Word: baghdads
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...view of the war in Iraq that I've read; certainly, it's the best written. But it also raises, implicitly, the mystery of our qualified success there. Finkel follows an Army battalion through the 2007 surge, as it attempts to secure a particularly nasty and neglected area of Baghdad. This was the first attempt to implement the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, and the troops have their doubts about the new tactics. Major Brent Cummings, the second-in-command, reads the doctrine and is perplexed by sentences like "Sometimes, the more force is used, the less effective...
...vote had been delayed for weeks over the apparently parochial issue of electoral lists for the contested northern city of Kirkuk. Oil-rich Kirkuk, claimed by Iraq's Kurds as an integral part of their autonomous semistate but administered by the Arab-dominated government in Baghdad, has long been a potential flash point in the uneasy relationship between the Kurdish autonomous region and Baghdad. Sunday's compromise, which allows recent Kurdish returnees (much of the city's Kurdish population had been expelled by Saddam Hussein, precisely to cement Arab control there) to vote in Kirkuk but gives parliament the authority...
...that it has remained largely stable owes much to the cosmopolitan character of the city's native population, and the city's heroic local police force led by three generals - a Kurd, an Arab and a Turkoman. The relative calm in Kirkuk may also be a vindication of the Baghdad government's foot-dragging over the question of whether to turn Kirkuk over to Kurdish control. (See pictures of Iraq's revival...
...Iraqis settled there by Saddam as part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. After such normalization, according to the constitution, Kirkuk - and other areas with large Kurdish populations in four Iraqi governorates - should then hold a referendum to determine whether they should continue to be administered by Baghdad or be ruled by the Kurdistan Regional Government. It may have been constitutionally mandated, but the idea of forcibly resettling Kirkuk's Arab population was unthinkable while Iraq was in the grip of a Sunni-Arab insurgency and a Shi'ite-Sunni civil war, and that became the excuse...
...postponing the normalization process in Kirkuk envisaged by the constitution, and Kurdish politicians have begun to suspect that al-Maliki intends to use the central government's growing strength to push back against gains won by the Kurds in the aftermath of the invasion, when the government in Baghdad was weak. The central government has already blocked oil pumped under the auspices of the Kurdish regional government from being exported in Iraqi pipelines, even though revenue from the sales would have been shared with the central government...