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Even More Success/Signs of Progress From Iraq: Kirkuk
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| Even More Success/Signs of Progress From Iraq: Kirkuk
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| VacateTheWord |
Al Qaeda and other terrorist elements have attempted to bait the citizens of Kirkuk into sectarian violence, and it's residents have resisted and instead are working with the coaliton, as the residents of Anbar Province have recently done. Good news to say the least.
An Iraqi city resists violence
When a truck bomb blew off the front of the Quoria district police station here and killed seven people in January, fear raced through this ethnically and religiously mixed northern city that it, too, would face the sectarian strife tearing apart Baghdad.
But on a recent afternoon, Police Chief Abdullah Taja Salahudin showed US soldiers the progress in rebuilding the station, presenting it as a sign of Kirkuk's determination to reestablish peace.
"Kirkuk is in better condition than most cities in Iraq, and that is because for so long we have all these religions and populations in this one place," he says. "People have known for a long time how to live together, and now they refuse to give in to any trouble."
It's this resistance to provocation that has kept Kirkuk from descending into the kind of vengeful violence that has flared elsewhere, Kirkuki and US military officials say.
A Muslim Turkoman, Chief Taja has demonstrated this resolve while promoting the security of this city of Kurds, Turkomans, Chaldean and Assyrian Christians, and Sunni and Shiite Arabs. Aside from that January truck bomb, he has survived four improvised explosive device (IED) attacks. And in June 2006, a car bomb destroyed his house.
As encouraging as that determination has been, all agree that Kirkuk remains one of the biggest tests of Iraq's future. A major hurdle will be the resolution on its status – either as an Iraqi province linked with Baghdad or joined to the adjacent autonomous Kurdish Regional Government.
Iraq's Constitution calls for this issue to be resolved by a referendum among Kirkuk's population by the end of 2007. Most observers agree that sticking to the constitutional calendar is problematic at least – a census is supposed to be taken first and boundaries redrawn – and disastrous at worst. A referendum, which the Kurds would expect to win, could open the door to deeper strife and even the breakup of Iraq.
Underlying all this is Kirkuk's vast oil wealth and the struggle for its control. Who controls the oil, people here say, will determine who controls Kirkuk.
And as if that were not enough, the crucial national reconciliation issues being debated in Baghdad – from a law that is to set oil revenue-sharing among Iraq's sectarian and ethnic communities to revision of deBaathification law that could allow thousands of ex-Baathists to return to their jobs – will play a key role in setting Kirkuk's course.
The end result of those issues may be out of local hands, but in the meantime US officials here and some local security and political authorities are working to encourage intercommunity cooperation – and to see that the general refusal to take the bait of extremist provocations continues.
And the bait is continuous. Over the weekend in Kirkuk, car bombs killed a US soldier on Saturday and two Kurdish security agents on Sunday morning.
"We spend a lot of time trying to gauge ... what it would take to set off the kind of sectarian violence we haven't seen yet – and then working to avoid it," says Col. Patrick Stackpole, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team in Kirkuk. If not pursued carefully, the process of settling Kirkuk's status "surely has the potential to be a spark around here."
History plays a major role in the tensions that roil the city. For most Kurds, establishing Kirkuk's status as a part of the Kurdish north is the only way to redress the wrongs of Saddam Hussein. Under that regime, nearly 1,000 Kurdish villages were razed and a program of "Arabization" – wholesale import of Arab families – was implemented to destroy the Kurdish influence. Now as part of the constitutional process, Kurds who were forced out are being allowed to return, while Arabs who arrived under "Arabization" are offered land elsewhere and compensation for homes they choose to leave.
All of this has led some communities to openly question whether redressing old sins is resulting in a repeat of the past. "There is a fear that what the previous regime did to so many may be about to happen again to others," says Tahsin al-Kahia, a Turkoman member of the Kirkuk Provincial Council.
For some, another facet of Kirkuk's history holds the solution to its tranquility. "These communities have a long tradition of living and working together that goes back way before Saddam Hussein, and that's the history and tradition they need to call on now," says Howard Keegan, chief of the State Department's Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Kirkuk.
He says that he believes the negative examples elsewhere in Iraq is also having an impact here. "We don't have the Shia-Sunni divide here," Mr. Keegan adds, "but we do have TV, so people see the images of communities tearing each other apart."
US military and civilian officials say they can't alter a constitutional process, but they say they can encourage steps to ease the transition to whatever future Kirkuk chooses. One of those steps is simple education. "Some decision on Kirkuk's status is inevitable, but the key to easing tensions about it is education on the process," says Lt. Col. Michael Browder. "There's a lot of fear of being pushed out, of denied rights and services, but if people know that participation in the compensation aspects is voluntary, for example, that usually calms them down."
One problem is that many political leaders from the different communities continue to spout uncompromising rhetoric about Kirkuk's status.
"These issues from the Constitution are like a minefield, they are going to explode if pursued," says Mohammed Khalil al-Jabouri, a Sunni Arab member of the provincial council. "Already the power positions of this government are in Kurdish hands, they are not multiethnic, so we see what a referendum would bring."
The view is the polar opposite in the expansive office of Provincial Council Chairman Rizgar Ali. "We only have one solution, and that is Article 140," the section of the Constitution dealing with Kirkuk, he says. "What is the problem if Kirkuk becomes part of Kurdistan – do they forget Kurdistan is part of Iraq?"
Mr. Kahia, the Turkoman council member, says there are plenty of "problems" with that eventuality, including the impact it would have beyond Iraq's borders. "Neither Turkey nor Iran would accept Kirkuk being united with the KRG [Kurdish Regional Government], and both could cause huge problems we can't even imagine now."
The solution, he says, is to put off the referendum and focus on completing the other measures, such as resettlement and a census. "We have to take time," Kahia says, "we have to lay the foundation of democracy first."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070619/wl_csm/okirkuk |
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| otherone4life |
Yeah it's a real party over there ...still waiting for you to sign up ..
Truck Bombing Kills Scores at Shiite Mosque in Baghdad
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, June 19 — A suicide bomber barreled a truck filled with cooking gas and explosives into a square bordered by a large Shiite mosque in the heart of Baghdad on Tuesday, just as worshipers were finishing midday prayers. The Interior Ministry said at least 61 people were killed and 130 wounded.
The attack came as American forces began a large-scale assault on Al Qaeda strongholds outside the capital where, they say, many of these vehicle bombs are manufactured. The timing seemed intended to demonstrate that the insurgents could still strike with near impunity, blindsiding the American security crackdown in Baghdad.
The powerful explosion destroyed a part of the mosque and engulfed a line of minivans and an adjacent parking area in flames. The toll is expected to climb as bodies are counted and some of the wounded die.
“It was like an electrocution,” said Najim Abdul Wahid, 45, a carpenter who was working in the square at the time. “I saw a flash. When I was able to stand up again, I saw many charred bodies in the streets. People were screaming, calling for help. I saw many people burning inside their cars. Charred bodies mixed and melted with charred cars.”
Many Iraqis, beleaguered at every turn, said they saw the bomb as an attempt to aggravate sectarian strife and as one more piece of evidence that the Americans cannot protect them from extremists. Some of those who live near the site of the destruction said they thought that the Americans must be helping the suicide bombers.
“The Americans know everything, they can do everything, they can repair the space shuttle without touching it — why do they let these things happen here in Iraq?” said Abu Muhammad, 55, one of the custodians of the bombed Khiliani Mosque.
“We think the Americans want these things to happen in Iraq, to keep things like this,” he said, gesturing to the office of the mosque’s imam in which the walls and ceiling had collapsed, raining hundreds of bricks into the room, crushing the imam’s desk and chairs. The imam survived because he had already left the building when the bomb detonated.
Baghdad has suffered many ghastly suicide bombs, but this one struck at the soul of a working-class neighborhood, which for as long as anyone can remember has had a mix of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who have lived side by side, worshipped at each other’s mosques and mourned each other’s losses.
Worried about the growing sectarianism around them, the imams of the nearby Sunni Arab Ghilani Mosque and the Khilani Mosque, which was bombed Tuesday, started encouraging people last week to attend each other’s mosques for the weekly Friday Prayer.
Jalal Jaff, a Sunni Kurd, who lives just behind the street where the bomb exploded and raced to the scene to pull people out of burning cars, turned his head away on Tuesday evening as he passed the parking lot with more than a dozen destroyed cars, only their charred frames left, the rubber completely burned off their tires.
“He is a paid terrorist, not a human being,” Mr. Jaff said of the bomber. “The families will never know which body belongs to their relatives. They were mutilated, they had no faces.”
Like most of the people in the neighborhood, Mr. Jaff blamed Al Qaeda, a term used by Iraqis to refer generally to terrorists. The group operating in Iraq known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia includes many Iraqis but has some foreign leadership.
“Al Qaeda is like an octopus with many arms and hands,” he said. “This bombing was a challenge to the American and Iraqi army; they cannot get rid of these terrorists.”
Others in the neighborhood went further, accusing the Americans of helping Al Qaeda, which most people believe is responsible for the majority of the suicide bombings.
A man who identified himself only as Qassim, some of whose friends were killed in the large open parking lot across from the mosque, shouted: “The Americans finance Al Qaeda, they secure places and routes for them to do this.”
But others said they saw the bombing as an effort by religious extremists to inflame sectarian divisions. “People here realize that there is a conspiracy to sow hatred between us,” Mr. Jaff said.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki echoed that sentiment in a statement on Tuesday. “Today’s crime near the Khiliani Mosque that killed and wounded tens of innocents is another proof of the determination of the Saddam-Takfiri alliance to stir sectarian strife,” the statement said. Takfiri is the word used for extremist Sunni Muslims, who view even Shiite Muslims as heretics.
“The government and security forces are committed to strangling those groups and hitting them by sticking to our national unity which is the only target of these cowardly crimes,” the statement continued.
Military officials and diplomats warn that car bombs are likely to remain a potent weapon for militants. In a recent interview, a senior American military official said that in response to the intensified effort to root out Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia he expected militants to retaliate with “spectacular attacks.”
Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman in Baghdad, said the military believed most of the car bombs were being made in rural areas, where they are more easily hidden. But he did not discount that there were others already in Baghdad.
“I don’t want to say how many, but there likely are some in the city,” Colonel Garver said.
The bomb on Tuesday was so powerful that people blocks away felt the shock.
Mr. Wahid, the carpenter, who was putting the finishing touches on a wooden structure depicting old Baghdad houses, was thrown into a central fountain; it saved his life.
“Out of seven colleagues working with me, I only saw one colleague survived and others were lying on the ground,” he said.
Abu Muhammad, the mosque custodian, shakily unlocked the gate to the mosque’s two-story library, a repository of manuscripts and Koranic commentaries as well as bound newspaper copies from as much as 50 years ago.
He gestured feebly at the room: heavy tomes were scattered like leaves on the floor, the second story of the library had partly collapsed and a few stray pages of manuscripts, covered in flowing Arabic calligraphy, lay on the floor. “The Shia are a peaceful people,” he said. “Why is this happening?”
Three American soldiers were killed in Iraq on Monday and Tuesday, the American military announced in a statement. One was killed in Diyala, where a major operation is under way to clear out extremists from Baquba, the provincial capital, and surrounding areas.
In Baghdad, 21 bodies were found Tuesday and mortar shells killed people in at least three neighborhoods. A barrage of mortar shells also struck the fortified Green Zone at sunset, setting off high pitched sirens. There were no immediate reports of any casualties, but typically they are not announced right away.
In Samarra, where 2,000 national police officers have taken up positions, a civilian was shot and two others were wounded.
Reporting was contributed by Muhammed Abd al-Sattar from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Diyala, Samarra and Kirkuk.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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| VacateTheWord |
| The whole point of posting the story I put up is to show that we are making progress. You can put up a story about another bombing, which is fine because the good and the bad should be reported. However, when you turn a blind eye to anything good and focus on the bad then you are doing nothing more than what the terrorists want. |
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| Fdubya247 |
Quote: Originally posted by VacateTheTurd
The whole point of posting the story I put up is to show that we are making progress. |
You are failing miserably.
:tu: |
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| otherone4life |
| They just regurgitate the spin and pawn it off as truth. I'm still waiting for the explanation for why, after 51 months, Baghdad is still only "40 percent" secure ... |
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