You can see Kurdistan from where they stand
Iraq's Human chess pieces
Kurds are moved in and Arabs are forced out in a gambit to control oil-rich Kirkuk
By Bay Fang
KIRKUK, IRAQ--Asad Rashid sits in a sweltering tent on the city's outskirts and wipes his eyes with a dusty hand. Pretty soon, he must move back here, to a city he and other Kurds fled in the face of Saddam Hussein's wrath in 1991. But rather than being excited by the prospect, Rashid is unhappy. For much of the past 13 years, he has been on the move from one camp to another. Now, he is 61 and has a home for his family in government housing on the edge of Sulaymaniyah, one of the two main cities in the Kurdish-administered region. A week ago, officials came to the community and told residents they must move back to Kirkuk, to this resettlement camp. "They said they would move our ration cards to Kirkuk next week," he says. "They said, 'You're Kurds from Kirkuk--isn't it your dream to go back to your homeland?' "
For years, Kirkuk has been just that for the Kurds--a dream. They think of this city as the capital of an imagined Kurdistan, a storied homeland stretching through parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. For decades, though, the Iraqi regime under Saddam practiced ethnic cleansing in this city, which sits atop vast oil reserves, expelling Kurds, Turkmen, and Assyrians and replacing them with ethnic Arabs. Since 1968, Kurdish leaders say, some 250,000 Kurds have been forced out of Kirkuk, as Saddam sought to solidify Baghdad's grip on his northern oil territory and to thwart Kurdish aspirations for independence.
Now, they're coming back. In the past month, since being unyoked from its American overseers, the Kurdish government has been quietly pushing Kirkuki Kurds back into the city. Their aim is to ensure a favorable ethnic balance before the start of a national census on October 12 and a planned referendum on Kirkuk's future, in early 2005. The goal is to make it, like it or not, a Kurdish city.
But with this huge population shift come equally huge problems. Thousands of Arab families were booted off their property in Kirkuk after the war. And while some have moved away, many resettled in camps and abandoned buildings south and west of the city. With an uncertain future, and feeling stripped of their rights, they could explode into violence at any time. "Let's just say that the recruiting efforts of insurgents have not been hurt at all by this," says Col. Scott Leith of the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division, who oversees coalition activity in the predominantly Arab part of the region. "There is already the perception that the Kurds have taken more than their right."
