It seems pretty clear that war is coming really soon, or at least that the Iraqis think so. The Iraqi army seems to have moved into Kirkuk, and is fortifying the city and rounding up Kurds. They’ve been ethnically cleansing Kirkuk (an oil rich town near Iraqi Kurdistan) for years, removing the native Kurds and Turkmen, and bringing in Arab settlers. It looks like they’re trying to get rid of the remaining Kurds before the war starts, thus making it less likely that the Kurds will be able to overthrow the Iraqis and take over the town as they did in the uprising that followed Gulf War I. The fact that Iraq is moving into the town in force seems to indicate that they expect the invasion real soon now. It also exposes yet again the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, not that we need any more examples.

Oh, and if the Kurds get the opportunity to take over Kirkuk in the case of war, I imagine things will not go well for the Arabs that settled there …