Kirkuk tensions could spark Iraq civil strife, Turkish intervention

Ethnic rivalry in disputed oil hub could start a new crisis, ICG warns

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Ethnic tensions in the disputed northern Iraqi oil hub of Kirkuk are the biggest threat hanging over the country’s stability and could spark a regional conflict, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report received yesterday.

“In northern Iraq, largely unnoticed, a conflict is brewing that, if allowed to boil over, could precipitate civil war, breakup of the country and in a worst-case scenario, Turkish intervention,” said the report.

The ICG, an international conflict resolution think tank, warned that aggressive rhetoric has been festering unchecked in the ethnic tinderbox of Kirkuk as Kurds seek to right the wrongs of the old regime. Kurds were massively expelled from Kirkuk under Saddam’s policy of Arabization and are now seeking to tighten their grip on a city which holds huge oil resources and which they want as the capital of a future region, or state.

A recent decision brokered by the Iraqi government gave tens of thousands of displaced Kurds the right to vote in Kirkuk, effectively tipping the balance to the Kurdish community and drawing Turkey’s ire.

The Turkish military’s number two, General Ilker Basbug, said this week that such developments could “pose a threat to Iraq’s territorial and political unity and create a great security problem in the region.” The ICG said that as US attention is shifting to other troublespots in Iraq, the neutralizing influence of US troops is receding and the Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and Chaldo-Assyrians of Kirkuk “find themselves in a violent standoff.” “Turkey is anchoring its strategy in commitment to the political process in Baghdad... (and) is banking on progress in accession talks with the European Union to reduce any appetite for secession its Kurdish population might still harbor,” the ICG said.

But “public pressures resulting from Ankara’s manipulation of the Iraqi Turkmen question and the continued deployment of Turkish troops on Iraqi soil could create a dynamic of their own, possibly precipitating military intervention in Kirkuk,” it warned.