30 October 2006

1. "No easy answer to 'Kurdish question'", America's Kurdish dilemma stems from the fact that more than 20 million Kurds straddle the strategic borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

2. "Three More Journalists Charged Under 301", journalists Ozkan, Arcayurek and Bulut have been charged under article 301 for "publicly denigrating Turkish soldiers" in a program on Kanal Turk TV. Total of 68 people charged under controversial articles 301 and 159 in past 18 months.

3. "Modern Turkey has plenty of work to do - but still sets a worthy example", eighty-three years after modern Turkey emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, questions about the country's identity continue to divide its citizens and confuse both friend and foe alike.

4. "The Kurds Go Their Own Way", can freedom flower in Iraqi Kurdistan?

5. "Problems fail to deter Kurds", like other ethnic communities emerging from a long struggle for independence, Iraq's Kurds are going through a period of disillusionment with their wartime leaders.

6. "Kurds Improvise", while the Kurds of northern Iraq have been independent of the Iraqi government since 1992, they have not yet created a regular army. What they do have is a light infantry force, the Peshmerga. These troops have received some military training, from their own, and American, trainers. The Pershmerga can, at the moment, keep the Arab Iraqis out, but the organization is more a security force and jobs program, than an army.

1. - Los Angeles Times - "No easy answer to 'Kurdish question'":

27 October 2006 / by Kim Murphy

Driving north through these folded, wheat-colored mountains, it is easy to forget you are in Iraq.

Miles to the south, the Iraqi flags disappear, replaced by the flags of Kurdistan, a state that does not officially exist. Here in the northern mountains, though, even the symbols of the Iraqi Kurdish authority are nowhere to be seen.

Most of the flags here are those of the Kurdistan Workers Party — the PKK, listed by the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization responsible for the loss of thousands of lives in a separatist campaign across the border in Turkey. Deep in the mountains, all the road checkpoints are operated by PKK guerrillas. A giant portrait of imprisoned guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan stretches across a rocky slope.

The fact that much of Iraq's rugged northern borderlands with Turkey and Iran are under the day-to-day control of a militant organization might come as a surprise to those who thought U.S. forces had handed over authority nationwide to a new Iraqi government.

The PKK's guerrilla camps, ordered closed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki last month, still dot some of the steep valleys and ravines near the group's makeshift headquarters here; at least half the offices of its political affiliate, the Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, also remain open.

The efforts to rein in the PKK are a new and strategically important front in the Bush administration's campaign to create a new Middle East, and one of the most complicated political problems U.S. forces face in Iraq. Kurdish leaders, for instance, have battled the PKK over the years in various intramural squabbles, but have been reluctant to clamp down on the group because of its popularity among the Kurdish public and out of sympathy for Kurds in Turkey.

Founded three decades ago as a violent Marxist resistance movement battling for independence of Kurds in Turkey, the PKK began a concerted paramilitary campaign in 1984. It since has mellowed its politics but still fields a force of as many as 6,000 guerrillas along the Iraqi-Turkish border, with about 1,000 of them well within Iraq, government officials estimate.

Within Turkey, violence connected with Kurdish separatists has escalated this year. In August, a group calling itself the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons claimed responsibility for several bomb attacks aimed at tourists that killed three people and injured dozens in Turkish coastal resorts. The group is widely believed to be an urban guerrilla offshoot of the PKK. The PKK has concentrated on attacking Turkish soldiers, using bases in northern Iraq as sanctuaries, according to the Turkish government.

In northern Iraq, the PKK militants get training in Shakespeare and Goethe, in the military tactics of the Thirty Years' War and how to operate a Russian-made BKC machine gun and a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher.

"We are here for one reason, and that is to obtain the objective of the freedom of our people of Kurdistan," said a doe-eyed young guerrilla who gave her name only as Ozgur and said she joined the movement when she was 13.

America's Kurdish dilemma stems from the fact that more than 20 million Kurds straddle the strategic borders of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.

Iraq's roughly 4 million Kurds are arguably the United States' strongest allies in the war-torn nation, and U.S. forces would almost surely face a political backlash in Baghdad if they took military action against guerrilla fighters many Kurds see as heroes.

Yet the Kurdish guerrilla force here is battling one of America's bedrock allies in the region — Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a stable, secular Muslim state in a region trending in other directions. The continuing failure to end PKK violence coming out of Iraq has driven Turkey toward a stronger security arrangement with Iran, which also faces militant Kurds along the Iraqi border, a relationship that can't help but be worrying for Washington.

"How important is the PKK as an issue? Let me tell you that it's important enough that the president of the United States decided that we needed a special envoy to counter the PKK and to try to get all of our efforts in the United States focused in the right direction, along with those of Turkey and Iraq," retired Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, recently appointed the U.S. special envoy to counter the PKK, said after a visit to the region late last month.

"We all believe that the use of force is the last resort, not the first resort," he said. "But having said that, that does not mean that we will not take military action. Quite the contrary: All options are on the table."

The continuing polarization of Iraq and the mounting sectarian violence there have only exacerbated worries among its neighbors about reverberations within the substantial Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iran and Syria.

Iraqi Kurdistan has moved steadily to distance itself from the violent skirmishing between Sunni and Shiite Arabs to the south; regional President Massoud Barzani's recent order to pull down the Iraqi flag on public buildings and replace it with the Kurdish flag is only one in a long line of moves to establish a truly autonomous Kurdish republic. Here in the north, there are Kurdish schools, Kurdish broadcast channels, Kurdish cellphone companies and a full-fledged Kurdish regional government.

Militant groups such as the PKK are demanding an end to repression of Kurds elsewhere, recognition of their national status and language and eventually some degree of political autonomy — measures that government leaders fear will open the door to demands for a Kurdish state, discarding the borders of four nations, a recipe for regional war.

That is why solving "the Kurdish question" has become a top priority for the U.S., and why tackling the PKK, its most militant face, has become step No. 1.

After Ralston's visit to the region, Iraqi leaders persuaded the PKK to declare a unilateral cease-fire, an end to the regular cross-border attacks that are claiming the lives of Turkish soldiers on a regular basis.

The PKK agreed, its leaders hoping the expression of goodwill could open the door to significant movement on Turkey's part, starting with an end to what it sees as human rights abuses, recognition of the Kurdish language and possibly amnesty for some PKK fighters who have not been involved in violence.

"I would like to say that the cease-fire has not been announced because of pressure at all," Cemil Bayak, a longtime leader of the group's most militant wing and a member of its ruling council, said in an interview over a lunch of grilled chicken and steaming vegetable stew at his mountain redoubt.

The most important reason is that we want the Kurdish question to be solved peacefully, politically and by means of dialogue. This is what we want," said Bayak, who believed Turkey's bid to join the European Union would provide the impetus for human rights improvements needed to alleviate repression of the nation's Kurds. "We want violence to be put aside, and a new era to be opened on the issue."

But although the PKK has pledged to end its attacks on Turkish military targets, it is unclear whether the cease-fire will be embraced by other Kurdish militants, including the Falcons.

Turkish officials say the PKK is a terrorist organization that finances its activities through an international network of drug smuggling and human trafficking that reaches to Europe. Turkey is demanding the use of military force to disarm the PKK, but Iraq so far has refused, said Kosrat Rasoul Ali, vice president of the Kurdish regional government and a well-known former Kurdish peshmerga fighter.

"They want us to attack the PKK, they want us to crack down on the PKK," Ali said. "But it cannot be done. In the past we tried, but it was without result.

"We think that this problem cannot be solved with force," he said. "Because they are Kurds. It's very difficult for us Kurds to kill Kurds. In fact, it is impossible."

Ralston has refused to meet with PKK leaders, declaring, "We do not meet with terrorist groups." But Ali said Kurdish leaders hoped to broker a solution in which the PKK would disarm in exchange for guarantees on behalf of Kurds in Turkey.

"PKK is ready to hand over their weapons to the Americans, in return for several political steps by Turkey," Ali said. "Like a general amnesty to be published, to recognize Kurdish existence as a people in Turkey."

At the same time, some Iraqi officials believe Turkey and possibly Iran are behind some of the escalating violence in northern Iraq, especially in the city of Kirkuk, an oil center that Kurds hope to include within their federated republic, whose inclusion could form the basis for a powerful future Kurdistan economy.

In a pointed warning, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, said last month that Iraq was prepared to support opposition groups within neighboring nations whose governments it saw as instigating violence in Iraq.

Recognizing that America's prime aim is to discourage the growing closeness of Turkey and Iran at a time when the U.S. is seeking to isolate Tehran, PKK leaders are arguing that solving the Kurdish question — the main issue that Turkey and Iran have in common — is the best way to accomplish that goal.

"If you cannot solve the Kurdish problem in Turkey, you cannot separate Turkey from Syria and Iran," Bayak said.

"And so without putting Turkey and the Kurds together, you cannot have the fundamental basis for this project of a new Middle East."

2. - Bianet - "Three More Journalists Charged Under 301":

Journalists Ozkan, Arcayurek and Bulut have been charged under article 301 for "publicly denigrating Turkish soldiers" in a program on Kanal Turk TV. Total of 68 people charged under controversial articles 301 and 159 in past 18 months.

ISTANBUL / 27 October 2006 / Erol Onderoglu

Journalists Tuncay Ozkan, Cuneyt Arcayurek and Adnan Bulut have been charged for "publicly denigrating Turkish soldiers" in a program aired by "Kanal Turk" television and face up to 3 years imprisonment each if found guilty under penal code article 301.

The charges against all three journalists are linked to views expressed on the "Politics Stop" program on Kanal Turk. Ozkan is the producer of the progam, Bulut the television's program director and Arcayurek a "guest journalist" who appeared on television in this instance.

Subject to the Istanbul charges is Arcayurek's remarks during the program that were aired by the television:

"There is of course truth in the own words of the Turkish Armed Forces that says, we do not slam our fist down on the table, we speak with our brains. Of course we are not saying slam your fist on the table. But has it actually done what it said and what it wanted done by underlining these or pursuing them constantly? Or not? If you had done things by informing the public opinion, it wouldn't have come to this. We put our brains doen on the table, what happened? Nothing left. They didn't respect our brain. They didn't. Stupid".

BIA²: 68 people charged under 301 and 159

The Monitoring Desk of the "Establishing a Countrywide Network for Monitoring and Covering for Media Freedom and Independent Journalism-BIA²" project has disclosed that according to its data from news reports covered, a total of 68 people have been charged in Turkey under articles 301 and 159 of the Turkish Penal Code in 18 months.

While article 301 went into force on June 1, 2005, in instances where it has been favorable for the defendants, article 159 has been imposed.

Those who have been charged under both articles are journalists, writers, publishers, activists, unionists and, in some instance, ordinary citizens.

3. - The Daily Star - "Modern Turkey has plenty of work to do - but still sets a worthy example":

30 October 2006

Eighty-three years after modern Turkey emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, questions about the country's identity continue to divide its citizens and confuse both friend and foe alike. Buffeted by external factors like the Cold War and internal ones like the struggle to define democracy, the Turkish Republic has managed to survive several periods of pronounced instability. The land envisioned by the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is still very much a work in progress, but the country continues to serve as a useful crossroads between Europe and Asia, and its experiment continues to blaze a trail for other countries in the region.

Shortly after Ataturk established the republic in 1923, he initiated a series of wide-ranging reforms aimed at building a modern, democratic secular nation-state from the ruins of what had been a quintessentially Muslim empire. Today the debate over what it means to be modern, democratic and secular is still raging. This year's National Day celebrations were marred by a renewed debate over the Islamic headscarf and the need to balance secularism with the protection of individual and religious freedoms. The hard-line head of Turkey's powerful military establishment, General Yasar Buyukanit, has warned that the existing system faces "a serious threat by reactionary movements," which is code for parties whose political philosophies are determined by, or rooted in, Islam. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party fits the latter description, and the military has forced elected government out of office in the very recent past, so the general's comments are not to be taken lightly.

Turkey's experiences with striking a balance are particularly instructive for those Arab countries undertaking their own transitions to democracy. The Turkish example demonstrates that the road to irreversible change will be a long one, and that even meaningful progress will not guarantee instant approval from some world powers. It also illustrates that nationalist instincts can allow the actions of one era to hinder the ambitions of the next: Modern Turkey's continuing failure to come to grips with the Ottomans' slaughter of Armenians, for instance, remains a formidable barrier to better relations with Europe and therefore a major impediment to improved economic performance. And as Arabs know well, Turkey's previous status as an imperial power still clouds its relations with former subject peoples.

Despite these and other difficulties, today's Turkey is an increasingly important player on the regional and even the world stage. For it to consolidate its growing influence, however, it would be helpful if the balancing act could be replaced by a realization that in fact, Islam and democracy are not incompatible at all: They just haven't spent much time together.

4. - Reason - "The Kurds Go Their Own Way":

Can freedom flower in Iraqi Kurdistan?

August/September 2006 / by Michael J. Totten

Two hours into my first tour of Erbil, my guide for the day taught me to feel lucky. “If we were doing this in Baghdad, we would be dead by now,” he said.

Our driver nodded vigorously.

“It’s that dangerous?” I asked.

“With your face,” my guide replied, “and with our Kurdish license plates on the car, we could not last two hours.”

So goes the capital of Iraq. But I was touring the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the war is already over.

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked. Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road. Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.

The second line of defense is the Kurds themselves. Out of desperate necessity, they have forged one of the most vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Anyone who doesn’t speak Kurdish as their native language—and Iraq’s troublemakers overwhelmingly fall into this category—stands out among the general population. There is no friendly sea of the people, to borrow Mao’s formulation, that insurgents can freely swim in. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate the area are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society does a better job rooting out and keeping out Islamist killers than the U.S. military can manage in the kinda sorta halfway “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad.

In a region where rule by reactionary clerics, gangster elites, and calcified military dictatorships is the norm, Iraqi Kurdistan is, by local standards, an open, liberal, and peaceful society. Its government is elected by a popular vote, competing political parties run their own newspapers, and the press is (mostly) free. Religion and the state are separate, and women can and do vote. The citizens here are tired of war, and they’re doing everything in their power to make their corner of the Middle East a normal, stable place where it’s safe to live, and to invest and build.

But to carve out their breathing space, the Kurds have adopted discriminatory policies that would make any liberal-minded Westerner squirm. It remains to be seen how the contradictions will sort themselves out in the long run. But the outcome is important, especially if Kurdistan reaches the day—and it seems increasingly likely that it will—that it breaks entirely free of Baghdad and declares independence.
The Kurdish Autonomous Zone

Only 200 U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Even those are mere tokens. The Kurdish armed forces, the Peshmerga (“those who face death”), are in charge of security. They do a remarkable job. Since Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime was toppled, only a handful of violent attacks have taken place in their part of the country.

Granted: In 2004 a suicide bomber killed Sami Abdul Rahman, the deputy vice president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, along with more than 100 other people. Last year another suicide bomber self-detonated just outside the perimeter of the fake knock-off “Sheraton” hotel. Bits of flesh splattered the flowers near the front door.

Those were major attacks. But not much else has happened. Meanwhile, the rest of the Kurds’ country—if we can still think of Iraq as their country—is the most terrorized place in the world.

For that reason, among many others, Iraq might not survive in one piece. The overwhelming majority of Iraqi Kurdistan’s people are packing their bags for independence. Most have already said goodbye.

Not one Iraqi flag flies in Erbil. The national flag does appear above government buildings in the eastern city of Suleimaniya. But it’s the old flag, the pre-Saddam flag, the one that doesn’t have Allahu Akbar (“God is Great”) scrawled across the middle of it. The only reason it’s flown in Suleimaniya at all is that the city is headquarters to Jalal Talabani’s political party, the left-wing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and Talabani is the president of Iraq. (Note: The prime minister, not the president, is head of the government.)

In January 2005 the Iraqi Kurds held an informal referendum on independence. More than 80 percent turned out to vote, and 98.7 percent of those voted to secede. The Kurds have long dreamed of self-determination; today, when they look south, they see only Islamism, Ba’athism, blood, fire, and mayhem. To them, Baghdad is the capital of a deranged foreign country. The only people I met who thought of Kurdistan as “Iraq” were the foreigners. When a Palestinian-American aid worker warned me about security, he told me, “Never forget that you’re in Iraq.” But the Kurds kept saying, “This isn’t Iraq.”

The Push for Independence

If Middle Easterners had drawn the borders themselves, Iraq wouldn’t even exist. Blame the British for shackling Kurds and Arabs together when they created the post-colonial, post-Ottoman map. The Kurds do. Like the English, they refer to a toilet as “a W.C.”—but they insist that stands for “Winston Churchill.”

Arab Iraqis who want to “keep” Kurdistan should thank the heavens for Talabani, Iraq’s president. He belongs to the 1.3 percent of Iraqi Kurds who at least say they want to remain tied to Baghdad. Meanwhile, Masoud Barzani, president of Kurdistan and chief of the conservative Kurdistan Democratic Party, is playing bad cop. While Talabani is in Baghdad trying to forge a federal Iraq with official Kurdish autonomy, Barzani broods in his mountain palace and openly threatens secession. “Self-determination is the natural right of our people,” he said early last year. “When the right time comes, it will become a reality.”

It’s hard to overstate just how long and how badly the Kurds have wanted out. Barzani’s father, the guerilla leader Moula Mustafa, once told Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post, “We can become your 51st state and provide you with oil.” That was back in 1973.

Indeed, the dream of an independent Kurdistan dates back to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The League of Nations promised the Kurds a homeland of their own. Instead their homeland was broken into shards and parceled out to Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Only in Iran, where the local Kurds call the Persians “cousins,” do they feel much kinship with their nominal countrymen.

Nowhere do Kurds feel more distant from their fellow citizens than in Iraq. They have had their own de facto independent state here for the last 15 years. Most of Kurdistan north of Suleimaniya was protected by the U.S. and U.K. “no fly” zones during the interim between the first and second Gulf Wars. Young Iraqi Kurds have no memory of living under Saddam, no memory of ties to Baghdad, no memory of associating with Arabs, no memory of the oppression, the genocide, or the war. They see no point in creating ties with Baghdad that haven’t existed in living memory—especially when Baghdad is burning.

Sidqi Khan Bradosti, whose family owns the Zozik Trading Company, put it more mildly than anyone else. “We have nothing to do with Baghdad,” he said. “And I don’t want to have anything to do with Baghdad if it can’t be part of a federal rule-of-law democracy.” The comments of English teacher Birzo Abdulkadir were more typical: “We have nothing to do with the rest of Iraq. It was inflicted on us. What do we have to do with Arabism?”

Most Kurds are moderately conservative Sunni Muslims. But their religious tradition is historically more liberal and lenient than many others in the Middle East. “I speak and read Arabic fluently,” Abdulkadir told me. “I have read the Koran in its original language. I know it’s more flexible than most Arab imams admit.”

Kurds have “no friends but the mountains,” or so an old saying goes. It’s hard for Westerners to grasp just how isolated these people feel. That partly explains their fanatical pro-Americanism: A friend, at last!

Their isolation has also produced a you-leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone mentality. The mayor of Halabja, the city where Saddam used chemical weapons to massacre thousands in one day, wanted to make sure I understood this. “We never terrorized anyone in any country,” he said. “We occupied no one’s land. We defended ourselves with humble military force against a powerful enemy. We consider our nation a protector of human rights.”

The mayor conveniently left out the terror campaign waged by the Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey from the 1970s to the 1990s. The PKK was, after all, occasionally supported by some Kurdish groups in Iraq. Even so, several Kurds I spoke to thought the PKK was a strategic and moral disaster. “Abdullah Öcalan was our own Yasser Arafat,” one person told me, referring to the PKK’s former leader. “The difference between us and the Palestinians is that we learn from our mistakes.”

The president of Dohok University, Asmat M. Khalid, whose office is in that city’s old Ba’ath Party headquarters, told me the Kurds intend to build a new country with this idea as its foundation: “We have a different way of thinking here. We believe the key is to be civilized.…We don’t want our new generation to be aggressive. We don’t want them to have to fight. It is not our habit to kill.” The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) does what it can to broadcast this message to Arab Iraqis on its Arabic-language satellite station Il Takhi. Il takhi means brothers. There is no Arabic equivalent of such a channel in Kurdish.

I did sometimes hear Kurds expressing racist comments. Iqbal Ali Muhammad of the Kurdistan Islamic Union, a moderate Islamist organization that is the third largest party in Iraqi Kurdistan, bluntly said, “The Arab, he is wild. He is not a civilized person.”

Funny place, Kurdistan. I have defended Arabs before. But I never expected to do so in front of a Middle Easterner who described himself as an Islamist. Iqbal patiently listened to what I had to say in defense of Arabs generally, if not in defense of Saddam Hussein’s campaign of Black Arabism and genocide. I could tell I didn’t convince him.

Arab Iraqis might not mind Kurdish independence as much as some expect. The Baghdad-based blogger Omar Fadhil wasn’t allowed to meet me in Erbil because he’s an Arab (more on that later), so he told me in an e-mail that maybe he could meet me someday when I “visit Iraq.” It isn’t just the Kurds who have come to internalize the border between this region and the rest of the country.

Schoolteacher Raz Rasool lived for a while in Baghdad before returning to Suleimaniya. She thinks that if the Kurds decide to secede most Arab Iraqis will shrug and say, “Fine then, get out”—at least as long as they don’t try to take Kirkuk’s oil fields with them. (Granted, that’s a big if.)

“Arab Iraqis don’t care about any of our problems in Kurdistan,” Rasool said. “They think of our problems as our problems, not theirs. They don’t care that the Turkish military has soldiers stationed in parts of northern Iraq. That’s because they don’t think about Kurdistan as part of Iraq. They only care about Kirkuk, and they only care about Kirkuk because of the oil.”

Many Arab Iraqis aren’t even aware that Saddam’s regime committed genocide against Kurds. “A gum-smacking teenage Arab girl from Baghdad recently visited the genocide museum here,” Rasool told me, referring to an old Ba’ath Party dungeon that has since been converted into a monument to the tortured and the dead. The girl had no idea hundreds of thousands were murdered. She had no idea 5,000 villages were completely annihilated. She didn’t know that thousands, including children, were tortured to death in the prison blocks.

“She broke down in tears,” Rasool said. “She only knew that Kurds were supposedly troublemakers. She said she was so sorry, that she was ashamed to be an Arab.”

A Tightly Guarded Utah

Some Middle Eastern countries—Egypt, for instance—are grim, depressing places that feel like they’re circling the drain. Iraqi Kurdistan is optimistic, full of hope, infused top to bottom with a go-go, build-build attitude. Vast tracts of lovely new housing developments are under construction all over the major cities. Suleimaniya, the region’s cultural capital, has doubled in population in the last three years. It’s up to around 800,000 now, although no one is sure how many people actually live there. Like all cities that undergo rapid urban migration, most of the newcomers live on the outskirts. Unlike most Third World cities that explode in population, the outskirts of Suleimaniya are more prosperous than the old inner city.

Urban beautification campaigns are under way everywhere. Freshly cut bricks are being laid into sidewalks. Enormous new parks, some so large you might need a car to get from one end to the other, can be found in both Erbil and Suleimaniya. Highways are well-signed and in perfect condition. Advertisements for DSL Internet connections line the road from Erbil to the resort town of Salahhadin. There are no statues of tyrants, dead or alive. Most of the statues I saw were of poets. It’s a different world from the shattered country below. It’s easy to imagine the place as a reasonably well-functioning conservative democracy, a moderately prosperous Utah of the Middle East.

The longer central Iraq burns, the more distant the Kurds feel from Baghdad. But while the Kurds may not feel like they belong to Iraq, they don’t pretend they aren’t still shackled to it.

Erbil’s faux Sheraton is surrounded on four sides by six-inch thick concrete bomb blast walls. It isn’t physically possible to drive anywhere near the front entrance, let alone park there. Well-armed soldiers at the far end of the driveway search every inch inside, outside, and underneath each car before manually lowering the saw-toothed tire-busting blockade. Security agents in a squat concrete building scrutinize everyone who walks toward the front door from behind one-way glass windows.

Erbil’s international airport likewise is built with one-way glass. Step outside, turn around, and you’ll find that you can’t see a thing inside the terminal.

Every time I walked into a government office in Suleimaniya, security guards asked if I had any guns. I didn’t, but there was always a pile of them on a table that others had dropped off before they were let inside.

I expected the Peshmerga to let me blow through the checkpoints with minimal hassle because I’m American. Instead, they scrutinized me just like everyone else. A couple of times I got pulled out of the line for even closer inspection. The soldiers were cold, serious professionals. The only people who have an easy time at these checkpoints are those who perfectly speak Kurdish with a local accent. That’s the one trait that can’t easily be faked, and it’s the only trait that can be trusted.

Kurds love freedom, but they love checkpoints too; in general, they see them as the barrier that holds back the horrors from the south. People don’t merely trust and appreciate the security. They feel it. A detached garden restaurant on the grounds of the “Sheraton” has all-glass walls on three sides. The only wall made of metal and stone is the one behind the well-stocked bar. Suburban Suleimaniya is a wonderland of brand-new modern shiny glass buildings. No one in their right mind in Baghdad would build brand-new structures like these.

During Beirut’s civil war the profits of window and glass companies perfectly tracked the rise and fall of the level of violence. When people felt safe from the chaos of war, they replaced the windows blown out from bullets, rockets, and car bombs. When they felt under siege and pessimistic, they didn’t bother. Iraqi Kurds are so optimistic they’re putting up new glass buildings for the first time in their history.

There is some disgruntlement. I met a university professor who got so wound up in his opposition to both major parties I thought he might have a heart attack. “They are all corrupt!” he said as he flailed about in his chair. “All of them!” There is, indeed, an enormous amount of corruption. Leaders and functionaries in both parties take a cut from almost every business that matters. “And they want everyone to become a Peshmerga!” the professor exclaimed. “We have more generals than the Red Army!”

Perhaps the security apparatus is a bit overdone. Few Kurds are in the mood to take any chances, though. The Peshmerga are in charge of security here; the Iraqi army has been infiltrated by Ba’athists and isn’t allowed anywhere inside the autonomous zone. Like most people, the Kurds believe a modern civilized country needs a state with a monopoly on the use of force. But they don’t think the state in Baghdad is civilized yet.

The Peshmerga offered to patrol the roads in and out of Kirkuk, which is just outside Kurdish government territory. But the U.S. authority on the ground wouldn’t have it. Arab tribes in the area might get twitchy about being policed by the Kurds.

The Kurds took the pushback in stride. The minister of the interior in Suleimaniya laughed out loud when I asked him how well they get along with the American military. “Ha ha ha, our relationship is very good,” he said.

Racial Profiling, Kurdish-Style

It’s certainly better than their relationship with Arabs. The Kurds may be the most liberal of Iraq’s three dominant ethnicities, but they’re the quickest to impose illiberal laws on everyone else. I learned that when Omar and Mohammad Fadhil, the bloggers behind Iraq the Model, drove up to Kurdistan from Baghdad to meet me at my hotel. They never made it. The Peshmerga told them Arabs were not allowed to enter the region without a Kurdish escort.

It was racial profiling at its worst. The Fadhils did nothing at all to deserve that kind of treatment. Two upstanding citizens were not allowed to visit a region in their own country for no reason except that they’re Arabs. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Index of Political Freedom ranks Iraq the third freest Arab-majority country, after Lebanon and Morocco. Yet freedom of movement, one of the most basic freedoms, still doesn’t exist. It’s a one-way limitation too: Kurds can visit the north, center, and south of Iraq whenever they feel like it.

Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Regional Government actually provides money and housing for Arab Christians who want to pick up and resettle in the north. The overwhelming majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims. Yet they discriminate against their fellow Sunnis in favor of “infidels.”

Arab Muslims aren’t barred from the region. They can visit as tourists, and they can buy new homes there. But they must have connections if they want to settle in Kurdistan, and they must prove they aren’t a security threat before they can even show up.

And then there’s Kirkuk. Perhaps nothing in all Iraq poses a bigger challenge to Western liberal principles than this city.

Kirkuk sits atop one of Iraq’s biggest oil fields. It has always been an ethnically mixed city on the southernmost fringe of Iraqi Kurdistan. Today it lies just beyond the Kurdistan Regional Government’s autonomous zone. From 1986 to 1989 Saddam Hussein ethnically cleansed a good portion of the Kurds who refused to change their ethnicity to “Arab,” then moved more Arabs, Stalin-style, into the Kurds’ former homes.

No ethnic group dominates the city today. Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Turkmen (Iraqi Turks who speak their own dialect of Turkish), and Assyrian and Chaldean Christians live cheek by jowl. It’s a little Lebanon where everyone is a minority. And it’s one of the worst tinderboxes in all of Iraq. Two violent incidents, from terrorism to kidnapping to sniping, occur every day in that city.

The Kurds want it back. They don’t want to leave Iraq without the city they call “Our Jerusalem.” Nor will they tolerate a federal Iraq that doesn’t include Kirkuk in their autonomous zone.

I asked KDP Minister Falah Bakir what “Our Jerusalem” was all about. Is Kirkuk some kind of cultural capital? Is there a historic significance to the city that Westerners aren’t aware of?

“No,” he replied. “Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan. But it isn’t ‘Jerusalem.’ Kirkuk is Kirkuk, just as Erbil is Erbil and Mosul is Mosul.” It’s just another Kurdish city, in other words. It was dubbed “Our Jerusalem” by Jalal Talabani as part of a P.R. campaign.

The Peshmerga could take Kirkuk militarily any time the order is given. But they’re holding back. The Kurdistan Regional Government says it wants to take the city peacefully and with honor.

Trouble is, first they want to kick out the Arabs moved there by Saddam. Not all the Arabs. Those who lived there before the Arabization campaign, those who are actually from there, are welcome to stay. The Kurds swear they have no interest in creating an ethnic-identity state. They merely want, they insist, to make the city as safe and secure as Erbil, Suleimaniya, and Dohok.

South of the Peshmerga line, some towns with Sunni Arab majorities are forcibly evicting Shia Arabs at gunpoint, with rocket launchers, and without compensation. The Kurdistan Regional Government, by contrast, says it will financially compensate everyone asked to leave. Even so, reversing one population transfer with another isn’t right. The Kurds seem to understand this, given that they’re offering to pay damages to the evicted. They might not even care about the city’s ethnic composition if Kirkuk weren’t wracked with violence. But the city is a dangerous place, and the aftershocks of Saddam’s divide-and-rule strategy are still explosive.

I didn’t get to visit Kirkuk, but Guardian reporter Michael Howard knows the city well. “Many of the Arabs I’ve spoken to in Kirkuk are aware that they are in someone else’s territory,” he told me. The overwhelming majority of Kirkuk’s residents eschew violence no matter what their politics might be. But there are just enough people who don’t to turn the city into a looming mini-Yugoslavia.

Waiting to Jump

It’s hard to say what will come next. The Kurds seem to know what they want, but even they have no idea what their next move is. If they declare independence today, Turkey very well may invade; the Turks dread nothing more than Turkish Kurdistan attaching itself to Iraqi Kurdistan. Or open war could break out between Kurdistan and what’s left of Iraq. No one wants to lose the black gold mine in the earth beneath Kirkuk. Even the U.S. might not recognize an independent Kurdish state for the trouble it may cause if Ankara and Baghdad aren’t persuaded to go along first.

The Kurds are patiently biding their time. But make no mistake: They aren’t waiting to decide if they want to remain part of Iraq. They’re waiting for just the right moment to jump.

Racial profiling may or may not outlast the war. Iraqi Kurds want to be protected from predominantly Arab terrorists. More than anything, though, they want self-determination for Kurds. How they treat their own ethnic minorities if they ever achieve independence will be a crucial first test. Are they really the kind of people they think they are?

On February 1, I had lunch in a restaurant in Dohok with my driver and translator. A music video played silently on a TV in the corner: a beautiful woman with flowing black hair singing what seemed to be a slow, quiet song.

“Is she a Kurdish singer?” I asked my translator.

“Look,” he said. “She is at the oil fields of Kirkuk.”

He was right. A flame shot out the top of a well.

“What’s she singing about?” I asked.

I expected a heavy dose of Kurdish nationalism, but he surprised me. “A long time ago,” he said, “before the Kurds knew Islam or science, when we still worshipped fire, Kirkuk was a mystical place. We did not know then what oil was. Flames came out of the earth.”

On screen, the singer swayed slowly and sadly. “People used to go there and pray when they hoped to give birth to a son,” my translator said. “She is there now asking for peace.”

5. - Financial Times - "Problems fail to deter Kurds":

29 October 2006 / by Steve Negus

In Chamchamal, a dilapidated Kurdish town in northern Iraq, a group of men chat away the hours until the breaking of the Ramadan fast at sundown and recount the many reasons why they have lost faith in their government.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the two guerrilla movements who fought for 40 years against Baghdad, have proved less inspiring in peacetime. "They were towers of strength ... but now they are failures," laments one.

They complain, like others across the Kurds' autonomous northern zone of Iraq, of shortages of fuel, poor drinking water and other symptoms of the corruption and administrative lethargy they claim characterise the new administration.

In August, they took to the streets to demand changes, one of many protests to have broken out across the Kurdistan self-rule area in the past month. Yet this gathering in Chamchamal dismisses a suggestion that they may ever support an alternative to their current leadership.

As bad as the present might be, they also recall a day 18 years ago when the Iraqi army rolled into town as part of its Anfal campaign, an attempt to isolate Kurdish guerrillas by depopulating the regions from which they drew their support.

The Kurds estimate 180,000 people lost their lives. One policeman recalls how men, women and children were loaded into trucks and driven away, never to be seen again. "The [problems] today are all paradise compared to how it was then," he says.

Long struggle

Like other ethnic communities emerging from a long struggle for independence, Iraq's Kurds are going through a period of disillusionment with their wartime leaders.

The region, an oasis of stability in the country, is going through an economic boom as Iraqi capital flees north but many claim they have seen little benefit.

Kurds point to the region's numerous half-finished roads and sniff that some party crony must have received the contract. They look at the ranks of shiny new condominiums on the outskirts of large towns and say they are out of the price range of all but the party elites.

Nonetheless, there is little serious challenge to the current government, largely because many Kurds see their independence struggle as only half-finished. Two years ago, the region held a non-binding referendum on whether Kurdistan should seek independence or remain part of Iraq. Nearly 99 per cent voted to break away.

Kurdish officials frequently remind Baghdad that they are in a "voluntary union" that could be dissolved at any time if the centre tries to assert too much control but, in truth, they admit secession would be difficult, given that Kurdistan is a land-locked region.

"It's the desire of all the Kurds for one day to have a state of their own but one has to think realistically," says Nechirvan Barzani, the regional government's prime minister. "As the leadership, it is not our role to follow the sentiments and the emotions of the street if such objectives were not achievable."

However, the government has set itself three objectives which many see as a half-way house to independence.

The first is to develop the economy. Last year, the regional government, over Baghdad's objections, started signing contracts with foreign oil companies to develop northern oil fields.

Kurdish leaders say they plan to share the revenues with the rest of the country once the fields start producing commercially early next year but they will retain the right to sell independently if the federal government does not, in turn, share revenue from southern fields.

The second objective is to unify the two rival administrations of the KDP and PUK, which fought a mini-civil war in 1996 and which subsequently each ruled their own halves of the region. They were nominally united in May.

A final goal is the absorption of the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and other "disputed territories".

The Kurds say they are sticking to a timetable included in Iraq's constitution. It calls for a referendum in the territories by the end of 2007 on joining the Kurdistan region. They say they have enough votes in the region to win it despite opposition from some Sunni Arab and Turkmen groups.

As for Kurdistan's other problems, Barzani says, they require "patience and time". Kurdistan is still dependent on Baghdad for electricity and fuel.

The people of Chamchamal appear sceptical that two parties addicted to patronage and power can reform themselves but, for the time being, see no alternative to letting the leaders that have taken them halfway to independence complete the journey.

6. - Strategy Page - "Kurds Improvise":

29 October 2006

While the Kurds of northern Iraq have been independent of the Iraqi government since 1992, they have not yet created a regular army. What they do have is a light infantry force, the Peshmerga. These troops have received some military training, from their own, and American, trainers. The Pershmerga can, at the moment, keep the Arab Iraqis out, but the organization is more a security force and jobs program, than an army.

Although officially a united force, the Kurdish gunmen are split into two main groups, and many smaller clan and party organizations. Each of these smaller entities can lay claim to "their boys (and girls)." The Peshmerga is co-ed, with about ten percent of the 80,000 on the payroll being women. The pay isn't great, but it helps assure the loyalty of active duty fighters to their paymaster (usually a tribal leader or politician.)

While the Kurdish troops are, on average, more reliable and effective than their Iraqi Arab counterparts, their leadership is still more traditional than professional. The Kurds have many of the same leadership problems that their Arab brothers to the south have. There's nepotism, corruption and a lot of officials who are more concerned with getting rich, than with getting their job done right.

The Kurds know that they will more likely achieve their goals (staying autonomous, getting control of the northern oil fields and the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk) through negotiation, rather than armed force. But the average Kurd is getting tired of the corruption and inefficiency of their leaders, despite the need for unity in the face of threats from Arabs and Turks.