Oil and ethnic rivalries fuel fight for Iraqi border town

Abdul-Samat Ali Baram is the latest casualty of a prolonged campaign by the Baghdad government, stretching back decades, to reduce the Kurdish population of the oil province of Kirkuk and replace its people with Arabs.

The fate of Kirkuk, at the centre of Iraq's northern oilfields, will once again become a explosive issue in Iraqi politics if Saddam Hussein is overthrown. For years he has sought to change its demography, replacing Kurds and Turkomans, another of Iraq's multitude of minorities, with Arabs from southern Iraq.

But the looming war has rekindled the hopes of the Kurds that they will be able to reclaim their homes.

Sami Abdul-Rahman, the deputy prime minister of western Kurdistan, said: "There are a quarter of a million Kurds who have been expelled and want to go home. And they are not just from Kirkuk. I am from Sinjar, from which Kurds were also expelled, and I can't tell my relatives not to go back. It is their inalienable right and they have suffered a lot."

Mr Baram, a paunchy, unhealthy looking man of 50 with a swollen neck, has just been expelled from Kirkuk for refusing to join the Iraqi army. "Three or four men with guns started visiting my house every day, asking me to join the al-Quds Army [an Iraqi militia], but I refused. My brother was killed fighting in the Iraqi army in the Iran-Iraq war and I did not want to die as well," he said.

Mr Baram, a Kurd who was working as a casual labourer, was hurriedly packed into a small pick-up earlier this month with his wife and four children and driven to the last Iraqi government checkpoint on the road from Kirkuk to Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region and outside President Saddam's control.

He and his family made their way to Bnaslawa, a grim town with streets of glutinous, foul-smelling mud where 50,000 people, almost all Kurds from Kirkuk, are crammed into houses scarcely bigger than huts, made out of breeze blocks often daubed with mud.

For a city that rouses such passions, Kirkuk is a disappointingly nondescript place. Its most impressive buildings are associated with the oil industry. The half-ruined ancient citadel was badly damaged in fighting between Kurds and government troops in the most recent Kurdish uprising 12 years ago.

Sami Abdul-Rahman, 71, a veteran of Kurdish politics, said: "It was the question of who should control Kirkuk which prevented us reaching agreement with Saddam in negotiations in 1970 and 1974, and led to another war." At the high point of the uprising against President Saddam in 1991, Kurdish troops seized the city only to be driven out in a fierce counter-attack by the elite Republican Guard a few days later.

The Kurds are unlikely to attack Kirkuk again if the Iraqi armed forces break up. Any such action would be opposed by the United States and Britain and would provoke intervention by Turkey. America reportedly plans to land troops at an early stage in any war to seize the city and protect the oilfields from sabotage.

But the Kurds do not have to make a frontal assault on Kirkuk to regain control of the city. All they need do is allow the hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees, who are now living in Iraqi Kurdistan, which has had de facto independence for a decade, to go home. This would once again make them the predominant community in this much fought-over city and province.

That is an outcome much feared by the Turkomans, who claim that they were once the majority in Kirkuk. Orhan Ketene, a Turkoman spokesman, said Kirkuk was the Turkoman capital "and it will stay that way". But the demographic history of Kirkuk is much disputed and the Kurds are the ones in the best position to regain their lost lands.

The Kurds in Bnaslawa, living in their miserable concrete hovels with the stench of raw sewage wafting through the dark little rooms, do not have to think much about their intentions. Deportees from every village and city district have appointed committees to organise their return to Kirkuk as soon as it is safe to do so. Many have been for years. Salah Rashid, 36, wearing a torn leather jacket and selling lemons from a cart in a muddy lane, was deported from his village of Klisa, near Kirkuk, in 1987.

"They forced all the Kurds – 20 families of us – to come here," Mr Rashid said. "They let us take half our furniture. I don't know why they chose us. I'd like to go back as soon as we can. They gave our house to an Arab, but I am sure he will want to leave automatically."

Going by past experience, the reversal of decades of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk might not be so easy or bloodless.

Patrick Cockburn is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.