IN MOSUL AND across the country Iraqis quietly pulled up stakes and moved away from mixed territory, like wild creatures sensing a tsunami. Shi'ites began to talk of forming their own autonomous region, as allowed in the TAL, and the Sunnis worried at the thought of being left with nothing but sand as Kurds and Shi'ites partitioned off the oil-producing lands. The Sunni figurehead president, Ghazi al-Yawar, denounced any talk of partition as treasonous, but an informal population transfer crept along into 2005, clearest along the Kurds' new green line.
For Mam Rostam the news of Kurds on the run was bittersweet—he hated the idea that Kurds would flee anywhere, but the fact that they were fleeing to Kirkuk pleased him to no end. He was having the last laugh. Twenty years earlier Rostam had joined Talabani's delegation to Baghdad when negotiations between the regime and the PUK had broken down over the status of Kirkuk. Then foreign minister Tariq Aziz had taunted the Kurds when the deal failed.
"Tariq Aziz told us you can only look at Kirkuk and weep, like we Arabs weep for Gibraltar and Spain," Rostam recalled. "Look how racist they are," he said. "The Arabs are all like that. Even their religion is the same—all about kill them, hang them, cut their ears. You can't find the word love in the Koran."
As my interpreter, a practicing Muslim, turned dark red but kept translating, Rostam complained that the Arabs in the city had not returned his friendly greetings when he passed through their neighborhoods—at least not the Arabs who weren't "original" Kirku-kees. "That's the nature of an occupier. They're always scared and expect you to come and kick them out. Those with blood on their hands, they'll never like us," he said.
According to Rostam, hundreds of Kurdish families had fled from villages south of Kirkuk—he had recently found homes for several families from Hawijah. He pointed me in the direction of Askari, a warren of houses just across the bridge from the city center. Sitting in the living room of Heybat Rostam (no relation), I had a rush of déjà vu, realizing when I had last been to Askari—visiting terrified Shi'ite families on the day that Kirkuk fell to the Kurds, April 10, 2003. This was the same street, maybe even one of the same living rooms, but the Shi'ites were gone—more ghosts of Kirkuk—replaced by the Kurdish woman for whom this house was most recently a shelter.
"Kill the Kurds first, then the Americans," Heybat recounted. "That's what they were writing on the walls in Hawijah."
Fleybat and her twelve children had always lived in Hawijah, part of Saddam's tribal heartland. Her family owned a bakery and had a good life, relatively speaking. With the U.S. invasion they began having problems as their neighbors began to accuse Kurdish residents of secretly aiding the Americans. Months after the end of the regime, teachers in the schools still made the children pledge allegiance to the Ba'ath Party. Even so, Heybat didn't think of leaving until the night letters began arriving.
"Four or five times a month, they threw letters over our garden wall, telling us to leave or die," she said. "But we didn't want to go."
In January 2005, nine Kurds were found shot dead in Hawijah, and Heybat's nephew Isam was one of them. She had had enough and was now hoping to live peacefully in Kirkuk. The Kurdistan Regional Government had given her and her family a million Iraqi dinars in assistance, and they had used it to pay for six months' rent in this small house; one of her sons had found work as a baker. She said the house belonged to a Kurd, but he had bought it cheaply from a fleeing Arab. As we spoke, the room filled with her friends and relatives, all recent refugees from Hawijah. My experience from two years earlier repeated itself down to the small details—the family was so poor they didn't have tea and sugar to offer a cup of Iraq's national drink.
Officially, Hawijah was part of Ta'mim province, one of the provinces Saddam Hussein created in 1974 to gerrymander the ethnic balance around Kirkuk. Hawijah had been tacked onto Ta'mim to increase its Arab population, and as such, none of the Kurdish officials now in Kirkuk cared about hanging on to the town. The more important point was that families like Heybat's could vote in Kirkuk during the January 30 elections. In addition, encouraged by the Kurdish parties, Kurds "came home" to Kirkuk in time for the elections, staying in makeshift tents in the soccer stadium and other open spaces. No one denied that the Kurds had increased their voting population by tens of thousands, though the Iraqi Turcoman Front claimed that the number was in the high six figures. As for the Arabs from Hawijah, they were politically irrelevant—Sunni groups across Iraq had called a boycott of the elections, and the Kurds didn't mind one bit. The Kurds had won the right to allow the returnees to vote in the January elections by threatening nothing less than a full boycott.
Baghdad and Washington couldn't afford to have the elections fail, and Sunni Arabs clearly intended to stay home, either on principle or because of the threats that extremist groups had made against anyone who went to the polls. A Kurdish boycott would have meant a parliament entirely selected by Shi'ite Arabs, many of them with close ties to Iran. Suddenly the Kurdish politicians were being described as kingmakers, and they showed no sign of compromising this time. Unless Kirkukee Kurds were allowed to vote in Kirkuk, they told the Americans, Arabization would have succeeded in becoming a fact. And the Kurds saw no contradiction in denying the vote to the hundreds of thousands of Arabs Saddam had imported to the city.
"Kirkuk is the city of Kurds, Turcomans, Chaldo Assyrians, and real Arabs—those who were there before Arabization," Jalal Talabani explained. "We are for first normalizing—reuniting Kirkuk because Saddam divided it, ending this ethnic cleansing policy by returning those who left and sending back those [who came]. They must go back home first. We will never agree that they vote as Kirkukees; they must vote at their birthplace."
The loudest protests to this policy came not from Arabs, who still lacked organization in the city, but from the Iraqi Turcoman Front. In the ITF's Kirkuk office, its head of public relations, Fawzi Akram, claimed the Kurds would certainly steal a victory in the election. Akram had toned down some of the mad predictions and estimates the ITF originally pushed on the Americans—no longer claiming three million Turcomans lived in the city But he stressed that with only a tiny number of election observers and journalists across the country to observe, no one could possibly certify the elections as free and fair. Holding to results from such an election, he said, was a recipe for violence.
"When the civil war comes to Iraq, it will bring a fire so hot it will burn the green wood with the tinder," Akram said. As he spoke, several assistants loaded up a truck with pamphlets and fanfare, including Turcoman Front flags, Turcoman Front lighters, stainless steel watches with the ITF symbol on the faceplate, and nifty pens that revealed a Turcoman Front symbol when turned upside down. When asked if Ankara gave the ITF any funding for all the swag, Akram said he accepted money from anyone who wanted to help the downtrodden Turcomans of Iraq. Would Turkey help the Turcomans in the coming war? "Of course the branch goes back to its root," he answered. "If there is trouble here, every group will have help."
The way to solve the issue, Akram said, was to return to the 1957 Iraq census. Today, as in 1957, the city of Kirkuk's population was more than half Turcoman, with the rest split between Arabs and Kurds. As almost everyone in Kirkuk did, Akram was using the scant historical information available and turning it to his side. The 1957 census had indeed shown a majority of Turcomans in Kirkuk, and the city was known as a Turcoman business hub.5 But the Kurds used the same document to show that with all the outlying villages included, they had once held a strong majority in the province of Kirkuk. The city's demographics had been rigged so many times it became hard to tell the stacking from the unstacking. Rostam and the other Kurds in the city dismissed the ITF as a small bunch of troublemakers.
"They have told so many lies," said Jalal Jawher, the PUK rep in Kirkuk, "claiming that they have three million, but now it's clear they have less than one hundred thousand. And now they need to tell more lies in order to excuse their first one."
Ordinary Turcomans and Kurds in t
he marketplaces and kebab joints sang a more moderate line than any of the parties. "The most important thing to us is security and peace," said Omar Ghazi, a Turcoman storekeeper in the central market. He would vote for the Turcoman Front's list but didn't mind the idea of living under a Kurdish government either. "I've been to Sulimaniya, and they seem to be running things very well. If we are with them, that's okay. But we hope everyone will get along together here," he said.
The most powerful rivals in the north had found a way to get along, recognizing that the opportunity to hold some power in Iraq outweighed their personal competition. The election was designed so that Iraqis voted not for individuals but party lists, with seats in parliament awarded according to each party's support at the polls. Talabani and Barzani fielded a common list of candidates for the national elections, maximizing the Kurdish power inside Iraq, including even the Kurdish Islamist parties. It was called the Kurdish Coalition list, and for once, Kurdish internal politics appeared to end at the mountains' edge (inside Kirkuk it was called the Kurdistan Brotherhood list, which included some Turcomans and Arabs).
Assuming a good voter turnout and a Sunni boycott, the Kurdish list would win a big enough bloc to make an attractive ally for the larger Shi'ite list in the parliament, where a two-thirds majority was needed to select a prime minister. Officially the parliament selected a president first, who would in turn pick a prime minister and a cabinet. In fact all the political bargaining over the presidency, vice presidents, and ministers would be done in advance, as one package. The assumption was that the Shi'ites would agree to pick a Kurd for the ceremonial post of president if the Kurdish president pledged to select a Shi'ite prime minister. After that, the rest of the ministries would be painstakingly negotiated between the parliamentary factions.
Both Kurdish leaders could get their way. Even if the presidency was largely symbolic, Talabani yearned to hold the post. He would then be able to weigh in on matters in Baghdad and, just as important, jet about to capital cities around the globe, finally walking through the front door of the statehouses, not ushered through the back. The Kurdish autonomous region was enshrined in the new Iraqi government, and in neat symmetry, Barzani wanted only to become president of the Kurdistan Regional Government and never have to bother with the heat and dust of Arab Iraq again. The Kurds would play kingmakers in Baghdad and kings in Kurdistan. The hatchet that had cleaved Kurdistan so many times might finally be buried.
The quiet of Iraq's first Election Day felt like an early-morning dream across the country. Eight million or so Iraqis went out to vote, most on foot because of a strict curfew and ban on nonofficial vehicles. Without cars on the road, the streets lay open, free of traffic jams or car bombs. For the day, Iraqis recaptured a bit of the jubilation of the early weeks after the regime fell. In Kirkuk, Kurds crowded the streets of Shorja, many of them wearing their finest traditional outfits—the women in long flowing dresses with heavy coin jewelry and the men in baggy trousers and pressed tunics wrapped up in sashes. Many of those returning early from the ballot boxes started to play music and dance—the Kurdish traditional step is something between an Israeli hora and a Texas line dance. Most of the pictures of Barzani and Talabani still hanging inside the polling stations had come down, but the Kurdish flag flew all over Kurdish neighborhoods. Kirkuk sounded more like a village, with no unexplained noises in the distance—Mam Rostam had sternly prohibited celebratory gunfire.
In the face of stepped-up security and a driving ban, most of the insurgents wisely laid low, conceding the day. They did lob two mortars into the city from a safe distance. The first one landed in the stadium full of Kurdish returnees, killing a sixteen-year-old boy whose parents defiantly buried him and then went out to vote anyhow. The second mortar landed in an Arab neighborhood, wounding several people. The news failed to dampen the spirit in the Kurdish parts of town, where the lines at polling stations filled streets all day long.
The Turcoman neighborhoods also had full polling stations on Election Day, but none of the celebratory feeling of the Kurdish sections. Outside the Iraqi Turcoman Front offices were empty streets and none of the bluster promised days before. At several nearby polling stations, election officials said turnout had been high. But the Turcomans I spoke with never lost the suspicion that it was all fixed. Toward the day's end, the polling station at al-Tisayn neighborhood was close to empty, but the administrators said they had had more than two thousand voters during the day—a good showing. The staff made a good slice of Kirkuk: a Kurd, a Turcoman, a Christian, and an Arab.
"You see the whole Iraqi family here," said Omar Muhamad, a Kurdish engineer working at the center. Nearby a Turcoman newspaperman, also on staff, agreed cheerfully. "Yesterday everyone was afraid, today we all feel very strong," he said. But then the warmth disappeared: "Still, we have heard that in Shorja, the Kurds are not allowing Turcomans to vote."
"Excuse me, but did you see this? Speak only of what you saw," said Muhamad, the Kurdish engineer, who hadn't walked so far away. "No please, I am speaking—he's not letting me speak," said the Turcoman, who wouldn't give his name. "There was no problem, but some mistakes. And some groups want to make trouble," the Turcoman continued. "This is the first time we've tried this in Iraq. Maybe next time it will be normal."
A brief foray into the Arab quarter revealed an even starker contrast. With an orange election sticker covering the upper-right-hand corner of our windshield, my colleagues and I felt safe enough driving the city's empty streets, but pulling through the neighborhood of Nasr, we could feel the mood change completely. Here the silence felt oppressive, and the few people on the street looked at our car with fear. Sunni Arab groups across the country that had been ordered to boycott here were under threat to stay away from the polls, and any vehicle looked to them like a rolling fireball. The few pedestrians out on the street stared us down as we drove by, their faces heavy with the knowledge that today the insurgents would be killing their own—attacking Sunni Arabs who dared to break the ban. It didn't help that American helicopters kept ripping through the air at very low altitude, barely audible before coming so close they blew your hat off. In the Kurdish neighborhoods that was a reassuring sound, yet in Nasr it felt like the last thing you might ever hear.
With no one around to ask for directions, finding a polling station in an elementary school took some time. We sped toward the safety of razor wire around the schoolyard, but when we were about fifty yards away, the Arab police greeted us with a few shots in the air. We all began shouting "journalist!" in Arabic and pointing frantically to the sticker on our car. The cops responded by firing more shots, but these didn't look so much like warnings as poor marksmanship. The driver began to turn the car around—not easy in the narrow street—but in a moment the police had rushed the car. Wearing black ski masks that made me suddenly think I was in Fallujah again, they pulled us all out and frisked us as one of the men kept his Kalashnikov trained at waist level. When they finally realized their mistake, everyone calmed down, and my disbelief turned to anger for a moment. I asked them what the hell they had been thinking. The men apologized sheepishly, and then we all laughed a bit as the adrenaline left our systems. "You should put a bigger sticker on your car," one of the policeman said, though he must have known there was only one official size.
The bullet dodging seemed even more absurd when we realized that almost none of the local Sunni Arabs had come out to vote. A few men were there and didn't seem to know whom to vote for. One man said he had voted for the Islamists, though they were boycotting the elections. "We've had no problems, though," said one of the cops. "The only shooting was at you folks."
We had been hoping to quietly slip in and out of Nasr, but the gunfire had ruined that plan. The policemen advised us to wait for one of their patrol cars to escort us out of the area. The whole neighborhood knew we were there, and suddenly everyone down the block looked a little mean. I finally got tired of the stares from a group of young men on the opposite corner an
d walked over to chat with them, surprising them into their Middle Eastern hospitality reflex. After a few pleasantries I asked if it was safe around here, and they told me they couldn't promise beyond this block. We waited an hour for the police cruiser but then gave up and just made a bolt for the highway, driving back toward the fiesta in Shorja without incident.
AMONG THE KURDS returning to Kirkuk from the north and south, a small number had come from thousands of miles away. Though polling stations had been set up in Europe and America for millions of Iraqi expats, Hoshyar Darbandi made the trip from Stockholm, Sweden, in time to vote, in Kirkuk, in person. At forty-three, Darbandi looked younger than the cousins he was staying with in Kirkuk, even with his silvering hair. Other features marked him as a returnee, like his new ski jacket and flashy running shoes. Darbandi told me he had come back so he might vote not only in the national elections but also for Kirkuk's city council—Kirkuk was the only part of "Iraq" he really wanted to bother with.
"We've never written our own history," Darbandi said as he walked away from the polling station in Shorja. "It's always been forced upon us. We're dreaming that this time Britain and America will help us write our own history—not to build our country, but just help us live with the Turcomans and Arabs."
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