This one's been simmering, largely unnoticed, for some time. It's the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, right on the edge of the turf the Kurds claim as their own, and ownership of it and its adjacent oil riches is up for grabs.
The Kurds want it and have arranged a referendum to decide the issue. They've also spent the past year flooding Kirkuk with every Kurdish settler they could squeeze in. In the process they've been ousting Sunni and Shia Arabs settled in the town years ago by Saddam.
The Arabs from the south along with the Turkmen population are contesting ownership of the city. According to the LA Times, tensions are escalating:
None of the groups want war, they say. Yet everyone here appears to be preparing for it.
"They are right when they call it a time bomb," said Sheik Abdul Rahman Obeidi, a prominent Sunni Arab leader in Kirkuk. "We will not leave, and we will not let anyone take Kirkuk. We are ready to fight. We hope we won't have to, but we're ready."
Kurdish leaders, in turn, warn that they will take the city by law or by force.
"People don't have any more patience," said Kurdish Councilman Rebwar Faiq Talabani, sitting in Kirkuk's heavily fortified provincial council building. "They are telling the government, 'If you can't get our rights back, we'll do it by ourselves.' "
The situation among the three Iraqi groups is complicated by a poison pill provision in the Kurdish constitution that Baghdad was coerced into accepting as part of Iraq's constitution. This provides that Iraq may share the wealth from all existing oil wells among all Iraqis but all new wells and fields will be the exclusive property of the Kurdish Autonomous Region. The Kurds have threatened to separate if they don't get a deal to their liking.
The whiff of separation brings two additional parties into play - Turkey and Iran. Both have troublesome Kurdish minorities in their own nations and both fear that an independent Kurdistan would serve as a sanctuary to support insuurrection.
The Turkmen of Kirkuk are, of course, ethnic Turks and Turkey has made loud threatening noises to take action if the Kirkuk Turks are forced to become part of a Kurdish mini-state.
Where is this heading? In any of about four or five possible directions, all but one of them bad. This could become Iraq's next civil war and it could also pave the way for Iraq's first foreign invasion since the American conquest of 2003. The worst part is that no one entity truly "owns" this issue, there's no one to control and defuse it. It's taken on a life of its own.
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