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Kirkuk is a 'land mine' where all sides want U.S. to stay
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Jul 18, 2011 03:41pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Monday, July 18, 2011 09:40:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | By Roy Gutman | McClatchy Newspapers
KIRKUK, Iraq — If civil war were to resume in Iraq, a dread event that could spell the breakup of the world's next great oil power, Kirkuk is the likely epicenter.
It doesn't take much to set ethnic tensions to boil in this oil-rich province of 850,000, also named Kirkuk, which Kurds consider their Jerusalem but which Arabs and Turkomen also claim. An altercation on a street in the city of Kirkuk, a riot in a nearby Arab town and a car bombing shook the peace in the first half of this year, pitting Kurds against Arabs in a manner that Sunni Arab extremists are only too eager to exploit.
"Kirkuk is different from anywhere else in Iraq," said Col. Michael Pappal, the U.S. military commander at Contingency Operating Site Warrior, the American base at Kirkuk airport, soon to be turned over to Iraqi forces. "Does it have the most violence? No. The most lethal violence? No. Is this where the civil war is going to start? There's a potential for that."
Or, as Tahseen Al-Shaikhli, an Iraqi government spokesman, put it: "Kirkuk is like a land mine on a lake of oil."
Nowhere, Iraqi and U.S. officials say, is the argument for keeping American troops in Iraq past Dec. 31 stronger than in Kirkuk. |
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