KIRKUK, IRAQ — A staunch Arab nationalist, Ismail Hadidi once dreaded the possibility that his ethnically diverse city would be swallowed up by the neighboring semiautonomous Kurdish region and cut off from the Baghdad government.
But the provincial councilman is also a practical man. And when he compares the chaos and violence in the Iraqi capital with the prosperity and peace next door in the three-province Kurdistan Regional Government area, teaming up with the Kurds doesn't seem like such a bad idea. He's even considering buying some property in the Kurdish enclave.
"The people of Kirkuk were afraid of this," said Hadidi, a Sunni Arab tribal leader. "But given the situation, I believe most people will move toward being part of Kurdistan, because what the people want above all is security."
Uncertainty clouds Iraq's future, but not so much here. The Kurdish region's exploding economic and political power has begun to shape northern Iraq's reality.
Oil-rich and ethnically diverse Kirkuk, the capital of Tamim province, was billed as northern Iraq's most contested prize in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its fate was to be resolved by the new Iraqi Constitution, which instead mandated a referendum. But that hasn't happened yet. And now, just as medieval peasants clung to local warlords who could protect them from looters and bandits, this gritty city's war- and poverty-ravaged population has begun gravitating toward the Kurds, who are hungrily reclaiming territory lost to successive waves of Arabization.
Few doubt what will happen when U.S. forces exit. Grown strong and rich in their enclave of more than 16,000 square miles, Iraq's Kurds will rush to annex Tamim and other areas in Diyala and Nineveh provinces they have laid claim to, which could double the size of their de facto state.
"The Kurdistan region will include all parts of Iraq that are historically and geographically part of Kurdistan," predicted Omer Fattah, deputy premier of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is based in Irbil.
Hussein and leaders of earlier Arab-dominated Baghdad governments sought to upend the oil-rich region's ethnic balance by forcibly evicting tens of thousands of Kurds and other non-Arab minorities and replacing them with Arab settlers. A referendum on whether Kirkuk and its outlying province will join the Kurdish region is scheduled to take place by year's end.
