Michael Totten’s misinformation about Kirkuk

This kind if mis­in­for­ma­tion you get from west­ern­ers who try to be an experts in Iraq’s eth­nics conflicts.

Meet the Iraqi Police in Kirkuk

The city’s ter­ror­ists are mostly Baathists, not Islamists, and their racist ide­ol­ogy casts Kurds and Turk­mens as ene­mies. They’re boxed in on all sides, though, and have a hard time oper­at­ing out­side their own neigh­bor­hoods. In their impo­tent rage they mur­der fel­low Arabs by the dozens and hundreds.

Since my mother orig­i­nally a Kurd from Kirkuk province, my father is a Turk­man from Kirkuk city, and many mem­bers of the fam­ily from both sides are still liv­ing their, this is the sit­u­a­tion right now.

Kirkuk was never a strong­hold of the Baath party, mil­i­tary kept law and order in Kirkuk dur­ing Saddam’s gov­ern­ment and not the Baath party.

After the US inva­sion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam’s gov­ern­ment cre­at­ing the chaos in every Iraqi city, Kirkuk was not effected by the event, police, civil ser­vices were all func­tion­ing as it was before the invasion.

In a mat­ter of a month, a wave of bomb­ing blasted Kirkuk’s neigh­bor­hoods, ask any­body in Kirkuk and doesn’t mat­ter if he is a Turk­man or Kurd about who is doing these bomb­ing and he will tell you:

Barazani [Kur­dish war­lord]

Alerted by this Kur­dish inva­sion of Kirkuk city, Turk­man who never had Mili­tias before argued that it is the time to estab­lish their own mili­tias to counter the Kurds PKK militias.

Read:

Why the Turk­men should have an armed Mili­tia? [PDF]

The Turk­men of Iraq do not see any obsta­cle from hav­ing such an active mili­tia in north of Iraq and to be posi­tioned adja­cent to 5000 PKK Kur­dish ter­ror­ists whom have been liv­ing in north of Iraq and being sup­ported and equipped by both Kur­dish parties.

This call was sup­ported by Turkey since many Turk­man are descended from Turkey like my fam­ily and many Turk­man still have fam­ily mem­bers and lob­by­ists in the Turk­ish government.

Kurds knew that win­ing Kirkuk, can only be estab­lished by dom­i­nat­ing Kirkuk city.

Read:

Gertrude Bell let­ter [14 August 1921]

The one excep­tion is Kirkuk. There, as you know, the town pop­u­la­tion is Tur­co­man and the vil­lage pop­u­la­tion Kurd. Nei­ther want Arab rule and among the Turks there has been a good deal of Turk­ish, anti-British propaganda.

Read:

Kirkuk: Har­bin­ger of Iraq’s future

They left as two peo­ple, and then after 12 years they come back as 15.….There were not more than 5000 and many of them were from out­ly­ing villages,

As you can see from this short his­tory of Kirkuk after the inva­sion, Baath party has noth­ing to do with the con­flict in the city.

All ethics groups in Kirkuk are using Baath party to legit­imize their plans or to explain their fail­ure, count­ing on peo­ple like M. Tot­ten who will echo these false calls.