WASHINGTON, April 21 (UPI) -- The U.S. Army officer in charge of Kirkuk and the surrounding regions said Friday the Iraqi government should move quickly to dampen ethnic tensions there.
The oil-rich area is split between Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen, all of whom are vying for political power, said Col. David Gray, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, which has been in Kirkuk for the last six months.
"Right now we haven't seen any widespread violence regarding this issue, but I believe it's clearly one that needs to be dealt with quickly for this part of Iraq to move on and be peaceful overall," Gray said.
The area was "Arabized" by Saddam Hussein as he forced Kurds and Turkmen out of their homes. Some 120,000 of the displaced have come back, many of them squatting in squalid makeshift camps throughout the city. There will be a census taken in 2007 to determine the ethnic makeup of the city. If it is dominated by Kurds, it is likely to be politically joined to "Kurdistan," the area that covers the northern quarter of Iraq.
"The oil infrastructure up here is very, very important, not only to this region but to Iraq itself. And so the tensions over that, control of that and control of Kirkuk itself -- it has great symbolism and meaning to every one of the ethnic groups here. It does cause a great deal of friction," said Gray Friday in a videoconference with Pentagon reporters. "Once the government's seated, I anticipate there'll be a lot of pressure to conduct that census, and there will be multiple plans for who's a resident and at what point were they a resident, to manipulate the numbers one way or another."
Insurgent groups are trying to deepen the rift between ethnic groups.
"They are using both their terrorist tactics as well as propaganda and information campaigns to try and keep things stirred up here, trying to cleave the ethnic -- or to reinforce ethnic tensions rather than to bring it together," he said.
