It was supposed to be one of the most important missions of the war in Iraq — securing the country’s vast northern oil fields. But when we arrived at Iraq’s biggest oil well yesterday afternoon, just outside the newly liberated city of Kirkuk, the US Special Forces were nowhere to be seen.
The suburban villas and tennis courts of the Iraqi Oil Company shimmered in the afternoon sunshine. Behind them a vast plume of smoke from a burning oil well billowed into the sky. ”We don’t know what’s going on,” Adil, an Arab employee at the huge Baba Gurgur refinery admitted, two hours after the fall of Kirkuk, Iraq’s fourth largest city, and the first in the north to slip from Saddam Hussein’s control.
”We have not seen any Americans,” he added. ”We have just seen lots of people arriving in taxis, trying to steal our furniture. We are very nervous.”
Like many Iraqis, Adil was yesterday under the distinct impression that President Saddam was still in power. ”We don’t get TV here,” he pointed out.
With no US troops to be seen, it was easy to be confused. Earlier, the Americans had given stern warnings to the Kurds that they should not try and seize Kirkuk, or any of the other strategic oil cities in northern Iraq. Kirkuk, although pre-dominantly a Kurdish city, has a large Turkish-speaking minority, and any Kurdish move on it would provoke a wrathful response from Turkey.
Yesterday, though, the Kurds gave what was in effect a giant V-sign to Ankara, apparently with the sly connivance of Washington.
Early yesterday it had seemed business as usual. The Iraqi army encamped on the outskirts of Kirkuk, apparently unaware of the fall of Baghdad, lobbed artillery shells at Kurdish forces sitting with US Special Forces on the opposite ridge. But at around 11am the shelling stopped.
Inside the city, Kurdish residents started their own uprising. Iraqi troops beat a hasty retreat — apparently fleeing down the road to Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace. Minutes later, Kurdish peshmerga armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers began streaming towards the city in an over-excited cavalcade of battered Toyota pick-up-trucks and taxis.
There was a brief hiatus. Iraqi troops had blocked the road with a huge wall of earth. Soon, though, the peshmerga found a way round it. By 2pm they had taken Kirkuk — with no Iraqi resistance. ”We are delighted,” Abduallah Ali, a 55-year-old retired civil servant, said as a group of youths tried to pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein wearing Arab clothes in Kirkuk’s main square. ”The last three weeks have been hell. We will never forget what Blair and Bush have done for us.”
Since the war in Iraq started, the city had been under curfew. Most Kurdish residents had been too scared to leave their homes. ”I spent ten days in the police station last month,” Abdul Jabay (34) explained. ”They hit me with cables. They put shoes in my mouth. Then after ten days they let me go. We appreciate the US. They have done Iraq a huge favour.”
In fact, apart from a brief appearance by US Special Forces in white Land Rovers, there were no coalition forces at all in Kirkuk yesterday. The original plan was for the 4th Infantry Division to liberate the city. It fell apart last month when Turkey refused to allow US troops to enter Iraq through its territory. The Pentagon had been struggling to put together a northern front ever since. But within an hour of the peshmerga’s arrival yesterday the downside of allowing Iraqis to liberate themselves became horribly clear.
After accepting the waves and cheers of Kirkuk’s residents the peshmerga embarked on a massive, prolonged looting spree. Over at the Baba Gurgur oil field the looting took on prodigious proportions. There was a traffic jam of peshmerga looters. Three peshmerga drove off in a fork-lift truck. Another group of Kurdish fighters set off with the entire contents of a villa, including several air-conditioning units and a bicycle. I asked one of them why he was stealing.
”It’s for my house,” he explained.
”But don’t these things belong to somebody?” I asked.
”They belong to Iraq and I’m Iraqi,” he replied.
Civilians were at it too. Women in chadors emerged from government offices with upturned tables on their heads. Children carted off ceiling fans, while other locals clung grimly to a concertina of mattresses piled on to a taxi. By 5pm the conclusion that the city had slipped into total anarchy was unavoidable.
Unlike Baghdad or Basra, there were no coalition troops in sight. ”Everything is getting messy,” Harsham Wahab, a member of Kirkuk’s Turkish-speaking Turkomen minority complained, as looters dipped into the technical college opposite his house. ”This isn’t the kind of freedom we wanted. We are looking for proper freedom, where people don’t try and steal our things.”
The liberation of Kirkuk was turning into a PR disaster for the two main Kurdish parties now in control of the city, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP). The groups have administered different chunks of the Kurdish self-rule enclave since the last Gulf war. Both have coveted the city for a long time. They had assured US and British diplomats their forces would behave with restraint when the day of liberation arrived. This turned out to have been optimistic. Last night PUK officials were holding an emergency meeting in the trashed former Ba’ath party headquarters — abandoned that morning. There was only one item on the agenda: how to halt the looting. ”We are trying to stop it,” Commander Friat Mohammad said. ”But the local people are very angry. They have been oppressed and tortured. That is why they are looting. It’s going to take a couple of days to sort out.”
American Special Forces did make a brief appearance in a palace in the north of the city, used by senior Ba’ath party officials and by Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s cousin. Nearby another statue of Sadam lay in an Ozymandian heap.
While most Iraqis clearly welcome liberation from dictatorship, the problems posed by the profound lack of government are becoming starker by the day. It was clear Mr Ali and his expatriate British wife, Colleen Barker — resident in Iraq for 33 years — were already looking back on the Saddam years with nostalgia. ”The bombing of Iraq has been going on for so long we have got used to it,” Barker said. ”It’s been going on for 12 years.”
What did she think of Tony Blair’s determination to liberate the country she had made her home. ”I’m a little bit scared at the moment. I don’t want to talk about it. But we had a nice life here.”
Disputed city prized by Kurds
Kurds see Kirkuk as the ”historic heart” of Kurdistan. But it is not a uniquely Kurdish city. There are also Turkoman, Assyrian and more recently Arab minorities within its confines.
Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose peshmerga fighters entered the city yesterday alongside US troops, called Kirkuk ”the Kurdish Jerusalem.”
Its oilfields produce about 900 000 barrels a day.
Kirkuk was once a largely Kurdish city but Kurds accuse the government of Saddam Hussein of deliberately diluting the Kurdish proportion of the population by driving them out and bringing in Arabs.
Under this process, known as Arabisation, financial rewards were offered to Arabs who took Kurdish wives. Kurdish civil servants, soldiers and police were transferred out of the Kurdish region, and names of towns and villages in the area were Arabised. – Guardian Unlimited Â