northern iraq, kurd, kurds, kurdish

For months, Turkish political and military leaders had warned that in the event that Kurdish irregular forces entered the northern Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, Ankara would feel compelled to intervene. When it came to crunch time, however, Ankara blinked.

Kurdish forces entered Kirkuk on April 10. Yet Turkish officials, after some instant diplomatic huddling with US Secretary of State Colin Powell, refrained from carrying out the threat to send troops into northern Iraq. Instead, Powell helped broker an arrangement under which Ankara committed to dispatching 15 military observers to monitor the Kurdish withdrawal from Kirkuk. The withdrawal was virtually complete by April 13, according to media reports.

Ankara's reticence on the northern Iraq issue is understandable. Turkey's fragile economic condition pushes Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government to seek accommodation with the United States. Turkey's refusal early in March to allow a full-scale US military deployment had cost the country billions of dollars in economic aid. [For additional information see the Eurasia Insight archive]. With foreign and internal debt at a massive $160 billion, Turkey can ill afford to risk losing the smaller $1 billion package that Washington is offering on the condition that Turkish troops stay out of Iraq.

A recent poll showed a majority of Turks oppose intervention. However, not everyone is amenable to non-intervention arguments based on economic pragmatism. Many Turks expect Ankara to still defend the interests of their ethnic cousins in Iraq, the Turkoman. Differing expectations within Turkey on the northern Iraq issue could still emerge as a source of international tension in the coming weeks.

On April 10, large crowds gathered outside the Ankara headquarters of the Iraqi Turkoman Front (ITF), a strongly pro-Turkish group representing Iraq's Turkish-speaking minority, to protest the alleged killing of 50 Turkoman in Kirkuk. They also called bay for Turkish intervention. "The clear aim of this [Kurdish] incursion is to expel Turkoman [residents] from Kirkuk," ITF's Ankara spokesman, Cuneyt Mengu, told CNN-Turk television.

The nature of the protests is indicative of the dilemma that northern Iraq poses for Turkey. Strategically, the Turkish establishment's overriding fear is that the oil fields of Kirkuk and Mosul could provide the economic backbone to Iraqi Kurdish dreams of an independent state, separatist dreams which Turkish officials say could rub off on Turkey's own Kurdish minority. [For background information see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The oilfields around Kirkuk produce about 40 percent of Iraq's oil.

In practice, analysts say, Ankara's policy towards northern Iraq has undergone a very recent transformation. "After 1991, Turkey's Iraqi policy was two-pronged," says Tarik Oguzlu, an expert on Iraqi-Turkish relations at Bilkent University in Ankara. It exerted considerable influence over newly autonomous northern Iraq, and backed Saddam as guarantor of regional stability, Oguzlu said. But as war loomed after September 11th, "Turkey upped its support for the Turkoman as a means of countering the growing power of the Kurdish authorities there."

Turkey insists its concern for the Turkoman in Iraq is no different from its support during the 1980s and 1990s for ethnic Turks in Bulgaria oppressed by the Communist authorities then in power in Sophia. But Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is skeptical of such an argument. "Don't forget most Turkoman live in areas until now controlled by Saddam [Hussein]," he said. "What did Turkey do for Turkoman affected by his Arabization campaigns around Kirkuk and Mosul in the 1980s and 1990s? Zip. This is purely political."

Turkoman leaders are also wary of ITF expressions of concern. "Do we have to open our umbrellas here just because it's raining in Ankara," asks Walid Sharika, leader of the Iraqi Turkoman Brotherhood Party in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil. Describing the ITF as "a creature of Turkish diplomacy," he believes Turkey's support for it is exacerbating ethnic tensions in Iraq.

Nowhere are those tensions likely to be higher than in Kirkuk, which Iraqi Kurdish leaders characterize as the "Jerusalem of the Kurds." Turkish sensitivities over the city boiled over last August, when Iraqi Kurds proposed it as the capital of their portion of a new, federal Iraq. Turkey responded by closing its borders to the semi-illicit oil trade propping up northern Iraq's UN-controlled economy. "Northern Iraq," Turkey's then defense minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu asserted, "was forcibly separated from Turkey during the War of Liberation" after 1920.

Erdogan's government seems less tempted by irredentism than its nationalist predecessor. But there is still the vexed and highly political question of Kirkuk and Iraq's demographic structure. Extrapolating from figures from the 1957 Iraqi census, the last time Iraqis were asked to specify their ethnicity, ITF insists Turkoman today number 3 million. The group also claims that Kirkuk is historically a Turkish city. While a significant portion of Turkey's media seems to accept such claims, experts are less sure.

Turkoman may have been 9 percent of the population in 1957, some say, but lower birth rates and Saddam's Arabization campaigns have taken their toll since then. "My eyebrows start to go up when estimates rise much above 1 million," Clawson said.

The danger of such exaggerations is that they risk upsetting the post-war stabilization and repatriation process in Mosul and Kirkuk. For decades, both cities have been subject to massive Arabization campaigns. In the last ten years alone, the Washington-based Human Rights Watch estimates that 120,000 people, mainly Kurds, were forced to flee to Kurdish controlled northern Iraq. Now many want to return.

Despite twice warning that "we will not allow armed Kurds, or civilians, to destroy the demographic situation in the Kirkuk region," Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, along with the military leadership, has so far shown restraint. What remains to be seen, however, is how Turkey intends to combine support for the Turkoman with its stated willingness to cooperate with a US-led commission to address the property claims of families displaced under Saddam.