Quotes of the Day

If you want a glimpse into the challenge the U.S. faces as it tries to prevent Iraq from coming apart, consider the plight of Salim Izzat. Five months before the U.S. invasion last March, Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime ordered Izzat to vacate his farm outside the northern-Iraq town of Dibagan, 50 miles southeast of Mosul. The command was part of the regime's systematic, 15-year-long campaign to populate the predominantly Kurdish reaches of northern Iraq with ethnic Arabs. Kurds like Izzat were pushed out of their homes by force; dissenters, including Izzat's brother, were executed. A few days before the war, most of the Arabs who had taken up residence in Dibagan left town, but not before they demolished houses, ransacked shops on the main street and plundered every scrap of metal that would move. Izzat's Arab tenants razed his crops, stole more than 200 chickens and ran off with his life savings. Now Izzat lives with his wife and nine children in a crumbling three-room guardhouse in a parking lot in Dibagan; every day a policeman comes to tell him he has to move off city property. Izzat isn't ready to forgive the people he blames for his predicament. "I hate the Arabs," he says.

Ethnic grudges die hard in Iraq. In towns like Dibagan all across the country, long-simmering disputes between Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites, and even secular and religious Iraqis are bubbling to the surface—all of which has complicated the U.S.'s plan to transfer power to a new Iraqi government by June 30 and raised questions about whether Iraq will remain whole after it does. And so it was not entirely surprising that the Bush Administration last week scrambled for help in sorting out the mess. In a meeting at the White House, President Bush asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to come up with a plan for Iraqi self-rule that the country's squabbling factions could accept. A U.N. team arrived in Iraq last week to evaluate the coalition's plans for transition and assess the feasibility of holding broad-based elections before the June 30 deadline. The elections have been demanded by Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, but are resisted by U.S. officials, who say a general vote cannot be held safely. The intrigue deepened last Thursday when Sistani's bodyguards said the cleric had escaped an assassination attempt outside his home in Najaf. Sistani aides later told U.S. military officials that accounts of the purported attack had been fabricated.

Still, the rumors seemed to underscore fears that the country could quickly slide toward chaos. Retired General Anthony Zinni, the former top commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, told TIME that foreign jihadists are trying to incite a civil war in Iraq. "They want Iraq to come apart," he says. "They want the U.S. to fail, and they want to see it become three theocratic states. They don't want to see Iraq hold together as a democracy." Says Herro Kader Mustafa, a Kurdish-American coalition official in Mosul: "We are doing our best to make sure things don't erupt."

Nowhere is that task more delicate than in northern Iraq, home to most of the country's 4 million Kurds. The area has been among the nation's most peaceful since the overthrow of Saddam, but that calm was shattered on Feb. 1 when a pair of suicide bombers detonated themselves in the offices of the two main Kurdish political parties in the city of Arbil, killing more than 100. The attacks raised fears that the violence plaguing the rest of Iraq might now routinely spill into the Kurdish areas and might have strengthened the Kurds' determination to defend the autonomy they have enjoyed since 1991, when the U.S. established a no-fly zone in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds from Saddam. The U.S. has assured the Kurds that the new government in Baghdad will allow them to maintain their own parliament and security forces. But many observers believe such a federal structure is only the first step toward the Kurds' ultimate goal: independence. "The Kurdish problem is the most difficult for Iraq's long-term territorial integrity," says Phebe Marr, a veteran Iraq expert retired from the Pentagon's National Defense University, "because they are really separatists."

The U.S. is worried that Kurdish hopes for greater autonomy could spark clashes with Arabs living in northern Iraq, especially if the Kurds claim control over Kirkuk, an ethnically mixed city in an area prized for its vast oil reserves. The prospect of an oil-rich, autonomous Kurdish state also frightens Iraq's neighbors—Syria, Iran and Turkey—all of which have large, restive Kurdish populations that might be emboldened and financed by wealthy Iraqi Kurds. Turkey, which has fought a 15-year war against Kurdish separatists, has threatened to send its army into Iraq to prevent the Kurds from attempting to secede. In a press conference in January, the deputy chief of staff of the Turkish army, General Ilker Basbug, warned that "Iraq's future might be very bloody if there was a federal structure, especially based on ethnicity."

The U.S. has so far been able to ward off sectarian violence between Kurds and Arabs. "There isn't obvious ethnic hatred in the north," says Mustafa, the U.S. official in Mosul. "But there is a real conflict that political parties are exacerbating with their attempts to manipulate public opinion." Some locals say Kurdish authorities have incited ethnic hostility by giving benefits to their kinsmen. Nasser Rahim Jusef, a Turkish employee of the Northern Oil Co., says the former regime's program of "Arabization" is being replaced by "Kurdization": at the expense of other ethnic groups, Kurds are being recruited back into jobs Saddam's regime pushed them out of. "The oil business needs to be a meritocracy," says Jusef, who has worked at the company for 28 years, "not one based on racial discrimination."

Yehya Assi Mahmoud, an Arab attorney in Kirkuk, says he saw Kurdish militias seize 28 Arab homes in his village of Shaheed last April. In June he quit the city council to protest what he considered to be American favoritism toward the Kurds; now he fears that the coming transfer of power will result in wide-scale reprisals by Kurds against their Arab neighbors. "If the U.S. left now, Kurds would move in to ethnically cleanse the remaining Arabs in Kirkuk," he says.

Kirkuk may be the most combustible place in northern Iraq. The city is fairly evenly divided among Arabs, Kurds and ethnic Turkomans. Kurdish leaders want the city and its environs, which hold some 40% of the country's oil reserves, to be part of Kurdistan within a federal Iraq. That way, says a U.S. official in Kirkuk, the Kurds hope to secure a sustainable source of oil income for themselves in case a new government in Baghdad proves incapable of running the country once the U.S. hands over power. U.S. and Iraqi officials fear that Kurdish authorities may try to run Arabs and Turkomans out of Kirkuk and move Kurds south into the city, then hold an independent referendum to decide whether Kirkuk should join Kurdistan. Says Rogar Ali, a political adviser to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (P.U.K.), one of the two large Kurdish political groups: "Elections will decide the destiny of Kirkuk and other Kurdish areas."

For their part, the Kurds say autonomy is their only safeguard against the possibility of oppression by Iraq's Arab majority. And as mostly Sunni Muslims, the Kurds fear domination by a directly elected Shi'ite government. While the perpetrators of the suicide bombings in Arbil are unknown—some Kurdish officials suspect loyalists of Saddam's regime, whereas others finger foreign terrorists from Ansar al-Islam, a radical Islamist outfit linked to al-Qaeda—the attacks served as a grisly reminder to the Kurds of the ruthlessness of their enemies. At the P.U.K. headquarters, where a suicide bomber blew up more than 50 partygoers on the first day of the Muslim feast of 'Id al-Adha, colorful streamers still hang from charred walls pockmarked by shrapnel and bits of human flesh. There had been so much carnage to remove, the cleanup crew had missed a severed right hand that still lay on the floor, between an overturned couch and a stereo speaker. Across town, at the headquarters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Shwan Hala Salih surveyed a similar scene of devastation. His cousin had been killed in the blast. "Terrorists are of many kinds," he said, holding a hand-colored photograph of his relative. "Most are enemies of the Kurdish people."

The shock of such a brutal atrocity is likely to bolster calls for revenge. Yet in towns where Arabs and Kurds have lived together for generations, members of both groups say they are determined to stay. In Mukhmur, 30 miles south of Arbil, locals have painted over the portrait of Saddam with a picture of an Arab and a Kurd holding a flagpole. Hanging together above the two men are the Kurdish and Iraqi flags, and above these fly the American and British flags. Naffisa Abdullah, an Arab woman dressed in a black head scarf and a navy blue aba, says she will resist any attempts to force her out of her home. "I consider this area my native place," she says. "We just want to have a good life and get along with each other."

Such sentiments seem wishful in a land where so many still have grievances to settle. In Arbil last week, Hajji Maluwd, 62, a mechanic, walked in the funeral procession for a Kurdish leader who was killed in the 'Id bombings and ran down a list of personal demands: he wants his demolished home rebuilt, and he wants to move back to the land that Saddam's regime took away. At the same time, Maluwd doesn't think a civil war will erupt between the Kurds and the Arabs, and he says he's willing to wait for his house and his land and let democracy work. Gesturing his cigarette at the procession of Kurds mourning the death of a fallen leader, he says, "We've walked in too many of these." Iraq's only hope is that many more of his countrymen feel the same.

• Brian Bennett | Arbil