Kurds watch and wait in Iraq
KIRKUK, Iraq — Iraq crept closer to all-out sectarian warfare Tuesday with the deaths of at least 44 Sunni inmates at the hands of vengeful Shiites at a prison in the town of Baquba.
The first reported mass murder of Sunnis by Shiites came during a back-and-forth battle for Baquba as the oneweek old campaign by Sunni ultra-fundamentalists drew to within only 60 kilometres of Baghdad in the north and came even closer to the west of the capital. The killings in Baquba were believed to be in revenge for the apparent execution of more than 700 Shiites shot with assault rifles last weekend in Saddam Hussein’s old hometown, Tikrit, by men fighting for the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Ominously, reports surfaced for the first time Tuesday of at least four possibly religiously motivated murders of Shiites in Baghdad too.
Although an assault on the capital by ISIL militants is probably several days away, Baghdad is under a strict curfew amid panic buying of staples and unsubstantiated rumours that Iranian troops are being brought to the city to shore up its defences.
As Iraq edges toward a bloody war most Iraqis now expect and dread, the country’s Kurds continue to occupy their own autonomous region in the northeast as well as the ethnically diverse city of Kirkuk. Their Peshmerga army took over the city after government forces ran away last week rather than face the Sunni invaders, who have been sweeping southeast from the Syrian border, seizing control of about onethird of the country as they went.
The disgraceful performance of Iraqi troops, who greatly outnumbered and outgunned the Sunni extremists, caused Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to sack four generals Tuesday.
With trillions of dollars at stake, Iraqi Kurds, the Sunni insurgents and the Shiiteled government that the United States helped install in Baghdad after toppling Saddam all covet the fantastically endowed oilfields around Kirkuk. But the tragedy now enveloping Iraq, and causing reverberations in capitals and oil markets around the world, is about far more than money.
The root causes are to be found in a centuries-old dispute between Sunnis and Shiites about who is a Muslim. But it has been fuelled more recently by oppression of one group by the other, depending on who holds political power. With Sunnis and Shiites living in proximity between the eastern Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, the battle in Iraq may signal the beginning of a much bigger struggle for control of Arab lands from Lebanon through Jordan, Syria and Iraq to the Gulf.
The Kurdish strategy will be to try to stay back from the fray while the country’s ruling Shiite majority and Sunni minority fight it out. Although no Kurdish leaders have yet said so publicly, it is accepted as fact by many here that the Kurds are looking for a propitious moment to declare independence and become the country they believe they should have been when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated 100 years ago and British and French mapmakers left them as unhappy minorities straddling Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.
“Absolutely, when we sit together in the future with different Iraqi parties to talk about the future of this area, we will have more power,” was as close as Ala Talabani, who represents Kirkuk Kurds in the Iraqi parliament, would come to answering a question about independence.
“But Peshmerga are not taking this like our opportunity. What they are doing is filling the gaps that the Iraqi army left. They are defending and securing different Iraqis here — Turkomans, Arabs, Christians and Kurds.”
The war is close to Kirkuk. Peshmerga and ISIL militants clashed as recently as Saturday south of the city and the Peshmerga arrested a man Tuesday whom they suspected of being a Sunni extremist at the last checkpoint south of Kirkuk that is under Kurdish control. The Peshmerga, who have a ferocious reputation as warriors, have been mustering in large numbers in Kirkuk, fanning out south from there to defend part of what they have always viewed as their homeland from the Sunni extremists, who have such a brutal interpretation of Islamic religious law that even al-Qaida has disavowed them.
Peshmerga Pte. Amanj Burhan offered a typical Kurdish take on the current situation, denouncing the Iraqi army as cowards and the Sunni Arabs as poor fighters with a twisted view of Islam. (The majority of Kurds are Sunni.)
“We are Muslims, but I am not like them,” Burhan said, as soldiers from his platoon nodded in agreement a few metres away from where the Kurds’ red, white and green flag, adorned with a sun, rippled from a flagpole where there had been an Iraqi flag only a few days before.
The odds that the Kurds’ tricolour will become a national, rather than regional, flag look better every day. But so does the possibility of a much larger religious war that could soon reverberate as far away as northwest Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Southeast Asia and come to involve regional powers such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.