By Patrick Cockburn
The Independent, 14 April 2003
AT LEAST eight people were killed in gun battles between Iraqi Kurds and Arab tribes south of Kirkuk yesterday as Arabs in northern Iraq become increasingly nervous of the Kurdish advance south.
The fighting was around the town of Hawi Jah on the road between the Iraqi oil centre of Kirkuk and the city of Tikrit.
"It has been chaos. The Kurds are here to steal, and have killed some of our people while trying to rob them on the road," said one leader of the al-Obaid tribe. Arabs said five people were killed in the clashes while the peshmerga said three of their number were killed.
There is growing friction between Kurds and Arabs in northern Iraq after the capture of Mosul and Kirkuk by Kurdish forces last week, and a wave of looting and arson in both cities. Al-Obaid tribal leaders said the looters were beginning to creep up to their villages.
The Kurds said they were trying to negotiate their way through the area to advance down the road to Tikrit. "If we pulled our forces off the road, the Kurds would be right up to our houses like they were in Kirkuk," said another sheikh of the al-Obaid tribe.
The Kurds have advanced from the three northern provinces of Sulaymaniyah, Arbil and Dahuk, where they have had de facto independence for 12 years, to reclaim and go beyond areas from which they were ethnically cleansed by Saddam Hussein.
This is leading to an Arab-Kurdish war quite separate from the larger war to overthrow President Saddam.
Kirkuk, under the control of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and US troops, is quieter than it was last week, though there is an undercurrent of fear among Arabs in the city. Kurdish officials say that many Arabs who were settled there by the government in Baghdad have already left, though other Arabs can stay.
Some houses already bear a sign in Kurdish reading "returned to the original owner". One Arab, who refused to give his name, said: "The problem is that everybody carries a gun. It is impossible to tell who really is a peshmerga."
Outside the governor's office in the centre of Kirkuk, a distraught man called Rahim Abdul Hassan Mohi and his wife were trying to get somebody to find out who had shot at their house. Mr Mohi said somebody had sprayed the house with sub-machine-gun fire "when I was out but my wife and sister were at home".
He had the number of the car, showing it came from Arbil, and wanted those responsible arrested. He said nobody in the governor's office would listen.
Under President Saddam, about 300,000 Kurds were driven out of Mosul and Kirkuk provinces and forced to live within the Kurdish enclave.
All their villages were destroyed and Arab settlers farmed their lands. This process is now being reversed and in many areas the Arab villages, built in traditional Arabian style, are deserted.
Their inhabitants had evidently seen the writing on the wall and all the houses have beencleared of furniture and farm machinery.
But the further south the Kurds move, the greater resistance they are likely to meet. In Arab villages south-east of Mosul at the weekend, people were still tending their sheep.
Local peshmerga warned that if we continued down the main road local Arabs would fire from their roof-tops as soon as they saw we had Arbil number plates on our car.
The events in Mosul at the end of last week are what have done most to aggravate tensions between Arabs and Kurds. Fadel Mirani, a leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said that the looting, which looked more like a medieval sack of a city, was in fact the result of the KDP trying not to anger the Arabs.
The Arabs make up 70 per cent of Mosul's population, with most of the 300,000 Kurds there living on the east bank of the Tigris, which divides the city.
Mr Mirani, speaking at Mosul airport, said the KDP did not want to send its peshmerga into Mosul because of memories of the killing of Arabs by Kurds during a failed military coup in 1959.
When the Iraqi army surrendered last week, the KDP had expected the Americans to move in. They had not done so because their troops had gone to secure the oilfields in Kirkuk.
This explanation is not accepted by the Arabs who believe the peshmerga led the looting. This the KDP denies.
As in Kirkuk, it is difficult to tell who is an official peshmerga because most Kurds have guns and military uniforms are easily obtained.
The KDP were yesterday trying to repair the damage, strictly controlling traffic into Kirkuk and confiscating goods they believed stolen. A red fire engine marked "Saddam International Airport" stood next to Khazar bridge. It had been retrieved from looters by peshmerga.
Looting in the country is almost impossible to stop because looters often move in advance of the regular troops.
As Kirkuk was falling, we could see them darting into Iraqi army bases from which the troops had only just left. Indeed, the absence of looters is usually a sign that something very dangerous - which has deterred even them - is about to happen.
The writer is the co-author with Andrew Cockburn of `Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession'
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Citation: Patrick Cockburn. "Tensions Boil Over Between Kurds and Arabs in North," The Independent, 14 April 2003.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=397005
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