Talabani's Road to Damascus

Though the Bush administration won't engage with Syria, Jalal Talabani, Iraq's president, has stepped into the void. He's in Damascus now on a six-day trip to Syria, the first time an Iraqi head of state has visited the country in more than two decades. Talabani and Syria's President Bashar Al-Assad are supposed to have discussed the flow of insurgents through Syria into Iraq, among other topics.

Don't expect this to be the last time Talabani -- who is also head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two ruling parties of Iraqi Kurdistan -- charts a course separate from his American patrons. Kurdish officials complained loudly last week when US soldiers made an unannounced raid on Iranian government offices in Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. The episode included a tense face-off between Kurdish and American soldiers at the Arbil airport.

Clearly, Talabani and the Kurds are making a bigger effort than the US to improve relations in the neighborhood. It's not hard to see why. They'll need all the good-willl they can get as the issue of Kirkuk starts to take center stage in the Iraq saga.

The clock is now ticking on a referendum to decide the future of the oil-rich city, which was the target of an ethnic cleansing campaign during the Saddam years that drove out many of its Kurdish residents and brought in Arabs from the south. Though the city now falls under the authority of the central Iraqi government, Kurds -- who call Kirkuk "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan" -- want it "returned" to their control, and have been resettling the city with their own kind. The city's Arab and Turkomen populations would like Kirkuk to stay as it is. According to Iraq's constitution, residents of Kirkuk are supposed to vote on their future in December.

Already the whining has begun. Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- who seems immune to Talabani's charm offensive -- has been threatening to get involved in the Kirkuk issue. "Turkey cannot just sit idle and watch the demographic structure of Kirkuk change," he said. Turkey claims protectorship over the Turkomen of northern Iraq, with whom the Turks share a distant Central Asian past but little else. More importantly, Turkey -- which has a disaffected Kurdish minority population of its own -- is wary of seeing Iraqi Kurds take another step on the road to an independent Kurdish state.

Turkey's saber-rattling may be having an effect in Washington. The Baker-Hamilton report called Kirkuk a "powder keg" and recommended that the referendum be delayed. Sen. John McCain (one of the few Congressional supporters of President Bush's "surge" policy for Iraq) has also come out in favor of delaying it.

This would be a mistake. Delaying the referendum would risk alienating some of the US's last friends in Iraq, not to mention, trample Iraq's constitution. Moreover, it would merely postpone the inevitable. The Kurds want Kirkuk and they are going to get it. They run the only reliable native military force and the only stable territory in Iraq. So far Iraq's Kurdish leaders leaders have displayed patience towards US goals of keeping the country together, when 99 percent of Iraqi Kurds want out. A delay would only push Kurds faster towards a final break.

And if the US and Iraqi Kurds have a quarrel, we now know who will try to fill the void. Perhaps Iran and Syria -- who have angry Kurds of their own -- won't be so sorry to see a separate Kurdish state after all.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut