppity Iraqi Kur­dis­tan would encour­age its own 12 mil­lion or so Kurds to rebel.
“We are con­cerned about the Turk­ish posi­tion,” said Pire. “They have no right to have a doubt about the future of the area. I can­not explain why they have sus­pi­cions about a free life for the Iraqi peo­ple.“
And the Turkomen? What’s their angle? The Iraqi Turkomen Front and its pres­i­dent, Sanan Ahmet Aga, say they just want equal rights for their peo­ple, secu­rity and a seat at the polit­i­cal table. And the best way to get that, they feel, is to appeal to their eth­nic broth­ers the Turks to cud­gel the Kurds. This way, they can grab more polit­i­cal power than their num­bers would nor­mally allow. (Pop­u­la­tion num­bers are pretty fuzzy, con­sid­er­ing the last offi­cial Iraqi cen­sus was in 1957 and the Ba’athist regime rou­tinely used fuzzy math for its own polit­i­cal agenda — hm — but I’ve heard esti­mates of the Turkomen pop­u­la­tion that range between 2 per­cent and 12 per­cent of Iraq’s pop­u­la­tion — 500,000 to 3 mil­lion peo­ple.)
Like­wise, the Turks can use the image of the oppressed Turkomen, cow­er­ing behind their doors in the face of mor­tal threat from bar­baric pesh­mer­gas and in need of Turk­ish pro­tec­tion, as a rea­son for them to main­tain a mil­i­tary pres­ence in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan.
The Kurds, of course, are hav­ing none of that. “Turkey is a regional power and they have inter­ests and they are mis­us­ing the issue [of the Turkomen] to express their inter­ests,” said Pire. “The Turks speak of the Turkomen. But what hap­pened to the Turkomen in Kirkuk? They weren’t tar­geted.“
As near as I could observe, Pire’s right on this one. The loot­ing I wit­nessed yes­ter­day in Kirkuk was pretty equal-opportunity. Homes weren’t being looted; gov­ern­ment build­ings and shop­ping cen­ters were. A cou­ple of times I saw a kids car­ry­ing tables or other office fur­ni­ture while sport­ing the crescent-moon-and-stars-on-blue flag of the Iraqi Turkomen Front. They didn’t look too wor­ried about their safety.
“Turkey,” he said, “is poi­son­ing the atmos­phere with their behav­ior.“
But to hear the Turkomen talk, per­ils lurk every­where for them.
“We are in dan­ger from the pesh­mer­gas,” said Salim Otrakchi, a polit­i­cal advi­sor to Iraqi Turkomen Front pres­i­dent Aga. “Al Jazeera and Ara­bia TV show them tak­ing all the money from the bank in Mosul.“
The ITF wants the Turks to come in, for rea­sons detailed above, but wor­ries that a small con­tin­gent of Turk­ish offi­cers won’t be enough.
“We are for any admin­is­tra­tion that keeps peo­ple safe,” said Otrakchi. “But if the Amer­i­cans can’t do it, let another power do it. The Amer­i­cans are not pre­pared for this kind of work.“
He 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.
I asked Otrakchi if the rea­son for Turkomen fears in Kirkuk and Mosul was the Kurds or the gen­eral dis­or­der. Were Turkomen being tar­geted by any­one? Why were they deserv­ing of spe­cial pro­tec­tion?
“Our peo­ple fear the power groups,” he said. “And the pesh­mer­gas have the power. No other group has power. This power is not being used to keep peo­ple secure.“
I said I saw many Kurds and Turkomen together in the park in Kirkuk pulling down the statue. And that I didn’t think pesh­mer­gas were actu­ally in Mosul, that reports have said they stopped just out­side the city while the Iraqi defend­ers melted away. It was the lack of pesh­mer­gas — or any other author­ity — that led to the loot­ing in Mosul turn­ing sav­age, if the pic­tures are to be believed. Again, aren’t the Kurds just as threat­ened by dis­or­der and riots as Turkomen?
He asked me to make an appoint­ment and talk to his pres­i­dent on Sat­ur­day morn­ing. So I did. Maybe then I’ll get a straight answer.