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For Iraq, Year Ends the Way It Began, With Guns Drawn

Officials in Baghdad, including American diplomats, are trying to mediate a dispute with the Kurdish government in the north.Credit...Azad Lashkari/Reuters

Tim Arango and

BAGHDAD — It was just the sort of episode that observers have long worried could provoke a serious conflict: when federal police agents sought to arrest a Kurdish man last month in the city of Tuz Khurmato in the Kurdish north of the country, a gunfight ensued with security men loyal to the Kurdish regional government.

When the bullets stopped flying, a civilian bystander was dead and at least eight others were wounded.

In response, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, rushed troop reinforcements to the area, and Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s semiautonomous northern Kurdish region, dispatched his own soldiers, known as the Peshmerga, and the forces remain there in a tense standoff.

Almost a year after the departure of the United States military closed a painful chapter in the histories of both nations, Iraq finds itself in a familiar position: full-blown crisis mode, this time with two standing armies, one loyal to the central government in Baghdad and the other commanded by the Kurdish regional government in the north, staring at each other through gun sights, as officials in Baghdad, including American diplomats and an American general, try to mediate.

Like bookends, Iraq is closing the year just as it began, with a major confrontation that has exposed sectarian and ethnic rifts that hundreds of billions of American dollars and thousands of lives have not reconciled. At the outset of the year, it was the sectarian divide between Shiites and Sunnis that was on vivid display when the government of Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, issued an arrest warrant on terrorism charges against the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi.

“The year started with the warrant against Hashemi and is ending with tanks on the edge of the Kurdish mountains,” said Sarmed al-Tai, a columnist for the newspaper Al Mada, which ran a story on Sunday on the anniversary of the American military’s departure, describing the exit as “leaving a large vacuum and a significant deterioration of the national partnership.”

As American troops left at the end of 2011, Mr. Maliki sent tanks to surround Mr. Hashemi’s home in the Green Zone of Baghdad. An arrest warrant led to Mr. Hashemi’s self-imposed exile, first in the Kurdish north and then Turkey; a trial in absentia followed, then the handing down of not one but two death sentences. Mr. Hashemi now lives in a suburban high-rise apartment in Istanbul, where he is protected by Turkish guards and remains defiant.

“Legally, I am still a vice president,” he said in a recent interview, adding, “I do have a lot of time to look after the future of my country.”

The latest crisis is an ethnic one, between Kurds and Arabs, and the consequences are potentially more serious because the Kurds, in contrast to the Sunni Arabs, enjoy a measure of autonomy in the north, control their own security forces and have longstanding ambitions for independence.

Tuz Khurmato, the city where the clash occurred, is of mixed ethnicity, where Turkmens, Arabs and Kurds compete for power. It lies in a region around the city of Kirkuk, an area of vast potential oil wealth that is at the center of a longstanding power struggle between Kurds and Arabs. As part of his brutal rule, Saddam Hussein moved tens of thousands of Arabs into the area, to dilute what was historically a Kurdish stronghold. After his fall, thousands of displaced Kurds demanded the right to return to the homes they had been driven from, creating tensions that have yet to subside.

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Kurdish security forces, called the Peshmerga, have been in a standoff with the Iraqi Army near Kirkuk, a northern city claimed by Arabs and Kurds.Credit...Azad Lashkari/Reuters

The latest crisis began after Mr. Maliki sought to consolidate his control over security in Kirkuk, where Kurdish and Iraqi forces have shared responsibility for security, and it reached a critical stage after the gunfight.

“This is a red line for the Kurds,” said Joost R. Hiltermann, an Iraq expert at the International Crisis Group. “Maliki is essentially taking control of the police. And the Kurds will never give up the city.”

Efforts at mediation, backed by the Americans, have so far failed to reach resolution. On Monday, Mr. Maliki and Mr. Barzani sent more troops to the area, with each side accusing the other of doing so first. Mr. Maliki warned the Kurds of the “seriousness of their behavior” and warned of its “consequences.” A spokesman for the Peshmerga said, “Anything is possible.”

Some Arabs in the area are yearning for a fight. “We are in favor of a military conflict with the Kurds because without a conflict we will remain frustrated, depressed and with no power at all,” said Sheikh Abdul Rasheed, the head of an Arab political council in Kirkuk.

The Kurds have cast the conflict in the historical context of their struggle against Mr. Hussein, but this time against Mr. Maliki, whose accruals of power over the last year have raised alarms in Baghdad and Washington. Mr. Barzani, in a statement, said, “The Kurdistan region is ready to defend its soil and all its citizens.”

Mr. Maliki, in a news conference over the weekend, said: “It is not a struggle against a dictator. It will be an ethnic conflict that is not in the interest of both parties.” He added, “War is not a game or a picnic.”

Analysts say the tensions are also rooted in the political rivalry between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Barzani, who this year tried to assemble a parliamentary coalition to oust Mr. Maliki from office. Mr. Barzani has also engineered oil deals with international companies, like Exxon, in violation of Baghdad’s laws.

Of Mr. Maliki’s efforts to control security in Kirkuk, Mr. Hiltermann said, “Obviously, he’s doing it to poke Barzani in the eye.”

Now some Kurdish officials, recalling the role the American military played in helping secure autonomy for the Kurdish region after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 by instituting a no-fly zone, are calling for the unlikely return to Iraq of American troops.

For average Iraqis, who have a lifetime of experiences of war and brinkmanship backed by threats of violence, there is a sense of the solemnly familiar, even as they worry that the latest flare-up in tensions between Arabs and Kurds might lead to direct conflict.

“My grandfather had a date palm tree, and when I was 4 years old, I opened my eyes and saw a tank near the date palm tree,” said Mr. Tai, the columnist for Al-Mada, who grew up in the southern city of Basra and fled to Iran after Mr. Hussein turned his tanks and helicopter gunships on his own people at the end of the Persian Gulf war. “Now, I see tanks outside my newspaper.”

Tim Arango reported from Baghdad, and Duraid Adnan from Baghdad and Kirkuk, Iraq.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: For Iraq, Year Ends The Way It Began, With Guns Drawn. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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