Kirkuk could be key to invasion

Just a 30-minute drive from this isolated checkpoint, beyond Iraqi troops and artillery deployed on a rocky ridge, lies a city that could make or break a U.S. intervention in Iraq. Kirkuk may even be one of the first stops for American troops.

The northern Iraqi city's importance was first hinted at in the Old Testament. The reference, some Middle East scholars believe, was to the endless flame from Kirkuk's natural gas, a clue to oil deposits discovered about 2,500 years later that give modern Iraq its economic and strategic importance.

But protecting Iraq's oil wells to ensure that President Saddam Hussain's forces don't destroy them, as they did Kuwait's rigs before withdrawing from that country in 1991, is only one reason that U.S. troops may deploy in this city. More important, say U.S. officials and Iraqi dissidents, is its ethnic makeup.

Kirkuk is a city of about 900,000 people with conflicting claims on the land. Rivalries are so deep that any scramble for the city could become a war within a war - with Iraqis fighting among themselves to claim it, potentially dragging in neighbouring countries. "Taking Baghdad will determine the outcome of the war. Sorting out Kirkuk will determine what happens afterward," predicted a senior U.S. official.

Between 120,000 and 200,000 Kurds, as well as Turkomans and Assyrians, have been expelled from Kirkuk since 1991, according to UN officials and a recent Human Rights Watch report. Tens of thousands were forced out in earlier decades.

Most were dumped at this lonely checkpoint, where Kurdish guards man a small cement shelter, or two other crossing points into the northern Iraqi enclave known as Kurdistan. And most are still waiting near here to reclaim their seized land, homes and possessions turned over to Arabs during Hussain's rule and to bring Kirkuk back under Kurdish control.

"Kirkuk is the embodiment of the Kurds' suffering in Iraq. It's the place of the most brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, which continues to this day," said Barham Salih of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, which controls this checkpoint and half the Kurdish enclave that has gained self-rule since 1991 under protection from U.S. and British warplanes.

"For Iraq to be peaceful and rid of its terrible past, any new government has to redress the injuries of the people of Kirkuk," said Salih, prime minister in the eastern sector of Kurdistan.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution warned that, if Hussain is toppled, the anger and plight of hundreds of thousands of displaced people could ignite "political struggles that are now dormant, suppressed by the larger struggle against the regime in Baghdad."

But undoing the past presents its own problems, which is why American troops are likely to try to take and hold Kirkuk as one of the early acts of any military operation, U.S. officials say. The goal will be to prevent any race for the land by Kurds and other displaced minorities – and the outbreak of an internal war that could divert U.S. attention and unravel the postwar transition.

In the confusion of conflict, that may be a tough assignment, U.S. analysts and Kurdish officials concede.

Ibrahim Aziz Biez, 29, is a Kurd born in Kirkuk, where his family ran a bakery. He was forced into exile in Kurdistan in 1992 and soon after joined the peshmerga, the guerrillas whose name means "those who face death."

"Now I have two big goals in my life - to get rid of Saddam Hussain and to go home to Kirkuk," he said. "Kurdistan without Kirkuk is like a human being without a heart." Biez is not unusual. A UN survey found that about 45 per cent of the Iraqis formally deported or unofficially squeezed from Kirkuk expect to return if Hussain is ousted.

With the peshmerga, the Kurds have a force to make this more than just a civilian rush to retrieve land. Indeed, most of the roughly 50,000 fighters aligned with one of the two dominant Kurdish groups in northern Iraq have ties to Kirkuk. The majority are from families forcibly deported from the area, according to a Kurdish official.

"Saddam Hussain says Kirkuk is the centre of the north – for intelligence, the military, to administer the region, and even for his Baath Party's northern headquarters. If it's the capital of the north, it should be after he goes too," said Noshirwan Mustafa, a Kurdish author and historian.

"So we demand that the Kurdistan regional government annex it. We will never give up Kirkuk."

@Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service