Seattle Times: "In Iraq unrest, pay attention to Kirkuk"
I published an op-ed on the current situation in Kirkuk—from a historian's perspective—in the June 16th, 2014 edition of The Seattle Times. Here is an excerpt:
ON Thursday, while the city of Mosul and much of the rest of northern and western Iraq fell under the control of the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), something else happened: Kurdish troops took over the disputed city of Kirkuk.
[...]
What is remarkable is how quickly the Iraqi Army moved out of this much-valued city. Kirkuk is a highly diverse, multilingual city that is claimed by Kurdistan but also long inhabited by Turkish-speaking Turkmens, Arabs and Chaldo-Assyrian Christians; no single group is clearly in the majority. Non-Kurdish communities typically do not want to live under Kurdish control.