Governing (in) Kirkuk: resolving the status of a disputed territory in post-American Iraq International Afairs 86: 6 (2010) 1361–1379 © 2010 The Author(s). International Afairs © 2010 The Royal Institute of International Afairs. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. STEFAN WOLFF Kirkuk has been among Iraq’s most intractable problems. A diverse province and city with three main ethnic groups—Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen—all of whom have diferent tales of sufering and entitlements to tell, Kirkuk is also beset by problems well beyond the control of its citizens and their representatives. Control- ling Kirkuk, which supposedly sits on approximately 10 per cent of Iraq’s oil and gas reserves, or preventing someone else from doing so, has major resource implications. Control of Kirkuk is also symbolically important for all three of its main ethnic groups, but especially so for Kurds who have come to see Kirkuk as ‘their Jerusalem’. Politically, the future of Kirkuk is, like that of the other inter- nally disputed territories of Iraq, tied up with the full implementation of Iraq’s 2005 constitution, which, in its article 140, stipulates normalization (i.e. reversal of Arabization), a census and a referendum ‘in Kirkuk and other disputed territories to determine the will of their citizens’ (concerning the status of these territories in other words, whether they are to become part of the Kurdistan Region). The future status of Kirkuk has thus become a major bone of contention between Kurds and Arabs in Iraq as a whole, and has become entangled in two other disputes, over a federal hydrocarbons law and over constitutional reform. Beyond Iraq, Kirkuk matters to Turkey, 1 which allegedly fears that a Kirkuk that is part of the Kurdistan Region would further encourage Kurdish separatism in Iraq and the region as a whole, 2 including Turkey. Being seen, rightly or wrongly, as having signiicant potential for igniting an all-out civil war between Arabs and Kurds, the future of Kirkuk also matters to the international coalition forces in Iraq, and especially to the US, which cannot aford for Kirkuk to derail its plans now that combat forces have been withdrawn. 1 On the role of Turkey see, among others, Bülent Aras, ‘Turkey, northern Iraq and Kirkuk’, Foreign Policy Bulletin 5, 2007, pp. 6–9; Philip Giraldi, ‘Turkey and the threat of Kurdish nationalism’, Mediterranean Quarterly 19: 1, 2008, pp. 33–41; International Crisis Group, Turkey and Iraqi Kurds: conlict or cooperation?, Middle East report 81 (Brussels: ICG, 2008); Robert Olson, ‘Relations among Turkey, Iraq, Kurdistan–Iraq, the wider Middle East, and Iran’, Mediterranean Quarterly 17: 4, 2006, pp. 13–45; Robert Olson, ‘Turkey’s policies toward Kurdistan–Iraq and Iraq: nationalism, capitalism, and state formation’, Mediterranean Quarterly 17: 1, 2006, pp. 48–72; Thanos Veremis, ‘The transformation of Turkey’s security considerations’, International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Afairs 40: 2, 2005, pp. 75–84. 2 See Ted Galen Carpenter, ‘Middle East vortex: an unstable Iraq and its implications for the region’, Mediterranean Quarterly 20: 4, 2009, pp. 22–31.