General's return stirs memories

Kirkuk: The general with the easy smile has been here before. A little more than a decade ago, Saddam Hussain dispatched him to this province where oil wells belch orange flames day and night.

Now another Iraqi Arab leader has sent him north, in a battle of wills over Kirkuk that has awakened the past and raised fears of new fighting on the territory. Already, one of his units has confiscated some Kurdish farmland for a base, stirring memories of Saddam's attempts to uproot the Kurdish population and settle Arabs.

Major General Abdul Amir Zaidi laughs at all the rumours swirling here about him, especially the one about being related to Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, who ordered Zaidi here to head a new Arab-led army division after he pulled out the Kurdish-led 4th Division last July.

Zaidi is firm about what the government intends to do - remove Kurdish forces, known as the peshmerga, from this bitterly disputed province that is home to as much as 13 per cent of Iraq's oil reserves and borders the semiautonomous Kurdistan region.

He makes clear the time has come for the peshmerga to leave the province's northern areas, although he insists that departure will be the result of negotiations.

"What's the point of the [peshmerga] going outside the boundaries of Kurdistan? When they do this, they are a militia carrying weapons," he says.

Under Al Maliki's orders, Zaidi's division has begun dismantling the Kurds' careful handiwork since Saddam was ousted in 2003 to annex the province through a monopoly of local government power and mastery of the area's security branches. Al Maliki's government is finally asserting Baghdad's authority, but the Kurds cannot forget how similar nationalist ambitions have ended in tragedy for them.

While Kurds headed the old division, Zaidi's 13,000-man force is 75 per cent Arab.

In its eight months in Kirkuk, the Iraqi army has begun scouting roads in districts in northern Kirkuk, which had been considered the peshmerga's domain.

All of this has come with no sign of a negotiated resolution of Kirkuk's status between the Kurdish regional government and Baghdad. The province's future is being debated in two national committees and awaits the suggestions of a United Nations report to be released next month. But most of those involved believe the chance of a solution before the scheduled US combat troop withdrawal from Iraq by August 2010 is wishful thinking.

If no solution is found by then, the brinkmanship risks sparking a new Kurdish-Arab conflict - and could do so sooner.

Aware of the dangers, the US military has raised its presence from one battalion to a combat brigade in hopes of putting Kirkuk on the right path ahead of the planned American withdrawal.

Since the 12th Iraqi Army Division's arrival, the Americans have already been called in to mediate confrontations that risked tipping over into violence.

The American commander in northern Iraq, Major General Robert Caslen, says his soldiers have been able to cool tempers and establish communication channels between the sides. Despite such strides, he warns the risk still exists of one side opening fire on the other.

"This situation right here is the most dangerous course of action for Iraq in the near future," Caslen said. "It's very important that Iraq gets it right. If we don't, a lot of the change we've had over the last couple of years could go in a heartbeat as a result of something going wrong in those particular areas."

For the Kurds, Zaidi is a symbol of all that has soured in their relationship with Prime Minister Al Maliki. In his black beret and olive fatigues, he represents the old regime to them, a figure intimately involved in northern Iraq's history of struggle between Kurds and Arabs.

In turn, Arab leaders have rallied to the general, seeing him as a counterbalance to the peshmerga. The Americans have praised Zaidi for moving cautiously as he expands the army's role in Kurdish areas.

"He realises every step he takes is something that has to be negotiated," Caslen said.

On a recent night, the general slouched in an armchair in his office, located on the edge of the region's flat grey oil fields. He let out a loud laugh at the rumours. Kurds say he was imprisoned by the Americans after the war, then released. Others say he participated in the 1980s Anfal campaign against the Kurds as a young officer, which he denies. He especially likes the one about being related to the prime minister.

"It would be an honour for me to be related to Maliki," Zaidi says with zest.

He swats away the allegations about jail time with another laugh. Even as he professes bonhomie his words reveal strains between him and the Kurds. He reiterates that Kurdish forces should not be active in Kirkuk's northern districts, which border Kurdistan.

"This is outside their jurisdiction."

He signals a similar opinion on Kurdistan's intelligence service, which has more than 3,000 agents around the province and has been accused of abducting Arabs and Turkmens. They will be asked to leave when the national government deploys its own agents here, he says.

"We will tell [them], 'Thank you for efforts. You did your duties. Go back to Kurdistan.'"

Zaidi, a 35-year army veteran, bristles at the charges he is tainted because of his association with the old regime.

The answers to Zaidi's past resides in Daraman, on the northern plains of Kirkuk, where he headed the 15th Brigade of the 1st Division from 1996 to 1998.

Zaidi says he directed soldiers on training missions, but people from the few surviving towns in Kirkuk's northern areas recount different memories of the army - of soldiers beating up Kurds for smuggling goods from Kurdistan, arresting others for driving on roads near the army's bases, and locking up some just for looking at a soldier in town.

In the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi military had evicted the majority of the Kurds, razed their homes and erected lemon-coloured concrete barracks, and a giant yellow-brick compound. Now, the land has changed once more, and Kurds have returned since 2003, gripping any deeds that prove their ownership of the land.