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JUNE 6, 2003: Stop the execution of Kurds in Iran Appeal to the International Community and Human Rights Organisations At a time when the Arab and Kurdish nations in Iraq are planning and working for the establishment of a federal democratic government, the Islamic regime in Iran, in flagrant violation of the principles embodied in the International Declaration of Human Rights is pursuing its policy of oppression and violation of the rights of all people in Iran, in particular the Kurdish people. In March this year while the delegation of the UN Human Rights Sub- Commission was in Tehran, the Islamic authorities executed three young Kurdish men in Kurdistan. At present the lives of three more Kurdish men are at risk because of imminent threat of execution. In a statement of the Association of Iranian Political Prisoners (in Exile) dated 22 May 2003, the names of the accused and details of their cases are given below:
Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) BRUSSELS: MAY 25, 2003: The Turkish state is responsible for the death of Ismet Baycan Ismet Baycan, a member of the First Peace Group, has died in prison in the city of Mus. He had been in poor health for some time, but regrettably, because of state policy the prison authorities refused to allow him to be treated, thereby making his death inevitable. The Turkish state is thus directly responsible for the demise of the peace ambassador Ismet Baycan. The KNK strongly condemns this. Ismet Baycan is a martyr for peace and for Kurdistan. We offer our condolences to his family and to our nation. As is well known, on 2 October 1999, acting on the appeal of Mr. Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ended its conflict-based strategy and adopted a policy founded on peace and democratic struggle. In order for the PKK to show its commitment to this new strategy, a number of guerrillas, known as the First Peace Group, went to Turkey and for the sake of peace and a democratic solution handed in their weapons. Unfortunately the Turkish authorities reacted harshly and punished these goodwill ambassadors. Following this, in an inhumane act, it refused to assure medical treatment to an individual in its custody and thus became responsible for his death. This event clearly demonstrates just how far the Turkish state is from the Kurdish nation vis à vis peace and democracy. The "Repentance Law" now in preparation will be a further indication of this attitude. The State demands that Kurds accept death and imprisonment, and it is on this basis that they will be required to agree to the new law. It is this continuing unconstructive stance by the Turkish state that will ensure the failure of the new law. Once again, the KNK condemns the approach and inhumane policies of the Turkish state that have resulted in this tragic death. Executive Council of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) AL TASH: APRIL 29, 2003: Iranian Kurds Hopeful After Regime Change Collapse of Saddam's Regime Brings Opportunity for Iranian Kurdish Refugees in Iraq The fall of Saddam Hussein's regime offers hope to thousands of refugees in a camp outside Baghdad where they were forgotten, they say, after fleeing the borderland between Iran and Iraq 23 years ago. Maybe now, the Iranian Kurds say, the world will pay attention. "It is the first time in 23 years the age of the camp that anyone has come to talk to us," said Mahmoud Rezaei, greeting a reporter and a representative of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch. Hundreds of residents followed the visitors around the Al Tash camp on Sunday. "People are so thrilled to see you," said 23-year-old Homa Ahmad. The animosity between Iran and Iraq lasted well past the nations' 1980-88 war, and the two remain uneasy neighbors today. But the U.S. overthrow of Saddam this month has changed the landscape and, for the residents of this camp, presented an opportunity. The majority of the refugees claim to be victims of the Iran-Iraq war, forced into Iraq when Saddam's forces occupied Iranian border towns. "The Iraqi army took us hostage. They told us, 'You have to become our agents and fight against Iran.' We refused, so they took us by force and brought us here," said Aziz Ahmad Abdul-Majid, 44. The other refugees are Kurdistan Democratic Party members and their families who fought the Iranian regime in the days after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Khatoon Abdullahi, her husband and three daughters fled on foot into Iraq from their home across the border. Iraqi army buses transported the refugees to a Kurdish town in northern Iraq. In 1982, her family settled in Al Tash. "There was nothing here no water, no electricity. We lived in tents in the dust and dirt," said Abdullahi, 50, speaking in Kurdish. She does not want to go back to Iran. The government, she says, "does not respect human rights, especially those of Kurds." On Sunday, a group of U.S. officers visited Al Tash and met with its operator, Azam Ali Haidar. They discussed security, health and other needs. Haidar told them he wanted the U.S. Army to run the camp. "This we can't do. You are the leader," replied Maj. Peter Buotte, 35, a civil affairs officer from Portland, Maine. He asked Haidar if they could choose someone from the camp to be their police chief. Haidar replied that they needed American help and that the camp couldn't afford to pay a policeman's salary. "Our government and soldiers cannot make your government. You have to do that. We can teach you," said Dr. Danic Inzarry, a physician with the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division. Most refugees interviewed said they wanted to return to their homeland. They said Iranian officials had visited them on several occasions and told them they could return as about 10,000 did between 1996 and 2000, before Saddam stopped allowing them. Today, many of those willing to return to Iran say they can't afford it. "Iran is my country, not Iraq," said 18-year-old Hamzeh Abdul-Qader, who was born in the camp and has never seen Iran. "If I had a car, I would go back right now," said Mohammad Ahmad Mohammad, 50, from Qasr Shirin, a border town. "Iran," he said, "is a rose garden." Associated Press CREMONA: APRIL 28, 2003: A road to Ansar began in Italy Wiretaps said to show how al-Qaida sought to create substitute for training camps in Afghanistan Days before the fall of the Ansar al Islam terrorist group in northern Iraq last month, an alleged Ansar militant named Noureddine Drissi got an urgent call on his satellite phone from his imam. The call came from an unlikely place: this comfortable northern Italian town of 70,000 known for its 13th century bell tower, Christmas sweets and violin-making workshops that preserve the delicate artistry of Antonio Stradivari. But on the clandestine map of Islamic terrorist networks, Cremona was closer than it seemed to the Iraqi village of Kurmal in Ansar's mountain stronghold. Drissi, a Tunisian immigrant, had left his job as the librarian of a mosque in Cremona three months earlier and made the journey to a terrorist training camp near Kurmal, authorities say. Italian police wiretapped his long-distance conversations with the religious leader in Cremona who had allegedly sent Drissi and other recruits to join Ansar's holy war. During the March 18 call, Drissi sounded defiant but edgy on the eve of battle, according to wiretap transcripts. His voice straining over a weak connection, he asked the imam to attend to his family if anything happened to him. "If you hear that Ansar al Islam has been hit you'll know it's us ... you understand?" Drissi said, according to the transcript. The imam said he had sent about $1,500 and a new recruit to Iraq, and Drissi said he hoped the new fighter was experienced. "When he gets here we'll see. ... May God help him. ... You should call me before sending," Drissi said. "Fine! But he's good!" said the imam, identified by authorities as a Tunisian named Mourad Trabelsi. "May God pray for us!" Drissi said. It is not known whether Drissi survived the combat that erupted soon afterward. Kurdish and U.S. troops routed Ansar on March 28, invading its bases and leaving hundreds of its fighters dead, captured or on the run in the borderlands where Iraq meets Iran. Three days later, Italian anti-terrorist police carried out a related offensive in Cremona, Parma and Milan. They arrested Trabelsi and six other alleged members of a network that supplied Ansar with fighters recruited among North African and Kurdish immigrants in northern Italy. Investigators say the case offers a picture of how al-Qaida sought to transform Ansar's Iraqi stronghold into a substitute, on a smaller scale, for the Afghan camps to which the terrorist network had sent aspiring holy warriors before the U.S. defeated the Taliban in late 2001. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, members of a network commanded by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a top al-Qaida figure, fled to the Russian republic of Chechnya and northeastern Iraq. U.S. and European investigators say Zarqawi's specialists used a camp in the village of Sargat, near Kurmal, to experiment with cyanide poisons, toxic gas and ricin, a castor bean extract that can be used as a biological weapon. The network allegedly plotted attacks in Europe that were assigned to different ethnic cells - Algerians in Britain and France, Jordanians and Palestinians in Germany - but were ultimately dismantled by police. As the prospect of a U.S. military operation in the Persian Gulf grew, the network's recruiters in Italy sent at least 40 fighters for terrorist training in Ansar camps and to help fight Kurdish forces, prosecutors say. Alleged ties between al-Qaida and Ansar became a prime exhibit in the U.S. government's case for war when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his presentation to the United Nations in February, accused the Baghdad regime of protecting Zarqawi and his men. Italian investigators say they found no evidence tying al-Qaida and Ansar to the Iraqi regime, which did not control the region where the camps were located. In a wiretapped conversation in Trabelsi's Renault sedan March 18, the Cremona imam and a Kurdish recruiter described Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as an infidel tyrant for whom it was not worth fighting, according to Italian court documents. "He who has fought beneath the flag of a blind man is ignorant," Trabelsi is alleged to have said, reciting a Koranic verse in reference to Hussein. "That has been said about only a blind man's flag, imagine beneath an infidel flag." The investigation is said to have revealed an active role in Ansar plotting by suspected terrorists based in Syria and Iran - countries seen as potential targets in the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Syria was a hub for recruits moving between Europe and Ansar's Iraqi stronghold, according to court documents. Overseers in the Damascus area apparently coordinated the flow of recruits and gave orders by phone to operatives in Europe. The suspected bosses in Syria include fugitives with ties to the Hamburg, Germany, cell that plotted the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as well as to the car-bomb attack on Israelis in Kenya in November, Italian authorities say. Iran also served as a prime route for recruits bound for the Ansar camps and as a headquarters for Zarqawi, investigators say. Especially after the defeat of Ansar, Iran has become a refuge for fugitive leaders of al-Qaida, according to court documents. Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top deputy, has gone into hiding in Iran, as have Zarqawi and his top lieutenants, Italian investigators say. In the Italian case file, wiretaps of suspects based in Europe, Syria and Iraq fill dozens of pages of transcripts that tell an inside story of al-Qaida in action. A June 15 conversation laid out a blueprint of the network's evolution and survival despite law enforcement pressure. An unidentified visitor from Germany counseled the Egyptian imam of the Via Quaranta mosque in Milan to avoid communicating via the Internet, to speak in code with associates and to use messengers. Funding was still plentiful, the visitor said. "Don't ever worry about money, because Saudi Arabia's money is your money," the visitor said, speaking cultured Arabic with a North African accent. And he explained how the terrorist networks had regrouped after Muslim leaders in London and others had been arrested. "Sheiks" had held secret strategy meetings in Austria, Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries where there was less heat, according to the transcript. "Now Europe is controlled via air and land, but in Poland, Bulgaria and countries that aren't part of the European Community everything is easy," the visitor said. "First of all they are corrupt; you can buy them with dollars. ... They are less-controlled countries, there aren't too many eyes." Police are still trying to identify the apparently high-ranking visitor. The Milan imam, Hassan Nasr, was a key suspect, but he disappeared in February. His friends and family accuse Egyptian and U.S. spies of kidnapping him. An investigation has turned up no trace of him. The Via Quaranta mosque and another on Milan's Viale Jenner have been bases for terrorist recruitment and logistics since the late 1990s, according to police. Investigations led by prosecutor Stefano Dambruoso have resulted in a dozen arrests and eight convictions of extremists affiliated with the mosques. Nonetheless, during the last year, the two mosques became pivotal to the gradual restructuring of European networks under the command of Zarqawi, authorities say. Zarqawi, 36, once ran his own training camp in Herat, Afghanistan, where militants learned to use chemical and biological weapons. His network allegedly includes Algerian combat veterans who trained in Chechnya and Jordanian gunmen who killed a representative of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Amman, Jordan, last year. Investigators say Zarqawi has considerable autonomy from bin Laden - and an obsession with Israeli targets because of his Palestinian-Jordanian background. In April 2002, German authorities arrested five people believed to be his followers and charged them with plotting a shooting attack on Jews in a public place. A few months later, Italian police identified suspects who were in phone contact with Zarqawi and his allies, court documents show. Two Kurds living on the semi-rural edge of Parma had set up operations for Ansar, according to authorities. Their phone number was found on Ansar leader Mullah Krekar when he was arrested in Amsterdam last September. Krekar was later deported to Norway and is under investigation by authorities there. The Kurds allegedly worked with the imams in Milan and Cremona to radicalize young Muslims and send them to the battlefields of northeastern Iraq, according to court documents. The Kurds also made money by smuggling illegal immigrants, including extremists, into Europe, police say. The two Kurds were "dedicated to the logistical support and finance of the group and the provision of false documents," a prosecutor's report states. "The network took advantage of a logistical structure in Turkey and Syria, managed by a Kurd known as Mullah Fuad, who assisted the passage of volunteers into Iraqi territory via smugglers." Wiretaps in recent months contain detailed conversations in which Fuad organized the flow of "brothers" to Iraq via the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo. As one recruit prepared to depart Milan, an Egyptian recruiter gave him Fuad's number in Syria and said: "I've talked to [the mullah] about your work ... understand? Before you get to the wall and before you start the work, contact me." The reference to "the wall" is code for the Iraqi border, investigators say. The Italian investigation benefited from intelligence passed on by U.S. authorities, who in December provided numbers of half a dozen Thuraya satellite phones used by suspects in Iraq. Among them was one used by Zarqawi's top lieutenant at the Ansar camps, documents show. U.S. law enforcement also warned in December that the Zarqawi network was intent on "committing terrorist attacks with nonconventional weapons, including chemical or toxic agents, in the United States, diverse European countries including the United Kingdom, and the Middle East," court documents show. Several dozen arrests in Britain, France and other countries during the last six months were made with the intent of blocking plots by Zarqawi operatives, who police say want to make their mark with an unprecedented chemical or biological attack. Zarqawi and his aides supervised his network from a refuge in Iran, where they remain, investigators say. "I don't think he spent much time in Iraq," an Italian law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "His lieutenants ran the activity at the Ansar camps." U.S. and Italian investigators determined that the suspects in Italy repeatedly communicated with the alleged terrorists using the satellite phones in the Ansar stronghold. In a nimble bit of subterfuge Jan. 28, police stopped an Egyptian recruiter on the street in Milan for a feigned immigration check, then surreptitiously copied phone numbers from his address book, according to documents. The numbers were in code: once deciphered, they corresponded exactly with the phone numbers of Zarqawi's henchmen in northeastern Iraq, police say. Phone intercepts allowed investigators in Cremona to track Drissi, the 38-year-old librarian at the mosque here, as he allegedly prepared for jihad four months ago. He embarked on the journey with the help of a widespread, convoluted network that is typical of Islamic extremism. On Dec. 13, Drissi went to a phone booth at the train station and called Iraq to announce his imminent departure via Syria and Iran, according to a transcript. When he was told of the death of a friend in combat, Drissi exclaimed: "May God accept him among the martyrs!" Drissi, his wife and two children left Dec. 24 on a flight for Damascus. It was not unusual for trainees to bring their families, who were housed in Kurmal and other villages on Ansar's turf. Two weeks later, Drissi had made it as far as Iran. He enlisted Trabelsi back in Cremona to advise the Ansar militants that he was on his way, according to documents. Drissi also contacted associates in Germany for help in getting money sent to him. On March 11, Trabelsi got through to Drissi in Kurdish territory on a satellite phone. They exulted when they heard one another's voices, but Drissi alluded to dark events ahead. "I think that a big bomb is coming, do you understand?" Drissi said. Investigators think that this could be a reference either to an impending terrorist plot or to the U.S. offensive against Iraq that was days away. As the imminence of the war brought more recruits from Italy to the Ansar stronghold, Drissi told Trabelsi it was no time for amateurs, according to the transcript of a call three days later. "Listen, there's one here who wants to go there," Trabelsi said. "Who is it - Kamel?" "Yes." "No, that one's no good!" Drissi exclaimed. He added: "If there's someone good, send him by another route. Ask if there's people who want to come and then send them." Although prosecutors say the conversations are explicitly incriminating, Trabelsi's lawyer denies charges of terrorism. As strict Muslims, Drissi and Trabelsi simply admired Ansar al Islam's campaign to impose Taliban-style fundamentalism in northern Iraq, said the lawyer, Franco Antoneoli. Drissi took his family to Ansar territory as part of a spiritual mission, not a military one, Antoneoli said. Trabelsi sent about $1,500 to Iraq because Drissi had asked him to sell his property and forward the money to help sustain his pilgrimage, the lawyer said. "For a good Muslim, it was a way of getting closer to God," Antoneoli said. "A world of pure Islam. Yes, it was a zone controlled by Ansar al Islam. They talk about war and attacks on the phone. But Drissi did not train or fight with them." As for Trabelsi, 33, his lawyer said he has a wife and three children, has spent 10 years in Italy and works as a manual laborer. The imam lived in a weathered brick building on a narrow, quiet street about two blocks from the Stradivarius museum here. He is a religious leader in a community of North Africans who have been drawn to the thriving small cities of the Po Valley in part by jobs in industry and agriculture. Trabelsi denies being a terrorist recruiter, though he has "very strong sentiments that are anti-American, pro-Taliban, pro-Osama bin Laden and pro-Palestinian," Antoneoli said. "But that's not a crime." Trabelsi and the others are charged with terrorist activity, providing fraudulent documents and aiding illegal immigration. If they go to trial, they will have to explain their contacts with a wild corner of Iraq where combat has wiped out their dreams of jihad or a fundamentalist sanctuary. It is likely that picturesque, seemingly sleepy Cremona will figure into their stories. After Kurdish troops and U.S. Army Special Forces overran Ansar al Islam's stronghold, they recovered at least two Italian identity documents belonging to the group's Arab fighters. One of them was a 20-year-old Moroccan, Sayed Hamsi, who is believed to have died in combat. His identity card was issued Jan. 9, 2001, by the city of Cremona. Sebastian Rotella [Italy] and Jeffrey Fleishman [Northern Iraq] Los Angeles Times KIRKUK: APRIL 29, 2003: Iraq resumes oil output from Kirkuk field Iraq's North Oil Company said on Tuesday it restarted the giant Kirkuk field last week, but will not recover pre-war output levels in the near future because of war damage, looting and a lack of workers. Oil output resumed last Thursday at 30,000-40,000 barrels per day (bpd) from Kirkuk, and the crude is being pumped by pipeline to refineries to feed local fuel requirements, Adil Qazzaz, deputy director general of the North Oil Company, told Reuters. Before the war, Kirkuk pumped 850,000 bpd, about 40 percent of Iraq's total production. "We will not reach our former production levels in the near future. We have lost lots of equipment and machinery. Some was destroyed and some was looted, and we have no transport for workers," Qazzaz said. The northern restart, just a month after the U.S.-led forces began their invasion of Iraq, follows the resumption of output from the southern fields on Tuesday last week at 50,000 bpd. "The U.S. military are trying to help. They are trying to provide security which we need. Local forces are also providing security," said Qazzaz. Of 6,000 workers in the region, only 500 were now working, he said. Reuters correspondent Daren Butler said he saw U.S. troops guarding a gas/oil separation plant and Kurdish fighters protecting administration buildings. Qazzaz, who has worked at the North Oil Co for 33 years, said the United States had agreed to keep Iraq's existing oil company organisation for the time being. The North Oil Co is drawing on extra oil from storage tanks to pump 100,000 bpd of crude down a pipeline to the Daura and Baiji refineries, he said. Qazzaz declined to give an outlook for output from the north, but the U.S. military said last week it expected Kirkuk production to soar to 800,000 bpd in two to six weeks from April 21. The U.S. military also expects output from the southern fields to reach 800,000 bpd by mid-May. Iraqi production could be constrained by a lack of export outlets, while legal and financial obstacles are ironed out at the United Nations. Before the war and under tough U.N. sanctions, Iraq produced about 2.5 million bpd. But its huge reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia, could produce much more with years of work and investment. Qazzaz said the Kirkuk field could produce a million bpd with the right equipment, but this would take a "long time". Reuters By Daren Butler DAQUQ: APRIL 29, 2003: U.S. Fears Ethnic Wars: Kurds want to reclaim land Near this town south of Kirkuk, fertile fields stretch, green and tan in all directions. The tan is barley, much of it ready to be reaped in the coming two or three days - but there is no one in the villages to harvest it. For centuries this land belonged to ethnic Kurdish farmers. But the Saddam Hussein regime, dominated by Sunni Arabs, mistrusted Kurds and since the 1960s expelled between a half-million and a million of them from areas, like this, close to the country's oil fields. Hussein's Iraq built new villages here for Arabs from southern and central Iraq. Since U.S. troops ousted Hussein, a new round of ethnic cleansing has begun. The Kurds expelled from the region have returned, many having been forced out recently from the Arab towns where they had lived for 20 or 30 years. The Kurds are carrying their old deeds to the land here - and guns. They have ordered the Arabs out, and an estimated 2,000 Arabs have fled to huddle under tents made from burlap sacks in plowed fields a few miles away. The Kurds are gathering in Daquq, the main town, and vowing to reoccupy the villages. The U.S. Army has declared that such expulsions must stop and that the land battles must be resolved in a new court system. But it is uncertain that anyone - the Army or Kurdish leaders - will be able to halt the ethnic cleansing of Arabs. Daquq looks primed for ethnic violence that could seriously complicate the U.S. effort to establish a stable government in Iraq. "U.S. forces are not tolerating the forcible eviction of people," said Maj. Rob Gowan, an Army spokesman in Kirkuk. "Claims will have to be settled by some legislative or judicial process." But with only 1,000 troops scattered in the city of 1 million people, "to be honest, I don't think we have the means" to intervene outside Kirkuk, even in Daquq, only 20 miles away, he said. At the Americans' urging, one of the two most senior Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, declared that PUK policy is to halt all expulsions. But Talabani's directive seems impotent even among his relatives here and in the PUK office in Daquq, where hardliners appear to have been helping organize the expulsions. "With all due respect to Jalal Talabani, he represents his party and his government, but he doesn't represent my family," said Azzeddine Talabani, a distant cousin of the Kurdish leader. The Arab villages should be occupied immediately by waiting, homeless Kurds, he said. At the PUK office, a room full of Kurdish men with pistols stuck in their belts interjected their approval as Azzeddine Talabani explained: If the Kurds let the Arabs go back to the villages, "it will take a long time to have our claims dealt with in any court," he said. "We'll never get them out again. We don't believe we'll get another chance like this." Talabani pulled from a briefcase records showing his family's ownership of land around Daquq, including that of the village of Matara. In the 1970s and '80s, Hussein's regime razed Matara and other Kurdish villages as part of his "Arabization" campaign. According to a study by the Washington-based Brookings Institution and estimates by other scholars, the Arabization drive forced 600,000 to 1 million- plus non-Arabs, most of them Kurds, out of Iraq's oil belt. "In the absence of a mechanism for the gradual return of the internally displaced, the likelihood of inter-ethnic violence erupting as individual families seek to re-establish claims to property and assets is very high," the New York-based group Human Rights Watch said in a report last month. In Matara, the government confiscated land and built a new village called Omar bin Khattab. There, it settled Arabs from the Shammar tribe, a nomadic group that had migrated north from Kuwait and southernmost Iraq. Like everyone else in this conflict, Samir Mazhar Shahin Al-Shammari has some bitter truths to tell - and some obvious distortions. "When our people came here, this place was a desert," he said. For him, the prior Kurdish presence was invisible. "There was no one here, so how can the Kurds say that we stole the land?" he asked. For 31 of his 49 years Al-Shammari's people lived in Omar bin Khattab, raising two generations who know no other home. Two weeks ago, just after the fall of Hussein's government, carloads of Kurdish fighters showed up and ordered the villagers to leave. Al-Shammari showed a paper dated April 12, signed by Ako Ahmed, the senior PUK leader in Daquq, asking all PUK personnel to "let the citizen ... move his furnishings and family into the Arab areas because this man is from the Arabization campaign." The people of Omar bin Khattab are now camped in tents amid the fields and irrigation canals of another Arab village, Saad bin Abi Waqas. Every day Al-Shammari drives into Kirkuk to plead for U.S. forces to come to Daquq and enforce the principle they have proclaimed: no peremptory expulsions. But three miles from his camp in the fields, his village remains abandoned, the doors of its one-story concrete- block homes hanging open in the dusty breeze. Beside the door of Al-Shammari's home, painted in red, is the name "Mahmoud Shakur," a man from the former Kurdish village who has made his claim and says he is ready to make it stick. Newsday By James Rupert TURKEY: APRIL 29, 2003: Gelali: Ankara should encourage Turkoman-Kurd dialogue Turkey should encourage dialogue between Iraq's Kurds and Turkomans, says Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Ankara representative Bahroz Gelali, who has just come back to Ankara after a trip to northern Iraq including the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Gelali, in a special interview with the Turkish Daily News, said he took three very important Turkish civilian officials to Kirkuk and drove around the city talking to Turkomans. He said the Turkish officials were told how Turkomans and Kurds were tortured together by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi police at the notorious security headquarters of Kirkuk. "I was taken into custody and forced to sit on my knees for six days in a cell one meter by one meter along with a Kurdish prisoner," a Turkoman man told the group. The man, who asked not to be named, said, "Even this shows how we and the Kurds suffered the same fate in this city." Gelali categorically denied a report in daily Sabah that 300 Turkoman families had been evicted from their homes in Kirkuk by Peshmerga fighters. "No one can touch the Turkomans. They are our brothers and sisters," Gelali said. He said all the entrances to Kirkuk are controlled by American soldiers who disarm Kurds or anyone else trying to drive into the city. "We handed our guns to the American soldiers when we entered the city with our Turkish friends," Gelali said. He said the Turkish officials talked to prominent Turkoman families of Kirkuk, who said they were satisfied with the way the city was run. The Turkomans, however, complained that they lacked unity and that efforts should be made to organize them into a viable political force. They also said Ankara should promote dialogue between the Turkomans and the Kurds and avoid some groups trying to cause friction. Gelali reported that there were some Kurdish police maintaining law and order, but said there was much disinformation by the Turkish press which hurt the tranquil atmosphere being created in Kirkuk. He said the death of a small Turkish boy was the result of a traffic accident but this was used by some activists as a pretext to attack Kurds. Four Kurds were wounded when Turkomans sprayed their car with bullets, allegedly revenging the death of the child. Gelali also said reports that 50 Turkomans were murdered were all proven false by Turkish observers. Gelali said many Kurds living in the south have moved to the north, further increasing the Kurdish population in the region. This has created the need for the Kurds to reorganize themselves. "The same thing is valid for the Turkomans. They too have to reorganize themselves in view of the new situation in Iraq." Gelali said Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul won the hearts of the Iraqi Kurds by calling them "our relatives." He added, "Now we expect to be treated as relatives." Gelali said Iraqi Kurds have lived with the Turkomans in the past, are living with them now and "will live side by side with them in the future." If Turkey wants to help the Turkomans it has to help them to reorganize. Gelali said he visited a city called Telefar and was told by the local Kurds that 80 percent of the city's 150,000 people are Turkomans. "As you see, there is a great Turkoman presence here and we feel Turkey should extend a helping hand to them as it is doing for the Turkomans in Kirkuk and Mosul." Turkish Daily News by Ilnur Cevik KIRKUK: APRIL 29, 2003: U.S. Military Launches Joint Patrols in Kirkuk U.S. soldiers began joint street patrols with local police in the troubled northern Iraqi oil city of Kirkuk on Tuesday, a day after a grenade attack injured some 10 people. A wave of looting and violence among the city's ethnically diverse mix of Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens and Assyrians erupted after troops loyal to Saddam Hussein fled the city nearly three weeks ago. "When we arrived here looting was rampant, there was a lot of gunfire. It was a pretty bad situation but we are starting to get a handle on it," said Maj. Rob Gowan of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, who arrived in the city with the first group of U.S. troops on April 10. There is still work to be done on security. An unknown assailant threw a grenade from a car in the city on Monday afternoon, causing a blast which injured around 10 people, Gowan said. No further details were available. The U.S. military has divided the city into seven precincts which it is policing together with local officers from the main ethnic groups. Heavily armed U.S. soldiers sat beside local police officers in Humvee jeeps that sped along the quiet city streets in bright sunshine on Tuesday. There are around 1,000 U.S. troops in the city and another 2,000 at the nearby air base. "We wish we had more soldiers but we are doing a good job with what we have. Imagine if we had just stayed at the airport. If we weren't in the city there would be more fighting, death and continued destruction," Gowan said at the government building where the military coordinates with local groups. Iraqi policemen in dark green uniforms lined up in the corridor to have photos taken for an identity card allowing them to bear arms. Some 160 cards have been issued so far out of a planned total of some 800-1,000, one U.S. officer said. With the new police force in action, U.S. forces have started disarming Kurdish peshmerga fighters, who streamed into the city on April 10 when Iraqi troops left. "We have been telling the peshmerga they need to be in uniform. After a few days of grace we started last week to take their guns away. We don't want paramilitary groups in the city and we only want party flags on official buildings," he said. LEADERSHIP COUNCIL The U.S. military has also launched bi-weekly meetings of 20 local representatives in a "leadership council," consisting of five Arabs, five Kurds, five Turkmens and five Assyrians. "Our intention is to represent each group in the city. We are chairing the meetings and leaving the rest to the delegates," Gowan said. Progress is slow at the meetings. At Monday's meeting the delegates considered what the city flag should look like, but adjourned on the issue. Elsewhere in Kirkuk, work is advancing on establishing services. Water and electricity supplies are working, the looted hospitals are operational and humanitarian aid is being delivered. While U.S. soldiers maintain security inside the government building, police officers stand guard outside as people arrive to file complaints on subjects such as looted property. Despite the ethnic divisions, the city is united in reviling Saddam. Arab, Kurdish and Turkmen children played together in the nearby city square. They point to where a statue of Saddam once stood. It has been replaced by a sculpture of a man made from Iraqi army boots. "This is our special personal insult to Saddam. We have remade him out of soldiers' boots to show how worthless he is," the sculptor's brother said. Nearby, a joint U.S.-local police patrol speeds by and Abdurrahman, a retired teacher dressed in traditional ankle-length white shirt, comes out of his house to watch. "I am happy to see the Americans here. I am a Turkmen and I believe now all the people of Kirkuk must live in peace, whether they are Arab, Turkmen or Kurd." Reuters TURKEY: APRIL 24, 2003: Turkey's Historic Blunder After weeks of the geopolitical equivalent of friendly fire casualties, Ankara has finally allowed U.S. aid to move to Northern Iraq. Two weeks earlier, and after lengthy delays, it permitted the U.S. Air Force to use Turkish airspace for strikes against Iraq. This saved about $1.6 billion in aid to Ankara, but it was too little, too late. At the critical juncture in a run-up to the war, the Turkish government failed to pass the authorization for the use of the Turkish air bases and for transit of the crucially necessary U.S. 4th Infantry Division through the Turkish territory. Despite the Bush administration offering Turkey $6 billion in military and economic aid as an incentive to facilitate U.S. troops deployment for the action in northern Iraq, Turkey's refusal to grant the U.S. request has made those payments moot - with devastating economic consequences to the ailing Turkish economy. Turkish AK (Justice and Development) Party's Islamist government, led by the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdagan, a political newbie, and foreign minister Abdullah Gul, quoted broad opposition of the Turkish public as the main reason to limit U.S. involvement in Turkey. Some polls said that over 90 percent of the public rejected the war. The government, however, did not impose the customary party discipline in the crucial parliamentary vote to allow U.S. troops to deploy, thus sending a subtle message to the members to vote as they like. An Ankara-based analyst with close ties to the foreign policy and military establishment who requested anonómity told TCS that two factors contributed to Erdagan's failure to prevent an unprecedented crisis in U.S.-Turkish relations: lack of policy experience and a hidden Islamist agenda. The adamant opposition to the U.S. use of air bases and troop transit is likely to signal a watershed in the U.S.-Turkish relations and raises fears on both sides that the strategic ties between Washington and Ankara will never be the same again. Turkey reminded Americans of the old English proverb, "a friend in need is a friend indeed" - by indeed failing to come to America's aid. Many U.S. policy makers are fuming, because they view Ankara as throwing decades of close military cooperation to the wind. The Turkish military, for years favorites of the U.S., seem to be unable or unwilling to challenge their Islamist political masters. The anger is palpable, because the Pentagon had counted on Turkey to facilitate the opening of a crucial northern front against Saddam. Instead, a nightmarish scenario of Turkish-Kurdish hostilities has emerged, albeit briefly. Turkey's loud and threatening insistence on deploying its own troops in Northern Iraq to "control" the Kurds - but refusing to fight or even help to fight Saddam, was duly noted. In the end, Turkey has sent up to 3,000 troops and some observers into Kurdistan - allegedly to prevent emergence of independent Kurdish state. Pentagon planners counted on the Kurdish militia known as peshmerga to attack Saddam's military and to assist the U.S. in securing northern Iraqi oil fields around Mosul and Kirkuk earlier than they could do it. Moreover, reported contacts between Iranian envoys and the Turkish government earlier this spring further complicated prosecution of the war as the U.S. was trying to ensure that Tehran and Ankara do not enter the fray to partition Iraqi Kurdistan and secure the oil fields for themselves. Such a development would have further complicated American involvement in volatile Northern Iraq. While speculations continue as to what caused the Turkish-American rift - AK Party's inexperience or an Islamist hidden agenda - advisors to the Turkish military interviewed in Washington and Ankara list a series of concerns that may be detrimental to Turkey in the future. They stress that the leading European states will never adopt Turkey into the expanded European Union, while closer integration with the Muslim world, advocated by the previous Islamist government let by Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, will derail Turkey's economic and technological progress. Thus, they say, abandonment of close ties to the U.S. is a strategic catastrophe for Turkey, comparable with the defeat in the naval battle of Lepanto in the hands of the Venetian Republica Serenissima, or bashing at the walls of Vienna in 1682 in the hands of the Polish king. Finally, some compared Turkey's blunder with entering World War One on the side of the German Axis. All three events signaled major geopolitical deterioration in the fate of the Ottoman Empire: the end of domination of the Mediterranean, the end of expansion into Europe, and the end of the empire itself. These experts believe that Washington's policy toward Ankara may reflect a number of changes in the future. Not only will the U.S. not deliver the promised $20 billion dollar assistance package, it is likely that the Bush administration may instruct its Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund to oppose future bailouts. While it will be for the benefit of the Turkish economy in the long run, in the short run Ankara will feel slighted. U.S. may cease seeing Turkey as a special strategic partner, or even as a reliable ally. This is at the time that links with small Gulf states, and NATO candidates such as Romania and Bulgaria, which provided crucial air bases, are stronger than ever. As Iran is arming itself with ballistic missiles and, quite possibly, nuclear weapons, the Pentagon may not be as happy with Turkey's participation in ballistic missile defense programs led by the U.S. as it was only some months ago. Further, on the technology transfer side, Washington may lean on Israel to curb or stop the current wide ranging cooperation between the Turkish military and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and military industries on both sides. For decades, Ankara counted on Washington to support it on a number of sensitive bilateral issues, but today Washington will be less likely to side with Turkey against Greek claims in the Aegåan Sea. The U.S. State Department may become more critical of Turkey on the Cyprus partition issue. Despite past support of the Turkish membership in the European Union, as President Bush repeatedly stated, this no longer may be the case. In addition, it may be more difficult to see Ankara as a balance to Moscow in Central Asia, especially as radical Islam, not Russian neo-imperialism, is currently viewed as the main threat in the region. Long-standing U.S. support to the Baku-Ceyhan Main Export Pipeline (MEP), including financing issues, may not be as enthusiastic as it was. The Armenian-Turkish relations are particularly sensitive. For years, the American-Armenian community has built its muscle in the Congress. The Armenian lobby counts over 100 members on both sides of the isle, many on key committees and with a powerful political clout. Turkish experts fear that the Bush administration will drop its long-term resistance to classifying Ottoman atrocities against Armenian civilians in 1915 as an "Armenian holocaust". In 2000, President Clinton personally intervened to defeat House Resolution 596 - a draft legislation to express the attitude of the Unites States on the Armenian alleged genocide. While that Resolution was defeated, after the recent U.S.-Turkish friction, this may not be the case in the future. Congressional recognition of the Armenian 'genocide' by the Ottoman authorities may become relevant if and when reparation claims by genocide survivors or their heirs may be launched. Finally, the imbroglio may end potential U.S. support for future Turkish military involvement in domestic politics. If the Turkish military is incapable of weighing in on a matter of vital importance to the U.S., why would Washington tolerate in the future violations of democratic norms by the military as it did in the past? In the long run, Turkey may be dealt with "on case by case basis", a senior Washington military expert and a retired U.S. military intelligence officer said, "but the memory of what happened will hang like a dark cloud, slow to dissipate." The U.S.-Turkish ties that were forged during the Korean and Cold War are set back by decades, not years. Turkey is about to pay a high price for what many in Washington and Ankara see as the largest strategic blunder of its leaders. It will take a lot of efforts on both sides to put this Humpty-Dumpty together again - and a thankless and difficult task that may be. Tech Central Station By Ariel Cohen ANKARA: APRIL 20, 2003: Turkey's FM admits snags in Azeri-Turkish pipeline project Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul admitted Sunday that problems over land expropriation and taxes in Turkey are holding up work on the construction of a major oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey's Mediterranean coast. In an interview with the CNN-Turk channel, Gul confirmed that British oil multinational BP, the project operator of the planned Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, had complained to the Turkish government over the difficulties. "We have recently received such a letter. They have raised certain complaints... Some expropriation affairs, some financial affairs and tax issues are creating problems," Gul said, without elaborating. He pledged that Ankara would clear the snags in the shortest possible time. "We have taken an extraordinarily speedy action to overcome the problems. This project is very important for us and the prime minister (Recep Tayyip Erdogan)is personally following the matter," Gul said. His comments came atop an announcement from Baku Saturday that a hoped-for loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to finance the Azeri section of the conduit has run into problems, apparently due to widespread concerns about the environmental impact of the project. The announcement was seen as a blow for the 2.9-billion-dollar pipeline project to export Caspian oil to the Mediterranean, which has already been dogged by criticism from environmental groups. The BTC pipeline, due for completion in 2005, will carry crude from Azerbaijan's sector of the Caspian Sea via Georgia to a tanker terminal at the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. It is backed by the United States and investors include BP, ConocoPhillips, Statoil, Unocal, Itochu, Inpex, TPAO, Eni Agip, Delta Hess and Azerbaijan's state oil company SOCAR. AFP TURKEY: APRIL 23, 2003: Turkey's secular elite clashes with government on Islamic-style headscarves Tensions rose between Turkey's staunchly secular establishment and the Islamist-rooted government on Wednesday over strictly-guarded rules governing the separation of church and state in the Muslim country. The latest episode in a long series of disagreements erupted over the wearing of the Islamic-style headscarf, seen by the secular elite as a statement of support for political Islam and which is banned from public offices and schools. President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the army and opposition MPs on Wednesday shunned an official reception given by parliament speaker Bulent Arinc to mark a national holiday, in which the headscarf made an unprededented appearance. At least five MPs from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) attended the reception with their headscarved wives, in a move likely to be seen by many as an affront to the secular system. But in a bid to avoid a potential crisis, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and several ministers, including Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, chose to attend the function alone without their headscarved wives. "We have said before that we will never be a side to any tension in the society. Thus, we will never respond to the efforts of those who are trying to create tension in our country," Erdogan told reporters at the reception. He implicitly accused the secular elite of trying to deviate the country from its true agenda. "The people will never forgive those who contribute" to the tension, Erdogan said. Arinc, an AKP member, also left behind his headscarved wife, who has already been at the at the centre of controversy when she attended an official ceremony to see off the president on a visit abroad last year. "No one would benefit from bringing an issue to a point of tension and then carrying Turkey from this tension to a crisis," Arinc said earlier on Wednesday in reference to the planned boycott. The Turkish military sees itself as the self-appointed guardians of secularism and is watching closely to see whether the AKP, a conservative movement with Islamist roots, deviates from secular principles. The AKP says it has dropped its past Islamist views, but it is still suspected by many of harbouring a hidden Islamist agenda. The liberal Radikal daily on Wednesday warned of a "dangerous escalation" in the battle over secularism. "All eyes will now be on the National security council meeting on April 30" when top army officers might issue a new warning to the government on the headscarf issue, the paper said. The headscarf dispute comes atop last week's decision by the AKP government to back a controversial expatriate religious association long suspected of promoting fundamentalism. Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said he had asked Turkish embassies to support the Milli Gorus (National Vision) organisation, which has built a strong network among expatriate Turks in Europe, primarily in Germany. Turkey's secularist establishment has long suspected the grouping of fostering religious fundamentalism and raising militants against the country's secular system. Milli Gorus rejects the charges, and says it has only social, religious and cultural concerns and aims to protect the interests of Muslim communities in Europe. AFP by Hande Culpan ANKARA: APRIL 21, 2003: A Shared Strategic Vision The role that Turkey could -- or should -- play in Operation Iraqi Freedom has been the subject of much debate in both Turkey and the United States. Unfortunately, in the course of the debate, some pessimists have even called into question the relevance of the strategic partnership between our countries. Just as the fate of Saddam Hussein is critical to U.S. national security, the fate of northern Iraq is critical to Turkish national security. Turkey and the United States share concerns about the impact of the Iraqi conflict on the activities of terrorist organizations, about the humanitarian crisis caused by Hussein's policies and about the long-term political and economic stability of the region. As a global leader, the United States must address these issues. As a regional leader, Turkey must address them also as it contends with the conflict just across its border. While this fact, and Turkey's legitimate need to respond accordingly, should be obvious, some have attributed a hidden agenda to Turkey's involvement in the conflict. For decades Turkey and the United States have cooperated closely on many issues. This has been possible not only because we have similar goals and priorities but also because we have been able to transcend differences when faced by common threats and risks. This resilience in our partnership has allowed our alliance to endure, and it will enable us to prove the critics wrong. But why should Turkey have concerns about the military operation in Iraq in the first place? Why the hesitancy in abandoning diplomatic efforts for military action, a hesitancy displayed by Turkey's democratic parliament? Because we have lived through similar experiences before. Although we supported the Persian Gulf War, it was a devastating event for Turkey and its people. It precipitated an economic crisis in our country from which we have only recently begun to recover. A half-million refugees poured across our borders in need of humanitarian relief. Acts of terrorism perpetrated by separatist elements that entered Turkey after the war claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives. Despite these severe hardships, Turkish support for both U.S. and U.N. efforts to confront and disarm the Iraqi regime after the 1991 war were considerable and comprehensive. To its own detriment, Turkey meticulously honored the U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq. Turkey allowed Incirlik Air Base to be used for refugee assistance in Operation Provide Comfort, and later for airborne enforcement of one of Iraq's two no-fly zones in Operation Northern Watch. These activities protected the Kurdish factions in northern Iraq from the wrath of Baghdad and enabled the ethnic groups in that region to experiment with democracy and to achieve a degree of freedom and prosperity. Our experience over the past decade with regard to Iraq is but a microcosm of the collaborative efforts Turkey and the United States have undertaken throughout our long partnership. Our cooperation is evident in many vital domains, in particular in the war on terrorism, and also in common efforts to bring stability and security to the Balkans, to Afghanistan and Central Asia, and to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Turkey has for years been an understanding friend of America. Indeed, Turkey was one of the first countries to stand up in support of the United States after the tragic attacks of 9/11. Turks had no qualms about sending their sons and daughters to Afghanistan to fight a common enemy in defense of freedom and to lead the international peacekeeping effort there over the past eight months. The Turkish people have never shied away from joining forces with the United States in the face of a threat, whether in Korea, Somalia, Bosnia or even East Timor. The United States in return has been a steady strategic partner for Turkey. Successive U.S. administrations have supported Turkey through economic and security challenges and in Turkey's own fight against terrorism. Underlying the enduring partnership between our countries has been our embrace of democratic principles, for which our troops have fought and died together in the past. As the leader of the governing party and now prime minister, my role has been to try to reconcile this respect for democracy and the understandable sensitivities of Turkish public opinion with our desire to support the United States and safeguard our national security interests. After much deliberation and with 94 percent of the Turkish public opposed to a new war against Iraq, my government was able to secure approval for the use of Turkish airspace by allied forces entering Iraq. As for Turkey's own role in the Iraqi conflict, the concerns we share with the United States about terrorism, refugees and long-term regional stability have shaped our approach. First, we are securing our border against a new incursion of terrorist elements. Second, we are preparing to respond to a possible refugee crisis in a way that permits effective delivery of humanitarian aid inside Iraq with minimal impact on other populations. And third, we are encouraging, as we have for many years, the preservation of Iraq's territorial integrity and the establishment of a framework whereby all Iraqis can share in the natural wealth of that country. In all of these efforts, my government is committed to cooperating with the United States and other coalition members. In confronting common challenges, we share the same strategic vision -- not just on Iraq, but on many issues. The writer is prime minister of Turkey. Washington Post By Recep Tayyip Erdogan NORTHERN IRAQ: APRIL 18, 2003: Iraqi Kurds face uncertain future Like other Iraqi opposition groups, Iraq's Kurds are eyeing the future with a mixture of optimism and apprehension. Optimism, because the hated Saddam Hussein, who persecuted and even gassed their people, has gone. Apprehension, because it is not yet clear who, or what, will replace him. For the past decade Iraqi Kurds have experienced what some regard as a golden age. Since the last Gulf War, around four million have lived in their own autonomous area, protected from the Iraqi president by Western air patrols. Their standard of living was better than in the south. Their unique situation gave their two main leaders - Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) - added legitimacy on the world stage. MISGIVINGS Now the air patrols and Saddam Hussein have gone. Having helped the Americans dislodge his regime, the Kurds will have to deal with whoever takes over in Baghdad. "The Kurds are in an unfortunate position," Gareth Stansfield of Exeter University says. "There's no way they could have said no to the Americans, though they made it clear that they really wanted to have guarantees about their future in Iraq - but ultimately those guarantees have not been given." From being in a unique geopolitical position, the Kurds are now only one among many opposition factions jostling for a place in the new Iraqi order. What they want is a form of federal democracy which will protect much of the autonomy they currently have, along with a real share in central government - something the Kurds have been denied in the past. As Barham Saleh, a senior official in the Kurds' regional government, put it: " We want a devolved power structure and significant self-government for the regions. "We want participation for the regions in the federal government in Baghdad, on a basis of equality and fair representation." FRIENDLY FIRE Like everyone else in the Iraqi opposition, the Kurds are manoeuvring to push through their own political agenda. They have had some success - federalism has been endorsed by three successive Iraqi opposition conferences, including one in southern Iraq last week. But when it comes down to details, they may have more of a fight on their hands. Some other opposition groups are less enthusiastic about federalism, or have different ideas about how it might work. For the time being, the Kurds are being cautious. They have toed the line where Washington is concerned, perhaps hoping this will increase their political leverage later. Apart from an initial pre-emptive rush into the politically sensitive northern city of Kirkuk ahead of US forces, their peshmerga militia has largely kept its promise to work under US command. When US friendly fire hit a Kurdish convoy, killing several people and injuring the brother of the KDP leader, criticism was muted. "This is a war situation and these things can happen," said KDP foreign affairs spokesman Hoshyar Zebari. CRACKS The Kurds were clearly delighted at the fall of Kirkuk and Mosul, strategic cities with large Kurdish populations. However, there are reports of brewing tensions in these cities, between Kurds and ethnic Turkmen, or Kurds and Arabs. In Kirkuk, there have been reports of other political parties emerging who, in future, could pose a challenge to the KDP and PUK. As for the two main parties themselves, relations have improved dramatically since the mid 1990s, when simmering rivalries between them erupted into war. But there are signs of small cracks appearing in their recent impressive show of unity; Mr Barzani openly criticised the PUK for its premature stampede into Kirkuk. By Pam O'Toole BBC April 18, 2003 WASHINGTON: APRIL 16, 2003: Some Bush Aides Wary of Autonomy for Iraq Regions Some Bush administration officials are concerned about Kurdish, Shi'ite and Sunni regions having a great deal of autonomy as part of a postwar Iraqi government, people familiar with the deliberations said on Wednesday. President Bush hailed advocates of Kurdish autonomy visiting the White House last month, saying he envisioned replacing Saddam Hussein's government with a "federation" made up of the country's major ethnic groups. Saman Shali, executive vice president of the Kurdish National Congress of North America, said he had received assurances the Kurds would have the "autonomy to run their own affairs" after the war. "Please do not sell out the Kurds again," Shali implored White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice at the end of the visit. "We will not, I promise," Rice said in response, according to Shali's account. In subsequent meetings with lawmakers, administration officials raised the possibility of a federation of states drawn along ethnic lines, congressional sources said. Officials say they have not committed to a federation or any other structure for a future Iraqi government. "We're going to leave those decisions to the Iraqi people where they belong," one official said, putting the onus on yet-to-be-named Iraqi leaders to draft a constitution with the help of American and other outside advisers. But some Bush administration officials see "potential pitfalls," including a heightened risk of power struggles, in a federal system that grants autonomy to regions based on ethnicity, sources close to the deliberations said. Iraqi Kurds want to retain at least the autonomy they now have as the price for remaining part of a federated Iraq and as a reward for helping American forces fighting in the north. "In the end, some kind of federated system -- with local governments that takes into account regional differences in the population -- may work," said a source. "But when you have a country as ethnically diverse, with certain ethnicities concentrated in certain areas, you have the potential for ethnic conflict." POTENTIAL PITFALLS U.S. policy-makers hope to avoid the fate of Afghanistan, where lawless regions dominated by warlords pose a real threat to future stability. The fear in Iraq, officials say, is that semi-autonomous regions could work at cross-purposes, undermining centralized authority in a nation with a history of divisions between Kurds and Arabs, Sunni Muslims and Shi'ite Muslims. Regions might vie for independence, undercutting a central principle of U.S. policy: maintaining Iraq's territorial integrity. A federation could also give undue weight to regional powers, which are in some cases hostile to the United States. Saudi Arabia might shape policies in a semi-autonomous Sunni region, while Iran could influence Iraq's Shi'ite majority. The politics of setting up a semi-autonomous Kurdish region within Iraq could be especially difficult. Turkish leaders are uncomfortable with the degree of autonomy the Iraqi Kurds have gained since Saddam lost control of a slice of northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. But for the Kurds, that autonomy is the baseline from which they expect to improve their lot in a post-Saddam Iraq. The capture of the northern oil cities of Kirkuk and Mosul underscored the danger. When Kurdish fighters swept in, they triggered an immediate threat of Turkish military intervention. American troops were sent to the city to ensure Turkey stayed on the sidelines. Kurds, who had a majority in Kirkuk and a share of its oil wealth before Baath party ethnic cleansing "Arabized" the city, want Kirkuk as their capital. "We have to strengthen what we have, not weaken it," said Shali. Mike Amitay, executive director of the Washington Kurdish Institute, warned of a public outcry and "maybe violence" if the Kurds' autonomy is rolled back. "The genie is already out of the bottle," he said. Reuters By Adam Entous MUNTASIR: APRIL 17, 2003: Kurds Redrawing Map by Memory, With Force With the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's ethnic Kurdish minority has achieved a long-held dream: restored control over broad swaths of territory the Kurds consider their own. But as the U.S.-led war that toppled the Iraqi president comes to an end, Arabs, Turkmen, Americans and the Kurds themselves are struggling to prevent that dream from becoming a nightmare. The new map of Iraqi Kurdistan is being drawn with politics, blood and ethnic conflict. Northern Iraq is seething with tension between Kurds and other ethnic groups. The two main Kurdish political parties are at odds over how to administer the north. And U.S. forces are trying with mixed results to balance the various factions while a new, post-Hussein Iraq takes shape. The outlines of the conflict are visible on the walls of mud huts in Muntasir, a hamlet a few miles south of Kirkuk, the region's oil capital. Muntasir is an Arab village, created in the aftermath of a failed Kurdish revolt in 1975 as part of Hussein's program to expel Kurds from the area and replace them with Arabs. On Tuesday, however, Kurds from the neighboring village of Indijah came to Muntasir and told the Arabs they had 24 hours to leave. Across the fronts of buildings in the hamlet, Kurds scrawled the initials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two militia-backed political parties in the north. The names of Kurdish peasants were written on three houses that they evidently planned to occupy. "We are defenseless," said Hamad Oweid, an Arab shepherd and father of five daughters. "Many families left to hide in the mountains. We don't know what else to do." In Kirkuk, meanwhile, the city's two new de facto mayors are taking a more measured approach to ethnic tensions. One of the men, the PUK's interior minister, Faraidoon Abdul Qadir, listened to an ethnic Turkmen couple who had been told by Kurds that they must give up their home. He sent them away with a security squad to confront the ruffians. The other mayor, Kamal Kerkuki, a native of Kirkuk and member of the political bureau of the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), said the people who have poured into Kirkuk since it was liberated -- including Kurds displaced by Hussein's Arabization campaign -- have been told to leave. Property disputes will be settled by judges, he said. "Now everybody who came from outside must go out," Kerkuki said. "The population of Kirkuk will decide who is powerful in the future." From the region's dusty villages to its halls of power, there are countless examples of how the war has overturned decades of Kurdish misfortunes. But the war has also left key questions: Can Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds live together peacefully after years of bitter warfare? Will the Kurds be allowed to retain control of key northern cities and the lucrative oil fields in this impoverished region? And if so, can the Kurds create order and a measure of prosperity out of a chaotic situation? The conflict between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in northern Iraq predated the U.S.-led war and could last well beyond it. Earlier Kurdish drives for independence, expanded autonomy and territory have been powerful fissures in Iraqi political life. For many years, the PUK and KDP held almost no territory and were pursued relentlessly in mountain refuges by Hussein's armies. It was only after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the failed Kurdish uprising that followed that an autonomous region took shape, existing outside government control and protected by U.S. and British planes enforcing a "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq. Hussein's government maintained control of Kirkuk, Mosul and the rich northern oil fields, however -- until last week. With the collapse of Iraqi authority, the PUK sent its forces to Kirkuk without U.S. permission, a breach of an agreement to keep its militia under U.S. command. Looting and mayhem resulted, and although the United States ordered the PUK to withdraw, a PUK administration is still trying to govern the city. One recent morning, that administration was embodied by a line of 70 garbage trucks, road graders and dump trucks parading through downtown Kirkuk, occasionally honking. Many bore the city seal of Sulaymaniyah, the city in the Kurdish zone where many Kurds from Kirkuk had fled the Arabization campaign. "We come to serve the people of Kirkuk and keep the city clean," announced Ahmed Ali Hamamin, a municipal employee in Sulaymaniyah. "According to the instructions of [PUK leader Jalal] Talabani, we are to serve the people of Kirkuk whether they are Turkmen, Kurd or Arab." Hamamin spoke on the city's main street. Graffiti written in Arabic on a wall facing him declared: "Kirkuk without the Turkmen is worth nothing, and the Turkmen without Kirkuk is worth nothing." Behind him, a sign in Turkish read: "Kirkuk Is Ours." In theory, the nascent administration answers to an 18-member governance committee made up of six Kurds -- three from the PUK and three from the KDP -- six Arabs and six Turkmen. At its first meeting, last Thursday, proceedings were conducted in Arabic and, in a sign of where higher authority lies, translated into English for the U.S. Army officer who ran the meeting. Brig. Gen. James Parker, the senior commander for U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said the American approach "to all these issues is one of balance. . . . I told them we're not going to order -- and I'll stop it if I find out about it -- any evictions. We're not putting any people out. We're not going to arbitrate property." "It's not a government," the general said of the transitional structure. "A government will be installed sometime later." Human Rights Watch, the New York-based human rights organization, criticized the United States and its allies for failing to bring "law and order to Kirkuk and ensure the security of civilians." "Kirkuk now is a tinderbox," said Hania Mufti, a Human Rights Watch monitor in northern Iraq. "U.S. troops should stop the violence. And PUK leaders should take immediate steps to halt any expulsions of Iraqi Arabs from their homes." About 90 miles to the north, the Kurds have also taken control of the city of Mosul, where Arabs are the majority of the population. When Iraqi forces abandoned the city five days ago, Kurds were among the most avid looters. In the past two days, 17 people have been killed -- at least seven by U.S. troops -- and 18 wounded in disturbances in the city, according to hospital officials. The Kurds "say they want to be part of Iraq, but they act like conquerors," said Mahmoud Qusai, a retired Arab ship captain in Mosul. A crowd that had gathered around him murmured, "Let them come, let them come, and they will see." In the countryside, the PUK is not only deploying armed riflemen, it is taking steps to expel Arabs they say are settlers on the land. Anyone who was transferred from other parts of Iraq by the Hussein government and put on Kurdish land must leave, officials say. "We want it orderly, but the Arab settlers must go," said Gen. Ako Ahmed, self-styled provisional governor of Daqoq district, a county south of Kirkuk that includes Muntasir. Ahmed denied that the PUK was expelling residents of Muntasir and a half-dozen other rural hamlets in his region. "They will go voluntarily. They have relatives in the south and will live with them," he predicted. The KDP has actively discouraged the forced expulsion of Arabs. Like the PUK, the KDP says settlers must eventually leave but under an agreement of international organizations and the new Iraqi administration, when it appears. "Kurdish citizens have no right to threaten any Arab citizen or attack any Arab village belonging to indigenous Arab tribes," the KDP's leader, Massoud Barzani, said in a statement. Barzani's appeal followed several shootouts between Arabs and marauding Kurds. Over the weekend, 12 Kurdish militiamen were killed in an assault on the Arab town of Hawijah, south of Kirkuk. Ezzedin Mohammed, an official of the Red Crescent medical aid society, said he had buried the bodies of 38 people, Arabs and Kurds, involved in fighting in the past two days. "This thing is getting out of hand. We are going from one war to another," he said. Washington Post by Daniel Williams and Karl Vick SAAD, IRAQ: APRIL 18, 2003: Kurdish militias reclaim land, leaving Arabs homeless Arabs say they've received eviction notices, but Kirkuk governor denies any official policy. The liberation had hardly begun when the eviction notices arrived. Sometimes they came in written form, Arab residents here say. Sometimes they came in the form of carloads of Kurdish gunmen, warning Arabs who have lived here for three decades that they had three days to get out. "They came and told us we have to leave so that there will be no killing," says Khalaf Nasaf I-Shumari, the aging sheikh of a small village called Omar Ibn Khattab, about a half-hour's drive south of the city of Kirkuk. "They gave us a paper, signed by the local authorities, which said we have to leave in three days," says Atiye Awad I-Shummari, a resident of the same village. "They held up their guns in my direction and told me to leave," says Alwan Humayed I-Shummari, who tried two days ago to go back to the village they fled over the weekend. They set up tents outside the larger nearby Arab village of Saad looking for safety in numbers. It is no coincidence that all three men have the same family name. They come from the same Arab Bedouin tribe, which once wandered with their flock near the borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. From his earliest years in power, Saddam Hussein plucked them and thousands of other Arabs out of southern Iraq and moved them to the country's predominantly Kurdish north - an area bursting with oil. Mr. Hussein gave the Arab migrants rich farmland that belonged to Kurdish tribes. Most of the Arab settlers were also given money to build a house. Others moved into houses that Kurds were thrown out of in Hussein's brutal campaigns against them. Now, with Kurdish forces running Kirkuk and its environs, Hussein's "Arabization" policy is coming back to haunt its beneficiaries - shepherds and farmers who had little say in the matter. Senior Kurdish officials, in interviews, say that the Baath Party's project to turn this into a more Arab area was wrong and must be righted. But while leaders in the two main Kurdish parties say that must be done gradually, in a legal and humane way, groups of Kurdish militiamen - and possibly lower-level officials - appear to be taking the matter into their own hands. A Human Rights Watch team visiting the region this week said that they saw several copies of eviction notices signed by a local official for the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), the party that now has de facto control over the Kirkuk region. The researchers say they received consistent reports from Arabs in this region that they are being threatened with force and told to leave their homes. "The party line is that people should be returning to wherever they came from, and the way they've been evicted is this three- day notice," says Hania Mufti, the London director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. She says that US occupation forces have an obligation to stop forced population movements - a violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention on war crimes. "Whatever the Kurdish forces do reflects on the US forces here, and someone has to be in charge." The most senior official in the PUK is Faridoon Abdul Qadir, the party's interior minister who is now acting as Kirkuk's interim governor. He says that there is no official drive to push Arabs out of northern Iraq, and that such papers - allegedly signed by the PUK - are forgeries. When Arabs came to his office this week carrying their eviction notices, he tore them up and asked that they ignore the notice. "The regime wanted to change the demographic balance, and now Arabs are [her in] approximately the same number as Kurds," says Mr. Qadir, whose office has been inundated with complaints from Arabs and Kurds. Hussein brought at least 150,000 to 200,000 Arabs to the city in the past three decades, he says. "I've done a lot of legal research and legally, that [Kurd] who was thrown out has a right to go back to his house," he says. "But I told everyone to stop this. I told both sides not to rush the matter and not try to come to a quick solution," he says. "I told the Arabs that I won't let anyone throw them out." All the land and property disputes, he says, must be settled in a court process. But away from urban Kirkuk, Kurdish authorities do not appear to have much sympathy for Arabs now under their rule. In Daquq - the PUK office from which Arabs claim the eviction notices originated - the interim governor says there is no policy to remove Arabs from the area - yet. "I didn't send out any letter like that, and I didn't tell anyone to evacuate anyone, say Ako Ahmad, the acting governor of the Daquq region. "They are really Baath Party members and are afraid for themselves. They have a lot of weapons there - I heard about the possibility of chemical weapons." "Because these people were criminals and they supported [Hussein]," Mr. Ahmad says, "they are afraid for their lives." According to Ahmad, the PUK's pesh merga fighters have not tried to remove any Arabs from the area. But he says he cannot prevent Kurds who were removed from this area years ago from trying to return to their homes. "It's their land and their rights," he says. To be sure, thousands of Kurds were driven out of this area under the Baath Party, and many would like to return. Kurds who are hoping to build their current autonomous government into a federal state within a united Iraq view Kirkuk as a natural part of that regional state - and view the newest Arab residents as unfairly tipping the balance away from a Kurdish majority. But after an entire generation of living here, many of these Arabs view the region as home, and would like to stay. "I was born here, and this is my home," says Alwan Humayed I-Shummari, a father with three wives and 17 children. He could not bear to tell them they had to leave their home - so instead he said they were only going away for a while - to a bleak tent with a dirt floor turned to mud by a chilly April rainstorm. In the city of Kirkuk itself, several Arab families say Kurdish gunmen have been coming to their neighborhoods, often shooting guns in the air and issuing orders to leave. The PUK official who is now acting as the city's mayor, Rizgar Ali Hamjan, says there is no policy to evict Arabs from the city. But, he says, those who have moved here should leave voluntarily. "The right thing is that they return by themselves," he says. "If they have some feeling of justice, they must go back to where they're from." By Ilene R. Prusher Christian Science Monitor KIRKUK: APRIL 17, 2003: Pax Americana in Kirkuk, north Iraq Normality is returning to the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, but US troops controlling the multi-ethnic town have handed over only a minimum amount of responsibility to local leaders as they seek to maintain security. The renewed calm is a stark contrast to the two days of looting and score-settling that gripped the city after US-backed Kurdish forces took it on April 10, but the situation as of Thursday was not as bad as in Mosul to the north, where unrest is ongoing. Shops have reopened and Kurdish fighters over the weekend pulled out of the city to be replaced by US troops, in line with demands by Turkey which feared Kurdish control of the oil-rich town would strengthen the prospect of Kurdish secession. Oil and gas workers are expected to return to work Saturday, as are school and government employees, said Faraidun Abdul Kader, who considers himself the "interim governor" of the city. Government buildings that were sacked in the unrest have been cleaned and couches have even been placed in some halls. Saddam Hussein's portrait is still on the wall, but, significantly, is lacking a face. "Water, electricity, telephones have been restored," said Kader, pleased that looting had died down. Salaries, unpaid for two months, could be given out next month, he added. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), whose fighters arrived in the city ahead of US troops, is running three hospitals, cleaning roads and repairing local radio and television station offices. It is possible the PUK will seek to maintain Kirkuk under its control. The city, with its Arab, Kurdish, Turkoman, Assyrian and Chaldean population, is historically Kurdish but remained under Saddam's control after 1991. The Kurds have said they consider it their future capital. But faced with a threatened Turkish military intervention in north Iraq to ensure the Kurds do not control the oil-rich regions between Mosul and Kirkuk, the United States has asserted its authority over the cities. Though Kader, the PUK's "interior minister", considers himself interim governor of the town, US army major Jeff Cantor quickly dismissed the claim. "There's no civil governor of Kirkuk, Colonel Mayville is the military commander of Kirkuk, he has the upper hand on every decision," he said. Cantor said the renewed calm here was largely a result of US efforts: "We provided people with what they need: water, electricity, that helps significantly." The government buildings are heavily guarded by US troops, who nervously watch crowd movements nearby, notably following deadly shoot-outs in Mosul earlier this week, which saw many civilians killed. On the balconies, some 20 US troops stand guard, cocking their weapons at anything suspicious. Maintaining security is the priority. "The politics will follow once everything is in line," Cantor said. A city municipal council has been created, including six representatives of Kirkuk's four main communities. Cantor, who has also served in Bosnia and Kosovo, said he was "impressed by the way everyone is cooperating and getting along," and added that if things remained so Kirkuk could become a "model city" for the rest of Iraq. For his part, Kader said the Kurds wanted Kirkuk to be part of a "democratic and federal" Iraq. It is not a Kurdish city but an Iraqi city, he stressed. In fact, it is not known whether Kirkuk has a majority Kurdish population. Following the 1991 Gulf War when most of Iraqi Kurdistan came under the control of Kurdish forces, backed by US and British airpower, Kirkuk remained under the authority of Baghdad. Saddam's regime continued an active policy of settling Arabs in and around the city and there has not been a census in a long time. The calm in Kirkuk contrasts with the situation in the nearby countryside, where residents of Arab villagers have taken up arms against what they say are wondering bands of Kurdish looters. AFP SALAHUDDIN: APRIL 16, 2003: Top Kurdish leader assesses the costs of war For the Kurds, this may be the first war to end without massive casualties and political defeat. But to Massoud Barzani - leader of one of two main Kurdish parties in northern Iraq - the war is rife with disappointments and far from over. Mr. Barzani, born on the same day in 1946 that the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) he now leads was founded, headed to a US-sponsored conference Tuesday in Nasiriyah as one of the key players set to determine Iraq's future. But after a lifetime spearheading the Kurdish struggle, the present situation has him deeply troubled. One of the biggest Kurdish gains in a generation - the downfall of Saddam Hussein - has been marred by mayhem, looting, and violence. And the unfettered fall of Kirkuk late last week set in motion a chain of events that derailed a limited but well-controlled northern front, setting the stage for Kurdish infighting. In an interview, Barzani lays blame for the chaotic turn of events in Kirkuk and Mosul - another northern city unchained by the disappearing Iraqi regime - on the doorstep of his rivals in the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan). The PUK is the other main party in the territory that has come to enjoy de facto self-rule since the 1991 Gulf War. Its pesh merga fighters rushed into Kirkuk on Thursday, Barzani charges, in violation of an agreement painstakingly hammered out with US officials - and tailored to keep a vigilant Turkey from marching into the fray. "The PUK violated that agreement," says Barzani, who spoke to the Monitor and the Associated Press at his headquarters, ensconced in a mountain resort. "We made an agreement with the Americans that large [numbers of Kurdish] troops would not enter Kirkuk," he says. "We have lost the opportunity," to show the world the face of responsible behavior as Mr. Hussein's dictatorship disintegrated, "and we are very sorry for that." While KDP forces stayed outside the city, Barzani charges, the PUK's poured in, raising the ire of Ankara. Turkey, vehemently opposed to the creation of any form of Kurdish state, worries that a Kurdish seizure of oil-rich Kirkuk could make an independent Kurdistan economically viable - and recharge its own sizable Kurdish minority. As Kirkuk fell, Turkey threatened to send in troops. According to Barzani, that made the US skittish about allowing KDP forces to secure Mosul, which was sucked into a violent power vacuum the following day. The KDP's forces were delayed, waiting for an American go-ahead - giving looters and shooters a head start. "If that delay had not taken place, we would have been able to stop the looting," he says. "If they had allowed us to go in within 12 hours we would have been able to stop this. When our troops went in, it was at the request of the people of Mosul themselves and the request of the Americans and with coordination with them." All of this, he says, forced the Kurds to accept the presence of 20 Turkish military observers in Kirkuk. The words of rebuke do not bode well for Kurdish unity as leaders from around Iraq meet to formulate an interim government to run the country until elections are held. But the KDP and the PUK, which split off from the former in the mid-1970s, have had more than their share of differences. After forging an uprising against Hussein at the end of the Gulf War, they wound up fighting each other in the mid-1990s. At one point, Barzani even turned to Hussein for help, although KDP officials say he was trying to counterbalance the military and financial assistance the PUK received from Iran. Moreover, the conclusion of the war reveals strains in the Kurds' relationship with the US. Barzani, whose father founded the KDP, has in past interviews pointed to many letdowns by the US, from former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975 to former President George Bush in 1991. In this war, the Kurds were Washington's only fighting regional ally, marking the first time the Kurds have had a world superpower on its side. But the war, like much of Barzani's life as a pesh merga - meaning those who face death - has taken a personal toll. A week ago, US airplanes accidentally bombed a convoy of KDP fighters advancing toward Mosul with US special forces. Eighteen of the KDP's most elite pesh merga were killed, and Barzani's younger brother and son were injured. "It was very unfortunate, but it was not deliberate because there were also American soldiers and officers with them," he says. While wholesale looting and vandalism has tapered off, parts of Mosul and Kirkuk are still seething with ethnic tensions. In Kirkuk, for example, Arabs say they are being told by pesh merga that they have three days to leave the city, while Turkmens say they are also being targeted for theft and violence. None of that will be tolerated and minority rights will be respected Barzani says. But the Arabs who were moved to Kirkuk by Hussein will have to leave, he says. "All those Arabs who have been brought to this area under the Arabization process ... should be taken back." He adds that "an international body should oversee the process." But any attempt to quickly undo decades of forced population shifts under Hussein is not likely to reflect well on the Kurdish cause. Many Arabs in Kirkuk, for example, say pesh merga are already pressuring them to leave. Whether Kurdish leaders can keep a lid on people's desires for revenge and property reclamation - after decades of murder and mistreatment by Hussein - could be their most challenging litmus test in the coming weeks. Having been a willing partner when Washington saw so many allies' doors slammed shut, Iraqi Kurds find themselves in a historically rare moment of power - a turning point Barzani acknowledges feels sort of strange. "We, as Kurds ... should not forget where we stand, and we should always look to the future," he says. What that future holds is unclear. For all their differences, the KDP and PUK both say they hope to have a Kurdish state as part of a united, federated Iraq - not an independent Kurdistan. But worried neighbors, Turkey in particular, are not convinced. Barzani warns Turkey not to send its own troops over the border. "We should all speak the language of dialogue and understanding and not military action, because when you send troops in it would further complicate the situation." Christian Science Monitor by Ilene R. Prusher KIRKUK: APRIL 17, 2003: Looters Halt Flow of Oil From Kirkuk: Managers Blame U.S. For Not Stopping Kurds Hundreds of looters still show up each day to carry away valuable pieces of North Oil Co., nearly a week after U.S. troops were said to have secured Kirkuk's oil fields. The few dozen American paratroops on duty here protect only the processing plant of the state-owned company. They have left to the whim of Kurdish guards acres of warehouses that, before the current looting spree, contained $500 million worth of spare parts necessary to resume operations. Until a week ago, the company produced a million barrels of oil a day. One oil company official said that without the parts -- let alone the fire-damaged offices and battered control boards that must be repaired or replaced -- it will take two to three months to bring back the flow of light crude that was supposed to help pay for the reconstruction of Iraq. South Oil Co., the sister firm that produces an additional 1.5 million barrels a day from fields south of the 32nd parallel, is also off line because of the war. "I expected better control from the Americans -- much, much better control from the Americans. The way I saw it, all this damage was done before their eyes," said Hameed Abulrazaq Salim, North Oil's director of engineering. Like other Iraqi managers, Salim spoke ardently of petroleum's potential to revive a nation crippled by 12 years of international sanctions and three wars in as many decades. "This is the first place that should be protected," Salim said. "What do we do with oil? We don't drink it. We sell it!" The damage to the company's sprawling complex just northwest of Kirkuk is so vast it has yet to be fully assessed, said the acting general manager, Adil Kazaz. Offices were stripped of equipment and phones, then gutted by arson. About 180 company vehicles were driven, towed or pushed away. Front-end loaders and firetrucks went out the gate, along with the long blue buses that ferried North Oil employees to work. Those workers are now stranded at home. Electrical and mechanical workshops, where custom parts were fashioned for the three well fields here, were stripped almost as thoroughly as the Iraqi officers' club. "You want to connect one pipe to another, what do you work with?" said Nadia Adil, a draftswoman now waiting at home. "If there's no office to work in, what do we draft?" North Oil executives expressed dismay at the lack of U.S. protection. But the oilmen said they understand the emotional logic that brought Kurdish brigands to the complex last Thursday. The company -- founded by the British, who sank the first well in 1927 -- has been a symbol of the repressive Iraqi state since it was taken over by the Baghdad government in 1972. Even the name of Kirkuk province was changed, to Tamim, Arabic for nationalization. "When there are only two barrels of oil in the world, one of them will be Iraqi," reads the quotation of ousted president Saddam Hussein mounted at the entrance to the processing plant. Kurds were forced out of Kirkuk by the tens of thousands under Hussein's campaign to "Arabize" the petroleum region. During their short-lived uprising against Hussein's government in 1991, Kurds had also vandalized and looted North Oil's facilities. "But nothing like this," Salim said. Baghdad fell April 9. That evening, residents of Kirkuk watched as the army and members of the ruling Baath Party made preparations to leave. The next morning dawned on deserted checkpoints and empty troop carriers. Among the missing was North Oil's director general, Salih Ali Hamid. It fell to his deputy, Kazaz, to shut down operations. The decision plunged Kirkuk into a paralysis that lasted most of a week: North Oil operates the generator that supplies power for the whole city, and for its water pumps. But there was no choice. Employees had rushed home to protect their houses against looters, who began showing up at North Oil by midday. Senior company managers, who described themselves as apolitical and felt secure enough to remain, patrolled the streets of the shady residential campus the British built to house executives in the style of a company town. By midday, men wearing the billowing pleated pants favored by Kurds were going door to door, demanding the keys to every vehicle in sight. The oilmen surrendered their company cars, but Salim insisted on keeping his 1979 Volkswagen Passat. Fifty-two years old, British-educated and the boss of 2,700 employees, Salim had managed no greater prize on a salary of $200 a month. But though the engineer kept the car, he said he felt he lost the sense of shared purpose that had sustained him through his career. "I decided to be a volunteer, to serve people all my life," he said. "I failed." "Oil is the main backbone of Iraq," he said. "And it must be used by a government that looks to the needs of the people. If you have a reasonable government with a reasonable plan, you can do miracles." Salim recalled the schools, hospitals and impressive network of roads built across Iraq with the petroleum windfall of the 1970s, before Hussein came to power and threw the country into one disastrous war after another: Iran-Iraq for eight years in the 1980s, then the 1991 Persian Gulf War, "and now this one." "Most of the income goes to the army," Salim said. "And so we are burning our tanks for the third time." Kirkuk fell without a shot, at least until armed Kurds began blasting away at the Anchor locks on the huge metal sheds filled with spare parts at North Oil. There were no Americans in sight. At mid-afternoon Thursday, when the gateway closest to town was a snarl of stolen and overburdened vehicles, several hundred members of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade waited on the edge of Kirkuk for orders to advance. Hours later, when the Pentagon pronounced the oil fields "secured," the North Oil executives knew otherwise, they said. Only the processing plant, a maze of pipes where sulfur is extracted from crude in the lee of a huge protective berm, is under U.S. control. Kurdish militiamen from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan lounge in stolen office furniture at the compound's two main checkpoints, where the shoulders are littered with confiscated booty that disappears each night, a North Oil manager observed. One valuable spot, the transportation depot, stands unguarded. On Monday, Jasim Hassan and Khidir Osman rooted through a pile of empty cardboard boxes outside a warehouse that once contained $200 million in high-value Caterpillar heavy equipment parts. Kurds from the nearby city of Irbil, they tried to explain their presence as they fiddled with a heavy-duty electrical connector. "That's right, the Kurds want the oil fields," Osman said. "But we are unemployed. We have nothing to do. So we came here for a walk." "We are ordinary people. We know nothing of politics," Hassan said. "Our share was always being eaten, so we came here to get something." As he spoke, orange and white taxis backed up the lane between warehouses laden with loot. Stacked on the roof of one car were six LP gas bottles and a used tire. By Karl Vick Washington Post APRIL 24, 2003: The Turks Enter Iraq Turkish Special Forces team is caught by U.S. troops in Kurdistan Even as the U.S. works to stabilize a postwar Iraq, Turkey is setting out to create a footprint of its own in the Kurdish areas of the country. In the days after U.S. forces captured Saddam's powerbase in Tikrit, a dozen Turkish Special Forces troops were dispatched south from Turkey. Their target: the northern oil city of Kirkuk, now controlled by the U.S. 173rd Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade. Using the pretext of accompanying humanitarian aid the elite soldiers passed through the northern city of Arbil on Tuesday. They wore civilian clothes, their vehicles lagging behind a legitimate aid convoy. They'd hoped to pass unnoticed. But at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kirkuk they ran into trouble. "We were waiting for them," says a U.S. paratroop officer. The Turkish Special Forces team put up no resistance though a mean arsenal was discovered in their cars, including a variety of AK-47s, M4s, grenades, body armor and night vision goggles. "They did not come here with a pure heart," says U.S. brigade commander Col. Bill Mayville. "Their objective is to create an environment that can be used by Turkey to send a large peacekeeping force into Kirkuk." The presence of the Turkish soldiers highlights the increasing possibilities of instability in the region, which has a sizable Turkoman population that has clashed with the Kurdish majority since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. In the first days after Kirkuk fell to allied forces on April 10th, Turkoman families and political parties were attacked by bands of Kurdish looters. In a dramatic display on April 11, an enraged group of Turkoman men dumped the body of a small boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, in front of the Daralsalum Hotel where international journalists had taken rooms. He'd been shot through the waist at close range by a PK light machine gun. The 7.62mm round travelled up through his torso and exited through his skull, leaving a hollowed shell where his little head was supposed to be. American commanders in the city believe the covert Turkish team was meant to inflame these kind of tensions. "These [Turkish] forces are tied in to Turkoman groups in the city," says Col Mayville. The 173rd Airborne commanders suspect an amalgam of local Turkoman parties under the banner of the Iraqi Turkoman Front (ITF) were to be used by the covert team to wreak havoc. "In this first convoy was real aid. They'd do this two or three times then money or weapons would have started flowing in. We suspect their role was to strongarm or discipline the members of the ITF. What they're doing is crystallizing the ITF along the Turkish agenda," says Col. Mayville. By Wednesday U.S. paratroopers were holding 23 people associated with the Turkish Special Forces team. Some were drivers and aid workers. But a dozen of them, says Col. Mayville, were identified as soldiers. "We held them for a night, brought them in, fed them and watched their security. After all," he says wryly, "they are our allies." Early Thursday morning American troops escorted the Turkish commandos back over the border. Time Magazine By MICHAEL WARE |