[A-List] Iraqi Kurdistan

["Stan Goff" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[And Kurdistan remains the snake under the conference table.  -SG]

January 26, 2005 
How the US Can Attack an Ally 
by Aaron Glantz

IRBIL, Northern Iraq ? Irbil is normally a quiet place. Capital of the
Kurdish autonomous area in Northern Iraq, the city of 800,000 has
largely avoided the bloodshed of 22 months of war and occupation. 

Kurdish fighters here fought alongside the United States in the initial
invasion. Since the fall of Saddam, the area has been governed by
Kurdish leaders, whose followers provide security. There are no American
soldiers on the streets, and no Humvee patrols. The area had not seen a
single American attack since the invasion. 

Until this month, that is. 

Just past midnight Wednesday Jan. 5, three U.S. helicopters arrived over
Irbil from a base in Baghdad, and began circling over a college
dormitory near the center of town. Many in the boys dorm, who attended
nearby Salahudin University, were still awake cramming for midterm exams
scheduled for the next day. 

"Suddenly, American soldiers began to jump out of one of the helicopters
and started shooting at the building," says Salam, an English department
student. Local police tried to intervene to stop the attack, but were
pushed back by the Americans, students and Kurdish officials say. 

Then the helicopters opened fire. First they fired bullets at the
dormitory, and then they launched four rockets. One of the rockets hit
the electricity generator on top of the dorm, which exploded in a giant
fireball. "The whole building was in flames," Salam said. "It's a
miracle nobody died." 

The helicopter attack sent a wave of dismay throughout the Kurdish
autonomous region, where nearly everyone supports the U.S. presence. 

After strong condemnation by the Kurdish government, and unrest in the
streets, the U.S. commander in charge of Northern Iraq issued an
apology. "I ask the President, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and
the people of Irbil to accept our sincere apologies," Gen. Carter F. Ham
told Kurdish television. 

But Gen. Ham provided no reason for the attack. He told Kurdish leaders
the attack was ordered from Baghdad and carried out by U.S. forces based
there. 

The Kurdish government accepted the apology, but officials here remain
puzzled. "You should ask them why they came here," director-general of
the ministry of the interior in the Kurdistan Regional Government, Tariq
Gardi told IPS. "Because when they came here they found nothing. If
there is any terror network in Irbil, we would be the first to know
about it, not the Americans." 

Kurds see themselves as friends of the United States, Gardi said. "If
they share information with us we will cooperate with them. We will help
them and we will get their target, but they didn't cooperate with us and
they came with three helicopters and they didn't achieve anything." 

Like their leaders, most Kurds are still grateful to the Bush
Administration for toppling Saddam Hussein. The vast majority seems to
have accepted the U.S. apology. But at the same time, there has been a
subtle shift of attitudes here. 

"Previously we welcomed the Americans warmly," says Mohammed Mahmoud, a
recent graduate of the university's English department. "We thought that
they had come to liberate us, to help us, and to cooperate with us in
governing our region. But now we think the U.S. troops are here just for
their own interest. They don't respect the local government of the
Kurds." 

Mohammed Mahmoud says the helicopter attack has made Kurds appreciate
their government more. He hopes official outrage by the Kurdish
government will convince the U.S. military not to behave in Kurdistan
the way they have acted in Fallujah, where whole neighborhoods have been
destroyed and hundreds ? perhaps thousands ? of civilians killed in
massive air and ground assaults. 

"It showed the American commanders in Iraq that Kurdistan is a region
completely different from any other part of Iraq," Mahmoud said. "If
U.S. troops go to Fallujah and carry out operations and even damage
houses, no one will condemn the operation, but in Kurdistan, because we
have a government and our own security forces, if anything is done
without this coordination, it is condemned by the people. It is an
insult to the Kurds."

(Inter Press Service)

Iraq's Turkmen chase every vote in bid for tighter grip on oil regions 
AFP: 1/25/2005 

KIRKUK, Iraq, Jan 25 (AFP) - Confronted with the ambitions of US-backed
Kurds, Iraq's Turkmen community has adopted an aggressive electoral
campaign, sparing no effort to grab the largest possible share of the
north's coveted oil resources. 

Network and satellite television, five radio stations, a plethora of
Turkish-language newspapers and daily political rallies: Turkmen have
deployed a full arsenal to goad its members into casting the right
ballot on Sunday. 

On Turkmeneli TV, the announcer gives his community a nightly pep talk:
"Iraqi Turkmen! Participating in the elections is a national, patriotic
and religious duty. Vote for the Iraqi Turkmen Front list number 175." 

The number of the list and a countdown to election day flash insistently
in two corners of the screen. 

On January 30, Iraqis will take part in a national and provincial vote,
while Kurds will also elect their autonomous assembly, in the country's
first multi-party elections in decades. 

In the northern city of Kirkuk, the uneasy ethnic mix of Turkmen, Kurds
and Arabs has fanned tensions and often spilled over into violence. 

Turkmen claim they make up about 13 percent of Iraq's population of 27
million, but according to the last Iraqi census conducted in 1977, their
people account for no more than two percent of the population. 

Nationalist organisations fear the large contingent of Shiite Turkmen
will be lured by list 169, a coalition of heavyweight parties from
Iraq's majority Shiite community which was blessed by Iraq's Shiite
spiritual leader -- Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- and is expected to
dominate the vote. 

"We are concerned that Shiite Turkmen in cities like Tall Afar, Daquk,
Taza, Tuz Khurmatu, Amerly and Mandily might vote for the Shiite giant
list of the United Iraqi Alliance," said Saadeen Argej, who heads the
Turkmen Shura Council. 

Other divisions are threatening the fragile Turkmen bid to muster votes
in the election, with party rifts adding to the religious differences. 

Some Turkmen parties have strong ties with neighbouring Turkey, while
others opposing Ankara's interference in Iraqi affairs have found
support from Kurdish movements. 

The balance of power in Kirkuk was effectively tipped to the Kurds last
week, when a deal was reached with the Iraqi government and the
electoral commission allowing up to 100,000 Kurd refugees to vote in
Kirkuk. 

The move was seen by many as a boost to a Kurdish drive for
independence. Ankara has stridently denounced the decision as opening
the door to an eventual secession. The biggest Arab political list in
Kirkuk announced Monday it had withdrawn in protest over the larger
Kurdish electoral registration. 

The Iraqi Turkmen Front's own ambitions of a jointly-run autonomous rule
in Kirkuk -- with a Turkmen president, a Kurdish deputy and an Arab
parliament speaker -- appear even more of a long shot. 

But the Turkmen leadership also fears the dire security prevailing in
some areas outside Kirkuk's Tamim province where its community lives
will strip it of many valuable votes it cannot hope to make up in other
regions. 

"About 300,000 Turkmen, most of them residents of Tall Afar might not
dare to go to polling stations because of the security situation there,"
said ITF leader Faruq Abdullah Abdulrahman. "It will be a great loss for
us". 

Tall Afar is a northern city which is home to a large Turkmen community,
but lies in the troubled Nineveh province, where the January polls have
been threatened by relentless insurgent attacks. 

"Tall Afar is a big city in Iraq with virgin oil reserves and could have
a unique position if it would be used as a passageway connecting Syria
to Turkey through Iraqi lands" says Qassem Abbas Mussa, a Turkmen
economist. 

Feeling that the oil hubs so key to their national project are falling
out of reach, the Turkmen have become increasingly acrimonious over what
they perceive as pro-Kurdish bias on the part of the almighty United
States. 

"Since the downfall of Saddam (Hussein)'s regime, there has been some
sort of a political courtship between some US officials and their
Kurdish counterparts," said Faruq Abdullah Abdulrahman, head of the
Iraqi Turkmen Front. 

01/25/2005 13:24 GMT - AFP 

January 27, 2005  
Kurdish Parties Eye Independence 
 
by Aaron Glantz 

ARBIL - Ahmed Khani sips his tea as he reclines in a high-back leather
chair, a sepia-toned portrait of the father of Iraqi Kurdish
nationalism, the late Mullah Mustafa Barzani behind him. 

In the portrait, Barzani wears military fatigues and the traditional
Kurdish headscarf. Khani is wearing a suit. 

Ahmed Khani is the deputy local chief of the Kurdistan Democratic Party
(KDP), which Mullah Mustafa Barzani founded a half-century ago. Now, the
organization is run by his son Masoud and controls the western half of
the Kurdish autonomous area ? from the steep mountains along the Turkish
border to the provincial capital Arbil in the plains. 

The eastern half of Kurdish Iraq is controlled by the Barzanis ? old
rival Jalal Talabani and his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). 

For this weekend election, Kani says the two parties have buried their
differences and are running on a Kurdish unity ticket. And he is
confident of victory. 

"We expect to win 99 percent of the vote in the Kurdistan parliament,"
he told IPS. "Perhaps 98 percent." 

Kani can be sure of a commanding victory because nearly every political
force in Kurdistan has joined his coalition. Not only are the PUK and
KDP together, but Kurdish parties representing Islamists, Communists,
Christians, and ethnic Turks as well. 

Each party's representation in the Kurdish parliament has been
negotiated in advance: the PUK and KDP will get 41 seats each, the
Communists 10, the Kurdistan Islamic Union nine, the Turkmen four. 

"This is not like Saddam's election when 99.999 percent voted for Saddam
and only he didn't vote for himself, so he could say that it's fair,"
the KDP official said. "It's not like that. People are supporting us.
People are voting for us." 

The different political parties have their own supporters and they are
divided," he acknowledged. "But when all the parties are together, of
course they will get 99 percent of the vote." 

That is not by itself a good thing, says Dler Mohammed Sheriff, a
Communist Party candidate and a lawyer. "But democracy hasn't really
taken root in Iraq yet," he said. "We should be arguing on the basis of
ideology, but right now we think the case of Kurds is in a threatened
position. That's why we have decided to be on the same slate as the
Kurdish parties." 

Underlining this perceived need for national unity is the difficult
history of the Kurdistan autonomous region. After allegations of massive
fraud in the first Kurdish parliamentary election in 1992, the two main
parties agreed to share power equally, with both taking 50 seats each in
the 111-member assembly (the other seats were reserved for ethnic and
religious minorities). 

But the arrangement did not keep the peace for long. In 1994 a war
erupted between the PUK and KDP, with both sides seeking to increase
control over the Kurdistan region. The war was brutal, and both sides
called on outside forces for help. 

"It's absolutely against democracy," university professor and human
rights activist Farhad Pirball says of the unified election slate. "But
this is a very important election for the future of Kurds. Kurds have
different ideas and ideologies, but when we discuss the election, the
more important thing is independence." 

The reason that Kurds have made a united list is "because they think the
most important thing is to be united and to ask and to struggle for
independence," he added.

(Inter Press Service)