The predominantly Sunni Turkomen of Kirkuk complain of abuse at the hands of peshmerga in the police.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
Turkomen and Kurds both claim to be the majority group in Tuz Khurmatu.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
Turkomen nationalists say that the returnees are outsiders, brought in to colonise a strategic outpost close to northern Iraq's oilfields.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
In Tuz Khurmatu, these offices happened to be located in a largely Turkomen part of town, and were natural flashpoints.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
The clashes briefly spread to the nearby oil production centre of Kirkuk, where three Turkomen were killed during a protest.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
This has put them into conflict with the small Turkomen minority in the north, which fears being dominated by the Kurds.
Kurds say that Turkomen mobs began hunting down Kurds in the street.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
After the war, the Turkish government promised to send troops to protect the Turkomen, and Turkomen parties have been announcing that the time for such intervention has come.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
Turkomen nationalists fear that Tuz Khurmatu, which the Baath regime placed in a predominantly Sunni province, will be attached to the Kurdish north in a future federal Iraq.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
Like the Romanian communist nomenklatura, the Baath Party appropriated the resources of the nation for its benefit and exploited sectarian and ethnic tensions among Sunni, Shia, Kurd and Turkomen.
Turkey considers itself the Turkomen's protector, and the Turkish press is quick to pick up on allegations of persecution suffered by their co-linguists, particularly if they come at Kurdish hands.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
Throughout the north, Turkomen nationalists say that they are being short-shrifted by the Americans working in partnership with their Kurdish wartime allies, and denied their proper representation in Iraq's new interim local governments.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
Now, however, America says that it is trying to prise the Kurds out of their security role, and to institute a government in which the town's four ethnic-confessional groups (Kurds, Turkomen, Arabs, and Christians) are equally represented.
ECONOMIST: Ethnic rivalry in Iraq's relatively peaceful north
In and around the ethnically-mixed northern city of Kirkuk, three parked car bombs went off downtown simultaneously one in an Arab district, one in a Kurdish one, and one in a Turkomen district killing four civilians and wounding 18.
But such a move would upset a lot of people, not least Turkey, which has been watching the new-found Kurdish confidence with growing alarm and is not averse to stirring up discontent among Iraq's Turkomen people, who live largely in the north.
Each party took 41 seats, most of the rest going to mild Islamists, Turkomen, Christians and Yazidis (followers of a sect that is said to descend from Roman-era worshippers of the god Mithras), nearly all with the blessing of the two big Kurdish parties.
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