Word: northerners
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...allies. Iraqi Kurds are cheering the arrival of their guerrilla fighters in Kirkuk Thursday, and the same news has Turkey's leaders confronting their worst nightmare about the war next door. The U.S. had promised Turkey that the Kurdish fighters would be kept out of the northern oil town, and that, indeed, had been Washington's orders to the guerrillas working with U.S. Special Forces to confront Saddam's northern strongholds. But once Saddam's regime began to collapse, the Kurdish fighters took the gap and drove all the way into Kirkuk...
...Iraq's Kurds and Turkey, the northern oil town has always been the key prize in the battle to overthrow Saddam. It was their desire to prevent the Kurds capturing Kirkuk and the other key northern oil town, Mosul, that led Turkey to demand that the U.S. agree to the deployment of tens of thousands of Turkish troops in northern Iraq. Failure to reach such an agreement was a significant factor contributing to Turkey's refusal to grant permission for the U.S. to launch a ground invasion from its territory. But Turkey has since been cooperating with...
...Kirkuk is ground-zero of both Turkish and Kurdish ambitions in northern Iraq. The Turks' primary concern is to counter the ambitions of Iraq's Kurdish nationalists - although the Kurdish parties that have governed the section of northern Iraq liberated from Baghdad in 1991 officially deny they plan to seek an independent state, that goal has long been an organizing principle of local Kurdish politics. And Turkey, fearful that even formalized Kurdish autonomy in Iraq would stoke secessionist passions among its own Kurdish minority, has threatened to send its own troops into the region to keep a lid on Kurdish...
...recent Afghanistan campaign offered an unhappy precedent of Washington managing the competing claims of rival allies. Mindful of the concerns of Pakistan, the Bush administration had implored the Northern Alliance (traditionally backed by Pakistan's enemies) to stay out of the Afghan capital, Kabul, after the Taliban fled. But in the heat of battle, there was no way of stopping the key U.S. proxy force from pursuing its own agenda against Washington's wishes, helping set the stage for the current unstable equilibrium in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Now, the Kurdish "peshmerga" appear to have copied the Northern Alliance strategy...
...suppressed a potentially fearsome array of regional, political and ethnic tensions, many of which can be used to help bring it down. But the nightmare facing any occupying power is how easily it can find itself satisfying no one and making enemies of erstwhile allies. The evolving situation in northern Iraq right now is a reminder that winning the peace in Iraq will almost inevitably be harder than winning...