Kurds are on the move again in northern Iraq but this time they're not fleeing. As many as 500 Kurds a day streamed into Kirkuk last month in a land rush that took city officials and U.S. troops by surprise. The influx, which has slowed in September, leaves the nascent city government struggling to cope with dozens of refugee camps on once vacant patches of ground. Migrants like 60-year-old Tarek Salman Dawoud say they are reclaiming the ancestral city they were forced to flee under Saddam Hussein's campaigns to make Kirkuk an Arab city and control its oil wealth. ''This is our land. We've been here for thousands of years,'' Dawoud said, standing with other Kurds who shouted in assent. Just behind them, a sea of dusty canvas tents stretched across a few square miles of a former Iraqi air base.
However, U.S. officials say the surge is timed to establish residency ahead of elections slated for January. A strong showing for Kurdish leaders could shift Kirkuk province which sits atop 6 percent of the world's known oil reserves into the orbit of the Kurdish autonomous regions to the north. Arab migrations have shaped this area since oil was discovered here in the 1930s but picked up momentum in the mid-1970s, when Saddam began asserting control over the government. The New York-based Human Rights Watch estimates that 250,000 Kurds, Turkmen and Assyrians were expelled from Kirkuk and other parts of northern Iraq in the 1970s alone. A 2001 U.N. census in the autonomous Kurdish regions counted more than 800,000 displaced Iraqis. |