Kirkuk Iraq

Across a bleak desert landscape dotted with blazing oil fires on the northern edge of this ancient city, new houses are rising from the sands -- thousands of them in neat rows, mostly unfinished save for their gray cinder-block shells. A startling sight in a country still waiting for any significant reconstruction to occur, it contains clues to the biggest of the unresolved conflicts in Iraq that could yet plunge the country into chaos as U.S. forces withdraw. The homes are being built by Kurds who have poured into the northern province of Kirkuk to reassert, they say, their claim to land from which they were expelled by Saddam Hussein in an effort to create an Arab majority.

Across a bleak desert landscape dotted with blazing oil fires on the northern edge of this ancient city, new houses are rising from the sands -- thousands of them in neat rows, mostly unfinished save for their gray cinder-block shells. A startling sight in a country still waiting for any significant reconstruction to occur, it contains clues to the biggest of the unresolved conflicts in Iraq that could yet plunge the country into chaos as U.S. forces withdraw. The homes are being built by Kurds who have poured into the northern province of Kirkuk to reassert, they say, their claim to land from which they were expelled by Saddam Hussein in an effort to create an Arab majority.

To the list of things best not watched in the making, such as laws and sausages, add Iraqi democracy. A U.S.-brokered leadership convention Saturday selected part of an interim government for this ethnically tense city. But the first steps toward democratic rule could be taken only after the detention of five Arab delegates suspected of ties to Saddam Hussein, an attempt by Kurds to pad their delegation's numbers and accusations that the U.S.

The general with the easy smile has been here before. A little over a decade ago, Saddam Hussein dispatched him to this province where the oil wells belch orange flames day and night. Now another Iraqi Arab leader has sent him north, in a battle of wills over Kirkuk that has awakened the past and raised fear of new fighting in the territory that the Kurds consider their Jerusalem.

Beyond the deserted Iraqi army bunkers and mud-splattered pictures of Saddam Hussein, past bullet casings and the cracked gas mask of a retreating soldier, the green hills turn arid, and an oil well burns in distant Kirkuk. The well flickers like a torch in the haze, and Bahez Abdulbaqi wants to go toward it. But he can't -- not yet. He and tens of thousands of other Kurds exiled from Kirkuk by the Iraqi regime over the last decade want to reclaim what was taken.

From the hills, pickup trucks loaded with men and Kalashnikov rifles sped down the mine-speckled highway, dropping onto the flatlands, zooming past oil slicks and curls of barbed wire and screeching into this city, where gunfire echoed overhead and the dream of tens of thousands of Kurds stood shining in dusty heat. "Kirkuk is liberated." "Kirkuk is liberated." The battle was barely finished, but the trucks kept coming.

American officials, regional leaders and residents are increasingly worried that this northern oil-rich city could develop into a third front in the country's civil war just as additional U.S. troops arrive in Baghdad and Al Anbar province as reinforcements for battles there. Al Qaeda-linked fighters recently have surfaced here, launching a wave of lethal attacks, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

The general with the easy smile has been here before. A little over a decade ago, Saddam Hussein dispatched him to this province where the oil wells belch orange flames day and night. Now another Iraqi Arab leader has sent him north, in a battle of wills over Kirkuk that has awakened the past and raised fear of new fighting in the territory that the Kurds consider their Jerusalem.

Surrounded by half-built housing developments, crowded tenements and congested roads, the tiny storefront office of Zakariya Real Estate is booming with business. Maps of subdivisions hang like gridded wallpaper. Shelves display tile samples and colorful pictures of modular homes, priced to fit a range of budgets. "Seventy percent of our clients are Kurds who were displaced by Saddam Hussein," proprietor Zakariya Tahir Ali said in a recent interview. "Now they are coming back."

The struggle for the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk sabotaged another effort by Iraq's parliament to approve a law Sunday allowing crucial local elections this year, a stalemate that also raised questions about whether major Shiite and Sunni parties were deliberately stalling on sending people to the polls. Despite a meeting of senior Iraqi leaders and U.S. and U.N. officials seeking a compromise on Kirkuk, members of parliament failed even to muster a quorum for Sunday's emergency session.

The struggle for the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk sabotaged another effort by Iraq's parliament to approve a law Sunday allowing crucial local elections this year, a stalemate that also raised questions about whether major Shiite and Sunni parties were deliberately stalling on sending people to the polls. Despite a meeting of senior Iraqi leaders and U.S. and U.N. officials seeking a compromise on Kirkuk, members of parliament failed even to muster a quorum for Sunday's emergency session.

Three Iraqi soldiers died in a roadside bombing Friday in the northern city of Kirkuk, where relations remained frayed among Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens after a suicide bombing and ethnic clashes early in the week. The bomb targeted a convoy of Iraqi army vehicles, killing three soldiers and wounding two, the military said.

Iraq's parliament ended its summer term Wednesday without passing legislation setting up provincial elections this year, forcing the government to call an emergency session for the weekend. However, a positive outcome remains far from certain. Parliament speaker Mahmoud Mashadani said he would convene a special meeting of lawmakers Sunday to resolve the impasse over the election legislation, which will help decide the status of the oil-rich, ethnically divided city of Kirkuk. U.S.

Kurdish lawmakers walked out of parliament Tuesday in protest over a vote on conditions for Iraq's provincial elections that called for ethnic groups to share power in Kirkuk, an oil-rich city that Kurds consider part of their territory. The walkout, which included shouting and accusations of a conspiracy against Kurds, appeared to reduce the chances that the elections would be held this year. There is no law setting out election procedures. U.S.

Kurdish lawmakers agreed Wednesday to a six-month delay of a referendum on whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk should join the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan or remain under Iraqi central government control. The delay had been expected because of problems in arranging the vote, which was supposed to have been held by the end of the year. A census to determine who would be eligible to vote, for instance, has not yet been done.

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.

A suicide attacker detonated an explosives-laden belt Tuesday outside a bank in the divided northern city of Kirkuk, authorities said, killing at least 20 people and injuring 83 as another bloody day unfolded in Iraq. The victims of the latest carnage in Kirkuk, an ethnic battleground claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens, included retirees collecting their subsistence pensions and child laborers on the busy street.

Iraq's parliament Saturday ordered an inquiry into the delay of a referendum over whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk will join the northern Kurdish semiautonomous region. The Iraqi Constitution requires that a referendum on the future status of the city be held by year's end to determine whether it will remain under Baghdad's control, become part of Iraqi Kurdistan or gain autonomy from both.

Two U.S. soldiers were charged with premeditated murder and their battalion commander was relieved of duty in connection with the death of an Iraqi, the U.S. military said Thursday. Army Sgt. 1st Class Trey A. Corrales of San Antonio and Spc. Christopher P. Shore of Winder, Ga., had been charged this week with one count of premeditated murder in an incident that occurred June 23 near the oil-rich northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, the military said in a statement. The statement said that Lt. Col.