The vast pools of oil burbling below this northern city made it a crucial asset for former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who worked harder here than perhaps anywhere else to foster mutual hatred amid the city's jumble of ethnic groups.
No measure was too large, or too small, to ensure that his control over the spigots went unchallenged.
He expelled tens of thousands of Kurds and replaced them with more loyal Arabs imported from elsewhere. A secret police force was recruited within each group to spy on rival communities. His government even commissioned a pair of rather crudely executed bronze statues of two men killed by the Kurds during political clashes in 1959 -- artwork calculated to fan the embers of distrust and loathing.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
Saddam is gone, but the effect survives. In late August, a sudden burst of ethnic bloodletting in Kirkuk and a neighboring town left 13 people dead. The US occupation administration quelled the violence through a combination of military muscle and forced negotiations.
But the lingering question remains whether the multiethnic city government being glued together under American tutelage can channel sectarian hatred away from bloodshed. If it succeeds in Kirkuk, many believe, then the effort to create an Iraq unscathed by similar fault lines may succeed, too.
"In Kirkuk, the Iraqi mosaic is very clear, so if you don't have problems here, you won't have them in the rest of Iraq," said Sargon Lazar Slewa, the town's deputy mayor and an Assyrian Christian. "If it's the opposite, it means there is no solution, and we might as well all get new passports and leave."
The US administration acknowledges that each group, in its own way, suffered under the Baath government. The quandary is addressing the problems without inflaming anew the city of 800,000.
Any Kurd or Turkman who refused to change his identity to Arab was forced to move, while many traces of Kurdish or Turkmen heritage were razed.
Permission for Arabs to sell land first had to be obtained from the presidential office in Baghdad, then was banned outright. Kirkuk's outsize statue of Saddam, since toppled, depicted him in Arab robes.
Although the definitive record is only now being compiled, the Kurds circulate staggering figures -- some 800,000 Kurds displaced across northern Iraq, more than 150,000 of them from Kirkuk alone.
If nothing else, the post-Saddam struggle for prevalence is a battle of dubious statistics. The main ethnic groups -- Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs -- all claim that they make up more than half the city. (The fourth group, mostly Assyrian Christians, constitute about 3 percent of the population, and admit it.)
No reference is too obscure.
Turkmen insist that visitors read the tombstones from the 1960s to discover how few Kurds lived in the city. The Kurds cite a Turkish encyclopedia, circa 1850 -- it would not possibly lie about Turkmen tribes -- to prove Kurds then made up 60 percent of the city.
The last census dates from 1957, and no one thinks it reflects reality. The most the American military can confirm is that no group holds an absolute majority.
Members of each community, especially the most educated, explain amicably how they learned all four languages growing up, and that intermarriage was common.
But it does not take long for Aly Shukr Bayati, a Turkmen lawyer and poet, to start quoting ancient texts that described snakes descending from the desert range north of the city to attack the hapless residents of the plains.
"The Kurds were living in the mountains," he says pointedly.
On the face of it, Kirkuk, a city of unexceptional two- and three-story buildings, their cement crumbling, would hardly seem worth the fight. Yet, by any standard, Kirkuk should be excessively rich. The first oil well was drilled here in 1923 and statistics compiled by the American military indicate that the city still sits on roughly 6.7 percent of the known global reserves.
"The streets of Kirkuk should be paved with marble," said Ghaib Fadel Karim, the city's director of antiquities and unofficial historian.
"Unfortunately, it is the poorest city imaginable because the money of Kirkuk has never been spent here," he said.
The roads are lumpy. There is no sewage system and the current 18 hours of electricity daily is about triple prewar levels. The broad Khasasou River, starved for water, dries up in summer.
"We could have been like Bahrain or Dubai, where they used the oil to improve life," said Adel Qazzaz, chairman of the Northern Oil Co.
"Iraq's main resource is oil, and for the last 20 years all the money went to buy weapons. We used it to kill people," he said.
Both Turkmen and Arabs accuse the Kurds of grabbing Kirkuk to control the oil under any future federal system dividing the country along ethnic lines, although everyone publicly supports the idea of oil remaining a national asset.
They charge that Kurds dominate the police force and the city government -- with the acquiescence of the US. (The Turkmen fret about US President George W. Bush no longer mentioning them in his speeches.)
"Saddam tried to Arabize the city and now the Kurds are trying to Kurdicize it," said Yousef Kemal Yaschili, a Turkmen member of the City Council.
"We have been telling them that this will lead to chaos and eventually civil war," he said.
Aside from the police, the Arabs and Turkmen see a creeping Kurdish annexation in myriad other ways, like flying their flag and changing the names on public buildings and streets.
"We cannot walk around downtown in Arab robes out of fear of insults from the Kurdish police," said Akar Nezal al-Tawil, an Arab tribal chief on the City Council.
Colonel Bill Mayville, commanding officer of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which runs Kirkuk, admits to a certain affinity with the Kurds because their soldiers, the peshmerga, helped his troops take control of the city.
He also recognizes an imbalance within the police force that he is trying to alter, although he asserts that the problem should be less about numbers and more about outlook.
"Are we going to spend the next 10 years redressing and remedying what happened to each group here?" he asked in an interview. "Or are we going to find a way to address that and move on?"
The military has tried to defuse the ethnic issue by having the town notables elect a 30-member City Council. It includes six members from each group and six independents, although most of them are Kurds. That, the Americans hope, will establish the framework to defuse any ethnic disputes peacefully.
On the larger question, in whose territory Kirkuk should lie in a future federal state, occupation officials call it a constitutional question that Iraqis must decide. They have the tacit agreement of the various Kurdish political groups not to try to change the city's ethnic balance until a formal claims process is in place, the officials said.
But it is possible to find Kurdish returnees -- more than 200 families live in the main sports stadium, for example -- who say Kurdish organizations promised them payments if they moved back.
Some wonder if the US is turning a blind eye.
"The Kurds have been trying to do a bit of social engineering," said one UN official. "They are not sure what will be part of any federal area of the north, so it's important to control certain areas now."
All major Kurdish political leaders make it clear that they consider the city unfairly cleaved from what they call Kurdistan, an idea popular in the community.
"If the attempt to annex Kirkuk to Kurdistan was made on a false pretext, it would fail," said Shirko Omar Muhammad, a 50-year-old Kurdish lawyer, describing Kirkuk as a delicate city because of its ethnic mix.
"But since it is based on demography, history and geography, it will succeed," he said.
In the ancient citadel, Saddam's government paid the mostly Turkmen and Kurdish population to move out and in 1998 bulldozed all but a few historic mosques and exquisite Arab houses. The most famous edifice is the Daniel mosque, said to contain the grave of the prophet Daniel.
Jahida Tahir, a local historian, believes it more likely that the remains are of a local holy man called Daniel whose identity was embroidered over time. It is an old local tradition.
"Everybody claims that they were the ones here first, that they were the ones who composed the prelude," she said during a tour, noting that everyone arrived more or less simultaneously in the past few hundred years. "It's just not true."
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