Iraq and the Kurds: Resolving the Kirkuk Crisis

Security in Kirkuk is deteriorating sharply. Two main factors are to blame. First, following the death of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi on 7 June 2006, jihadi fighters partly moved operations there, finding in the multi-ethnic region fertile ground for chaos by exacerbating communal tensions. An unrelenting series of suicide bombings began to shake the city and its surroundings, blind to their victims’ primary identity or political affiliation. Today Kirkuk resembles Baghdad in miniature, with shops shuttered in the normally teeming downtown market area, and Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans and Chaldo-As Syrians hunkered down in neighborhoods which, while not entirely segregated, are distinctly hostile to members of whatever community happens to be the minority. Violence at first predominated downtown, where communities commingled, as well as in areas inhabited by the Wafidin (Arab “newcomers” settled in Kirkuk as part of previous regimes’ Arabization campaigns). But in February 2007 it moved into the heart of Kurdish neighborhoods as if to show that the Kurdish parties’ control over Kirkuk’s security apparatus did not guarantee safety for the Kurdish civilian population.