Starve.Org White Noise Usenet Archive: "In the Balance"

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/magazine/20ELECTION.html?th

NYTIMES.COM

February 20, 2005
In the Balance
By NIR ROSEN

There were two days left before election day, and Gen. Rostam Hamid
Rahim, guerrilla war hero and a member of Iraqi Kurdistan's regional
Parliament since 1992, was determined that every Kurd vote. Known as
Mam (Uncle) Rostam, he told me he had joined the Kurdish nationalist
militia, or peshmerga (''those who face death''), at age 15, in 1968.
In 2003, he led the peshmerga into the northern city of Kirkuk -- the
fourth-largest city in Iraq and its most ethnically mixed and
contested -- following the American-led invasion of Iraq. Now 51, he
still wore an olive shirt tucked into baggy olive pants, with a sash
wrapped around his waist and a khaki vest: the traditional Kurdish
garb. A black-and-white-checkered scarf encircled his head; he moved
it back every so often to scratch his closely cropped hair.

On this Friday afternoon, Rostam had already visited a polling station
around the corner from the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, the Kurdish party Rostam belonged to, led by Jalal
Talabani. (Rostam is the union militia's field commander for Kirkuk.)
His next stop was the Panja Ali refugee camp, next to the Shorja
neighborhood where Rostam was born. Saddam Hussein destroyed the
neighborhood with bulldozers in 1991 to punish rebellious Kurds and
expel them north to the three provinces of Iraq (Erbil, Sulaimaniya
and Dohuk) that Hussein had earlier cordoned off as Iraqi Kurdistan.
Hussein's Kurdistan was intended to give the Kurds some autonomy --
and to provide a dumping ground for Kurds pushed out of the wealthier
areas bordering it, above all the city of Kirkuk and the oil-rich
province, also called Kirkuk, for which it serves as a capital.
Hussein had even renamed the province Tamim, Arabic for
''nationalization.''

Now, in the wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, hundreds of
Kurdish families had returned to Kirkuk, some living in tents, others
in hastily constructed houses. In the camp, Rostam sat down along with
other local Kurdish officials, including the deputy head of security
for Kirkuk, who fought with Rostam against Hussein years before.
Surrounded by a hundred men from the refugee camp and its nearby
polling station, gesticulating for added emphasis with his broad thick
shoulders and arms, Rostam repeated the same message he had been
telling Kurds throughout the city whenever he campaigned: ''You have
to vote, for the sake of our future.'' Rostam exhorted his audience to
vote for the party representing the Kurds and, taking their victory
for granted, asked that ''when the election results are announced,
please don't shoot in the air.''

Members of Rostam's peshmerga entourage were dressed in Iraqi National
Guard uniforms; some wore flak jackets that said ''Police.'' The
convoy of pickup trucks soon left the camp and continued on to another
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan office. Rostam marched into the office
and took a seat behind a large desk. Tea was brought out, and minor
officials greeted him with hugs and kisses.

He directed his gaze to the leader of the union's neighborhood
committee. ''Tell everybody to be quiet and calm on election day, and
tell people not to shoot in the air when the results come, because it
will make other ethnic groups nervous,'' Rostam said. He was certain
of the Kurds' triumph and told the men: ''We've done what we have to
do. People should just go and vote.'' Before leaving, he added that
signs giving people directions to the polling locations should be
written in Kurdish, not Arabic.

In 1984, Rostam accompanied his party chief, Jalal Talabani, to
Baghdad for negotiations with the government of Saddam Hussein. The
status of Kirkuk proved to be a stumbling block. According to Rostam,
Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz warned them: ''You will never get Kirkuk.
You can only pass through it and weep for it.''

In campaigning, Rostam was, in a sense, having his revenge.
''Sixty-five to 70 percent of Kirkuk is Kurdish,'' Rostam assured me.
''So if there was a referendum to join Kurdistan, we could join
easily.''

Rostam went on to say: ''Kirkuk is part of Kurdistan. When we win,
we'll make Kirkuk the safest and richest city in the Middle East. We
have struggled for more than 35 years for Kirkuk. Next year we'll have
new elections in Kirkuk, and we'll return Kirkuk to Kurdistan.'' He
meant the three-province Iraqi Kurdistan Hussein had created, but he
also meant, beyond that, the ancestral lands of the Kurds, which
stretch from Syria across much of eastern Turkey and into Iran, as
well as a large portion of Iraq.

The liberation of the Iraqi Kurds, for which they have paid a heavy
price, seemed within reach, and with the Iraqi election it looked as
if an altogether new kind of Iraqi politics might be born at last.
Yet, listening to Mam Rostam, it also seemed possible that this
election might be the beginning of the end for a unified Iraq. Thanks
to multiple accidents of history -- the uneasy presence of Sunni and
Shiite Arab minorities; an embittered local ethnic group, the
Turkmens; meddlesome neighboring countries with their own restive
Kurdish populations; and, not least, control of about 40 percent of
Iraq's known oil reserves -- the city of Kirkuk, population about
850,000, is where all the pieces of Iraqi politics come together, or
where they may well fall apart.

Being situated near some of the country's main oil fields might have
made Kirkuk a wealthy city, but that never came about. It is grim and
dilapidated; its roads are crumbling; and traffic crawls around the
roundabouts as boys sell bananas and boxes of perfumed tissue paper at
intersections. Humvees with masked American gunners rumble by.
Civilian drivers wait all day for gas as flames from sabotaged oil
pipelines light the western horizon like monuments to Kirkuk's
misfortune.

The winter rains in the days leading up to the election seemed to make
the city dirtier, washing it with gray soot and mud: passing cars
would leave a brown wake, and little waves crested over the sidewalks
and onto the gates of shops and homes. Wires and cables crisscrossed
above the city, trying to carry what little power was available a few
hours a day. Inside stores and offices, Kirkukis of all backgrounds
seemed to be watching Egyptian comedies when the electricity was on,
grumbling about having to look up when customers appeared.

Kirkuk was historically a cosmopolitan center where Jews, Arab Sunnis,
Christians and Shiites, Turkmens and Kurds lived and worked side by
side and attended one another's religious celebrations. As nationalism
spread throughout the region in the 20th century, replacing the
relative tolerance that characterized the Ottoman Empire, the Jews
fled, mainly to Israel, and Turkmen and Kurdish identities were
forcibly suppressed.

Kurds, who are Muslims but not Arabs (or Persians), speak their own
distinct language. (It is fast becoming the lingua franca in the
north.) The origins of the Kurds are nebulous, but by the time of the
Arab conquest in the seventh century, the word ''Kurd'' was used to
describe people living in the region of the Zagros Mountains. The
Kurds say they have been in the region for 3,000 years, surviving the
empires of the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols,
Byzantines and finally the Ottomans. By the 19th century, there was a
Kurdish nationalist movement. In 1918, Kurds pinned their hopes on the
12th point of President Woodrow Wilson's famous 14-point plan for
world peace: that the nationalities of the collapsing Ottoman Empire
should be given autonomy. In the 1920's, however, the presence of oil
in Kirkuk led the British to attach the area to Iraq, which Britain
controlled at the time. Other Kurdish lands were divided among the
larger countries of the region, and not long after the Kurds began
rising up in rebellion.

Of course, if Kirkuk had indeed been given autonomy after the Ottoman
breakup, it would not necessarily have led to Kurdish rule. Under the
Ottomans, the city had been governed by a Turkmen (or Turkoman)
nobility, and the majority of the city's population were Turkmens.
They are said to be, in the prevalent view, descendants of migrant
Turkic tribes who came to the region during the reign of the Seljuk
Turks, which began in the 11th century.

Turkmens and Kurds alike were suppressed by the aggressive Arabism of
Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Official ''Arabization'' began in the
1960's and accelerated significantly in 1975, when the Iraqi regime
began forcibly removing tens of thousands of Kurds, Turkmens and
Assyrian Christians from Kirkuk and bringing in Arabs to take their
place. This Arabization was chiefly motivated by the government's wish
to consolidate its grip on the oil-rich and fertile region -- and to
pre-empt a gradual demographic takeover of the city by the Kurds.
Under Arabization, as many as 250,000 non-Arabs, mostly Kurds, were
expelled north into Iraqi Kurdistan. Their former land titles were
declared invalid, and ownership was assumed by the government, which
rented the land to Arabs.

In 1987, in retaliation for Kurdish rebellions during Iraq's long war
with Iran, Hussein began the Anfal campaign. Human Rights Watch has
estimated that up to 100,000 Kurds were killed and some 4,000 villages
destroyed in what is widely considered a genocidal offensive. This
hardly dampened Kurdish militancy, and when the Kurds saw an opening
after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, they took it, rising against Hussein.
The uprising was crushed; the United States and Britain, principally,
responded by establishing a no-flight zone above the 36th parallel,
and Kurds fled their lands and retreated to the protection of Western
air power.

A Kurdish experiment with self-rule began in the no-flight zone. It
was not entirely successful, because the two main parties, the
Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
fought for control of the region. By 1996, the two sides had ironed
out their differences, but this did little to settle the question of
Kirkuk. There, the repression continued; during the 1990's, the
Baghdad government expelled more than 100,000 people from Kirkuk. In
2001, the United Nations estimated that 805,505 displaced people were
living over the border in Iraqi Kurdistan.

During the war to oust Saddam Hussein that began in March 2003, United
States Special Forces soldiers fought alongside Kurdish guerrilla
fighters. Together they descended on Kirkuk on April 10, and the
vengeful Kurds -- with Mam Rostam as their commander -- looted many of
the city's government buildings and shops, and convoys of Kurdish
vehicles could be seen carrying the booty back to the north. Thousands
of Arabs fled in advance of the Kurdish and American-led coalition
forces; those who remained were subject to a campaign of intimidation.
Many were warned to abandon their homes, which the Kurdish militias
were seizing for themselves or awarding to the families of peshmerga
casualties. The United States military eventually established a
provincial council, painstakingly divided among Kurds, Christians,
Arabs and Turkmens. Such a delicate arrangement was not likely to
survive a free election.

In the days before the election, Kirkuk was festooned with posters and
banners for the three main lists of candidates competing in Kirkuk:
the Kurdish Kirkuk Brotherhood List, showing an oil well and the
Kurdish national colors; the Iraqi Turkmen Front, signified by a light
blue crescent and star; and the candle of the United Iraqi Alliance,
the so-called Sistani list named for Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of
Najaf, who had endorsed it. All over town, Kurdish and Turkmen flags
competed for attention, with the blue of the Turkmens standing out
against the yellow, green and red of the Kurds. Only in the Arab
neighborhoods were there no signs of politics -- no graffiti, no
election posters or banners, no sign that any political event was
taking place -- only mud. The leading Arab electoral list had decided
to boycott the election.

In the Turkmen and Kurdish neighborhoods and in the center of town,
along the mixed shops of the main market on Jumhuriya Street, a war of
signs was taking place. For decades, except at the height of
Arabization, the Turkmen and Kurdish populations each had roughly
equal shares: enough to make them the city's dominant groups but not
enough to make either one the clear winner. Each party's poster or
banner had a national symbol or religious code to let the target
audience know it was meant for them, followed by the appropriate
number of the party on the ballot so that Kurds would recognize the
Kurdish symbols and associate them with only one ballot number and
Turkmens would do the same.

In one Turkmen neighborhood in the week before the election, I found
three Kurds -- two wearing American-issue military uniforms and
slinging Kalashnikovs, one wearing a business suit -- putting up
posters for the Kirkuk Brotherhood List, all next to one another,
above Turkmen signs. Another Kurdish soldier, with extra magazines for
his weapon stuffed into his vest, angrily kicked a Turkmen banner onto
the curb and then pushed it into the mud. Elsewhere I saw two Kurdish
youths -- also in American-issue uniforms with flak jackets and
Kalashnikovs -- putting up posters on the concrete barriers of the
United States Army's civil-military operations center. In the Sari
Kahiya neighborhood, which is mostly Turkmen, I was stuck behind a
convoy of cars covered in Kurdish flags and banners. A loudspeaker on
one blasted Kurdish music, while a man with a microphone in the lead
car recited a litany of crimes the Kurds had suffered. The cars were
full of armed men, hunched over with their rifle barrels just visible
over the windows.

In the Taseen neighborhood, another predominantly Turkmen area, new
all-Turkmen schools could be found with the Turkmen word for school,
''okul,'' revealing their ethnic identity. ''The burial of democracy
in Iraq began with the I.E.C.I.,'' announced a banner hung on a little
kiosk just across from the Turkmen sports center of the National
Turkmen Movement, No. 177 on the national election ballot. The
I.E.C.I. was the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, and the
Turkmens charged it was locally dominated by the Kurds, who were in
turn supported by the Americans. The Turkmens also claimed that the
Kurds overcounted themselves (and, when necessary, the Arabs) and
undercounted the Turkmens. Therefore, the election was, in the eyes of
the Turkmens, doomed to fraudulence.

In the National Turkmen Movement's sports center, I passed by many
armed guards on my way up to an office on the second floor. There,
Munir al Kafiri, secretary of the movement, greeted me, as did Husam
Edin, manager of the movement, who sat behind a desk. A dozen men in
elegant suits had been in a meeting when I showed up uninvited. On the
wall behind Husam, I recognized a faded picture of a gray wolf, baying
at the moon. It was a symbol of Turkey's Gray Wolves, a paramilitary
organization founded in Turkey in the 1960's. The Gray Wolves sought
to establish a greater Turkey that would include Kirkuk and its oil
fields. They battled leftists and opposed any recognition of the Kurds
in Turkey.

''We belong to the Turkish Gray Wolves because we believe that
anything taken by force can only be taken back by force,'' one of the
men told me. It is their rights that the Turkmens want back, I was
told, though their politics came to a sudden stop when they were asked
to explain what those rights were. ''The Turks have lived here for
4,000 years,'' another of the men said, in a historical addition of
about 3,000 years, and ''governments considered us relics of the
Turkish occupation, all governments ignored our rights.'' Now, I was
told, the interim Iraqi government ''has started taking sides.'' The
men claimed that the independent electoral commission had registered
an additional 108,000 internally displaced Kurds. ''This was a gift to
the Kurds,'' one said.

The National Turkmen Movement had sent its own gift to the I.E.C.I.
the day before. ''Yesterday we gave black roses to the I.E.C.I. to
tell them they had died,'' one of the men said.

Husam Edin, the Turkmen movement's manager, explained: ''According to
our documentation,'' which I was never shown, ''only 11,000 Kurdish
families were expelled from Kirkuk, so if you multiply it by 5, it's
only 55,000, still less than 108,000.'' The men denied that the
returning Kurds had ever lived in Kirkuk. ''Saddam kicked them out
because they had no Kirkuk residency and Saddam was trying to preserve
the demography of Kirkuk,'' Husam Edin said.

It was a very curious argument, given that Hussein, through
Arabization, had expelled thousands of Turkmens, too, in his attempt
to alter the demography of Kirkuk. Now, paradoxically, the Turkmens
were making common cause with Kirkuk's Arabs against the Kurds. This
was, of course, an alliance of convenience.

The Iraqi Turkmen front is the parent party from which the National
Turkmen Movement had split. I stopped by the offices of the front's
innocuous-sounding humanitarian-aid society one afternoon in the
Taseen neighborhood. Walking past gun-wielding guards whose uniforms
bore an eagle patch that said ''Hayat Security Company,'' I entered an
office and found several young men seated on a couch struggling to
clean two Kalashnikovs and put them back together. Four more rifles
were leaning against the wall in a corner. A poster of the founder of
the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was on the wall above
them, and on several shelves were various images of the Gray Wolves.

Omar Khattab, manager of the office, sat watching a Jackie Chan movie,
a pistol on his desk. Like Saddam Hussein before him, Khattab, now 43,
started out as a violent activist. As a teenager, he joined an
underground nationalist movement. He was one of its assassins,
shooting at Baathists. ''We succeeded in assassinating some of them,
praise God,'' he said. He was jailed 11 times. In 1979 he was
sentenced to be executed, but he bribed his way out of it by paying
1,000 dinars to change his birth certificate, making him a minor and
ineligible for execution. In 1991, he said, the Kurds jailed him on
charges of working with Turkish intelligence. ''Every political
organization that wants to start begins with leaflets,'' he explained,
''then begins assassinations so its voice is heard.''

I asked Khattab why he had a small army in his office. Was he
expecting violence during the election? ''God willing,'' he said,
''there will be violence. We are expecting it. You think we will keep
silent about the 108,000 Kurds? Civil war has to happen, but we won't
start it. Why do you think we were cleaning our weapons? Today there
was a demonstration of Kurds -- all of them armed, a provocation --
and where were the Americans? How can you come here to teach us about
democracy, and you don't give us freedom?''

He continued: ''We are ready for anything. Maybe after an hour, after
a day, after a week, but civil war has to happen. The Kurds are four
million, and we are three million. Our young men are ready to defend
us.'' He did not expect Turkey to come to their rescue. ''Turkey will
pursue its own interests, and if the Kurds give Turkey oil, then the
Turks will support the Kurds,'' he said.

On election day in Kirkuk, two elections actually took place. The
first was for a 275-seat National Assembly in Baghdad that would
appoint a government and draft a constitution. The second was for the
Kirkuk provincial government. Though initially confident of victory in
Kirkuk, Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
leaders began to fear registration was not high enough to give them a
sufficient margin to claim Kirkuk as decisively Kurdish. The two
parties threatened to boycott the election if the 100,000 Kurds they
claimed were Kirkuki refugees were not allowed to vote in Kirkuk. In a
compromise that infuriated the Arabs and Turkmens of Kirkuk, the
national election commission allowed about 60,000 new voters onto the
Kirkuk rolls, most of them Kurds.

The division of the vote along ethnic or religious lines marked the
election not only in Kirkuk but nationwide. Because the electoral
''lists'' had to compete on a national basis, they could not appeal to
particular local needs or issues. This meant that the political appeal
of any particular list almost had to be much less than the sum of its
candidates; in effect, the national lists became reflections of
ethnicity or religious belief. During the campaign, this had the
result of solidifying the connection between religion or ethnicity and
political power. And the problems of Kirkuk became less and less
distinguishable from the problems of Iraq as a whole.

Across town from the Turkmen neighborhood of Taseen was Uruba, or
''Arabdom,'' constructed by Saddam Hussein to house Arabs he imported
into Kirkuk. The muddy lots and rocky paths between homes were full of
children playing and garbage strewn about, as goats and herds of sheep
picked through the refuse for scraps. Uruba was nicknamed Resistance
City by American soldiers, who rarely ventured in. Women in purple and
green robes with head scarves chatted or mopped the spaces in front of
their homes. Men lolled about silently, staring at our car as it
struggled to traverse the pitted and broken streets: a new vehicle
with new faces inside.

A trickle of Sunni men, alone or in couples, slowly made their way to
the Al Tawhid Mosque, whose white walls and green towers were
surrounded by mud and sewage. Donkeys stood outside, while before the
mosque's gate children played with birds they had caught, holding
their feet and attacking one another with the screeching birds
spreading their wings.

I approached the mosque's guardians and was allowed to enter. A
hundred men stood barefoot in rows on carpets in the outer courtyard
because the interior of the mosque was full. Sheik Mahmud Husein Ahmad
al-Ubeidi began his khutba -- the Friday sermon -- and loudspeakers
outside echoed his shrill fury against the walls of the neighborhood.
As is the tradition, Mahmud began by retelling stories of the early
Muslim leaders and spoke of how they worked heroically to help their
flock. He contrasted them with today's leaders and ended with a
warning against the election. ''The occupier wants us to participate
in these elections,'' he said, ''but we know they are a fraud.'' After
prayers were over, I stood in line with other well-wishers to greet
the sheik, and he invited me for lunch; we drove off to his nearby
home. In his dark guest room, paint peeled off the walls against which
some 20 boys and old men in dishdasha robes were leaning. Sheik Mahmud
invited me to sit with him and others on thin mattresses placed on the
floor.

''We fear Iraq will have a sectarian war,'' the sheik began to tell
me, only to be interrupted by his 3-year-old son running to embrace
his father. I was told the boy's name was Osama. ''I named him after
Osama bin Laden,'' the sheik said, smiling. ''Bin Laden is a good
man.''

Mahmud has led the neighborhood mosque for two years, and a steady
stream of men entered his home to congratulate him upon his return
from his first hajj. When a man entered, the seated men all stood up
-- despite the newcomer's protests -- and he shook each man's hand,
embracing and kissing and exchanging wishes of peace and God's
blessings. Then the conversation would resume until the next
interruption, which included lunch, a large tin bowl of rice with
pieces of boiled meat on top.

''All the Sunni Arab leaders have banned the elections,'' the sheik
now said, adding that ''we don't have faith in the elections -- these
are secular parties.''

Mahmud acknowledged that he was a member of the Sunni Council of
Islamic Scholars, a radical coalition of sheiks in Iraq who support
the insurgency and oppose both the occupation and the election. Though
the scholars' council did not have an office in Kirkuk, as it did in
most Arab Sunni areas of the country, it was represented by the sheik,
who relayed its orders from Baghdad to Kirkuk's Sunnis. ''The council
said we should not participate in the elections,'' he said. ''We
should have the elections after the occupation is over, otherwise the
Americans will install whomever they want and the elections will
fail.'' He repeated propaganda heard in Sunni areas from Falluja to
Mosul: ''We heard that 700,000 Iranians were brought into the south,
and here foreign Kurds were brought in.'' Mahmud and his seated
supporters did not think Sunnis would be weakened by their intended
boycott. ''If we support the elections, we have to accept the
results,'' he said. ''But if we reject them, we stay strong.''

The men in Mahmud's room feared both the Kurds and the Americans, who
had altered the balance of power. The sheik explained that ''the
Americans arrested many of our youth, so did the Kurds. The Kurds have
hated Arabs for a long time. They see an Arab and say he is Saddam
Hussein.'' An older sheik, who was visiting, cut in: ''They are trying
to provoke us and attack Arabs in the market, beating them up. The
Americans support the Kurds.'' He and others finishing their lunch
denied that many Kurds had been expelled by Hussein. ''The government
only expelled 3,000 Kurds,'' said one of the men. Another, a round man
seated beside the sheik, denied living in Kurdish homes. ''We bought
our homes,'' he said. ''If Arabs stole the homes of Kurds, then they
deserve to get them back, but we took government land.'' The older
sheik interjected again: ''They want to take Kirkuk. We are sitting
here waiting. If anything happens we will react.''

When Hussein sought to Arabize Kirkuk, he used Shiite Arabs as well as
Sunnis. As with Turkmens and Arabs, Sunni and Shiite Iraqi Arabs, at
odds elsewhere in the country, have found common cause in Kirkuk
against the Kurds. For many Shiites, of course, particularly those
inspired by the young cleric Moktada al-Sadr and the exploits of his
Mahdi army, there is also common cause to be found in opposing the
American-led occupation and all its works.

At another mosque in Kirkuk -- a Shiite huseiniya -- I heard a
different sermon given. The modest building was obscured by the taller
homes in the area, and inside its courtyard men were washing their
feet, arms and faces in the ritual ablutions before prayer. The inner
walls were lined with posters featuring a who's who of radical Shiism:
Ayatollah Khomeini, Moktada al-Sadr and his revered martyred uncle,
Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, the father of political Shiism in Iraq. One
poster, showing Moktada al-Sadr beside a masked man wielding a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher, announced, ''The Mahdi army
supports Muslims and protects the religious sites for Iraqis.''
Another declared that al-Sadr was on the battlefield against the
Americans; yet another warned the Americans, ''Oh, infidels, I don't
worship what you worship''; and still another said of those infidels,
''Fight these people by day and by night, secretly and openly, and I
call on you to attack them before they attack you.''

Beneath the posters, on a bulletin board, al-Sadr's latest
announcements were posted. One from December declared that al-Sadr's
movement was boycotting the election, though it did not say that he
was quietly fielding candidates at the same time.

The men in the mosque gathered on the green carpet beneath plastic
chandeliers and spoke to one another in a murmur. They spoke in the
southern Iraqi Shiite dialect; they were among the Arabs from southern
Iraq that Hussein had encouraged (or forced) to migrate to Kirkuk to
replace expelled Kurds.

The prayer was interspersed with the traditional and ubiquitous Shiite
chant -- ''Our god prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad'' --
but appended to it was a remarkable innovation that supporters of
al-Sadr had added, changing accepted Shiite practice. The chant
requested that God speed the return of the Mahdi, or Shiite messiah,
damn his enemies and make his son al-Sadr victorious. Then the
congregants shouted: ''Oh, Allah! Oh, Ali! Oh, Mahdi,'' and placed
their hands on their bowed heads, finishing in a more subdued tone,
''Make us victorious.''

The huseiniya's imam, Mahmud, stood up. He wore a white turban that
made his narrow face look even thinner. Mahmud began with stories
about the heroes of early Islam and, uncharacteristically for a
Shiite, praised the early Sunni leaders and commended their friendship
with the prophet. The sheik then spoke about the importance of choice
and the responsibility that comes with it. ''It's important to apply
your freedom,'' he said. He called upon his audience to choose the
best marja, or religious source, as high-ranking Shiite clerics are
called. After prayers, posters of Moktada al-Sadr and copies of his
publication, Al Hawza, were put on sale.

Of course, not all Shiites were hostile to the election. The United
Iraqi Alliance -- the Shiite ''list'' endorsed by Grand Ayatollah
al-Sistani -- also had a presence in Kirkuk. Posters of Sistani and
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) and a major figure in the United Iraqi
Alliance, covered Sciri's extremely humble headquarters. Three
middle-aged men were sleeping in a room there when I arrived. They
hobbled out in a daze. Their Arabic was poor; they were all Shiite
Turkmens who spent nearly two decades in Iranian exile with Sciri and
its militia, the Badr Brigade. They fought in the south and in
northern Iraq. I asked them who their candidates were in Kirkuk.
''There are candidates here for the list,'' one of them said, ''but I
don't have their names or phone numbers here.'' He rummaged through
the desk until he found the list of their 17 provincial candidates.

They sent me to a mosque sympathetic to their cause. The walls were
covered with posters showing mass graves and depicting Saddam
Hussein's soldiers attacking Najaf. Inside, Seyid Sadiq al-Batat spoke
to a room filled with 150 men and, sequestered in the front, 50 women.
He spoke about Islam for 90 minutes and finally got to the election.
''Elections are an important day for the followers of Ali,'' he said,
referring to the Shiites, ''and we say to the occupier, No to
occupation for a day, for a week, for a year. Sistani refused the
American request to postpone the elections. People think that the
elections are a gift from the occupier. But they are a trick to let
them stay here to use our oil and natural resources. They were
refusing elections, but we forced them. We won't have a secular
constitution. We'll have an Islamic constitution. The majority in this
country is Shiite. Anybody who wants to liberate Iraq should vote for
this list.''

The night before the election, in the deserted headquarters of the
Kurdistan Democratic Party, I found Muhammad Kamal Salih, deputy
director of the party in Kirkuk. Only the flag of Kurdistan was on his
desk. Above him were posters of Mustafa and Massoud Barzani -- the
patriarch of Kurdish resistance and his son. Salih's cellphone rang
constantly with a Kurdish national song. No. 2 on the Kirkuk slate, he
was guaranteed a position after the election. He did not seem
particularly thrilled about this. Maybe it was not in his nature.

''We hope to have more Kurds on the council after the elections, more
than half,'' he said. ''Kurds are 47 or 48 percent of Kirkuk. It's low
because the imported Arabs have not yet been returned to the south.''
He was confident that the unwanted Arabs would leave. ''They came for
their personal interest, so if you offer them incentives, they will
go,'' he said. ''About 300,000 Arabs should go. About 50,000 have
already left Kirkuk. Ninety percent of them are only waiting to
receive incentives to leave. They will be given jobs, transportation,
land, homes in the south.'' He expected Kirkuk's oil revenues to pay
for their transfer. Salih's own responsibility was not oil but
education, in regard to which he complained of facing logistical
problems turning Arab schools into Kurdish ones.

I went to spend election eve with Mam Rostam at his home in the
formerly all-Arab Qadisiya neighborhood, which is the front line of
Kurdish-Arab tension. His newly confiscated home had belonged to
Shiite Arabs. They were gone now, and Rostam had renovated.

That night I told Rostam about the Friday prayer in the Tawhid Mosque
and how the imam urged everyone not to vote. Rostam laughed and
slapped his thighs. ''This is great for us!'' he said. He laughed when
I told him how I had cautioned the sheik that Sunnis would lose out if
they did not vote. ''No, you should have told them: 'You're right,
don't vote. It's for the infidels!'''

Rostam went into the kitchen and emerged with bottles of whiskey, ouzo
and beer. Soft drinks were not an option. His guests began arriving.
Gen. Salar Ahmad Faqi, the rotund and eternally tired chief of the
traffic police, settled into a chair, removing his Israeli automatic
pistol, which he said was a special gift from a benefactor he refused
to name. The chief of security for this neighborhood, a handsome man,
freshly shaved and with a permanent smile, refused to give his name or
have his picture taken. Asked about reports that Israeli intelligence
agents were training the Kurds, he said Iraqi Jews have the right to
return to Kurdistan.

''Better to have Israelis than Arabs!'' Rostam shouted. ''We think
that the Kurds and Israel are the best allies the Americans have in
the Middle East.'' There was a radio on, tuned to a Kurdish station,
and when reports of threats to Kurds were broadcast, Rostam, well into
his ouzo, began complaining. ''Muslims are bad,'' he said. ''Islam is
dictatorial. Look at Europe: you can see real democracy; you can see a
mosque, a church and nightclub all together.'' His friend Adil, deputy
chief of security for Kirkuk, who wore a black suit, black shirt and
red tie, added, ''I am an example of democracy. I pray, then I
drink.''

''The [Saddam] regime killed 182,000 people in the Anfal campaign and
destroyed more than 5,000 villages,'' Rostam declared, ''and no Muslim
cleric said anything.'' Voicing a frequent Kurdish refrain, he mourned
the loss of the Kurds' pre-Islamic religion. ''Our original religion
was Yazidi, and they came by the sword to make us Muslims,'' he said.
Then he added, ''We should replace mosques with discotheques.''

Shy young peshmerga in green fatigues and plastic slippers brought in
courses of salad, rice and meat as Rostam's well-fed comrades ate and
listened. Their cellphones rang often, each one with a different pop
melody. Atta, a local police commander, had a phone that trilled
''Jingle Bells.'' That night he took me with his police patrol into an
Arab district, where his men blared their sirens and fired their heavy
machine gun into the air.

Mam Rostam awoke on election day and switched on the Kurdish satellite
channel, where music videos from Sulaimaniya were playing. ''Isn't
this better than praying at a mosque?'' he asked. It was a theme with
him.

The school two houses down from his served as a voting center. Men and
women lined up in the hundreds on opposite sides of the school,
squeezed between walls and barbed wire. The sounds of heavy gunfire
cut through the chatter. People came early, starting at 7 when the
center opened, as Black Hawk helicopters circled above. Many of the
women wore shiny new clothes, their finest, full of color and glitter.
People came holding sample ballots and their registration cards. A
sign at the entrance said, ''Vote for who you want and only for who
you want.'' The school was decorated with Kurdish colors. Though it
was early in the morning, the feeling was of great excitement. People
moved quickly and in remarkable order. Men and women were eager to
vote, smiling as they walked out of booths, seemingly disappointed
that it was over so soon.

Rostam's convoy set out for his childhood neighborhood, Shorja, where
voting was held at a school. He was accompanied by two dozen peshmerga
members and his personal cameraman. The young cameraman leapt off the
back of the pickup truck from where he had been filming Rostam's lead
car and never stopped filming, sprinting around everybody in a panic,
pressing his video camera close to Rostam's face. Thousands of people
were on the street. Rostam circumvented the entire line and its
security procedures and entered with his cameraman and gunmen. Other
voters were made to wait as he put on his reading glasses and made a
show of studying the ballot. He was shown how to fold it, and the
staff was very impressed, or made it seem so. Outside the mood was
celebratory; some men beat drums, singing and dancing, while others
danced with the flag of Kurdistan. They appeared to be celebrating a
Kurdish victory much more than an Iraqi one.

Rostam's convoy continued to another neighborhood. As a large crowd
encircled him, he announced: ''Today is a historic day. Today our
geography, history and blood will bear fruit.'' Women approached him
to shake his hand. One old woman hugged him. She had been his nanny as
a child. ''Do you still want to wash me in a basin?'' Rostam roared.
Everybody laughed. News arrived of a mortar shell hitting the Kirkuk
stadium, which Rostam visited two days earlier to greet the 2,000
Kurdish refugees who had set up a shantytown there. A teenager had
been killed by the mortar round. Rostam drove to the hospital to
soothe the stricken family and friends, whose clothes were stained
with the victim's blood. Soon Rostam continued on to the Iskan
neighborhood. Thousands danced in the streets and greeted Rostam with
embraces. As he spoke to them, the men laughed and clapped. ''Did
everybody here vote?'' he demanded.

Once you left the Kurdish neighborhoods, the dancing stopped. Taseen
was quiet, though not as quiet as the city's Arab slums, which seemed
almost deserted until Iraqi policemen began firing on our car. After
surrounding the car, dragging us out and interrogating us at gunpoint,
they decided we really were journalists rather than terrorists, and we
were able to enter a girls' school that was serving as an election
site. There were six policemen on the roof. Occasionally one or two
people strolled in to vote. Some of the election workers wore masks to
avoid reprisals as collaborators.

Back in the Kurdish Shorja neighborhood at 2 that afternoon, we found
the festivities unabated. Hundreds of people were still lined up to
vote, while around them people danced and sang. Rostam remained in a
celebratory mood. ''The ballot boxes are empty in Baghdad!'' he said.
''It means we are going to win!''

But what had the Kurds won? At the very least, they seemed ready to
begin another round of forced deportations. Kirkuk's Kurdish assistant
governor for resettlement and compensation, Hasib Rozbayani, told me
the day before -- after waving me into his house with a pistol, a
house that had been taken from an Arab -- that he hoped to expel
300,000 Arabs and welcome the return of the same number of Kurds. Of
the Arabs, he said: ''They should prefer to live in peace and not be
in conflict every day. Their presence leads to conflict.''

There is little reason, however, to think that their absence will lead
to peace. When Kurdish voters left the polling places, they were often
directed to tents to vote once more, this time in an informal
referendum on whether they wanted to live in an independent Kurdistan
or in Iraq. According to the referendum's organizers, the vote went
98.76 percent for independence.

However primitive this straw poll was, the prospect of Kurds not
resting until they have created a state from northern Iraq -- a state
that would include Kirkuk -- is very real. For now, the two leading
Kurdish parties remain officially opposed to an independence
referendum. But within days of the vote, Massoud Barzani, leader of
the Kurdistan Democratic Party, was saying of independence: ''When the
right time comes it will become a reality. Self-determination is the
natural right of our people.'' Peter Galbraith, a former American
diplomat who had watched the breakup of Yugoslavia and was monitoring
the voting in Kurdistan, concluded that the breakup of Iraq was
inevitable, too, because the Kurds had finally got close to
independence and were in no mood to stop now. One of the Kurds' chief
representatives in Baghdad, Faraj al-Haideri, began calling for a
referendum in the summer on whether Kirkuk should merge with the three
neighboring Kurdish autonomous provinces.

Two weeks after the election, I phoned Mam Rostam, and he seemed to be
in a statesmanlike mood. Preliminary national results showed the Kurds
with an outsize share, thanks to Sunni Arab nonparticipation. Locally,
Rostam considered the election a success, ''despite the deep aversion
the Turkmen and the Sunni Arabs had for democracy and the will of the
people.'' He predicted that Kirkuk's provincial council, with a fresh
Kurdish majority, would ''try to remain part of Iraq.'' He said,
however, that ''once they realize that the Iraqi government does not
help them, or, let's say, does not do enough to help Kirkuk stand on
its feet, they will ask to join Kurdistan and enjoy the privileges the
Kurds enjoy at the moment.''

Once that happened, Rostam, too, foresaw independence. ''Kurdistan is
not yet an independent state,'' he told me, ''but why should we not
have the right to have an independent state of our own like all the
other small countries?''

Rostam said he was being considered for the post of ''chief commander
of the oil fields of Kirkuk.'' It appears that Kirkuk has become a
place where an oil field has to have a ''commander'' and where that
commander thinks of himself not as an Iraqi, but as a Kurd.

Nir Rosen has reported from Iraq and Afghanistan for The New Republic,
The New Yorker and other publications. This is his first article for
The Times Magazine. He is working on a book about contemporary Iraq.