The Great Game

This might be the straw that breaks Iraq's back. The Kurdish push for control of the city of Kirkuk (and the oil fields in the province that surrounds it) is in many ways the most dangerous struggle in Iraq. This is brinksmanship, and the prize is great.

Jax.

NB: Muhammad Ahmed comment on the problem of oil can be echoed throughout the developing world. It is the nations that lack natural resources that have had the most succes at democratizing.

KIRKUK, Iraq - Muhammad Ahmed realized how wide the chasm between Kurds and Arabs here had grown when he recently ran into a former classmate on the serpentine streets of this troubled city.

Mr. Ahmed, a Kurd, and his friend, an Arab, had studied together at Kirkuk's oil institute nearly two decades ago. But shortly after Mr. Ahmed started work at the state-owned North Oil Company in the late 1980's, the government of Saddam Hussein, intent on solidifying Arab control of Kirkuk, forced him out of his job and made him and his family move north, where they joined tens of thousands of other Kurds exiled from this city.

That mass relocation planted the seeds for a bitter ethnic antagonism that has grown into the most incendiary political issue in Iraq outside of the Sunni-led insurgency, and the one that more than any other is delaying formation of a new government. When Mr. Ahmed met his classmate again, he discovered his friend was still working for North Oil, one of as many as 10,000 employees helping to tap the region's vast troves of oil, estimated at 10 to 20 percent of the country's reserves.

"He had a great salary and a good job all these years," said Mr. Ahmed, 41, musing on the luxuries of his old friend's house. "Arabs, Turkmen and Christians were hired, and Kurds were not." He spoke from his own home: a cinder-block building hastily erected in a squatter camp inside the city's soccer stadium, where he and his family have been living alongside thousands of other returning Kurds since the fall of Mr. Hussein's rule. "We wish we didn't have oil in Kirkuk," he said. "If the oil wasn't here, we'd have a comfortable life now. All our problems are because of this damned oil."

Mr. Ahmed's plight encapsulates the growing struggle over Kirkuk, a drab city of 700,000 on the windswept northern plains. Efforts to restore Kurds to their jobs and property without disenfranchising Arabs are fraught with the possibility of igniting a civil war. The debate has so inflamed passions that Kurdish and Shiite Arab negotiators trying to form a coalition government in Baghdad may have to put off any real decision on Kirkuk's future.

"As far as Kirkuk is concerned, because of the different ethnic groups in it, we have to apply a permanent solution, not a temporary solution," Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the Shiite nominee for prime minister, said.

Kurdish leaders call Kirkuk their Jerusalem, saying they should control it - and its oil fields - because it was historically Kurdish. The Kurds are pushing Shiite leaders like Dr. Jaafari to help quickly give property back to Kurdish returnees, evict Arab settlers and employ more Kurds at North Oil, the only major government institution here that the Kurds have been unable to dominate since the American invasion. (more)