Kuwait Times

Published Date: September 27, 2008

KHANAQIN, Iraq: In a mirror image of Kirkuk, the Kurdish town of Khanaqin near the border with Iran that holds sizeable oil reserves is being exposed to ethnic tensions and rival territorial claims.

The local Kurdish political leadership warns that the area could see an ethnic explosion, as they call for Khanaqin to join the adjoining autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq.

They want to rebuild the town through the international oil boom. "What we are telling the government is simple. Implement the constitutional provision for a referendum for people in Khanaqin to decide their future," said Mala Bakhtyar, a senior member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the Kurdish political party of Iraq's President Jalal Talabani.

If they don't do that, then there will be political trouble and military trouble. Yes, there will be an explosion of violence," he told an AFP journalist touring the town in Diyala province.

Along the 170-kilometre (110-mile) road from Baghdad to Khanaqin are grim reminders of trouble.

Bombed wreckage of cars and trucks and a smouldering pile of debris were seen on Wednesday during a drive along what is regarded as one of the most dangerous highways in Iraq.

Despite regular checkpoints manned by the Iraqi security forces and police, attacks blamed on Al-Qaeda fighters take place on a regular basis.

However, Khanaqin itself has no Iraqi forces. Iraq's flag is flown by the Kurdish peshmerga fighters alongside their own flags at checkpoints and outside mini-camps.

All government buildings and private homes fly the Kurdish flag. The Kurdish tricolor-red, green and white, with a rising star in the middle-is also seen outside most homes along the main highway to Khanaqin.

Talks are underway between the PUK, a key coalition partner in the KRG, and the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to end the simmering tension between federal forces and Kurdish troops known as peshmerga.

The Kurds here are mainly Shiite Muslims. A peshmerga field commander himself, Bakhtyar led Kurdish fighters to take control over this town after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

When the peshmerga arrived here there were no Iraqi forces," he told AFP in an interview at his tightly guarded single-storey office located along the main road.

There were only 36 coalition (US) troops at the time. I came with 4,000 to 5,000 of our troops," he said. He argues they maintain better security in Khanaqin, part of the Arab-dominated Diyala, than provided elsewhere in Iraq.

US forces battling insurgents in the region have reportedly urged both sides not to escalate tensions or compound security worries in restive Diyala.

Fighters from Al-Qaeda in Iraq have not been able to use Khanaqin as a base because of the peshmerga, unlike in the rest of Diyala, which is regarded as one of the last strongholds of the jihadists, Bakhtyar said. --- AFP