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Chapter 3 The Post-2003 Iraqi Context No disputed territory exists in isolation from its wider geopolitical context . Kirkuk’s history and geopolitical situation, however, seem tailormade to produce interethnic struggle. From being a largely cosmopolitan town of the Ottoman Empire, with a mainly Turkish-speaking bureaucracy and elite (irrespective of whether or not these were in fact Turkmens, Kurds, or Arabs), Iraq was reinvented in the aftermath of World War I, which introduced new relationships between communities and the state. Increasingly communities became empowered or weakened on the basis of their ethnic and religious identities as a new ‘‘dominant nationhood’’ largely imbued by notions of Arabism and associated with (mainly) Sunni elites left over from the Ottoman period began to take hold.1 The discovery of oil north of the town in 1929 introduced a new dynamic that had not existed before into the interethnic balance. Far from being a provincial town in a province some distance from the center of the state, Kirkuk was now the focal point of Iraq’s economy with a strategic resource of global importance. The growing oil industry brought with it not only economic migrants performing the tasks demanded by a rapidly growing enterprise but also the need for the state to secure the resource from any possible regional or internal threat. The securing of Kirkuk was the raison d’être behind the policies of Arabizing Kirkuk, which every subsequent Iraqi government pursued to ever increasing degrees and which culminated with the actions of mass deportation ordered by Saddam’s regime from the late 1970s on. It was not only Kurds who were removed by the Arabization policies. Turkmens and Christians were also forcibly evicted. However, it is the Kurds who identify the Arabization of Kirkuk as a state atrocity against them to a degree not generally shared by their Kirkuki neighbors. Along with the genocidal Anfal campaign, which aimed to systematically depopulate the rural regions of Kurdistan, and the accompanying use of chemical weapons against Kurdish villages in the 1980s—manifest most 52 Ethnopolitical Perspectives brutally by the attack on Halabja in 1988—the Arabization of Kirkuk holds a particularly emotive place in the hearts and minds of Kurds, and it acted as a rallying point for the reinvigorated Kurdish nationalist movement that emerged in the 1990s. While the Iraqi government maintained the ability to control or at least marginalize the Kurds in the 1970s and 1980s, the establishment of an autonomous Kurdistan Region in 1991 gave political space to the Kurds and their leaders. In this space, notions of injustices intermingled with a heightening of the Kurds’ sense of distinctiveness from those around them. Some more nationalist-minded Kurds, though rarely from the leaderships of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the KDP, began to consider how an independent Kurdistan could emerge and how it would be able to provide for itself. It was in this environment that Kirkuk became the most important nationalist symbol, after the destruction of Halabja, of Kurdish oppression at the hands of the Iraqi government . Kirkuk continues to be seen as a lingering injustice by many Kurds. Its relative importance as a mobilizing force for Kurdish nationalism began to outweigh the examples of the Anfal campaign and the destruction of Halabja, which for many young Kurds were already firmly rooted in a history that, if not dim, was increasingly distant. Kirkuk, however , is palpable, nearby, and unresolved. The emergence of the Kurds as powerful political actors in Iraq who have the overt intention of unifying Kirkuk with the Kurdistan Region brought with it a predictably antagonistic reaction from Turkmens, Arabs, and Christians. Violence between Turkmens and Kurds had broken out sporadically in the Kurdistan Region in the 1990s. The Kurdish parties considered the most vocal Turkmen party, the Iraqi Turkmen Front, to be little more than the proxy of Ankara. For its part, the ITF believed that the Kurdish leadership wanted to eradicate any meaningful non-Kurdish presence in the region. Christians enjoyed a somewhat better relationship with the Kurdish parties heading the Kurdistan Region, with some important KDP members hailing from the community and with several prominent Christian organizations being funded by the Kurdish parties. Yet a distinct element among the Christian community remained highly critical of what was perceived to be a Kurdish plan to dominate the region. Most critical of the KDP, the PUK, and the KRG was and is the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM), a party with a large diaspora...

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