MOSUL, IRAQ — For decades, Arab soldiers and Kurdish guerrillas battled by gun, by mortar, by rocket. Now, elections are the latest weapon in the struggle for land and power in Iraq's north.
The ballot box has become a battleground in Nineveh province, a high-stakes combat zone where Kurds and Arabs will face off over the future shape of the country -- and confront each other over the past. The outcome could set the stage for another round of violence, which both sides insist that they do not want.
"In the last few years, almost 2,000 Kurds have been killed in Mosul," Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani told The Times this month. "We have not responded in the same manner and we have not reacted in any act of vengeance; but of course everything will have its limits."
The rival ethnicities are grappling with the legacy of Saddam Hussein's policy of displacing Kurds to create an Arab majority here. Whereas the Kurds believe they are correcting a historical wrong, Arabs see humiliation. They accuse the Kurds of harassment, arbitrary arrests and torture in the run-up to the election Saturday.
How the struggle plays out here, where Arabs clearly outnumber Kurds, will go a long way toward determining the outcome in other disputed territories, such as the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, where no side has such an outright majority.
"If these problems are not solved, there will be some extremism here in [Nineveh], on the Kurdish side and Arab side," Deputy Gov. Kharso Goran warned, sitting in his riverside office in the provincial capital, Mosul, flanked by the flags of Iraq, Kurdistan and his Kurdistan Democratic Party.
The Kurds have governed their own region, Kurdistan, since 1991 and have pushed to expand the area to include the northern and eastern belt around Mosul and the Sinjar region of western Nineveh. That has exacerbated Kurdish-Arab tensions, which U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker recently labeled one of the emerging challenges of the year.
"The people of these areas do not want to belong to Kurdistan," said Sheik Abdullah Humaidi Yawar, a senior leader in Hadba, a Sunni Arab nationalist movement. Yawar is considered the front-runner in the Nineveh election.
"They want to stay included in Nineveh," he said. "The Kurdish parties have proven to the people for the last five years that they are racist like the former regime."
