Violence in Iraq spreads to north
Attacks in Kirkuk blamed on newcomers

By Karl Vick
THE WASHINGTON POST

   KIRKUK, Iraq, Oct. 12 — A sharp rise in attacks on U.S. forces around this normally tranquil city is part of a concerted effort to expand violent resistance deep into northern Iraq, U.S. commanders and Iraqi officials say.

   A HANDFUL of guerrillas and financiers arrived in this ethnically mixed oil center and activated a local opposition that had lain dormant for months, according to the commanders, officials and residents. The newcomers mounted nightly hit-and-run operations culminating in three blasts — a mortar attack on a U.S. base, a grenade explosion at city hall and a booby trap explosion beside a Humvee outside town — in the space of just two hours Tuesday night.
    The following night two Iraqi policemen were killed when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded at a checkpoint that U.S. soldiers had left shortly before.
    Such attacks have come to be expected by U.S. troops stationed in Baghdad, west to Ramadi and north to Tikrit, an area known as the Sunni Triangle. But until two weeks ago explosions were rare in Kirkuk, a city of 800,000 that lies well north and east of the Sunni Arab heartland that has generated the most resistance to the U.S. occupation.
    The resistance organizers in the north are believed to have arrived from Fallujah and Ramadi. “They said, ‘Look, you need to do in Kirkuk what we’re doing down south,’ ” said Col. William C. Mayville Jr., commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
    “Kirkuk was peaceful, and they don’t like that,” said Ismail Ahmed Hadidi, the deputy governor. “They want it to be like other places.” So far, the surge of attacks has claimed the life of only one U.S. soldier, killed by a rocket-propelled grenade on Sept. 29 as his Humvee approached one of the safe houses where a handful of Americans live behind reinforced walls and long ropes of razor wire.

A NORTHERN FRONT?
    But the new development threatens to open a new front to the north just as concerns are growing in Baghdad that elements of Iraq’s majority Shiite population may be taking up arms. Two U.S. soldiers died on Thursday in what military officials said was an ambush in Sadr City, the large Shiite slum in Baghdad where a car bomb had killed eight Iraqis earlier in the day.
    In the north, the assaults began almost simultaneously with public vows by anonymous resistance leaders that attacks on U.S. forces would move beyond the Sunni Triangle. A senior U.S. military intelligence official said in an interview that militants who once moved alone have now organized to mount “out-of-area activities.”
    “There has been a growth in more cohesion amongst the former regime loyalists,” the official said. “So you might have someone from the south come up north for no other reason than that people know each other, they’ve worked in the organizations before. And so this should not be unexpected.”
    In a corner of Iraq that had built a reputation for relative stability, the mounting perception of insecurity carries political costs.
    Iraqi officials say the public’s preoccupation with the attacks is endangering ambitious construction projects, including hotels, an airport, even a convention center intended to boost economic prospects and help bridge ethnic divisions. Kirkuk is divided among Arabs, Turkmens and ethnic Kurds, each speaking a different language.

‘IT STARTED SUDDENLY’
    For soldiers, the attacks are an abrupt change. Paratroopers accustomed to handshakes and waves now stand guard while watching warily for attacks that one soldier described, with a shake of his head, as “pretty much nonstop.”
    “The Americans, until 10 days ago, were very happy here in Kirkuk,” said Wala’a Husain Khalisy, a surgeon and former Iraqi army officer. “It started suddenly.”
    Residents say a U.S.-guarded detention center in town regularly comes under mortar fire. Sentries at the air base that serves as Task Force Kirkuk headquarters have grown accustomed to answering small-arms fire. The dedication of a new police station was canceled after a rocket attack.
    Other strikes have hit civilian targets that were believed, sometimes mistakenly, to be associated with Americans. A man died trying to plant an explosive device outside the New Kirkuk Laundry, a storefront near the U.S. military’s civil affairs headquarters. The laundry, which had been targeted once before, had proudly displayed the fatigues it washed for U.S. servicemen and women.
    Early Tuesday, an 81mm mortar hit the Kirkuk office of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, killing a watchman. The Shiite group, whose leader was killed by a massive car bomb in Najaf, was a longtime opponent of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government, and lately a U.S. ally.
    “The Baathists are taking a higher profile,” said Fakhurdian Jaleel Khorshid, who heads the group’s shattered Kirkuk office. “They can go around and do these things.”

AID GROUP THREATENED
    Even an aid group has been threatened. Earlier this month an Iraqi worker wearing an International Rescue Committee T-shirt was abducted by four men in a Toyota taxi. The abductors, who did not appear to know their way around the city, questioned the man closely about his employer, a private U.S. aid group that employs 120 people in Kirkuk to dispense health care and other aid. Before releasing him, the men cut his arm and warned that the charity would be “targeted.”
    “They think that every organization here belongs to the CIA or the Jews,” said Abdulzahria Mehdi, security officer for the IRC office, which continues to operate.
    “The main objective is to destabilize the situation,” said deputy police chief Khattab Abdullah Aref. “There are those who want to turn Kirkuk into another troubled area.”
    Also worrisome was the Sept. 25 discovery of 1,000 pounds of TNT, intercepted by Iraqi police en route to Kirkuk from the town of Hawijah, a haven for Baathist holdouts. Hawijah is located in the western desert where Kurdish claims give way to traditional Arab lands. It serves as a natural avenue for infiltration from Tikrit and Fallujah, as well as from the Baathist stronghold of Mosul, a city of 1 million to the north.
    U.S. commanders called local sheiks together this week to implore them to cooperate. The sheiks blamed the problem on outsiders. The officers asked them to help round up the perpetrators anyway.
    “It’s all part of the stew,” Mayville said of the tribal, personal and economic dynamics behind the attacks. “And it’s as complex and convoluted as you want it.”