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12/31/2004:

"Iraq's Kurds Enjoy Self-Rule and Are Trying to Keep It"

ERBIL, Iraq - Even at night, on a busy thoroughfare in this Kurdish city, the sedan is an easy mark for the Kalashnikov-toting police at the checkpoint. It has Baghdad license plates and, more alarmingly, Arabs in the front seat. "What are you doing here?" the police demand, motioning the car to the side.

It was a routine exchange, but one that reveals how far Erbil and the entire Kurdish region have drifted from the rest of Iraq and toward an informal but unmistakable autonomy that Kurdish leaders are determined to preserve.

...The Kurds have veto power over most laws passed by the central government in Baghdad and have their own 80,000-member military, the pesh merga, whose troops are far better disciplined and skilled than most of their new Iraqi counterparts.

...The Kurds' desire for autonomy promises to tear at the unity of the new Iraq that the election planned for late January is supposed to help build. The voters are to choose a legislature to write a new constitution. But some Iraqi leaders have already expressed resentment at the most important safeguard of Kurdish independence: the power to veto the new constitution.

For now Kurdish officials appear unwilling to coexist on anything but their own terms, which means bolstering their autonomy and preventing outside interference, whether from Baghdad or another country.

Hamid Afandi, the minister of pesh merga for the Kurdish regional government based in Erbil, outlined one possible strategy: take control of Kirkuk - the disputed oil city north of Baghdad, where Kurds are even now wresting land from the Arabs who were settled there by Saddam Hussein - grab a far larger share of Kirkuk's oil revenue than the Kurds now get and use that to triple the size of the pesh merga force.
Full Article: nytimes.com