Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters leave the Northern Iraqi key oil hub of Kirkuk today. (Reuters Photo)

US troops move in as Kurds prepare to quit Kirkuk

By Mike Collett-White, Reuters, 4/11/03

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KIRKUK, Iraq, April 11 (Reuters) -- U.S. soldiers began securing oilfields and the airport in the key northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Friday as lawlessness and tensions between ethnic groups appeared to be on the rise.

Kurdish "peshmerga" fighters in the city since Thursday, when Iraqi forces fled, have agreed to leave, but a senior Kurdish official said this would only happen when U.S. troops could ensure stability -- a task that could take days.

"Peshmerga from outside the city will go out as soon as there are sufficient numbers of U.S. military personnel," said Barham Saleh, prime minister of one of two main factions controlling the Kurd-majority enclave in northern Iraq.

"More and more American troops are coming in."

But, by Friday evening, they were only in evidence in strength at an oilfield outside the city and at the airport.

Reuters correspondents saw around 20 U.S. troops securing Kirkuk's huge oilfields and a further 50-60 picking their way carefully across the grounds of a military airbase.

Those at the airport were armed with rifles, machineguns and mortars, and passed near ramshackle warehouses where hundreds of Iraqi bombs were stacked in wooden casings.

But their presence on the streets of the city was minimal, and thousands of soldiers may be needed to keep the peace in the ethnically-diverse city of 700,000.

Turkey expressed alarm at the chaotic entry of hundreds of peshmerga into Kirkuk on Thursday, fearing Iraqi Kurds could use the city's wealth to finance an independent state and stimulate separatist demands among its own Kurdish minority.

Jubilant Iraqis, who survived weeks of heavy bombing by U.S. planes, thronged the streets to greet the peshmerga, but joy turned swiftly to anxiety on Friday as looting intensified.

LAWLESSNESS AND UNEASE

More buildings of the ruling Iraqi Baathist party were looted and at least one was set ablaze on Friday as children and families searched rubble left by vandalism and U.S. bombing.

A supermarket in central Kirkuk still smouldered and a party administration office was completely gutted by fire.

At the airport, people searched abandoned Iraqi bunker positions and barracks, carting away anything from bedding to guns. Several groups of peshmerga could be seen taking away cartons of ammunition.

At the Taemin hospital, 50-60 injured peshmerga fighters had been treated in the last 36 hours, many of them from gunshot wounds sustained during looting.

A woman screamed when told that her brother had died of wounds from what doctors said appeared to be a mortar that landed near him. It was not clear who fired it.

"We get rid of Saddam, and now this," she sobbed.

Many people in the city are clearly nervous at having Kurds providing security. Arabs in particular are fearful of reprisals from those Kurds forced to flee the city by Saddam's often brutal policy of Arabisation.

Dilman Jamal, a young doctor at the hospital, said it was unstaffed when he arrived from the nearby city Arbil on Thursday.

"All the doctors were Arabs and they have all fled, fearing the Kurds will mistreat them," he said.

On the road east from Kirkuk, thousands of cars streamed in and out of the city, many full of smiling Kurds wanting to celebrate and discover the fate of the homes and families they left behind years ago.

Turkish-speaking Turkmens were also uneasy, having been the targets of robbery at the hands of Kurds.

"I left (Kirkuk) yesterday when the looting started," said Ahmad Saleh Mahmood, the field manager of a Kirkuk oilfield.

"They (the Kurds) carjacked me right here at the entrance, my family are still there and I can't get in touch with them."

But Saleh expressed hope that stability could be restored.