Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq

MAKHMUR, Iraq, June 17, by Dexter Filkins — Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.

The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.

The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy.

In Baghdad, American officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region. The Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands, but they want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability.

But thousands of Kurds appear to be ignoring the American orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at the camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands.

The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps.

American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.

"The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. "They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, `You don't own anything here anymore.' "

Ten years ago, Mr. Qadam said, Iraqi officials forced him to turn over his home in the southern city of Diwaniya and move north to the formerly Kurdish village of Khanaqaan, where he received a free parcel of farmland. Now, like the thousands of Arabs encamped in the parched plains northeast of Baghdad, Mr. Qadam, his wife and three children have no home to return to.

The push by the Kurds into the formerly Arab-held lands, while driven by the returnees themselves, appears to be backed by the Kurdish government, which has long advocated a resettlement of the disputed area. Despite an explicit prohibition in the Iraqi interim constitution, Kurdish officials are setting up offices and exercising governmental authority in the newly settled areas.

The shift in population is raising fears in Iraq that the Kurds are trying to expand their control over Iraqi territory at the same time they are suggesting that they may pull out of the Iraqi government.

American officials say they are trying to fend off pressure from Kurds to move their people back into the area. "There is a lot of pressure in the Kurdish political context to bring the people who were forced out back into their hometowns," said a senior American official in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "What we have tried to do so far, through moral suasion, is to get the Kurds to recognize that if they put too much pressure on Kirkuk and other places south of the Green Line, they could spark regional and national instability."

But local occupation officials appear in some areas to have accepted the flow of Kurds back to their homes. According to minutes of a recent meeting of occupation officials and relief workers in the northern city of Erbil, an American official said the Americans would no longer oppose Kurds' crossing the Green Line, as long as the areas they were moving into were uncontested.

And Kurdish and American officials say the occupation authority has been financing projects here in Makhmur, a formerly Arab area recently resettled by Kurds.

The biggest potential flash point is Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. Kurdish leaders want to make the city, with its vast oil deposits, the Kurdish regional capital and resettle it with Kurds who were driven out in the 1980's.

To make the point, some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.

"The Kurds are pushing, pushing," said Pascal Ishu Warda, the minister for displaced persons and migration. "We have to set up a system to deal with these people who have been thrown out of their homes."

To treat the burgeoning crisis, American officials last month approved spending $180 million to compensate Arab families thrown out of their homes; earlier they set up a similar program, with similar financing, for the Kurds.

The Americans have distributed handbills in Arab and Kurdish camps calling on Iraqis to file claims and produce ownership documents.

But some Iraqi and American officials say those claims could take months or even years to sort out, and will provide little immediate help to the families, Arab and Kurdish, languishing in the camps.

Some people said American officials waited too long — more than a year — to set up a mechanism to resettle displaced Iraqis. By then, they said, the Kurds, tired of waiting, took matters into their own hands.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, who has advised the Kurdish leadership, said he recommended a claim system for Kurds and Arabs to Pentagon officials in late 2002. Nothing was put in place on the ground until last month, he said, long after the Kurds began to move south of the Green Line.

"The C.P.A. adopted a sensible idea, but it required rapid implementation," Mr. Galbraith said. "They dropped the ball, and facts were created on the ground. Of course people are going to start moving. If the political parties are encouraging this, that, too, is understandable."

Kurdish leaders say they are merely taking back land that was stolen from them over four decades. Publicly, the Kurdish leaders say that they are committed to working within the Iraqi state as long as their federal rights are assured, and that no Arabs have been forced from their homes.

But in the villages and camps where the Kurds have returned, Kurdish leaders are more boastful. They say they pushed the Arab settlers out as part of a plan to expand Kurdish control over the territory.

"We made sure there wasn't a single Arab left here who came as part of the Arabization program," said Abdul Rehman Belaf, the mayor of Makhmur, a large area in northern Iraq that was emptied of Arabs and is now being resettled by Kurds.

Mr. Belaf is a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish political parties active on the other side of the Green Line; virtually all of Makhmur's officials belong to the party, too.

"We haven't stopped yet," he said. "We have more land to take back."

Before the war began in 2003, Arab settlers worked the fields in the areas surrounding Makhmur. Most of the settlers were brought north by successive waves of Mr. Hussein's campaign to populate the north with Arabs, killing or expelling tens of thousands of Kurds.

Exactly what happened when Mr. Hussein's army collapsed is disputed. Kurdish officials say the Arab settlers fled with the army. No expulsions were necessary, they said.

But some Arab families, like those who settled around Makhmur long ago, have largely been left alone.

"Saddam's people asked me to take Kurdish lands in 1987, and I said no," said Salim Sadoon al-Sabawi, a 60-year-old Arab farmer in the village where his family has lived for generations. "When the Kurds returned, they left me alone. There was no violence. We are like brothers."

Asked what the Kurds did to the Arabs who migrated into the area recently, Mr. Sabawi paused, and his son, Arkan, broke in. "They threatened people with death," Arkan said. "They told them to get out."

"Let's be honest," Mr. Sabawi told his son. "The Arabs who left all came here as part of the Arabization program. They kicked out the Kurds. It wasn't their land to begin with."

Mr. Belaf, the Kurdish mayor, said that before the war, the area around Makhmur was 80 percent Arab. A year later, he said, it is 80 percent Kurdish, as it used to be.

As hard as life is for Arabs in refugee camps, it seems to be hardly better for the Kurds displacing them.

Adnan Karim, 34, said his home was burned by the Iraqi Army in 1987. He began a life on the run after that, fighting Mr. Hussein as a pesh merga, marrying, having children and moving from one place to another. Last year he returned to an old military camp near Kirkuk, Qara Hanjir, hoping the new government would set aside some land for returnees like him. Nearly a year later, he is still waiting in a camp.

Mr. Karim said he was trying to provide for his wife and three children with a $40-a-month pesh merga pension and money from odd jobs. But much of his money is spent buying water from a truck.

Watching his children play in the dirt around him, Mr. Karim, a bedraggled man, gave in to despair.

"I have spent my whole life this way," he said, "just as you see me." Siunday New York Times, 20 June