×
Both Kurds and Sunnis are pledging violence over the outcome of the Article 140 referendum on who will control northern Iraq, which was scheduled to take place before the end of the year. Spencer Ackerman reports:
Mosul was fairly calm earlier this year as winter gave way to spring. Some nights at Forward Operating Base Marez, the major U.S. garrison in the multiethnic northern Iraqi city, explosions would boom as incoming fire missed its target. But veteran officers, who remembered when Mosul briefly fell to the insurgency in late 2004, celebrated what passed for Iraqi tranquility. The city's central roundabouts featured something rare to see in Baghdad during that time: people milling about, selling produce, cut-rate electronics, and mountains of jeans on flatbeds and donkey carts.That calm is now gone, as al-Qaeda in Iraq and rejectionist Sunni insurgents have opted to abandon surge-bloated Baghdad and Anbar, where Concerned Local Citizen militias have a strong presence, for a place where a single U.S. combat battalion protects a city of 1.7 million people. Back then, though, it was almost boring.Something sinister lurked behind that boredom. The city's Kurds and Sunnis looked to a fateful referendum over control of Mosul scheduled for the end of the year. Known as the Article 140 referendum after the provision in Iraq's constitution decreeing it, the referendum would ask residents of mixed-ethnic northern Iraq if they'd rather be ruled by the Kurdish Regional Government rather than by Baghdad. Kurds I interviewed, sure they'd triumph in the vote, promised war if the referendum didn't occur on time. Sunnis I interviewed, convinced the Kurds were right, promised war if it did. With a week and a half left in 2007, it's clear the referendum isn't going to happen. And with both insurgents and foreign terrorists set up in Mosul, Kirkuk, and their surrounding provinces of Ninewa and Tamim, the next powder keg of the Iraq War is due to ignite.Read the rest, and comment, here.--The Editors
