Syria: End Persecution of Kurds

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(New York) - Syrian authorities should end their unlawful and unjustified practices of attacking peaceful Kurdish gatherings and detaining Kurdish political and cultural activists, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 63-page report, "Group Denial: Repression of Kurdish Political and Cultural Rights in Syria," documents the Syrian authorities' efforts to ban and disperse gatherings calling for Kurdish minority rights or celebrating Kurdish culture, as well as the detention of leading Kurdish political activists and their ill-treatment in custody. The repression of Kurds in Syria has greatly intensified following large-scale Kurdish demonstrations in March 2004. The report is based on interviews with 30 Kurdish activists recently released from prison, as well as 15 relatives of Kurdish activists still in jail. The Syrian government refused to reply to requests for information or meetings with Human Rights Watch.

"At a time when other countries in the region, from Iraq to Turkey, are improving the treatment of their Kurdish minority, Syria remains resistant to change," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "In fact, Syria has been especially hostile to any Kurdish political or cultural expression."

Kurds, an estimated 10 percent of Syria's population of 20 million, live primarily in the country's northern and eastern regions. Human Rights Watch found that since 2005, Syrian security forces have repressed at least 14 Kurdish political and cultural public gatherings, overwhelmingly peaceful, and often resorted to violence to disperse the crowds. Not only have the security forces prevented political meetings in support of Kurds' minority rights, but also gatherings to celebrate Nowruz (the Kurdish new year) and other cultural celebrations. In at least two instances, the security services fired on the crowds and caused deaths.

"The Syrian government sees threats everywhere, even in village new year celebrations," Whitson said. "If the government wants better relations with its Kurdish minority, it should address their legitimate grievances instead of trying to silence them."

Syria has obligations under several international treaties to uphold freedom of expression and association, and the associated right to freedom of assembly. In addition, international law requires Syria to protect the identity of minorities and to guarantee them the right to participate actively in public and cultural life, including practicing their language and celebrating their culture in private and public.

Human Rights Watch also documented the arrests and trials of at least 15 prominent Syrian Kurdish political leaders since 2005. Since there is no political parties law in Syria, none of the political parties - let alone the Kurdish ones - are licensed. Accordingly, any member of a party, including all of the Kurdish parties, is vulnerable to arrest for membership in an unlicensed organization, a crime under Syria's penal code. Most recently, on November 15, 2009, the Damascus Criminal Court sentenced three leading members of the Kurdish Azadi Party, which advocates an end to discrimination against the Kurdish minority, to three years in jail for "weakening national sentiment" and "inciting sectarian or racial strife or provoking conflict between sects and various members of the nation."

Of the 30 former Kurdish detainees interviewed by Human Rights watch, 12 said that security forces tortured them. Most of those detained are referred to military courts, where they can be convicted of vaguely defined, overbroad "security charges," most typically the charge of "spreading false or exaggerated information that weakens national sentiment" or committing an act or speech that advocates "cutting off part of Syrian land to join it to another country."

A Kurdish political activist detained in October 2008 for three months at the Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence described the way the investigators treated him:

If the investigator was not convinced by what I said, the guards would take me to the "torture square," where they would make me stand on my feet for long days with my hands tied behind my back and my eyes covered with a black cloth. I was made to stand for 11 days with only brief periods of rest for 10 minutes to eat. If I would fall due to lack of sleep...they would throw cold water on me and beat me with cables. I developed many illnesses because of this torture. Tests I had done after my release showed that I had inflamed joints as well as infections in the stomach, kidneys, and chest.

(For more testimonials, see below)

Harassment of these activists continues even after their release; security forces continue to call them in for interrogation and frequently bar them from traveling outside the country.

The European Union and the United States have been eager to engage with Syria recently. Human Rights Watch urged these governments to communicate their strong disapproval of Syria's treatment of its Kurdish minority and to emphasize that further progress in their relations with Syria will depend on concrete improvements in Syria's human rights situation.

"Ignoring the treatment of Kurds in Syria will not make the problem go away." Whitson said. "The international community has played an important role in improving the treatment of Kurds in Iraq and Turkey and it needs to do the same for Syria's Kurds."

Human Rights Watch called on the Syrian government to:

• Free people being detained for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression, association, or assembly;
• Amend or abolish the vague security provisions under the Syrian penal code that unlawfully restrict free speech;
• Investigate officials alleged to have tortured or mistreated detainees;
• Enact a law recognizing the right of political parties to organize, and establish an independent electoral commission to register new political parties; and
• Form a commission to address the grievances of the Kurdish minority in Syria.

Accounts from "Group Denial":

A participant in a musical event to celebrate women's role in society organized on March 9, 2009 by a Kurdish party in the town of Qamishli described how the security forces dispersed the crowd:

Fifteen minutes after the celebrations had started, the security forces circled the room. They were carrying guns and sticks, and they scared the women and children. They quickly confiscated the [sound system] speakers and the chairs.

An activist who was at a private home attending a talk on the history of the Kurds described the arrest of participants by Military Intelligence on January 29, 2007:

We were 12 people gathered at Yasha's house to attend a cultural talk on Kurds. Suddenly, members of Aleppo's Military Intelligence came in and took all of us to their branch. They kept us for 10 days in Aleppo, and then they transferred us to the Palestine Branch [of Military Intelligence] in Damascus. They released seven of us and kept five in

detention. The five had confessed that they were members in the Yekiti Party.

A member of the Kurdish Future Movement, a political party, described his arrest while he was waiting to board a bus:

The civilian police detained me in the town of `Amuda and immediately transferred me to Political Security in al-Hasakeh. They charged me with belonging to the Kurdish Future Movement. They interrogated me for 12 days. During the investigation I was deprived of everything. Their questions focused on the political program of the party, its internal rules, my role in the party, especially after they had kidnapped Mr. Mesh`al Temmo, the official spokesperson for the party. After the interrogation they referred me on September 1 to a military judge in Qamishli, who ordered my detention for belonging to an unlicensed political party and inciting sectarian strife.

A member of the PYD party, a Kurdish political party, described the torture he endured while detained by Political Security in `Ain `Arab in May 2006:

They tortured me physically and emotionally. The physical torture began from the moment I arrived at the branch. The officer who heads the branch beat me personally. His men tied my legs to a Russian rifle, and the officer beat me on my feet with a whip. The beating covered various parts of my body. He would insult and threaten me and insult the Kurds. He found a notebook in my pocket where I had written the name of the town by its Kurdish name, Kobani, which the regime had changed to `Ain `Arab, so he hit me with more than 100 lashes saying, "Damn you and damn Kobani. Why don't you write `Ain `Arab?" The torture lasted for almost six hours of on-off beatings.

Turkey moves toward peace with Kurds - Washington Times

Suzan Fraser ASSOCIATED PRESS

ANKARA, Turkey | Turkey's government Friday announced new measures aimed at reconciling with minority Kurds and ending a 25-year-old insurgency, but there was no mention of the sweeping amnesty sought by Kurdish rebels.

The government wants to remove all restrictions on the once-banned Kurdish language, create a committee to fight discrimination, restore Kurdish names of villages and establish an independent body to deal with complaints against security forces, Interior Minister Besir Atalay told the parliament.

"It is an open-ended, dynamic process," Mr. Atalay said.

Turkey is under pressure to resolve the Kurdish conflict as it courts membership in the European Union. Turkey's civilian and military leaders have both acknowledged, however, that force alone cannot wipe out the rebels, who began fighting for autonomy in 1984 and have staged cross-border attacks from bases in northern Iraq.

Tens of thousands of people have died in the conflict, with human rights abuses committed by both sides.

Though fighting has ebbed in recent months, the Turkish government still must persuade a skeptical public that making peace with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, is both possible and necessary for long-term stability.

Opponents say reconciliation would ignore the sacrifices of slain soldiers and undermine state unity. They also accuse the government of negotiating with rebels deemed terrorists by Turkey, the EU and the United States.

"Have the mountains been bombed? They have," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an address to lawmakers. "Have there been cross-border operations? Yes, there have. Is terrorism continuing? Yes, it is. It is not possible to solve the problem through the security forces alone."

The rebels are asking for amnesty for their leaders and fighters. Rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan, a hated figure among many Turks, is serving a life sentence in jail. Persuading thousands of fighters to lay down their arms is likely to be a long and difficult process.

The government made no mention of an amnesty, however, in announcing its new peace plan, which would require legislative approval. Mr. Erdogan's ruling party has a strong parliamentary majority.

The measures would allow Kurdish politicians to speak their language while campaigning, reversing a policy that exposed pro-Kurdish politicians to prosecution if they spoke Kurdish in public settings.

The interior minister underlined Mr. Erdogan's message, saying "We aim to expand all our citizens' political rights and freedoms. The democratic overture does not intend to harm our unitary state and national unity, but to strengthen it."

Opposition lawmakers, who had disrupted Mr. Atalay's speech on the Kurdish issue earlier this week, listened to the minister this time in silence. However, they heckled the prime minister, and some walked out during his speech.

Kurds make up about 20 percent of Turkey's more than 70 million people and dominate the country's poor southeast region.

U.S. Adviser to Kurds Stands to Reap Oil Profits - NYTimes.com

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By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS

OSLO — Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth.

Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

Mr. Galbraith, widely viewed in Washington as a smart and bold foreign policy expert, has always described himself as an unpaid adviser to the Kurds, although he has spoken in general terms about having business interests in Kurdistan, as the north of Iraq is known.

So it came as a shock to many last month when a group of Norwegian investigative journalists at the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv began publishing documents linking Mr. Galbraith to a specific Norwegian oil company with major contracts in Iraq.

Interviews by The New York Times with more than a dozen current and former government and business officials in Norway, France, Iraq, the United States and elsewhere, along with legal records and other documents, reveal in considerable detail that he received rights to an enormous stake in at least one of Kurdistan’s oil fields in the spring of 2004.

As it turns out, Mr. Galbraith received the rights after he helped negotiate a potentially lucrative contract that allowed the Norwegian oil company DNO to drill for oil in the promising Dohuk region of Kurdistan, the interviews and documents show.

He says his actions were proper because he was at the time a private citizen deeply involved in Kurdish causes, both in business and policy.

When drillers struck oil in a rich new field called Tawke in December 2005, no one but a handful of government and business officials and members of Mr. Galbraith’s inner circle knew that the constitutional provisions he had pushed through only months earlier could enrich him so handsomely.

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company “has a representative in the room, drafting.”

DNO’s chief executive, Helge Eide, confirmed that Mr. Galbraith helped negotiate the Tawke deal and advised the company during 2005. But Mr. Eide said that Mr. Galbraith acted solely as a political adviser and that the company never discussed the Constitution negotiations with him. “We certainly never did give any input, language or suggestions on the Constitution,” Mr. Eide said.

When the findings based on interviews by The Times and other research were presented to Mr. Galbraith last weekend, he responded in writing to The Times, confirming that he did work as a mediator between DNO and the Kurdish government until the oil contract was signed in the spring of 2004, and saying that he maintained an “ongoing business relationship” with the company throughout the constitutional negotiations in 2005 and later.

Mr. Galbraith says he held no official position in the United States or Iraq during this entire period and acted purely as a private citizen. He maintains that his largely undeclared dual role was entirely proper. He says that he was simply advocating positions that the Kurds had documented before his relationship with DNO even began.

“What is true is that I undertook business activities that were entirely consistent with my long-held policy views,” Mr. Galbraith said in his response. “I believe my work with DNO (and other companies) helped create the Kurdistan oil industry which helps provide Kurdistan an economic base for the autonomy its people almost unanimously desire.”

“So, while I may have had interests, I see no conflict,” Mr. Galbraith said.

Kurdish officials said that they were informed of Mr. Galbraith’s work for DNO and that they still considered him a friend and advocate. Mr. Galbraith said that during his work on the Constitution negotiations, the Kurds “did not pay me and they knew I was being paid by DNO.”

Mr. Istrabadi, who was also the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2007, said the case was especially troubling given the influence of Mr. Galbraith’s policy views. In his writings — some of them on the Op-Ed page of The Times and in the New York Review of Books — he is generally identified as a former ambassador or with some other generic description that gives no insight into his business interests in the area.

Mr. Galbraith, for many years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has a long relationship with the Kurds. In 1988, he documented Saddam Hussein’s systematic campaign against the Kurds, including the use of gas. He served as United States ambassador to Croatia between 1993 and 1998. In September, he was fired as the No. 2 official with the United Nations mission in Afghanistan after he accused the head of the mission of concealing allegations of electoral fraud.

Views of Mr. Galbraith’s business ties are harsh within the central Baghdad government, which has long maintained, in stark opposition to Mr. Galbraith’s interpretation of the Constitution, that all the oil contracts signed by the Kurdish government were illegal.

Referring to the Constitution negotiations, Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani, vice chairman of the oil and gas committee in the Iraqi Parliament, said that Mr. Galbraith’s “interference was not justified, illegal and not right, particularly because he is involved in a company where his financial interests have been merged with the political interest.”

Citing what he said were confidentiality agreements, Mr. Galbraith refused to give details of his financial arrangement with the company, and the precise nature of his compensation remains unknown. But several officials, including Mr. Galbraith’s business partner in the deal, the Norwegian businessman Endre Rosjo, said that in addition to whatever consulting fees the company paid, he and Mr. Galbraith were together granted rights to 10 percent of the large Tawke field and possibly others.

An internal DNO document dated Dec. 3, 2006, which was first obtained by Dagens Naeringsliv, indicates that a company called Porcupine, registered in Delaware under Mr. Galbraith’s name, still held the rights to the 5 percent stake at that time, while a company associated with Mr. Rosjo held the other 5 percent.

Mr. Eide, the DNO executive, said that as far as the company knew, Mr. Galbraith’s work was proper.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Galbraith in 2004 was working as a businessman with no political assignments,” Mr. Eide said. “Given our network model and limited experience and knowledge from the region at that time, our evaluation concluded that we should use Mr. Galbraith to advise DNO in the first stage of the project.”

As revelations began appearing in recent weeks, Mr. Galbraith at first issued qualified denials stating that he had never been party to any arrangement in Iraq technically referred to in the oil industry as a production-sharing contract. But industry insiders say that the rights could have been couched in different terms — not an ownership stake, but a conditional right or option to become part of such an agreement at a future date.

Estimating the value of any stake in the Kurdish fields is difficult given the political uncertainties. But Are Martin Berntzen, an oil analyst at Oslo’s First Securities brokerage, said the Tawke field alone has proven reserves of about 230 million barrels, a figure likely to increase as new wells are drilled.

“Given no political risk, a 5 percent stake should be worth at least $115 million,” he said, though he emphasized that he knew nothing about Mr. Galbraith’s arrangement.

A possible indication of Mr. Galbraith’s estimate of the deal’s worth may be discerned in a London arbitration case in which Porcupine and a Yemeni investor who now apparently holds Mr. Rosjo’s former share are seeking more than $525 million from DNO, according to a filing reported on the legal news Web site Law.com. Oil analysts in Norway played down the likelihood of a reward as large as the claim.

According to DNO, the claim represents up to 10 percent of the value of the regional production contract, which the Norwegian oil firm now shares with a Turkish energy company after Kurdish authorities reviewed the previous deal and barred “certain third-party interests” from participating further. At a shareholders meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Eide refused to name Mr. Galbraith as a claimant in the case. He acknowledged, however, that DNO lost a procedural ruling in the case last May, and he said a final decision on damages was expected in early 2010.

In his response, Mr. Galbraith would say only that “my contractual relationship was with DNO and is the subject of pending arbitration.”

Mohammed Hussein contributed reporting from Baghdad, and David E. Sanger from Washington.

Kurdistan Halts Oil Exports - NYTimes.com

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By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

BAGHDAD — The semiautonomous Kurdish region has reopened a rift with the central government after announcing that it had halted all petroleum exports from Kurdistan until Baghdad pays the international companies that are pumping oil in the region.

Oil extracted in Kurdistan can be exported only through Iraqi government pipelines running to Turkey, giving Baghdad a stranglehold on the transport of oil produced there. At the same time, the government needs all the revenue it can get to pay for a host of pressing needs.

The amount of oil involved currently, about 100,000 barrels a day, is relatively small compared with Iraq’s total production of 2.4 million barrels a day. But with production from the Kurdish areas likely to increase markedly in coming years, the dispute has taken on added importance.

Kurdistan’s minister of natural resources, Ashti Hawrami, said in a letter dated Oct. 9 and posted on the Kurdish government’s Web site Monday that the decision to stop exports had been made in concert with the two international companies now extracting oil there.

“We have jointly agreed that no free oil will be pumped for export, and payments have to be made,” Dr. Hawrami wrote in the letter. “We will only resume exports with guaranteed payments.”

Kurdistan has awarded more than 30 contracts to international oil companies during the past few years over the objections of Baghdad, which has barred international companies working in Kurdistan from competing for oil contracts in the rest of Iraq.

Kurdistan began signing its own deals with foreign oil companies after becoming impatient with the central government’s inability to adopt a national oil law that would regulate the industry. The Iraqi Parliament still has not approved an oil law, but earlier this year Baghdad began seeking oil production deals of its own with international companies, including a preliminary agreement with a consortium of British Petroleum and the Chinese National Petroleum Company to develop the enormous Rumalia field in southern Iraq.

After DNO, a Norwegian company, and Genel Energy, a Turkish company, struck oil at the Tawke field in Kurdistan this year, Baghdad originally refused to export their production over its pipelines. The cash-poor government eventually relented, however, giving its approval in late May.

Exports from Tawke and from a second site in Kurdistan, at the Taq Taq field, started June 1, but Baghdad has refused to pay the companies for the oil because it continues to regard their contracts with Kurdistan as illegal.

Meanwhile, officials in Kurdistan said they could not afford to pay because revenue from the fields went directly to Baghdad.

DNO has a 55 percent share in the Tawke field; Genel Energy owns 25 percent; the remainder is owned by the Kurdish government.

Dr. Hawrami, who oversees Kurdistan’s oil sector, said the Norwegian and Turkish companies, which had invested $500 million in Kurdistan, had not received a penny so far for their exports.

Khalid Saleh, an adviser to Hussain al-Shahristani, Iraq’s oil minister, confirmed Monday that oil exports from Kurdistan had stopped. He said the government had no plans to abide by the terms of the Kurdish contracts.

“At this moment, the government is not willing to pay,” he said.

Dr. Hawrami also acknowledged in the letter a complex web of financial arrangements that the Kurdish government had with the two companies, including secret government investments and loans of as much as $50 million.

The deals, which were negotiated with the permission of the president of Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani, were intended to bolster the financially strained oil companies so they could continue exploration in Kurdistan, according to the letter.

Duraid Adnan and Sa’ad al-Izzi contributed reporting.

Minority Groups Targeted Again in Iraqi Suicide Bombings

By Ernesto Londoño and Dlovan Brwari
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 14, 2009

BAGHDAD, Aug. 13 -- Two suicide bombers killed at least 21 people in a cafe in northern Iraq on Thursday, Iraqi officials said, in the latest attack targeting ethnic or religious minorities in disputed territories.

The double bombing occurred about 5 p.m. in the Ayoub coffeehouse in Sinjar, a town about 240 miles northwest of Baghdad. Most of the victims were Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority. At least 30 people were wounded.

The attack, like other recent bombings, appeared intended to exacerbate tensions along a 300-mile stretch of disputed territory near the Kurdish north, pitting the Kurdish autonomous government against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's administration in Baghdad.

Although Sinjar is nominally part of Nineveh province, one of the three Iraqi provinces that border the Kurdish-controlled area, it is patrolled by the pesh merga, the Kurdish government's paramilitary force.

Nineveh's newly installed governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi, a Sunni Arab, campaigned on a promise to curb Kurdish expansion and has said he wants a military force in the province that is under his command. The mayor of Sinjar, Dakhil Qassim Hassoun, is close to the Kurdish government and has strained ties with Nujaifi.

Pesh merga units have come close to armed conflict with Iraqi army troops in recent months, as Maliki has sent additional soldiers loyal to the Baghdad government to areas that the Kurdish force has controlled in recent years.

With the U.S. military reducing its presence in Iraqi cities in recent weeks, insurgents have carried out several mass-casualty attacks in northern Iraq targeting members of ethnic and religious minorities.

On Monday, twin car bombs near Mosul leveled several houses in a village and killed at least 35 people, most of them members of the Shabak religious minority. That village was also under pesh merga control. Last Friday, more than 40 people, most of them Shiite Turkmens, were killed in Mosul after a car bomb detonated outside a mosque. More than 150 people have been killed in violent incidents in Iraq since Friday, according to a tally by the Associated Press.

Maj. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., the top U.S. commander in northern Iraq, said at a recent news conference that Sunni insurgents remain "a resilient force that has the capability to regenerate their combat power."

Residents said the cafe attacked Thursday is on the outskirts of Sinjar, in a scenic spot frequented by young people.

"This coffee shop is located on a farm that people visit in the summer to watch the sun set," said Saad Sabri, 25, a pharmacist.

In August 2007, Sinjar was the site of the deadliest string of attacks in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion when about 400 people, mostly Yazidis, were killed in a series of powerful explosions.

Special correspondent Zaid Sabah contributed to this report.

Different Teams, Common Goals: Camaraderie, Competition Unite Area Ethnic Groups

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Uighurs eased their cars into George Mason University's Lot I, as they do most Sundays. They dropped their bags on the edge of a field and pulled on cleats and blue shirts.

The Kurds arrived soon after. They slapped hands with the Uighurs and exchanged greetings: "Hey," they said, "Salam-u aleikum." A few from both sides knelt on the field to pray. Then it was time to play.

Soccer is the Esperanto of sports. Everyone from everywhere seems to play it; all you need are feet and a ball. In the Washington region, where so many ethnic enclaves share a passion for the sport, soccer fields can sometimes feel like the United Nations: Ethiopians and Ugandans; Bolivians and Kazakhs; Uighurs and Kurds. The teams might not speak the same language, but everyone understands "goal," "pass" and "corner."

Uighur United, a Northern Virginia-based team of men in their teens and 20s, was formed in 2005. Many Uighurs, a Muslim minority in western China, arrived with their families about 10 years ago, often via countries such as Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, where they fled to escape pressure from the Chinese government. They play against other Uighurs (pronounced "WEE-ghurs") across the United States and in Canada and this year plan to go to Australia.

"We're using it as a tool to reunite our youth," said Shafkat Ali, 22, a George Mason student who lives in Reston.

"Some of the people who come here at a young age, they sort of forget their own culture," explained Mustafa Sidik, 25, a University of Maryland student who lives in Annandale. "They get kind of Americanized. That's not a bad thing, but we don't want them to forget their culture."

They are also doing something their cousins in western China can't since a violent Chinese crackdown on Uighur protesters this month.

"Most of the time they . . . don't want you to get together," said Sidik, referring to the Chinese government, which he said has barred large gatherings of Uighurs. Soccer counts as a gathering. "I don't think anyone's playing soccer right now."

Kurds in northern Iraq can gather unmolested these days, but they, too, faced repression for years and often came here for similar reasons. In fact, many played soccer with the Uighurs at Fairfax High School, and they now attend local universities together.

For whatever reason, the Uighurs are more organized than the Kurds, who don't have matching shirts or even a team name.

"I wish we could have a team like them, because they go to Canada and different states," said Zirian Shammo, 21, a Kurd from Centreville who studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Sunday afternoon games are not particularly competitive. Still, each team wants to win. "They make fun of us all week if we lose," Shammo said. "The past couple of months, we've been losing, so all the jokes are on us."

The field has the potential to be a cacophony of tongues. The Uighur language is similar to Turkish, and two Kurdish dialects spoken by the players, Bahdini and Sorani, are incomprehensible to one another. The referee, an Iraqi, speaks Arabic. The game, therefore, takes place mostly in English.

As does the cheerleading, undertaken by a lone Kurdish woman with long black hair and coal black eyes.

"What the hell was that?" shrieks Sabat Mahmoud, 20, when the Uighurs score a goal in the first minute. She attends George Mason and often attends these games. "Come on, Kurdistan!"

About 20 minutes in, another group of Kurds shows up. Furious that the game has started without them, they pull on fluorescent yellow vests and run onto the field, insisting that they are the regulars and that the non-regulars must leave. Those already playing say there is no official roster; it's first-come, first-served.

The argument heats up. Some Uighurs sit down on the field to wait. Ahmed Razak, an Iraqi computer engineer who describes himself as a little of everything -- "Kurd, Turkish, Shi'a" -- retires to a bench, muttering, "You wonder why there's no peace in the Middle East."

But the fight has nothing to do with nationality; it's the same posturing among young men anywhere. Accusations of "disrespecting" are thrown around. A Kurdish player charges another; a Uighur holds him back. Rolling her eyes like an experienced matron, Mahmoud inserts herself between the combatants, saying, "Why don't we just go bowling?"

Finally, the fighting ebbs, a goal is moved to make room for a smaller Kurdish game and the larger game starts over. Despite the damp heat, they play energetically; they are even balletic. By the time the referee blows the whistle, it is almost dark.

The Kurds have won, 7-5. The Uighurs collapse beside their goal and justify their loss: They were more fatigued at the end because they played longer than the Kurds, thanks to the earlier mix-up.

The conversation turns to Chinese food, which the Uighurs insist includes dog meat; Japanese food, which is "cleanest" but involves raw fish; and wives, which, they say, are hard to find here. Most players live with their parents, who want them to find Uighur girls, but the pool is limited. One player went back home in 2006 to look for one but had no success there, either.

Ashraf Tahir, a native of Sudan and one of the team's two non-Uighurs, sympathizes about the difficulty of finding a good wife. "Our women, once they get here, become harder to deal with on a daily basis."

The players cross the field toward their cars. They talk about an upcoming protest in front of the White House. They talk about how the Chinese didn't like their parents' generation to practice Islam; now that they are here and free to worship, in some ways it's more difficult because of the non-Islamic temptations.

Walking ahead, Tahir, 24, explains to the Uighur goalie, a tall boy of 16, that a real man doesn't lose his temper, that Islam teaches that the best person is the one who controls his emotions. Many things in life will require a lot more patience than soccer.

"One day, you're going to have a wife to deal with," he said, "and you're going to have kids, and a job and a boss and co-workers who stab you in the back."

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.

Now It’s a Census That Could Rip Iraq Apart

By ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — When Iraqis were drafting their Constitution in 2005, the parties could not agree on who would control Kirkuk, the prized oil capital of the north. They couldn’t even agree on who lived in Kirkuk, which is claimed by the region’s Kurds, but also by its Turkmen minority and Sunni Arabs. For that matter, they couldn’t even agree on where Kirkuk was — in Tamim, Erbil, or Sulaimaniya Province.

So the Iraqis punted, inserting Article 140, a clause that called for a national census, followed by a referendum on the status of Kirkuk, all to be held by the end of 2007. What followed were a succession of delays, against a backdrop of sectarian violence and warnings that Kirkuk could blow apart the Shiite-Kurdish alliance that has governed Iraq since the Americans invaded.

Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government, warned two years ago that if “Article 140 is not implemented, then there will be a real civil war.” He’s still waiting.

But so is the threat of civil war, which lurked quietly in the polling places this weekend as residents of Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated areas voted for their regional president and Parliament. Until the status of Kirkuk is clear, nobody really knows how much power those regional officials can wield within the national government, or even whether the Kurds will want to remain part of Iraq.

The problem with settling that is the Kirkuk referendum. There can’t be a referendum until Iraqis figure out who is eligible to vote in Kirkuk, which they can’t do until there’s a census. And any attempt to hold a census in this country may well end up, all by itself, provoking a civil war.

Even now, Sunnis don’t agree that they’re a minority of the nation, and that the Shiites are the majority, though it’s patently obvious. And in Kirkuk, everyone is in denial, one way or another.

Ethnically mixed and awash in oil, Kirkuk has always been something of a numbers game. There are 10 billion barrels of proven oil reserves — 6 percent of the world’s total and 40 percent of Iraq’s — all within commuting distance of downtown Kirkuk. Its fields, though half destroyed, still produce a million barrels of oil a day.

Both Turkmen and Kurds claim to be in the majority; the last reliable estimates, from a 1957 census, gave Turkmen a plurality in the city and Kurds a plurality in the surrounding district, with Arabs second in the countryside and third in the city. In the Saddam Hussein years, the Kurds declared Kirkuk part of their autonomous region of Kurdistan, but the dictator sent the army after the Kurdish guerrillas, known as pesh merga, and held onto the prize. He then set about Arabizing it, forcibly relocating families from the south while evicting Kurds and Turkmen alike.

After 2003, pesh merga troops quickly took control of Kirkuk as the Iraqi Army collapsed. Some local Arabs revolted, nurturing an insurgency that still festers. Others simply remained. Meanwhile, Turkmen appealed to powerful patrons in Turkey that they were undercounted and ignored by everyone, and Turkey came to their aid to make sure the Kurds didn’t get Kirkuk, which supplies much of Turkey’s oil. Only the presence of American troops has kept a lid on things; a brigade is still kept in Kirkuk.

And still there is no census. “The Iraqi government for the last three years, every year they say it will come this year,” says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament.

A date for a census is on the calendar — Oct. 24. But it is subject to ratification by Iraq’s cabinet, the Turkmen have announced that they will boycott it and Arabs in Kirkuk may well do the same.

One proposal for getting past this problem would be to hold a census everywhere but in Kirkuk. If that happened Kirkuk could end up, in effect, a disenfranchised province when the next general national elections are held in January.

Another suggestion is to hold a referendum on Kirkuk without a census, but that would invite a dispute about the validity of the results.

And then there’s the Lebanese solution, the one that so far seems likeliest: just do nothing. The last census in that sectarian hodge-podge of a country was in 1932; no one would dare hold one now, since the groups who would almost certainly lose representation — Maronite Catholics, Druze and Sunni Muslims — would simply go back to war rather than get counted out.

Already, the Kurdish regional government has been defying Baghdad and issuing contracts to develop its oil fields, including some in Kirkuk. The Iraqi government showed its displeasure by moving its 12th Division, some 9,500 troops, up to Kirkuk; there they have been provocatively patrolling into pesh merga-held areas and setting off a series of minor incidents recently.

“It’s very worrisome that these incidents continue to happen,” said Joost Hilterman, of the International Crisis Group. “Perhaps they will be contained, but the stakes are huge.”

For the moment, there are still plenty of American troops around to do the containing, but all American combat troops are due to pull out by next summer. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to broker an agreement, especially when no one is likely to really want it.

Abeer Mohammed contributed reporting.

Opposition Seeks Shift in Power as Iraqi Kurds Vote; High Turnout Reported

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 26, 2009

SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq, July 25 -- An opposition party promising to break the grip of the two ruling parties in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region made a surprisingly strong showing in elections Saturday that appeared certain to shift the region's political arithmetic, opposition and government officials said.

Officials stressed that the results were preliminary and that a more accurate picture might not emerge until Sunday or later. Final results, to be announced in Baghdad, could take a week. But as early returns came in late Saturday, dramatically different moods descended over the opposing camps' headquarters.

Opposition officials said they were outpolling the ruling parties 2 to 1 in some parts of the crucial battlefield of Sulaymaniyah. Government and opposition officials said the opposition also did unexpectedly well in the other key province of Irbil.

"Early results from some of the locations in Sulaymaniyah and some in Irbil are not good," said Barham Salih, a veteran politician who was the ruling parties' candidate for prime minister of the Kurdish region. "It's anxious moments. We will see."

Overall, Salih said, the early results were "surprising."

Voters were choosing a president and a 111-member parliament for the Kurdish region, which has a remarkable degree of independence from Baghdad and is widely seen as a success story in an otherwise turbulent country. Polls were kept open an extra hour across the region's three provinces, and the electoral commission, citing preliminary figures at a news conference in Irbil, said turnout was 78.5 percent.

More than 500 candidates were running for parliamentary seats. Massoud Barzani, the incumbent president and head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two parties that have ruled the region for a generation, faced five challengers. In parliament, Barzani's list of candidates had agreed on a joint slate with the other ruling party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Hardly anyone here Saturday expected Barzani to lose the presidency, and the joint list still seemed likely to capture a majority in parliament. But it faced a spirited challenge by dissidents from Talabani's party running as the Change List, particularly in Sulaymaniyah. Many observers were watching how many seats Change won as a barometer of the ruling parties' staying power and the discontent they must now reckon with. More than 15 seats would be considered a victory for the opposition, analysts and officials said.

Late Saturday, the challengers appeared to be polling far better than that, in what was shaping up as a protest vote that crossed lines of class, party and clan.

"It will certainly change the political landscape in Kurdistan," said Hiwa Osman, an editor and former spokesman for Talabani. "However many seats Change gets, Kurdish politics have changed. It heralds a new era that's going to dictate its own logic."

Nosherwan Mustafa, a founder of Talabani's party and now the head of the Change List, added: "We don't want to change just the faces and the persons. We want to change the political system. We want to separate the political parties from public life."

The two parties have run the Kurdish region since former president Saddam Hussein withdrew Iraqi troops after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and a Kurdish uprising. They fought a bloody civil war in the decade that followed, reconciled and have ruled the region jointly since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, despite lingering tensions.

Over those years, the parties hewed to a formula that exchanged political plurality for stability, bringing prosperity to the Kurdish region and turning Irbil, its capital, into a Middle Eastern boomtown. Success, though, came at a cost. Under a relentless sun Saturday, many voters accused the parties of an almost complete lack of accountability in the control they exerted over most aspects of life, from appointments to lowly government jobs to multibillion-dollar deals.

Corruption was rife, they said, and jobs were few.

The disenchantment has overshadowed the growing battle with the federal government in Baghdad over the disputed boundaries between Kurdish and Arab Iraq and a law on sharing oil revenue and management of the country's sprawling reserves.

"I want a better life," Shwan Khalid, a 60-year-old voting in Irbil, said simply.

Within the parties, there were signs of a growing sense that, even with an electoral victory Saturday, they must make their rule more transparent.

"This is truly a new phase in Kurdish politics," Salih said, as he left the polling station. "It shows that Kurdish politicians can no longer take their voters for granted."

Ruling Kurdish Parties Face Electoral Challenge From New Opposition Bloc

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 25, 2009

SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq -- It is election season in Iraq's Kurdish region, and the campaigning here was perhaps most remarkable for how ordinary it seemed.

Barham Salih, a veteran politician and candidate for the region's prime minister, jostled through the crowd. Whistles of his admirers pierced through blaring songs. Campaign posters offered generic pledges: "What we promise, we deliver." "It even involves kissing babies," Salih shouted, amid a gaggle of girls singing, "The flag of freedom is the flag of Kurdistan." "Kurdish politics have evolved," he added.

They have evolved, but possibly not in the way Salih was hoping. Voters in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq go to the polls Saturday to elect their president and 111-seat parliament. And the election may redraw the political map here. For the first time in a generation, the two ruling Kurdish parties face a real opposition, one that is emerging from within their ranks and is determined to hold the parties accountable.

Its success could mean the undoing of a formula that has made the Kurdish region an example of prosperity to the rest of a turbulent country: the exchange of plurality for stability.

Muhammad Tofiq calls it "a turning point."

A former leader of one of the parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the chain-smoking Tofiq is a candidate on the dissident list, known as Change. "Everybody needs change, and everybody feels they need to change the situation. If we don't change the system, then I think the system will collapse."

More than 500 candidates are running for parliament. Massoud Barzani, the incumbent president and head of the other ruling party, the Kurdish Democratic Party, faces five challengers. But the real tension is between Tofiq's Change list and the two ruling parties, which have agreed on a joint slate for the elections.

No one expects the ruling parties to lose their majority. In fact, the real contest may be largely in Sulaymaniyah, where the Patriotic Union, along with its dissidents, draws its greatest support. But many will be watching how many seats the Change list wins, as a barometer of the ruling parties' staying power and the discontent they must reckon with. More than 15 seats would be considered a victory for the opposition, analysts said.

"Every day they are getting more popularity," said Asos Hardi, a columnist and newspaper editor. "They're the big surprise of the election."

Politics is intimate here, with larger-than-life personalities. Tofiq and the Change list's founder, Nosherwan Mustafa, were longtime confidants and lieutenants of Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and head of the Patriotic Union. At least six other Talabani colleagues have joined their defection.

Still, candidates of the Change list don't seem to differ all that much from the ruling parties in matters of high politics. Both sides endorse a secular Kurdish nationalism that has driven the movement since the days of Barzani's father, the legendary guerrilla leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani. But the burgeoning issues that are proving so dangerous to Iraq's stability -- a fight over a hydrocarbon law to share revenue and manage Iraq's sprawling reserves and negotiations over a disputed border between Kurdish and Arab Iraq -- seem peripheral in this contest. Although Change leaders urge negotiations with Baghdad, they focus more on domestic issues, namely the style of the two ruling parties. "Power corrupts," said Tofiq, who left the Patriotic Union in December 2006.

Even with the prosperity here, many seem disenchanted with entrenched corruption. Complaints are rife about unemployment, poor schools, a lack of housing, shortages of electricity and water, nepotism and the parties' interference in nearly all aspects of life.

"I want to change the dictatorship in my country," said Fareed Saeed, a 25-year-old supporter of the Change list, who gathered with friends in a noisy demonstration of support on a recent night in Sulaymaniyah. Under the watchful eye of police, cars festooned with Change banners blared horns as they careened through streets.

"If they don't respect us, there will be a problem," added a friend, Soran Ali.

Even in Irbil, the freewheeling Kurdish capital whose boom has come to represent the success of Kurdish policies, not everyone is content. "There are people in parliament who shouldn't be in parliament," said Halgurd Abbas, selling honeycombs near Irbil's historic citadel. "They're not serving the people."

Opposition figures seem convinced that the ruling parties will resort to fraud, and even government supporters say some vote rigging is possible.

If it is widespread, some opposition officials have threatened to unleash protests like those that recently shook Iran. But few think the ruling parties need to rig a vote that will almost assuredly deliver them a comfortable majority. As they point out, many of the Change leaders are architects of the system they now denounce -- an irony not lost on many voters. The parties also have the power of incumbency, drawing on their record in delivering Kurds from Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's repression to stability.

"It's true, there's discontent," Farhad Alaaldin, a businessman and supporter of the ruling parties, said as Salih shook hands and worked the crowd. Behind him fluttered banners for the parties' slate, the Kurdistan List. "But when it comes down to it," Alaaldin added, "the Kurdistan List has the most practical program to carry the country forward."

To Hardi, the editor, the contest is simply a modest first step.

"Democracy without challenge, without competition is nothing," he said. "I'm not saying the Change list is going to make Kurdistan a paradise. But I am talking about the real condition of democracy -- that is opposition, real opposition."

Challengers in Kurdish Elections in Iraq Face Uphill Task

By Nada Bakri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 19, 2009

SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq -- It was not yet noon when Hallo Rasch left his squat, two-story house in this eastern Kurdish city and strode down the road to his office, where a group of black-clad widows sat waiting for him in a sweltering room.

He bowed and thanked them for coming.

"If I wanted power and money, I would have pursued that," Rasch told them. "But I am here because I want to work for you, because I care about you and I want to help you get your rights."

Done, he moved to an adjacent room where several more women, men and children waited. He bowed and thanked them, too.

"If I wanted power and money," he started again, reprising his stump speech.

The campaign season is in full swing in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections Saturday. The two groups in Rasch's office represented supporters that even the 58-year-old presidential hopeful acknowledges are scant, in a bid for office that he acknowledges is quixotic.

Rasch is running as an independent against the incumbent, Massoud Barzani, who was elected president of Iraqi Kurdistan in 2005. The pragmatic and cautious Barzani has been at the center of Kurdish politics -- in the region, in the rest of Iraq and in the broader Kurdish homeland -- since succeeding his father, a legendary guerrilla leader, as head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party more than 30 years ago.

Rasch's uphill candidacy is playing out in a region simultaneously considered the most democratic in Iraq and not all that democratic. Two main parties -- Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani -- have for years exercised a stranglehold on the region, dividing between them politics, patronage, investments and business deals.

"My candidacy is upsetting this equation," Rasch said in a recent interview from his house in Sulaymaniyah. "It is good for democracy. We can't call it a democracy with only one candidate running."

Rasch and four other presidential challengers are trying to break the two parties' monopoly. By nearly all accounts, they have little chance of winning. But their supporters contend that an electoral victory is less important than what their candidacies represent: an effort to set the stage for a more democratic political life.

Equally important is the backdrop of growing public dissatisfaction with the two main parties. Complaints of corruption, nepotism, high unemployment rates and low wages are common among party supporters and opposition groups alike.

"During the days of Saddam, we had hope that his regime would be toppled one day," said Mohammed Mahmud, a retired teacher, referring to the late Iraqi dictator. "But today we've lost hope. They are the same people and the same faces, rotating again and again."

If elected, the challengers have promised to fight graft, reform public institutions, provide job opportunities and, above all, instill a sense of accountability. "We don't just have a program. We have a program and a time frame," said Rasch, who heads a list of independent parliamentary candidates. "In three months, we will accomplish so and so, and if not, we will leave."

The newcomers' political inexperience is overshadowed by the sheer prestige of the two dominant parties. Despite the complaints, both draw on a deep loyalty that transcends everyday politics. The parties, though occasionally bitter foes, led the Kurdish region to autonomy after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was still in power, and to prosperity after his fall in 2003.

Irbil, the region's capital, is booming. High-rise buildings and cranes dot the skyline. Sprawling, luxurious housing projects are under construction. Shopping malls are adding a Western look to the city. But beneath the veneer of prosperity, residents say, many struggle daily to make ends meet and to deal with the challenges of inadequate health care and poor schools. Residents of Sulaymaniyah, 100 miles southeast of Irbil, cite water and electricity shortages.

The annual budget for the region is huge -- about 17 percent of Iraq's budget this year -- but many Kurds complain that only the elite benefit from it, widening a gap between rich and poor.

"People are not happy with corruption," said Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister and a candidate for prime minister of the Kurdish region. "That has to change."

Politicians in Baghdad and in the north say Salih may benefit from the old system. If the two parties perform as expected, they said, he appears assured of securing the post of prime minister as the consensus choice. But his tenure could prove tumultuous.

"The opposition will change the current situation," said Abdel-Salam Omed, a 29-year-old lawyer sipping tea at Michko, a popular old cafe in Irbil.

In his office in Sulaymaniyah, Rasch, who was a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan until last year, courted voters with pleas and promises.

The widows were wives of fighters with the Patriotic Union who had died in clashes between the two main Kurdish parties in the 1990s. Among the other group visiting his office were former members of the party who said they had lost faith in their leaders when their pleas for better living conditions went unheeded.

"Don't vote for them," Rasch urged. "If Iraq was a poor country, we would have accepted this, but it is not."

Rasch is known to most people in the Kurdish region as Hallo Ibrahim Ahmed, after his father, Ibrahim Ahmed, a respected Kurdish thinker and a founder of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Several years after its creation, Ahmed broke ranks with the party, joined by his son-in-law, Talabani, who would later form the Patriotic Union. Educated in England and Sweden, Rasch was a professor of computer sciences at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm until 2000, when he moved back to Sulaymaniyah and started a group that worked with young people.

Rasch said his differences with the Patriotic Union stemmed from his attempts to reform the leadership. Party leaders had a different take on his departure: They said he was engaged in a family dispute with his sister, Talabani's wife.

Today, his independent campaign for the regional presidency has an amateurish feel. In his office, black-and-white posters printed on letter-size paper decorate the walls. "The road to Kurdistan is ahead," one reads. "With progress, we will have a brighter future," proclaims another. Money is tight, and campaign workers are scarce. The well-funded and well-run main parties, meanwhile, dominate the news.

"I will lose," Rasch said, before correcting himself: "I may lose."

But, he added: "I want to show people that nobody will kill you if you run. And the next time, people will have better chances."

Kurdish Leaders Warn Of Strains With Maliki

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 17, 2009

IRBIL, Iraq, July 16 -- Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region and the Iraqi government are closer to war than at any time since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the Kurdish prime minister said Thursday, in a bleak measure of the tension that has risen along what U.S. officials consider the country's most combustible fault line.

In separate interviews, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani and the region's president, Massoud Barzani, described a stalemate in attempts to resolve long-standing disputes with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's emboldened government. Had it not been for the presence of the U.S. military in northern Iraq, Nechirvan Barzani said, fighting might have started in the most volatile regions.

The conflict is one of many that still beset Iraq, even as violence subsides and the U.S. military begins a year-long withdrawal of most combat troops from the country. There remains an active sectarian conflict, exacerbated by insurgent groups that seem bent on reigniting Sunni-Shiite carnage. There is also a contest underway in Baghdad to determine the political coalition that will rule the country after next year's elections. But for months, U.S. officials have warned that the ethnic conflict pitting Kurds against Arabs, or more precisely the Kurdish regional government against Maliki's federal government in Baghdad, poses the greatest threat to Iraq's stability and could persist for years.

In an incident June 28 that underscored the trouble, Kurdish residents and militiamen loyal to the Kurdish regional government faced off with an Arab-led Iraqi army unit approaching Makhmur, a predominantly Kurdish town between the troubled northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Kurds believed the unit was trying to enter the town, and for 24 hours, Kurdish leaders, Iraqi officials in Baghdad and the U.S. military negotiated until the Arab-led Iraqi unit was diverted, the Kurdish prime minister said.

The Kurdish militiamen, who are nominally under the authority of the Iraqi army but give their loyalty to the Kurdish regional government, retained control.

"They sent huge forces to be stationed there to control a disputed area, and our message was clear: We will not allow you to do so," the Kurdish prime minister said.

"Our instructions are clear," Massoud Barzani said in a separate interview. Neither the Iraqi army nor the Kurdish militia has "the unilateral right to move into these areas."

U.S. military officials confirmed the incident but offered differing accounts. Asked if the incident was essentially the Kurdish Iraqi army facing down the Arab Iraqi army, Maj. James Rawlinson, a military spokesman in Kirkuk, replied, "Basically."

A spokesman in the Iraqi Defense Ministry blamed the incident on a misunderstanding. He said the army movement was nothing more than a troop rotation. When residents and others saw the Iraqi army unit's arrival, he said, they feared that the government in Baghdad was sending reinforcements. "They turned it into a big issue when it was a simple operation," he said.

The conflict between the government and the Kurdish region is so explosive because it intersects with the most critical disputes that still endanger the country's stability. They include debate over a hydrocarbon law to share revenue and manage Iraq's enormous oil reserves, some of which are located in areas claimed by the Kurdish government; talks to delineate the border between the Kurdish and Arab regions; and efforts to resolve the fate of Kirkuk, an oil-rich city shared by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens.

Complicating the landscape is the bad blood between two of the key players -- Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish president, and Maliki, whose stature has grown dramatically amid the restoration of a semblance of calm and his Dawa party's success in provincial elections in January. Although two delegations from Maliki's party have visited Irbil, the Kurdish capital, since the spring, the two men have not spoken in a year, Barzani said.

"Everything is frozen," said Prime Minister Barzani, a nephew of the president. "Nothing is moving." He warned that the deadlock was untenable. "If the problems are not solved and we're not sitting down together, then the risk of military confrontation will emerge," he said.

Both have blamed the other side for provocations, often with justification. Kurdish officials see in Maliki's actions a recurrence of what they believe is arrogance from Baghdad stretching back generations. Maliki's allies accuse Kurdish leaders of overreaching in their territorial ambitions and stubbornness in talks.

"If things remain the way they are between the two parties, without solutions and without abiding by the constitution, then unfortunately everything is possible," said Ezzedine Dawla, a Sunni Arab lawmaker from Mosul, Iraq's most restive city.

Last month's standoff was at least the third that involved the Kurdish militia, known as the pesh merga, reaching into land that had been administered by Baghdad until the U.S.-led invasion. With U.S. approval after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, Kurdish leaders dispatched pesh merga past the frontier. In predominantly Kurdish regions, they sent administrative staff and their personnel, as well. 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.

The Kurdish prime minister said the two sides narrowly avoided bloodshed in Makhmur.

He said the Iraqi army headed toward Makhmur, set in a wind-swept region of rolling wheat fields, with the intention of staying in the town. The troops were stopped by about 2,000 pesh merga in a standoff that lasted through the night. A flurry of phone calls continued into the next morning. The Kurdish prime minister said he stayed awake until 4 a.m. as the talks unfolded. "What does that tell you about the seriousness of the situation?" he asked.

American officials offered two accounts of what happened. Rawlinson, the spokesman in Kirkuk, said a battalion from Iraq's 7th Division was headed to station itself in Makhmur. At the nearby town of Debaga, it was stopped by soldiers of the 2nd Division, which is composed of pesh merga units. The U.S. military was alerted at 2:30 a.m., he said. "It was the middle of the night, and people got tense," Rawlinson said.

Maj. Derrick Cheng, a spokesman in Tikrit, said Iraq's 7th Division was headed to Nineveh province for an upcoming operation. "The movement fed fears and rumors," he said, and at least 30 vehicles and 100 people blocked the road. Calls were made, and the Iraqi army troops stopped on the road, then took another route, "bypassing Makhmur completely to avoid any potential conflict that might have resulted," he said. Rawlinson later said he would defer to Cheng's version.

Prime Minister Barzani saw the incident as more provocation than misunderstanding. He insisted that Iraqi army commanders were still imbued with a "military-style mentality of being the Big Brother to impose their will." He warned that the Iraqi army was biding its time until it became stronger, perhaps with tanks from the United States.

"Then what do you expect from us?" he asked. "We just sit down and wait to see it?" Asked whether the pesh merga had tanks, too, he replied, "Oh, yes. Yes, we do."

Correspondent Nada Bakri in Baghdad contributed to this report.