Good Actors

Erbil, Iraq On the highway leading out of Erbil, the capital city of Iraqi Kurdistan, the only place to eat before reaching the city of Kirkuk is the Kurdistan Restaurant. The low-slung cinderblock building is in the Baghdad-controlled governorate of Tameem, but you wouldn't know it from the image on the restaurant's facade. Superimposed against the red, yellow, and green colors of the Kurdish flag is an impressive map of Greater Kurdistan, the ideational Kurdish homeland stretching from southern Turkey to western Iran.That such a map appears just outside of Kirkuk is no coincidence. Kirkuk, which Kurds call their Jerusalem, is a fundamental component of the dream of Greater Kurdistan. Every Kurd can recite the story of how Iraq's Arabs stole the city from them. Located about 150 miles northeast of Baghdad, Kirkuk had never been of great historic or political significance. But, in 1927, a consortium of oil prospectors headed by Calouste Gulbenkian, the legendary Armenian oil magnate, discovered that the city was afloat some of the richest oil fields on the planet. The then-fledgling Iraqi government started exerting control over Kirkuk, moving Kurds out and Arabs loyal to Baghdad's Hashemite monarchy in. For nearly 80 years, the city has been a symbol of the Kurds' fragmented and oppressed status. With Saddam Hussein gone and Iraq's Arabs mired in sectarian disarray, they intend to take it back. The reconquest of Kirkuk has begun not with an army but with a creeping of Kurdish settlers along the highway south from Erbil. Before Saddam was ousted in 2003, the Iraqi army prevented Kurds from living south of the Qushtapa checkpoint, just a few miles outside Erbil. As soon as the Iraqi army abandoned its positions during the U.S.-led invasion, however, defiant Kurdish civilians immediately occupied the barracks to mark their new frontiers. Over the last three years, they have pushed closer and closer to Kirkuk. Crumbling stone structures along the road have become new Kurdish villages, displaying red, yellow, and green flags. And, in the northernmost sector of Kirkuk itself, just beyond where plumes of fire illuminate some of the world's richest oil fields, the first outpost isn't an Arab area, but rather the Kurdish neighborhood of Rahimawa. What the highway from Erbil to Kirkuk reveals is that, for three years, while Sunni and Shia Arabs have bitterly fought one another--and the U.S. occupation--the Kurds have methodically established a presence on the ground. Any peshmerga--guerrillas who serve as Kurdistan's army--who travel south to take Kirkuk will be treated as heroes along the road. Any Iraqi soldiers who travel north to retain it will have to subdue a hostile population. There would seem to be few better moments for the peshmerga caravans to fly down the Erbil-Kirkuk highway. This week's orgy of violence--in which Sunnis bombed Shia shrines and Shia militiamen pulled Sunnis out of their homes for execution in broad daylight--underscores how Iraq is at a point of permanent sectarian emergency. But the independence of Kurdistan is not imminent. After the attack on the Askariya shrine in February, instead of exploiting increased sectarian tensions, Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the president of Iraq, worked energetically to restart talks between Sunni and Shia leaders. Indeed, at every turn, the Kurds have opted not to declare independence but to keep the country united. "It's ironic," wrote Turkish columnist Cengiz Candar, "that Talabani ... long considered a secessionist, is now functioning as the glue most likely to make Iraq stick together and to prevent it from breaking apart." But Talabani's efforts aren't ironic. They're strategic. The current generation of Kurdish leaders has reached a consensus about Kurdistan's future: For the next several years, the Kurds must remain part of Iraq if they are to achieve statehood. That's because they need to convince Iraqis, often-hostile neighbors like Turkey, and foreign powers like the United States that Kurdish independence is a positive--or at least nonthreatening--development. The timetable for independence varies: Some Kurdish leaders suggest independence is only a few years away, while others see it in a decade or even a generation. The most important factor in winning recognition, however, will be the visible and consistent demonstration that they paid, in the words of one Kurdish leader, "more than our fair share" for building Iraq. But, in order to have a shot at independence, the Kurds must also set up an economic and political infrastructure that will make their dream of statehood viable. They must develop their copious oil resources. They must cement ties with bordering countries. And they must consolidate their hold over Baghdad politics. These moves run directly counter to the interests of Iraq, the country the Kurds are supposed to be paying more than their fair share. Over a dinner of grilled fish, Tariq Namiq, a bespectacled thirtysomething journalist, argues passionately that Americans are fooling themselves if they don't consider all Arabs terrorists. His virulence reflects a long-standing fear. Ever since British and French imperial machinations grafted a portion of the mountainous Kurdish homeland to the artificially created Iraq after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Kurdish experience in Iraq has been a story of relentless and bloody repression. That repression reached its apogee in 1987 and 1988 with the Anfal genocide, during which Saddam murdered 100,000 Kurds, destroyed hundreds of Kurdish villages, and evicted thousands of Kurds from Kurdish cities like Kirkuk. Namiq hosts a weekly TV program on the Kurdish network Zagros TV, which, he explains, reminds viewers that Kirkuk by rights belongs to Kurdistan, despite also being home to thousands of Arabs. When I ask if the Arabs can remain in the city--the Kurdish leadership insists they be relocated, and American diplomats have traced over 180 disappearances and kidnappings of Arabs to Kurdish forces--Namiq equivocates. Namiq is hardly alone in his distrust of Arabs. Despite Kurdish prominence in Baghdad, no one in Kurdistan has much faith that post-Saddam Iraq offers the Kurds anything more than the torments of the past. The entrance of the Sunnis into the political process in December was met in Kurdistan with apprehension that the formerly dominant minority is simply trying to use ballots as well as bullets to regain power. "Everyone has to have both legs in--not one leg in terror and one leg in the cabinet," says Fadhil Merani, the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) politburo who helped negotiate the sectarian character of the new government in Baghdad. Not that everyone thinks the Shia, with whom the Kurds allied against their mutual Sunni enemies, are much better. Many Kurds describe them as fanatical and backward proxies of Iran. Sunnis and Shia may not be able to find common ground in Baghdad, but, in Kurdistan, both are simply Arabs, and so both merit contempt. For the last three years, American and Iraqi officials thought they had a solution to the Kurdish problem: federalism. Transforming Iraq from a centrally administered state into one where the various regions enjoy considerable autonomy from Baghdad was intended to mollify the country's mutually suspicious factions and keep the country whole. Indeed, federalism has been a nonnegotiable demand of the Kurds, who have always said that, unless post- Saddam Iraq allowed them tremendous freedom of action, they would have no choice but to secede. Accordingly, both the interim and permanent Iraqi constitutions contained far-reaching guarantees for regional autonomy. The permanent constitution, approved in October, allows Kurdistan to nullify unacceptable national legislation; to retain the 100,000-strong peshmerga; and to control much, if not all, of Kurdistan's oil wealth. But federalism has proved unacceptable to the Sunnis, who rejected the constitution en masse and only agreed to participate in the December elections after receiving U.S.- brokered assurances that they could seek to amend the document this year. Defending the controversial provisions of the Iraqi constitution in October, American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad explained, "You couldn't bring the Kurds back into Iraq without federalism." But, contrary to the White House's claim that federalism is "a prerequisite for a united country," federalism has stoked, not tempered, secessionism. In January 2005, as Iraqis voted to elect their first government, a referendum was held in Kurdistan asking respondents whether they would prefer independence. Nearly 98 percent of an estimated two million voters said yes. "Federalism is a fact that's imposed on us," explains Dilshad Farriq, a 27-year-old Persian- literature student at the University of Salahuddin. "Independence is something we want." But independence is also something that the Kurds know they can't have--at least not yet. To understand why, one need only visit Zakho, a small city on the Turkish border, 100 miles northwest of Erbil. At first glance, Zakho is a boomtown. Seemingly everything outside of the already bustling city square is under construction, with massive cranes building enormous warehouses for companies like the Turkish appliance giant Arcelik. The marketplace at the center of town overflows with foot traffic, and the well-manicured parks, green even in winter, provide a stark contrast to the brown dreariness of the faraway capital. But Zakho, while prosperous, is also vulnerable. At one end of its sprawling Ibraheem Khalil Border Complex are two enormous iron gates, the near one black and the far one blue. On the black gate, farewell is written in English and Kurdish. The blue gate, another 100 yards in the distance, announces turkiye. A caravan of trucks stretches from the two gates for miles, waiting for the chance to carry their cargo into Turkey. The Kurds know that Turkey would not support an independent Kurdish state. Nor would Iran, Iraq, or Syria. As the Kurdistan Restaurant's facade testifies, all these neighboring countries have substantial Kurdish minorities. From the perspective of Ankara, Tehran, and Damascus, if Baghdad allows its Kurds to secede, their own will be next. Militarily, Kurdistan is vulnerable to its neighbors--Turkey foremost--which, if provoked by premature Kurdish independence, have no shortage of options for inflicting pain. The KDP's 70- year-old minister of peshmerga, Hahmid Effendi, says that, because of the peshmerga's lack of aircraft and heavy artillery, "we can defend against the Arabs in Iraq, but not against the foreign countries." But neighboring countries wouldn't even have to invade to seriously damage a fledgling Kurdish state. Trade has made Zakho a rich town, but the gates are an ever-present reminder to Kurdish leaders that, should they push too far or too fast, Turkey can very easily slam them shut. If the Turks did so, the economic consequences for Kurdistan would be severe. Yet, while Zakho highlights Kurdistan's precarious economic and diplomatic situation, it also holds the solution to both those problems. Last November, a small Norwegian company known as DNO began drilling just outside Zakho, and, on December 22, it struck oil. But, much to the consternation of Baghdad, the oil that emerges from Zakho will benefit not Iraq as a whole, but Kurdistan specifically. Article 109 of the Iraqi constitution calls for distributing oil and gas revenue between the regional administrations and the federal government- -but that joint ownership only holds for "current fields," not new ones like Zakho. The Kurdistan Development Corporation estimates that Kurdistan possesses about 45 billion barrels of oil reserves, putting its oil potential on par with that of petro-giants like Nigeria. "Its prospectivity is beyond doubt," says Micael Gulbenkian, the chairman of the Canadian-based Heritage Oil Corporation, which has signed agreements with Kurdistan to develop a 300-square-kilometer field near Taqtaq and is negotiating for more. "Just extrapolate on the basis of the Kirkuk fields to understand the potential of that region." (Those fields are family history to Gulbenkian: Calouste was his great-uncle.) The Kurds see that wealth as their ticket to independence. "We have to improve [the economy], especially with our oil, so then we can declare our freedom. Here, unlike in the rest of Iraq, it's secure, so Western countries come and invest, especially in oil, and so we will develop our economy," explains Dejar Ghafoud, a senior official in Kurdistan's interior ministry. "And, within ten to 15 years of federalism, the culture of the Arabs, Persians, and Turks will change"--that is, they will become more accepting of independence. That's not infeasible. The Kurds have signed deals like the one with DNO with at least a half-dozen corporations. These include the Turkish oil companies Petoil and Genel Elektrik, both of which have contracts to develop oil and gas fields in the east. As Turkish companies come to view Kurdistan as a lucrative investment opportunity, the thinking goes, the Turkish government won't want to do anything bad for business--or for its aspiration to join the European Union--like invading an independent Kurdistan or shutting down Zakho's border crossing. "Turks are democratic people. Turks know the importance of self-rule," says Ilnur eevik, a preternaturally sunny Turkish businessman. "In time, as things develop here, they will also develop in Turkey. We will develop a more positive look at Kurdistan." eevik should know. As president of the eevikler Construction Company, he has built hundreds of units of housing in Erbil, Sulaymaniya, and elsewhere, and he has recently inked deals to build massive electrical power stations. His company's logo hangs over many of Erbil's numerous construction sites, and eevik himself--an ex-adviser to legendary Turkish leader Suleyman Demirel--is a constant presence in the atrium of the Erbil International Hotel, the preferred place of business for the Kurdish capital's elite. eevik is hardly the sole Turkish businessman developing Kurdistan. An official with the KDP's ministry of municipalities estimates that Turkish businesses signed contracts in 2005 worth nearly $200 million. Despite this, Turkish acceptance of Kurdish independence will not come easily. But eevik notes one factor positively impacting Turkish views: "The Kurds did not split. On the contrary, we see that they made a great effort to become part of the Iraqi political process." But, when it comes to oil fields like the one outside Zakho, the Iraqis are less convinced of the Kurdish commitment to a united country. The Sunnis and Shia disagree that Article 109 of the constitution guarantees the Kurds control over the newly discovered oil. "It's like they are an independent country," a member of one of the leading Sunni political parties complained to the Los Angeles Times as soon as DNO arrived at Zakho. "This is Iraqi oil and should be shared with all the Iraqi partners." Another prominent Sunni figure told Reuters, "This shows that the Kurdish administration in the north is not interested in safeguarding resources for all of the Iraqi people." And he vowed that, unless the Kurds reversed their position, "we will fight this through diplomatic and political channels." The stakes of that fight are extremely high for Iraq. Revenue from oil sales accounts for over 90 percent of the Iraqi government's budget, but insurgent attacks, decaying infrastructure, and lack of investment have brought oil production down to about 2.2 million barrels a day, less than before the war. Development of new fields is vital for Iraq's crippled economy. This is exactly the type of situation that the Kurds want to avoid. With Baghdad and Erbil accusing each other of misrepresenting the constitution, the oil industry remains skeptical about investing in Kurdistan, its potential reserves notwithstanding. "What is the contractual, legal basis for development between [Kurdistan] and Iraq? No one knows," says Ed Morse, an energy analyst with Hess. As a result, while smaller, wildcatting oil companies fly into Kurdistan, the majors don't. "The Kurds need a recognized legal right to develop their oil," says Martha Brill Olcott, a former adviser to Unocal. "Without it, you can sell a little, and profit a little, but you're not going to get to the next stage." The Kurds may just have enough political leverage to resolve the oil dispute on their terms. Talabani has proved that only the Kurds can hold the country together--an ability that has given them enormous power. Witness the scene on January 21. That day, in the well of the Kurdish parliament, the two main Kurdish political parties, the KDP and the PUK, formalized a power-sharing agreement: Unification, they believe, will make the Kurds an unstoppable juggernaut in Baghdad--in their quest not only to gain control of their oil but to enlarge their territory. Indeed, the unification accord explicitly calls for "restoring Kirkuk, Khanaqin, Sinjar, Makhmour, and other Arabized areas to the embrace of the Kurdistan Region." That statement of purpose should unsettle anyone who isn't a Kurd. Yet, when it was unveiled, the parliament was stacked with Iraqi notables and foreign dignitaries determined to kiss the Kurdish ring. Khalilzad sat five seats from his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Kathemi Qummi--and their colleagues from Great Britain, France, and China weren't far away. Neither were Iraq's would-be leaders. The Shia politicians Adel Abdul Mahdi and Iyad Allawi, the ex-premier who seeks a comeback, made sure to clap at all the right moments. Allawi even spun the accord to me as "an achievement that shows the beginning of a process of cementing political progress." His enthusiasm paid off. In February, the Kurds threatened not to join a coalition government with the Shia unless Allawi's bloc received a cabinet post. It ultimately got six, including the justice ministry--something the Kurds are sure to remind Allawi of when it comes time to consider oil and Kirkuk. Nor is anyone likely to forget the lesson of Ibrahim Jaafari. Throughout 2005, Jaafari, the prime minister, and Talabani, the president, fought over who was in fact the true power in Iraq. The final straw, however, came this February, when Jaafari took a trip to Ankara without inviting Talabani, raising the prospect of a secret Turkish-Shia deal to frustrate Kurdish ambitions. Forging a temporary alliance with the Sunnis, Talabani informed the Shia that Jaafari was an unacceptable choice as premier and held firm for months. Jaafari was forced to step down on April 20. "We expect not just consolidation of our position in Baghdad, but enhancement," explains Shafiq Qazzaz, the minister for humanitarian aid. Qazzaz's title obscures his true role--de facto Kurdish foreign minister. "If this is handled like this--with our agenda respected by the Arabs--then, for years, co-existence with Iraq is possible. But not ultimately. Not ultimately." Indeed, while both Sunni and Shia influence has alternately waxed and waned over the last three years, the Kurds have consistently and incrementally amassed power. By tilting at different times toward either faction, they have preempted challenges to their agenda, thereby advancing it. To Qazzaz, all this investment in Iraqi politics will pay big dividends on the international scene when Iraq collapses, as he believes it inevitably must. "We are committed to the creation of Iraq. We've taken extra steps, even," he says. "But then perhaps Iraq doesn't come through. The Iraq of law and order, equal rights, democracy--perhaps it doesn't come. Then we go to the international community and say: We tried.... And what other option do we have, if not self- determination?" As the kurds advance their own agenda in ways that unavoidably conflict with Iraq's, Shia and Sunni opposition has grown. In a February Al Jazeera interview, radical Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr warned the Kurds: "No one has the right to demand Kirkuk," as many of the city's Arabs are his followers. (In an ominous move, Shia militiamen have flooded the city in recent weeks.) Furthermore, Iraq's neighbors may never acquiesce in the creation of a Kurdish state. Even Turks as pro-Kurdish as eevik are discomfited by the idea. So are the oil companies. Gulbenkian, for instance, notes that "peace and stability" are prerequisites for investment. And there's another obstacle: U.S. opposition to statehood. "Even over the long term, we believe in the territorial integrity of Iraq," says one American official. "We don't see anything good coming out of Kurdish independence." Others go further, saying that the only way to keep the Sunnis involved in the political process is to pressure the Kurds to reduce their demands for self- rule--both because the Sunnis oppose Kurdish independence and because the Shia have begun demanding as much regional autonomy as Kurdistan enjoys. But Khalilzad chooses to interpret Kurdish moves as ultimately consistent with Iraqi unity. As he left the Kurdish parliament following the unification ceremony, he portrayed the deal to me as a win-win arrangement: "It shows people coming together through dialogue and compromise, and that's what's needed for the future of Iraq as a whole." Regardless, the Kurds don't put much stock in America's anti-statehood posture. To put it mildly, the United States has even less influence over Kurdistan than it does over the rest of Iraq. The last time Washington pressured the Kurds to mitigate their demands for autonomy was during the March 2004 negotiations over the interim constitution. And, as Peter Galbraith, the former U.S. diplomat and Kurdish advocate, has observed, in the permanent constitution, "the Kurds won every point that [former U.S. viceroy Paul] Bremer had refused." Even if the United States could interrupt the Kurds' strategy, it's unlikely that it would. By all accounts, Khalilzad heavily relied on Talabani to avert a full-fledged war after the Askariya crisis, reflecting the hard fact that the Kurds are the only friends the United States has in an ever- deteriorating Iraq. The structural obstacles preventing the birth of an independent Kurdish state are tremendous and may well prove insurmountable. After all, the historical gamble that the Kurds are making depends on their ability to bend the unpredictable forces unleashed by the Iraq war in their direction. But, unlike the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Americans, the patient Kurds have yet to be disappointed. "We didn't promise our people any timetable for independence. We're not in any rush," says Merani. More importantly, "Iraq must come to realize that Kurdistan really means this," adds Qazzaz. "We accept an Iraq of pluralism and federalism, yes. But you look at Iraq and tell me: Can you build your hopes on such a country?" Qazzaz is calm as he continues. "We can't get [independence] tomorrow, nor next year," he acknowledges. "But the horizon is changing."

By spencer ackerman