Carnage
In Kirkuk Amid
Conflicts Over City’s Future
By James Cogan
19 July, 2007
WSWS.org
A
suicide bomber detonated an explosives-filled truck on Monday in the
busy political and commercial district of the oil-rich Iraqi city of
Kirkuk, just as hundreds of people were going for their lunch-break.
The carnage was horrendous. At least 85 people were killed and more
than 180 wounded. The victims were predominantly ethnic Kurds. Given
the crisis-stricken state of the country’s health system, many
of the injured are unlikely to survive.
The bomber targeted the headquarters
of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two Kurdish nationalist
parties that control the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government (KRG),
which rules the three predominantly Kurdish provinces in Iraq’s
north. The KRG claims Kirkuk as its historic capital and is seeking
to incorporate the city and its lucrative oil fields by the end of the
year.
According to witnesses, a
man drove a dump truck into the blast walls surrounding the PUK complex.
Local police estimated that the vehicle was packed with up to four tonnes
of explosive material. While the bomber failed to break through the
building’s protective barriers, the impact of the explosion brought
down office walls and part of the roof and generated a fireball that
engulfed nearby shops, buses and cars. Days later, the rubble of collapsed
buildings was still being searched for bodies.
Some 20 minutes after the
blast, a second bomb hidden in a truck was detonated in the busy Haseer
market approximately one-and-a-half kilometres away. Nearby shops, houses
and vehicles were damaged and one passer-by was injured. A third bomb
was discovered in a taxi and neutralised. A fourth car bomb was exploded
near a police patrol, killing one policeman and wounding three others.
The city’s medical
facilities could not cope with the casualties and their horrific injuries.
Health workers were forced to turn away wounded and arrange for their
evacuation to the northern cities of Irbil and Sulaymaniyah. Hundreds
of hospital beds in Kirkuk are still filled with the victims of the
massive July 7 bombing in the town of Amerli, some 80 kilometres to
the south, which killed 155 and wounded well over 260 people. The Amerli
atrocity, inflicted on an impoverished, ethnic Turkomen, Shiite community,
is believed to be the worst terrorist attack of the Iraq conflict.
The Iraqi government immediately
blamed the bombings in Kirkuk and Amerli on Al Qaeda-aligned Sunni Muslim
extremists, who have carried out numerous indiscriminate massacres on
civilians in retaliation for the support given by the Shiite and Kurdish
political elite to the US occupation. Suicide attacks are their hallmark.
Over the past five months,
the US military and the Iraqi army have been conducting major operations
in the western province of Anbar, in Baghdad, and in areas to east of
the capital to root out Sunni insurgents, including the group calling
itself “Al Qaeda in Iraq”. Heavy fighting has taken place
in Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province to the south of Kirkuk. Following
an assault on Baqubah in June, a number of extremist fighters are believed
to have fled north into the areas of neighbouring Salah ad Din province
where Amerli is located. Others may have re-established themselves in
Kirkuk.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s
government declared on Monday: “The enemy with his outrageous
attacks against civilians is trying to break the blockade imposed upon
him in Baghdad, Diyala and Anbar.”
Other possibilities cannot
be excluded, however. An intense domestic and international political
struggle is taking place over Kirkuk’s future. A number of Iraqi
organisations and foreign intelligence agencies have a motive for wanting
to plunge the city into as much chaos and instability as possible.
The context of the Kirkuk
bombing is the countdown to a November 15 referendum to determine whether
or not the city will be merged into the KRG. Kirkuk is the prize that
has underpinned the collaboration of the Kurdish nationalists with the
US invasion and occupation. The oil reserves surrounding the city would
provide the autonomous Kurdish region with substantial resources. The
Kurdish elites openly express their ambition to become an economic hub
of the Middle East, sustained by oil revenues. Factions within the Kurdish
ruling parties make no secret that their long-term agenda is to split
from Iraq and establish an independent nation—Kurdistan.
The Bush administration has
supported Kurdish ambitions in order to secure a reliable local ally
in Iraq. The US-established Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) legitimised
the establishment of the KRG as a de-facto separate state from the rest
of Iraq. Article 58 of the CPA’s “Transitional Administrative
Law” (TAL) or constitution obliged the Iraqi government to restore
the homes and property of thousands of Kurds who were forced out of
Kirkuk by the former Baathist regime during pogroms in the 1970s and
1980s. Baghdad was required to move out tens of thousands of ethnic
Arabs who were resettled in the city as part of an attempt by Saddam
Hussein to transform the predominantly Turkomen and Kurdish area into
an Arab stronghold. The aim of the current resettlement program is to
ensure that Kurds are a clear majority of Kirkuk’s population
before any referendum is held.
Article 58 was incorporated
unaltered as Article 140 in the US-vetted 2005 constitution that replaced
the TAL. The most important constitutional pay-off to the Kurdish establishment
was the power over oil resources granted to regions such as the KRG.
While the Baghdad government exercises authority over current fields,
regional governments were given exclusive rights over all untapped oil
fields lying within their jurisdiction. The KRG has already entered
into contracts with foreign energy companies, allowing them to develop
small fields in northern Iraq. The incorporation of Kirkuk would enable
the KRG to claim rights over potentially large fields in the vicinity
of the city. Including the remaining reserves in the Kirkuk fields,
the KRG claims that the Kurdish region has reserves of more than 45
billion barrels, worth over $3 trillion at current oil prices. If that
figure proves true, Kurdistan would be the largest potential source
of oil outside Saudi Arabia, Canada, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and Iraq
itself.
Opposition to the referendum
The Kurdish perspective is
being resisted on a number of fronts. Both Sunni and Shiite factions
of the Arab elite in Iraq oppose the prospect of northern oil revenues
going to the KRG. Central Iraq has limited oil reserves, but the Baghdad-based
ruling class has historically been able to extract the main benefits
from the country’s energy wealth in both the north and south by
concentrating revenues in the coffers of a strong central government.
The loss of the Kirkuk and northern oilfields would strip the country
of as much as 40 percent of its potential resources.
In the Iraqi parliament,
Sunni parties and the powerful Baghdad-centred Shiite movement of cleric
Moqtada al-Sadr have insisted that the constitution be revised to uphold
central authority over oil. They have also demanded that the planned
referendum in Kirkuk be postponed indefinitely, or, alternatively, that
the entire country be allowed to vote, not just residents of the city.
Within Kirkuk, the political
conflicts have fueled divisions. Sunni and Shiite Arabs, ethnic Turkomen
and Christian Assyrians accuse the Kurdish-dominated city government
and security forces of “reverse ethnic cleansing,” intimidating
non-Kurdish families to leave their homes to make way for returning
Kurdish refugees. Over the past months, a census has been taken in the
city to determine who can vote in the November referendum. Remaining
Arab settlers will be ineligible, even if they have lived in the city
for decades. The voting list is due to be released at the end of this
month. As tensions mount, the city is polarising into cantons, and non-Kurdish
minorities are believed to have formed militias to defy the Kurdish
armed forces.
The latest bombings will
be seized on by all sides to strengthen their positions. Opponents of
the referendum argue that it needs to be delayed and may call for the
dispatch of non-Kurdish units of the Iraqi army to provide security.
The KRG has already deployed more Kurdish pershmerga militiamen into
the city.
The response of the Turkish
government is being closely monitored internationally. Ankara has previously
threatened to take military action to prevent Kirkuk becoming the capital
of an autonomous Kurdish region. There are over 15 million Kurds in
Turkey—compared to less than 5 million in Iraq—and separatists
have waged a guerilla war since 1983. Turkey fears that the consolidation
of the KRG with a viable oil-based economy will fuel separatist sentiment
among eastern Turkey’s Kurdish minority.
The Turkish military has
an estimated 160,000 to 200,000 heavily armed troops along the border,
ostensibly to prevent Kurdish rebels sheltering in northern Iraq from
crossing over and carrying out attacks during the summer months. The
Turkish military commander has called for an invasion of northern Iraq
to wipe out guerilla bases, and threatened the KRG and its president,
Massoud Barzani, whom the military has accused of supporting the Kurdish
struggle in Turkey.
An additional casus belli
for a Turkish intervention into northern Iraq, and Kirkuk in particular,
would be emotive claims that it was necessary to protect the persecuted
Iraqi Turkomen population from ethnic cleansing. Significantly, Ankara
contacted US occupation forces soon after the Amerli bombing to volunteer
Turkish military aircraft to airlift the Turkomen casualties back to
Turkey for treatment.
Turkomen are the descendents
of Turks who moved into what is now Iraq, which for centuries was part
of the Ottoman Empire. While making up only 2 percent of the country’s
population, they were previously the majority in Kirkuk. The Turkish
government funds the Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF), a Kirkuk-based organisation
that holds seats in the Iraqi parliament and is virulently opposed to
the city’s annexation by the KRG.
In April, the ITF organised
a demonstration in Ankara to appeal for support to prevent the impending
referendum. A range of Turkish politicians and nationalist groups attended.
An ITF speaker warned: “I am calling out to Baghdad from here.
This is the sound of the footsteps of the Turkish people. We will protect
our traditions and customs in Iraq.”
In the tense and volatile
situation created by the US-led invasion of Iraq, the only thing that
is certain is that the death and suffering that took place on Monday
will not be the last.
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