Kurdish faultline threatens to spark new war

The only thing keeping Arabs and Kurds from fighting is the glue of US occupation

It is called the “trigger line”, a 300-mile long swathe of disputed territory in northern Iraq where Arab and Kurdish soldiers confront each other, and which risks turning into a battlefield. As the world has focused on the US troop withdrawal from Iraq, and the intensifying war in Afghanistan, Arabs and Kurds in Iraq have been getting closer to an all out war over control of the oil-rich lands stretching from the borders of Syria in the west to Iran in the east.

The risk of armed conflict is acute because the zone in dispute is a mosaic of well-armed communities backed by regular forces. Kurdish and Arab soldiers here watch each other’s movements with deepest suspicion in case the other side might attempt to establish new facts on the ground. It is to avert a new armed conflict breaking out between the powerful military forces on both sides that Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, travelled to Kurdistan for crisis talks last week with Kurdish leaders, Iraq’s (Kurdish) President, Jalal Talabani, and the President of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Massoud Barzani. Mr Maliki and Mr Barzani had not met for a year during which their exchanges have been barbed and aggressive.

The 26th Brigade of the 7th Division of the Iraqi army, an Arab unit, recently tried to move from Diyala province northeast of Baghdad through Makhmur, where there is a Kurdish majority, to reach the mainly Sunni Arab city of Mosul. Fearful this might be a Baghdad government land-grab for Makhmour, Kurdish civilians blocked the road. Khasro Goran, a senior member of the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), says the army advance would have been resisted if it had gone on. “Our forces had taken up positions on higher ground and if the Iraqi army brigade had come on, they were under orders to open fire.” Ominously for the future unity of Iraq, the Kurdish unit preparing to shoot was itself part of the Iraqi army.

American mediation and Arab-Kurdish negotiations in Baghdad ultimately prevented a clash and the 26th Brigade withdrew without fighting. But according to Mohammed Ihsan, the KRG’s Minister for Extra Regional Affairs, who has responsibility for the disputed territories, any outbreak of hostilities could be the start of a major conflict: “If fighting does start at one point I am sure it will quickly spread along the whole line from Sinjar [near Syria] to Khanaqin [near Iran].”

Independent