White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S. - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREA ELLIOTT

When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised.

Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy.

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The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said.

That emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced with a new set of intelligence-based protocols that law enforcement officials consider more effective.

Also this month, Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim academic, visited the United States for the first time in six years after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reversed a decision by the Bush administration, which had barred Mr. Ramadan from entering the country, initially citing the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Mrs. Clinton also cleared the way for another well-known Muslim professor, Adam Habib, who had been denied entry under similar circumstances.

Arab-American and Muslim leaders said they had yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including what they describe as excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive F.B.I. surveillance guidelines. But they are encouraged by the extent of their consultation by the White House and governmental agencies.

“For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

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In the post-9/11 era, Muslims and Arab-Americans have posed something of a conundrum for the government: they are seen as a political liability but also, increasingly, as an important partner in countering the threat of homegrown terrorism. Under President George W. Bush, leaders of these groups met with government representatives from time to time, but said they had limited interaction with senior officials. While Mr. Obama has yet to hold the kind of high-profile meeting that Muslims and Arab-Americans seek, there is a consensus among his policymakers that engagement is no longer optional.

The administration’s approach has been understated. Many meetings have been private; others were publicized only after the fact. A visit to New York University in February by John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, drew little news coverage, but caused a stir among Muslims around the country. Speaking to Muslim students, activists and others, Mr. Brennan acknowledged many of their grievances, including “surveillance that has been excessive,” “overinclusive no-fly lists” and “an unhelpful atmosphere around many Muslim charities.”

“These are challenges we face together as Americans,” said Mr. Brennan, who momentarily showed off his Arabic to hearty applause. He and other officials have made a point of disassociating Islam from terrorism in public comments, using the phrase “violent extremism” in place of words like “jihad” and “Islamic terrorism.”

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While the administration’s solicitation of Muslims and Arab-Americans has drawn little fanfare, it has not escaped criticism. A small but vocal group of research analysts, bloggers and others complain that the government is reaching out to Muslim leaders and organizations with an Islamist agenda or ties to extremist groups abroad.

They point out that Ms. Jarrett gave the keynote address at the annual convention for the Islamic Society of North America. The group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based charity whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas. The society denies any links to terrorism.

“I think dialogue is good, but it has to be with genuine moderates,” said Steven Emerson, a terrorism analyst who advises government officials. “These are the wrong groups to legitimize.” Mr. Emerson and others have also objected to the political appointments of several American Muslims, including Rashad Hussain.

In February, the president chose Mr. Hussain, a 31-year-old White House lawyer, to become the United States’ special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The position, a kind of ambassador at large to Muslim countries, was created by Mr. Bush. In a video address, Mr. Obama highlighted Mr. Hussain’s status as a “close and trusted member of my White House staff” and “a hafiz,” a person who has memorized the Koran.

Within days of the announcement, news reports surfaced about comments Mr. Hussain had made on a panel in 2004, while he was a student at Yale Law School, in which he referred to several domestic terrorism prosecutions as “politically motivated.” Among the cases he criticized was that of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer-science professor in Florida who pleaded guilty to aiding members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”

Muslim leaders watched carefully as the story migrated to Fox News. They had grown accustomed to close scrutiny, many said in interviews, but were nonetheless surprised. In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.

“Rashad Hussain is about as squeaky clean as you get,” said Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is Muslim. Mr. Ellison and others wondered whether the administration would buckle under the pressure and were relieved when the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended Mr. Hussain.

“The fact that the president and the administration have appointed Muslims to positions and have stood by them when they’ve been attacked is the best we can hope for,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.

It was notably different during Mr. Obama’s run for office. In June 2008, volunteers of his campaign barred two Muslim women in headscarves from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit, eliciting widespread criticism. The campaign promptly recruited Mazen Asbahi, a 36-year-old corporate lawyer and popular Muslim activist from Chicago, to become its liaison to Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Bloggers began researching Mr. Asbahi’s background. For a brief time in 2000, he had sat on the board of an Islamic investment fund, along with Sheikh Jamal Said, a Chicago imam who was later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Mr. Asbahi said in an interview that he had left the board after three weeks because he wanted no association with the imam.

Shortly after his appointment to the Obama campaign, Mr. Asbahi said, a Wall Street Journal reporter began asking questions about his connection to the imam. Campaign officials became concerned that news coverage would give critics ammunition to link the imam to Mr. Obama, Mr. Asbahi recalled. On their recommendation, Mr. Asbahi agreed to resign from the campaign, he said.

He is still unsettled by the power of his detractors. “To be in the midst of this campaign of change and hope and to have it stripped away over nothing,” he said. “It hurts.”

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, he seemed eager to change the tenor of America’s relationship with Muslims worldwide. He gave his first interview to Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language television station based in Dubai. Muslims cautiously welcomed his ban on torture and his pledge to close Guantánamo within a year.

In his Cairo address, he laid out his vision for “a new beginning” with Muslims: while America would continue to fight terrorism, he said, terrorism would no longer define America’s approach to Muslims.

Back at home, Muslim and Arab-American leaders remained skeptical. But they took note when, a few weeks later, Mohamed Magid, a prominent imam from Sterling, Va., and Rami Nashashibi, a Muslim activist from Chicago, joined the president at a White-House meeting about fatherhood. Also that month, Dr. Faisal Qazi, a board member of American Muslim Health Professionals, began meeting with administration officials to discuss health care reform.

The invitations were aimed at expanding the government’s relationship with Muslims and Arab-Americans to areas beyond security, said Mr. Hussain, the White House’s special envoy. Mr. Hussain began advising the president on issues related to Islam after joining the White House counsel’s office in January 2009. He helped draft Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech and accompanied him on the trip. “The president realizes that you cannot engage one-fourth of the world’s population based on the erroneous beliefs of a fringe few,” Mr. Hussain said.

Other government offices followed the lead of the White House. In October, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with Arab-Americans and Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., to discuss challenges facing small-business owners. Also last fall, Farah Pandith was sworn in as the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities. While Ms. Pandith works mostly with Muslims abroad, she said she had also consulted with American Muslims because Mrs. Clinton believes “they can add value overseas.”

Despite this, American actions abroad — including civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and the failure to close Guantánamo — have drawn the anger of Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Even though their involvement with the administration has broadened, they remain most concerned about security-related policies. In January, when the Department of Homeland Security hosted a two-day meeting with Muslim, Arab-American, South Asian and Sikh leaders, the group expressed concern about the emergency directive subjecting passengers from a group of Muslim countries to additional screening.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, pointed out that the policy would never have caught the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, who is British. “It almost sends the signal that the government is going to treat nationals of powerless countries differently from countries that are powerful,” Ms. Khera recalled saying as community leaders around the table nodded their heads.

Ms. Napolitano, who sat with the group for more than an hour, committed to meeting with them more frequently. Ms. Khera said she left feeling somewhat hopeful.

“I think our message is finally starting to get through,” she said.

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Israel Nabs Serial Attacker of Arabs, Leftist Jews - NYTimes.com

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JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli authorities have arrested a Jewish-American extremist suspected of carrying out a series of high-profile hate crimes, security officials said Sunday.

Police and Shin Bet security forces say Jack Teitel, a 37-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jewish West Bank settler, was behind the killing of two Arabs, the targeting of a peace activist and an attack on a breakaway Jewish sect over a period of 12 years.

Authorities originally suspected an extremist Jewish underground for some of the attacks. But acquaintances described Teitel, a father of four, as a lone wolf, and authorities say he acted alone.

Jerusalem police commander Aharon Franco said Teitel immigrated to Israel from Florida, and that he grew up on U.S. military bases as the son of a dentist serving in the Marines.

Franco said a joint police and Shin Bet operation nabbed Teitel earlier this month and he confessed to the crimes and re-enacted them. Police also displayed photos of a large weapons cache seized from the suspect's home.

''He is like a serial killer. This guy was a Jewish terrorist who targeted different types of people,'' said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. ''He was deeply involved in terrorism in all different levels.''

Results of the police investigation will be turned over to the state prosecutor to prepare an indictment.

In his most noted attack, Teitel is accused of sending a booby-trapped gift basket in March 2008 to the home of a family of American messianic Jews in Israel, who believe that Jesus is the Messiah but still consider themselves Jewish.

The explosion seriously wounded the family's 15-year-old son, Ami Ortiz, severing two toes, damaging his hearing and harming his promising basketball career.

''We are horrified by the fact that there are elements of Israeli society, Jews who feel justified in taking the lives of other Jews because of their beliefs,'' said Ami's mother, Leah Ortiz. ''We hope and pray that justice will be done in this case.''

Teitel is also accused of carrying out a pipe bomb attack in September 2008 that wounded a prominent Israeli professor and peace activist, Zeev Sternhell, an expert on the history of fascism who had spoken out against West Bank settlements.

Responding to news of the arrest, Sternhell said, ''I hope the system deals with this terrorist as it deals with all other terrorists, Jewish and Arab alike.''

Police also accused Teitel of killing a Palestinian taxi driver and a Palestinian farmer in 1997, and of stabbing and wounding an Arab in Jerusalem whom he suspected of making sexual advances. He also attempted to bomb police stations and patrols because they provided security for gay pride parades.

Such hate crimes are relatively rare in Israel. The most notable Israeli hate criminals were Ami Popper, who killed seven Palestinian laborers at an Israeli bus stop in 1990, and Yona Avrushmi, who threw a grenade into a peace rally in 1983, killing a participant.

Teitel is not suspected of being responsible for the shooting attack against a gay youth center in Tel Aviv in August, in which two people were killed, though police said he confessed to that attack as well.

Teitel arrived in Israel from the U.S. a decade ago and has lived in the West Bank settlement of Shvut Rachel, north of Jerusalem, for the past six years, his brother-in-law Moshe Avitan said.

Avitan said Teitel was a loner who spoke no Hebrew and rarely expressed political opinions. He worked from home in the computer field and has a degree in business.

Teitel's lawyer, Adi Keidar, told Israel's Channel 2 TV that his client is ''mentally disturbed.''

Islamic Rebels Gain Strength in the Sahara

Moving South From Algeria, al Qaeda-Affiliated Insurgents Find Support Among Locals in Mauritania, Mali and Niger

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania -- Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels are spreading far beyond their original battleground in Algeria and increasingly threatening Africa's Sahara belt, scaring away investors and tourists as they undercut the region's fragile economies.

Dozens of security personnel, as well as an American aid worker and a British tourist, were killed by militants in several attacks in the region this summer alone. The attacks -- which prompted this year's lucrative Paris-Dakar car race to relocate to South America -- have become more frequent and brazen. Recent hits occurred not just in the remote desert but also in Mali's tourist magnet Timbuktu and in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where a suicide bomber attacked the French Embassy last weekend.

Though still dominated by the veterans of Algeria's civil war, this Saharan insurgency has grown deep local roots. Armed bands roaming the desert include hundreds of recruits from Mauritania, Mali and Niger -- vast and impoverished countries that straddle the Arab world and black West Africa, and that relied on the now-collapsed tourism industry as the key source of foreign exchange.

"What had started out as an Algerian problem is now engulfing Mali and Mauritania. They are the weak link," says Zakaria Ould Ahmed Salem, a specialist on political Islam at the University of Nouakchott.

An Islamist insurgency that cost 200,000 lives erupted in Algeria 18 years ago, after that country's secular regime annulled the second round of elections that the Islamists were poised to win. But it is only in the past few years, as Algerian security forces contained the violence at home, that the rebels -- who seek to create an Islamic state encompassing North Africa -- began mounting operations in neighboring Saharan countries that had been unscathed by international terrorism.

Underlining its wider ambitions, the main Algerian insurgent movement, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, re-branded itself in 2007 as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Actual operational links between AQIM militants in the Sahara and traditional al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan or Afghanistan are tenuous, if they exist at all, Western officials say.

But the group's new name has made it easier to find money and recruits for the cause outside Algeria. "Someone like Bin Laden is considered a hero here," explains Mohamed Fall Ould Oumere, publisher of La Tribune newsweekly in Nouakchott.

Mauritania, where most people speak Arabic and watch satellite TV chains like Al-Jazeera, is a particularly fertile ground for AQIM's growth, and accounts for a growing share of the movement's cadres, Western diplomats say. In Mali, Niger and Chad, the bulk of AQIM recruits also come from Arab-speaking communities, which in these countries are outnumbered by black African majorities.

AQIM is trying to spread south, "aiming to attract the young Muslims of the region -- white ones and black ones," says Isselmou Ould Moustafa, a specialist on AQIM who interviewed many of the group's members for his Mauritanian publication, Tahalil Hebdo.

Security officials in Nigeria recently claimed that AQIM trained in Algeria some members of Boko Haram, the Islamist sect whose armed uprising cost several hundred lives in northern Nigeria last month. According to some experts on AQIM, there is also evidence of contacts between the Saharan insurgents and the Shabaab, the radical Islamist militia controlling a chunk of Somalia. "It's an arc of fire," says Mr. Oumere.

All the governments in the region say they are fighting back. But the area's political instability and frequent bickering between neighboring countries have long made it easy for Islamist rebels to roam the Sahara, obtaining sanctuary and help from local tribes. Mali and Mauritania both have strained relations with Algeria. Planned regional summits to tackle the cross-border terrorism problem have been repeatedly postponed.

A military coup in Mauritania last year complicated the situation: The U.S. reacted to the overthrowing of Mauritania's democratically elected president by reducing military cooperation with the country and pulling out a reconnaissance plane that flew regular sorties over the Sahara to search for insurgents. Cooperation is likely to be restored now that Mauritania has held a democratic election last month.

Government officials here say that, without outside help, Saharan countries have little chance of defeating AQIM. "This is a zone that can't be controlled. We don't know who's out there in the vast desert and what are they doing," says Mohamed Ould Rzeizim, who served until this week as Mauritania's minister of interior.

To finance its campaign, AQIM is smuggling Europe-bound cigarettes, drugs and illegal immigrants through the desert, Mauritanian and Western officials say. Depots of untaxed cigarettes, often brought in by ship from South America, dot the desert along Mauritania's porous northern borders.

An equally important source of revenue for AQIM is ransom money -- estimated at tens of millions of dollars -- paid by European governments for the freedom of European tourists kidnapped in separate attacks in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali and Niger. The hostages were usually transported across the Sahara to AQIM's bases in lawless northern Mali, where local officials helped negotiate the ransom collection and the tourists' release.

Mali's role as a sanctuary for AQIM has long infuriated Algeria and the U.S. The country appears to be taking a harder line after the Islamist rebels -- who refrained from killing their hostages in the past -- announced in June that they executed their British captive, Edwin Dyer.

A few days after the killing of Mr. Dyer, suspected militants also gunned down in Timbuktu the regional chief of Malian intelligence, Lt. Col. Lamina Ould Bou. The colonel, an ethnic Arab and former Islamist rebel, had played a crucial role in Mali's efforts against AQIM. According to Malian government accounts and al Qaeda Internet postings, armed clashes in the region in following weeks killed dozens of Malian troops and Islamist guerrillas.

"We are now engaged in a total struggle against al Qaeda," Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré declared last month.

The Saharan rebels have so far targeted only foreigners and security forces, sparing civilian targets like restaurants and hotels. In Algeria, Pakistan and Iraq, by contrast, al Qaeda-affiliated militants showed no concern about killing large numbers of Muslim civilians.

"These youngsters are not yet ready to carry out blind attacks and to explode car bombs, Algerian-style. They have not yet completely broken with the Mauritanian society," says Mr. Moustafa, the AQIM expert. But, he cautions, bloodier attacks are likely to happen soon: "They have bad teachers. Their future targets will be Mauritanian."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Greece: Halt Crackdown, Arrests of Migrants

July 27, 2009

Greek authorities are arresting large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers in the country's cities and islands and moving many of them to the north, raising fears of illegal expulsions to Turkey, Human Rights Watch said today.

Human Rights Watch received reports from a credible source that, in mid-July 2009, police transferred a group of Arabic-speaking people from Chios Island to the Evros border region, where they were secretly forced to cross the border into Turkey. On July 23, local human rights activists prevented authorities from transferring 63 migrants from Lesvos Island to the north by blocking access to the ferry. On July 25, the police took most of them to Athens under heavy police escort.

"These operations and transfers are very worrying," said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch. "We fear that people are being prevented from seeking asylum, that children arriving alone are not being protected, and that migrants are kept in unacceptable detention conditions and possibly even being secretly expelled to Turkey."

In another recent episode, in a large-scale police operation from July 16 to 18, police in Athens surrounded what appeared to be several hundred migrants and locked them inside an abandoned courthouse. The police arrested anyone who left the building. It is feared that some of them may have needed protection and did not have a chance to file a claim for asylum, the police prevented Human Rights Watch from speaking to the people held inside, and Human Rights Watch does not know the whereabouts of those who were arrested when they tried to leave.

In a November 2008 report, "Stuck in a Revolving Door: Iraqis and Other Asylum Seekers and Migrants at the Greece/Turkey Entrance to the European Union," Human Rights Watch documented how Greek authorities have systematically expelled migrants illegally across the Greece-Turkey border, in violation of many international legal obligations. These "pushbacks" typically occur at night from detention facilities in the northern part of the country, close to the Turkish border, and they involve considerable logistical preparation. Human Rights Watch at that time interviewed 41 asylum seekers and refugees - all privately and confidentially - in various locations in both Greece and Turkey, who gave consistent accounts of Greek authorities taking them to the Evros River at night and then forcing them across.

Human Rights Watch also documented how Greek authorities miscategorize unaccompanied children as adults and detain them for prolonged periods of time in conditions that could be considered inhumane and degrading. (See the December 2008 report, "Left to Survive: Systematic Failure to Protect Unaccompanied Migrant Children in Greece.")

In yet another recent incident, on July 12, police destroyed a makeshift migrant camp in Patras, on the Peloponnese peninsula. In the days before the camp was destroyed, the police reportedly arrested large numbers of migrants there, and according to credible sources, transferred an unknown number to the northern part of the country. On July 17, Human Rights Watch met with several Afghans in Patras, including 12 unaccompanied migrant children now homeless as a result of this operation, who were in hiding in abysmal conditions out of fear of being arrested.

A 24-year-old man told Human Rights Watch: "We're living like animals in the jungle ... we can't take a shower and we don't have proper food ... before I lived in the camp, but all of my things and clothes were burned. Now I have a shirt and a pair of pants, nothing else."

A 14-year-old Afghan boy who arrived in Greece one year earlier said: "The worst situation during the past year is now, in Patras - now that I'm living in this forest .... There's not enough food and we only eat bread with water."

Human Rights Watch also observed on July 17 how more than 1,000 migrants lined up all night, largely in vain, trying to file asylum applications at Athens' main police station. Greece recognizes as few as 0.05 percent of asylum seekers as refugees at their first interview and passed a law at the end of June that abolishes a meaningful appeals procedure, making it virtually impossible for anyone to obtain refugee status. It also extended the maximum length of administrative detention for migrants to 12 months - and under certain circumstances, up to 18 months - from previously 90 days.

"It appears Greece is doing everything it can to close the door on persons who seek protection in Europe, no matter how vulnerable they are," said Frelick. "The European Union must hold Greece accountable for acts contrary to international and European human rights and refugee law, and it needs to act fast, as the lives of many are at risk."

Worries About A Kurdish-Arab Conflict Move To Fore in Iraq

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 27, 2009

QARAQOSH, Iraq -- Louis Khno is a city councilman whose city is beyond his control. In his barricaded streets are militiamen -- in baseball caps and jeans, wielding Kalashnikov rifles, with the safeties switched off. They answer to someone else. Leaders of his police force give their loyalty to their ethnic brethren -- be they Kurd or Arab. Clergy in the town pledge themselves to the former. Khno and his colleagues to the latter.

"We're far from the conflict, but now we've become the heart of the conflict between Kurds and Arabs," Khno said. "We're now stuck in between them."

Khno called the town "the line of engagement," one stop along an amorphous frontier in northern Iraq shaped by contested history, geography and authority. Dividing the Kurdish autonomous region from the rest of the country, that frontier represents the most combustible fault line in Iraq today, where Arab and Kurd forces may have come to blows last month along hills of harvested wheat. Kurdish officials suggest that another confrontation is inevitable, with halfhearted negotiations already stalled, and U.S. officials acknowledge that only their intervention has prevented bloodshed.

Since 2003, when U.S. forces barreled into Baghdad, toppling Saddam Hussein, inspiring a Shiite revival and unleashing a Sunni insurgency that drew on a communal sense of siege, the war in Iraq has been in large part a sectarian conflict that pitted Sunni Arab against Shiite Arab. That war has subsided, even if bitterness remains.

For months, there were fears that the sectarian battle might reignite, as the United States withdrew its combat forces. Today, that looks less likely. Rather, U.S. officials say, the biggest threat to Iraq in the years ahead is the ethnic conflict, Kurds in the north against the Arab-dominated government in Baghdad, a still-unresolved struggle that has helped shape Iraq's history since the British inherited the land after World War I.

Already, the conflict has redrawn alliances, helping bring a Shiite prime minister into the arms of a powerful Sunni sheik in Anbar province, once the cradle of the insurgency. It has stoked long-standing Kurdish fears of a resurgent government in Baghdad bent on curbing the power of its regional government, which held an election Saturday for a president and new parliament. And it has plunged border towns like Qaraqosh into an increasingly nasty struggle that some fear may end in bloodshed.

"There may not be war. We're tired of wars," said Atheel al-Nujaifi, the Sunni Arab governor of northern Iraq's Nineveh province. "But there will definitely be clashes and fights here and there."

Animosity in Sunni Anbar

It was not so long ago when talk in Anbar, the sprawling province west of Baghdad, dwelt on lynching Americans, smiting infidels and driving Shiite politicians and their Iranian sponsors from Baghdad. Talk there is anything but subtle.

These days, there is a new refrain.

"The Kurds are most dangerous because they live among us as Iraqi citizens," declared Raad al-Alwani, a blunt-speaking sheik in Ramadi whose fondness for scotch competes with his affection for two $20,000 falcons tethered in his front yard. "They should remember that someday there will be a strong government in Baghdad again."

"In the old days, one policeman would have kicked all the Kurds out," added his cousin, Khalid Abdullah al-Fahad, dragging on a cigarette and sipping tea.

Another cousin, Skander Hussein Mohammed, chimed in.

"Our children will kick them out if we can't," he vowed.

With an ear tuned to Iraqi politics, along with the legacies that shape them, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has cultivated those resentments to fashion himself into a nationalist leader. He has staked out an identity as a defender of Iraq's unity and its Arab identity. He has insisted on a strong central government and changes in the constitution that are anathema to Kurds who see that document as their bulwark against an emboldened Baghdad. Since last year, he has dispatched the Iraqi army to the disputed border areas, many of them -- not incidentally -- home to potentially vast reserves of oil and gas.

That has played well in Anbar, where Maliki, a Shiite, has proposed an alliance with Ahmed Abu Risha, perhaps the most powerful Sunni sheik in the province, whose brother led the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq until he was assassinated in September 2007.

"He's someone who wants a united Iraq," Abu Risha said of the prime minister. "Our points of view, our perspectives are very close."

To call Iraqi politics transparent is to suggest Abu Risha's Rolex is imitation. It's not. And the parlor game in Baghdad these days is discerning Maliki's true motivations. Is he the nationalist strongman so many here desire, bent on defending the territorial integrity of Iraq from the reach of Kurdish ambitions? Or is he covertly sectarian, trying to stoke Arab fears to distract from his imposition of Shiite hegemony in Baghdad?

In Anbar province, Alwani insisted that Maliki's tough line on the Kurds was a gambit to gather Arab votes for parliamentary elections in January. Another sheik, Hamid al-Hais, praised Maliki's stand on the Kurds but insisted he must be tougher. To the nods of fellow tribesmen, Hais offered his own solution to Kirkuk, a city contested by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens: "If they try to take it, we wipe it off the face of the map."

Suspicions Among Kurds

There is a suspicion that colors almost every conversation in the Kurdish autonomous region, a majestic stretch of ranges, interspersed with rivers and fertile valleys. It is fostered by a fight with Baghdad that dates to the British era, and reinforced by the massacres Hussein unleashed at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.

"Is their policy of procrastination and delay for the sake of [allowing] them to get stronger to impose their will on us?" asked Falah Mustafa Bakir, a Kurdish minister.

Maliki has dispatched two delegations to Irbil, the Kurdish capital, ostensibly to break the deadlock in relations between the Baghdad government and the Kurdish government. But he has not spoken with Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish president, in a year, a clear sign that their once amiable relationship has fallen apart.

As one official termed it, "there's a lot of poison in the air."

U.S. officials acknowledge that the disputed boundary has become the most pressing issue in a slew of unresolved conflicts in Iraq -- from national reconciliation to an oil law on sharing revenue and managing the country's enormous reserves.

For years, that boundary was known as the Green Line, drawn as Iraqi forces withdrew from northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. It served as the border until 2003, when Kurdish forces, known as pesh merga, crossed the frontier with U.S. approval. Since last year, Maliki has pushed back, sending the Iraqi army to confront pesh merga in the border town of Khanaqin, which has a Kurdish majority, and deploying thousands more troops in Kirkuk. Fearing tension, the U.S. military has bolstered its presence in Kirkuk.

For months, though, the U.S. Embassy has abdicated the lead role in resolving the border issue to the United Nations, which has made little headway. Timing is bad, too. These days, Kurdish attentions are focused on the results of Saturday's election for a regional president and parliament, in which opposition parties did surprisingly well. Forming a government may take until September. With the campaign for national elections beginning in November, little time is left for real negotiation.

As in Arab Iraq, some are also suspicious of the motivations involved in fanning the conflict.

"Internal consumption," said Muhammad Tofiq, a Kurdish opposition politician. To him, the dispute is a way to divert attention from the corruption and failures of the region's ruling parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party. "To them, an oil well is more important than Sinjar and Khanaqin," two contested cities.

But old suspicions die hard here, as evidenced by a confrontation between Iraqi army and Kurdish forces that probably would have erupted last month in Makhmur, a disputed town controlled by Kurds, had U.S. forces not been present.

A round of late-night calls by the U.S. military and others averted a clash. "But when will it happen again?" asked Nechirvan Barzani, the Kurdish prime minister. "There is still the logic of who is powerful and who is weak."

Town of Divided Loyalties

The first question at the checkpoint on the edge of Qaraqosh, the Christian town along the disputed border, was standard. "Where are you coming from?" barked a militiaman in street clothes, armed and paid by a benefactor loyal to the Kurds.

The questions that followed weren't.

"Are you Christian?" he asked. "Are you Kurdish? Are you Arab?"

These days in Qaraqosh, it matters.

Residents seem to resist the idea of being joined to Kurdistan, as the Kurds refer to their autonomous region. Many of the Christians here pronounce a pride in belonging to an ancient community of Mesopotamia. Others resent the heavy-handedness of Kurdish security, which residents say has hauled away scores of people in the past few years to prisons in Irbil and, farther north, in Aqrah.

"When they return," one politician said, "they have to keep their mouth shut."

Qaraqosh is consumed in a claustrophobic conflict over space and borders, a grinding attempt to lay claim -- politically, psychologically and socially -- to everything from the authority of the police to the rebuilding of a church.

The native language of the deputy police chief is Kurdish. So is his loyalty, critics say. His boss speaks Arabic. Members of the city council pledge loyalty to Gov. Nujaifi's Arab-dominated government in Mosul, which provides Qaraqosh meager water and electricity. More generous is the money that has poured in from a benefactor, Sarkis Aghajan, a wealthy Christian who once served as Kurdish finance minister. Credited to him are buses for students, renovations of orphanages and monasteries, and even generators for electricity. Officials say he is behind the militia, too, which numbers 1,200 fighters in Qaraqosh and two other Christian towns.

"We have an order from the state," said Ghadeer Salem, one of the commanders.

Baghdad? he was asked.

"No," he replied. "Kurdistan."

Special correspondent Dlovan Brwari contributed to this report.