But lately Shukri has turned his gaze from the south, Saddam’s power base, to the north, where a Turkish military base outside his home village of Zewa is an increasingly ominous presence. “We have been afraid of the Turks from the first day they entered Kurdistan,” says Shukri, who sports a thick black mustache and a bandoleer packed with AK-47 clips. “They don’t treat us any different than Saddam, and we have no way of kicking them out. If Massoud Barzani [the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party] tells us to fight, we will take up arms and fight the Turks.” Another peshmerga, Sabah Mustafa Mohammed, waves his hand dismissively toward the Turkish border. “These Turks should go home,” he says. “For us the Turks and Saddam are the same–they are both enemies of the Kurds.”
Possibly just weeks away from a U.S. invasion, tensions are rising fast in northern Iraq–but between two U.S. allies rather than Saddam and his enemies. The war of words between Kurds and Turks is part of the price George W. Bush is paying to make war against Saddam. He’s forking over a premium: under a deal being negotiated between the United States and Turkey, Washington has agreed to permit tens of thousands of Turkish troops to occupy most of Iraqi Kurdistan. That’s in addition to at least $15 billion in loan guarantees and grants promised to Ankara, a hefty jump from what Turkey gets in U.S. aid now. In exchange, Ankara will allow Bush to deploy at least 40,000 U.S. troops inside Turkey as part of an Iraq invasion force. (A vote on the deal in the Turkish Parliament is expected this week.) Questioned about the horse-trading, a Turkish senior official tells NEWSWEEK, “We’re asking for a lot more than horses.”
The real question is whether, for the Bush administration, the trade will prove a Faustian bargain, one that Washington could pay even more for later on. The rekindling of old enmities between the Kurds and the Turks is an early sign that the road from Saddam’s brutal rule to Iraqi democracy may have some detours. One could be a civil or guerrilla war that outlasts Saddam’s rule. A potential flash point: the Turks want to see the peshmerga disarmed. “People are more afraid of the Turks than Saddam,” says Nasreen Mustafa Sideek, Kurdistan’s minister of Reconstruction and Development. “If the Turks intervene to control Kirkuk or destroy our political stability, their presence will not be acceptable.”
Many of the tensions center on Kirkuk, the oil capital of northern Iraq, which both Kurds and the Turkoman minority in the north claim as their ethnic birthright. In the ’90s, Saddam carried out an “Arabization” campaign that displaced thousands of Kurds and Turkomans from Kirkuk. If Saddam is deposed, many will scramble back to stake their claim, and Ankara is likely to side with its ethnic brethren. “I think people want to rush back to Kirkuk, and why not?” says Sami Abdul Rahman, deputy prime minister of the KDP. “I won’t stop them. And the Americans shouldn’t stop them.” But Turkish officials are concerned the Kurds will attempt to claim sole ownership of the oil. For their part, the Kurds fear that political pressure from Turkey may prevent them from claiming Kirkuk as their capital as well as Mosul, its sister oil city.
U.S. planners say they have an understanding with Ankara that U.S. troops will control those cities. But Washington intends to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq as quickly as possible. The Turks may stay on longer. Still, a Bush administration official insists no grab for oil will be permitted: “Oil is the patrimony of the Iraqi people as a whole, not of the north, or the Turkomans, Kurds, Shias or anybody else.” Turkish officials say their main objective is to pre-empt Kurdish independence, and to deal with the expected humanitarian emergency. “We have no intentions on north Iraq and its oil resources,” Turkish Prime Minister Abdullah Gul said last week. “If our troops enter that region, they will withdraw when peace is restored.” But he also suggested that Turkey plans to lay claim to some of Iraq’s oil, invoking old treaties that grant Ankara a small portion of Kirkuk’s output. The Turkish senior official indicates that Turkish troops could leave inside a year, but only “if the Americans get it right, and that is making sure the oilfields are properly controlled.”
U.S. officials also express irritation at the Turkish demands. “The Turks have this extraordinary $90 billion estimate of their potential losses” from an Iraq war, says a senior State Department official. “It’s a theoretical extrapolation… without any reflection of the fact that the Turks will be a hell of a lot better off with a stable neighbor. I am sure we could cook the numbers so they would end up owing us money.”
And the picture is getting even more complicated. As the Kurds gear up to possibly counter a Turkish occupation, pro-Kurdish elements in neighboring Iran are in recruitment mode. According to recent reports, 5,000 troops belonging to the Shiite-dominated Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an opposition group with close ties to Tehran, crossed the border into Iraqi Kurdistan last week. Abdul Aziz al Hakim, SCIRI’s military chief of staff, flatly denied that but added that SCIRI troops were cooperating with the peshmerga, and that many more of its Iran-based troops, known as the Badr brigade, will cross as soon as the Iranian government approves it.
For many Kurds, the real question is what Washington will do. “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” goes an old proverb, a bitter reflection on a century of Kurdish history that includes numerous betrayals by Washington dating back to Woodrow Wilson. “We won’t accept any occupation of our land,” says Farhan Haji Shukri, “whether it’s the Turks or anybody else.”
