By Bay Fang July 2004

KIRKUK, IRAQ--Asad Rashid sits in a sweltering tent on the city's outskirts and wipes his eyes with a dusty hand. Pretty soon, he must move back here, to a city he and other Kurds fled in the face of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s wrath in 1991. But rather than being excited by the prospect, Rashid is unhappy. For much of the past 13 years, he has been on the move from one camp to another. Now, he is 61 and has a home for his family in government housing on the edge of Sulaymaniyah, one of the two main cities in the Kurdish-administered region. A week ago, officials came to the community and told residents they must move back to Kirkuk, to this resettlement camp. "They said they would
move our ration cards to Kirkuk next week," he says. "They said, 'You're Kurds from Kirkuk--isn't it your dream to go back to your homeland?' "

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For years, Kirkuk has been just that for the Kurds--a dream. They think of this city as the capital of an imagined Kurdistan, a storied homeland stretching through parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq (news - web sites). For decades, though, the Iraqi regime under Saddam practiced ethnic cleansing in this city, which sits atop vast oil reserves, expelling Kurds, Turkmen, and Assyrians and replacing them with ethnic Arabs. Since 1968, Kurdish leaders say, some 250,000 Kurds have been forced out of Kirkuk, as Saddam sought to solidify Baghdad's grip on his northern oil territory and to thwart Kurdish aspirations for independence.

Now, they're coming back. In the past month, since being unyoked from its American overseers, the Kurdish government has been quietly pushing Kirkuki Kurds back into the city. Their aim is to ensure a favorable ethnic balance before the start of a national census on October 12 and a planned referendum on Kirkuk's future, in early 2005. The goal is to make it, like it or not, a Kurdish city.

But with this huge population shift come equally huge problems. Thousands of Arab families were booted off their property in Kirkuk after the war. And while some have moved away, many resettled in camps and abandoned buildings south and west of the city. With an uncertain future, and feeling stripped of their rights, they could explode into violence at any time. "Let's just say that the recruiting efforts of insurgents have not been hurt at all by this," says Col. Scott Leith of the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division, who oversees coalition activity in the predominantly Arab part of the region. "There is already the perception that the Kurds have taken more than their right."

Digging in. On a dusty plain, a tent city has sprung up to accommodate the hundreds of returning Kurds. They have been infor-mally divided into neighborhoods--one for people returning from Sulaymaniyah, another for those from Arbil. Men dig foundations for new concrete houses next to their tents. Cars are parked next to each makeshift abode, covered with sheets against the harsh sun. Hasib Rozbayani, a Kurd who is deputy mayor for resettlement and compensation, walks among the rows of tents. "There were over 500 here a couple of weeks ago, but dozens more are coming every day," he says. "We will be holding a referendum on the future of Kirkuk, and to have it, all the refugees have to come back, and all the Arabs have to leave." Asked how big he expects the camp to become, he gestures toward the blindingly bright sky--"infinite!" he says.

That's just what Arab leaders in Kirkuk fear. They say that some Arabs refusing to vacate their houses have been abducted by Kurds in what they believe signals a wave of now anti-Arab ethnic cleansing. "The parties are pushing the population back and trying to kick out the Arabs," says one Arab city council member, Mohammed Khalil al-Jaboury.

From the western edge of town, the road toward Hawijah shoots straight through the desert. Tumbleweed rolls past the skeletons of abandoned cars. A cemetery bakes in the afternoon sun. A lone shepherd, his face wrapped in a black-and-white scarf, points the way up a dirt track toward a cluster of dilapidated buildings that was once a military compound. This has become a makeshift village for 500 members of the al-Ghurairy tribe, who took refuge here in April 2003. Before the war, they lived in a village called Qara Dara, northwest of Kirkuk.

They moved there in 1982 because of a tribal dispute, they say, onto empty land that they knew had once belonged to Kurds. They built houses, dug wells, and started a school, and in 1996, at the height of Saddam's Arabization program, they were registered by the government as the official landowners. But after the war, they say, the Kurds came, waving guns and the Kurdish flag, and forced them to leave.

Their new settlement doesn't have a name. They have set up homes inside old halls with caved-in roofs, curtains dividing one family from another. For water, they put a tank on a tractor and drive across the road late at night to steal it out of a pipe that belongs to the Northern Oil Co. "We don't want to re-establish roots," says "Mayor" Jalal Yassin Hassan, a burly man in a flowing dishdasha. "They'll just come and kick us off again." All they do is wait for help and compensation, which never comes. "They won't hire us in town because we're Arabs," says a muscular 22-year-old with a tattoo of a knife dripping blood on one arm and, on the other, "I love Aseel." There are about 80 young men who spend the days sitting around the compound. "If this situation continues, maybe we will become thieves or terrorists."

Their old village of Qara Dara is now marked with a Kurdish flag. Mohammed Mawlood, 24, came back with his family eight months ago, to the village family members were forced from in 1963. He still has a house in the Kurdish capital of Arbil, but he wants to stay in the three-room whitewashed house in Qara Dara, so that his family won't lose the land again.
"The Baathists built this house, yes, but they left when we arrived," he says. "I don't know where they went--probably back down south."

Just after Kirkuk fell to coalition forces on April 11, Kurds moved quickly into the city, and weeks of looting and terrorizing of Arab families ensued. That was eventually stopped by the U.S. military, but the damage had been done. "The CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] and the Kurds should have had plans in place last year," says Hania Mufti of Human Rights Watch. "There was the assumption by the Kurdish leadership that when the government fell, Arabs would leave because they wouldn't feel safe. That happened in '91 [after the Gulf War (news - web sites)]--but then, Kirkuk was only in Kurdish hands for five days."

But not all the Arabs left, and now, say the Kurds, they should not be allowed to remain in Kirkuk--where their presence, of course, would skew the ethnic balance for the census. The Kurdish governor of Kirkuk, Abdul Rahman Fatah (news - web sites), cites a law from the old Iraqi regime stating that anyone who is not included in the 1957 census cannot buy land or a house. "It is unfortunate, but it is the law that is still on the books," he says. "The central government has to solve the problem of the imported Arabs."

Sorting it out. It has taken over a year to put together a possible solution in the form of the Iraq Property Claims Commission, which just started accepting claims this May. Its aim is to restore property to its original owner while providing some sort of compensation to those made to leave. The problem, though, is that no one knows exactly how it will work in practice--since no cases have yet been adjudicated. It also depends on having enough money: Right now the commission has a budget of $180 million for claims all over the country, but a single claim, if it involves multiple owners who have all made improvements to the property, can be up to a million dollars. Another problem is that sometimes one family leaving its land a generation ago has grown to three or four families upon return.

The road into Kirkuk is a frenzy of construction. Bulldozers rip through previously empty desert land, and new one-story houses, built without permits, sprout on both sides of the road. The Kurdish flag--red, white, and green stripes, with a sun in the middle--is everywhere. Spray-painted on a wall is: "Kirkuk--the Jerusalem of Kurdistan"

The speed of the return has aid workers worried and critical of the Kurdish government for pushing displaced Kirkukis back before ensuring adequate services for their arrival. Esteban Sacco, a resettlement expert in Kirkuk, says he was shocked when he attended a recent international aid meeting in Jordan. "The international community is still using the same language they were a year ago--'How are we going to assist the return of people without creating tensions?' " he says. "Well, I have news for them: The people are already there."

Turkey, too, is concerned that if Iraqi Kurds gain control of Kirkuk and its oil reserves, they will have the means to function independently of the central government, which might incite Turkey's own restive Kurdish population to revolt. Some Turkish Foreign Ministry representatives recently visited Kirkuk at the invitation of one of the two main Kurdish political parties and didn't like what they saw. "Our delegation found out there were serious efforts to change the demographic structure of Kirkuk," said a spokesman. "Many sections of the Iraqi population are concerned about these efforts."

Near the American airbase on the edge of town, a new 12-foot-high sign greets visitors. Colonel Leith says when he first drove past, he did a double take: "I was like, does that say, 'Welcome to Kurdistan?" He had his soldiers spray-paint over it: "Kirkuk is for all Iraqis." But recently, when he went by there again, he saw that the sign had again been altered. This time it read: "Kirkuk is for the Kurds."