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Iraq's Kurds, Arabs face choice: settle or fight
Thu Jun 4, 2009 12:00am EDT
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By Tim Cocks
KHANAQIN, Iraq (Reuters) - In a lively market town hotly disputed between Iraqi Kurds and Baghdad's Arab-led government, Khalil Ibrahim points at the ground under his feet to illustrate what he thinks the dispute is about: oil.
"Baghdad wants the oil here -- we're probably standing on some of it right now -- and that's the real reason they won't let us Kurds rule ourselves," said the retired Kurdish soldier, 58, before crossing the road to a gaudy ice-cream bar in majority Kurdish Khanaqin, on the edge of Iraq's violent Diyala province.
Along a fuzzy seam dividing central Iraq from the largely autonomous enclave of Kurdistan, a row is bubbling over which authority owns this patchwork of Kurd and Arab neighborhoods, river-fed palm groves and multi-billion-barrel oil fields.
Iraqi Kurdistan is believed to have up to 45 billion of Iraq's 118 billion barrels of oil reserves. If all disputed areas were included in the Kurdish region, its share might go up to 65 billion barrels, Kurdish officials say.
Nowhere has the row come closer to violence than Khanaqin, near the Iranian border, where local commanders had to defuse a standoff between the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces last August to prevent it degenerating into a shootout.
Yet a breakthrough this month on a parallel dispute over oil exports from Kurdistan -- which officially began this week despite Baghdad's rejection of contracts the Kurds have signed with oil firms -- has raised hope the disagreements are not so intractable.
The stakes are high. Officials and analysts see the dispute as the biggest long-term threat to stability as U.S. troops prepare to end combat operations by the end of Aug 31. 2010, under orders from President Barack Obama.
"They will come to a stage when the Americans withdraw where a choice has to be made: fight or pursue peace," said Joost Hiltermann, International Crisis Group Middle East director.
"It's going to be very difficult to prevent a fight. Once you take the American forces out, without having settled the major disputes, it's going to fall apart."
LAND, OIL, POWER
The struggle over land, oil and power has left much foreign investment in northern Iraq's oil sector in limbo.
Kurdish officials last month heralded an $8 billion plan to export natural gas via the Nabucco pipeline to Europe, keen to free itself of dependence on Russia. Baghdad rejected the deal.
Fields in the disputed areas are among those on offer by the Oil Ministry in bidding rounds, but the Kurds warn they might reject and block any deals on which they are not consulted.
In the desert area around Khanaqin, which has several oil wells none of which are yet producing, the dispute has also compounded the problem of a still-active Sunni Arab insurgency.
Al Qaeda and other militants exploit tensions between Peshmerga and Iraqi forces by hiding in 'no man's land' areas the two sides avoid to avert clashes. Diyala and Nineveh, another mixed Arab-Kurd province, are Iraq's most violent areas. Continued...
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