Under Saddam, Kirkuk was not part of the Kurdish region (which, with U.S. protection, had its own government, militia and even currency). Now Kurdish officials, anxious to reclaim Kirkuk, are urging -- even compelling -- Kurds to return to the city en masse.

"We don't accept that Kirkuk is not part of Kurdistan," the governor of Erbil, Nawzad Hady, told me. I had gone to meet with him in his office inside a well-guarded building in Erbil's center. One of the governor's many assistants led me up to the second floor, past some file-choked offices and through a series of increasingly well-decorated waiting rooms. In each room, a dozen or so men sat on couches along the walls smoking and drinking tea from fat hourglass-shaped teacups. After 45 minutes of drinking tea, I was ushered by another assistant into the governor's inner office, a long room decorated with new-looking upholstered furniture and lush carpets. Hady emerged from behind his raft-size desk and greeted me. We sat opposite each other with his translator in a chair between us while his assistant hovered, furiously taking notes.

Hady told me that Kurds must return to Kirkuk and the "10,000 dinar" Arabs must leave. (Other Arabs, families who have lived in Kirkuk for generations, do not face the resentment that the "10,000 dinar" Arabs do.) The Kurdish government has been handing out leaflets and using television campaigns, telling families to return. And Hady confirmed that in some cases, families have been paid $3,500 to go back to Kirkuk. At least a portion of the money to help families came from a U.N. fund, established before the war to build housing for refugees in Erbil. But the project fell apart, and with no sign of the United Nations' return, the government began using the money as aid and incentive for refugees to go back. Within his own government, Hady said, he directs all employees of the Erbil government who are originally from Kirkuk to move to that city, where they will be guaranteed an equivalent job and salary in the government there.

This hasty population redistribution program is as much about the future of Kirkuk as it is a question of reclaiming the past. Kurdish officials, including the governor, told me they intend to press for a referendum in which residents of Kirkuk will decide whether the city becomes reabsorbed into the Kurdish region. If the current Iraqi government refuses to allow Kirkuk's future to be decided by vote, Hady said, the Kurds will opt for deciding its future by force. Kurds may make up only 20 percent of Iraq's population, but their armed forces, or peshmerga, are nearly 100,000 strong -- bigger than all other Iraqi militias and armed forces combined. In short, the Kirkuk question could destroy the cobbled-together new government of Iraq.

Last week, Allawi declared that a "special status" might be granted to Kirkuk to take into account its diverse population. At this point, it's anyone's guess what "special status" will mean in practice. The Assyrian International News Agency quoted Allawi on Friday as saying that a countrywide abolition of militias would include Kurdish peshmerga. "Some of the Kurdish peshmergas will be recruited to the Iraqi army while some of them will be added to Iraqi police force." According to the agency report, Allawi added that the remaining peshmerga would lay down their arms and begin civilian life or would be retired. When Allawi first announced his intention to disband militias in June, a furious Kurdish response forced him to back down. I can't imagine the Kurds would ever agree to relinquish what is essentially their own army, especially when their future status remains unclear. If Allawi tries to force a disbandment, the results could be very bloody.

(It's interesting to note that Erinys, the South African security firm contracted to protect the oil infrastructure across Iraq, employs over 95 percent Kurds to guard Kirkuk's oil fields. Most of them are former peshmerga.)

Kurdish designs on Kirkuk have become a big problem, not just for the new Iraqi government, but for the Turkish government, which is apt to wig out anytime it perceives the Kurds to be making a move of strength. A little over a week ago, the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a warning to the effect that no "involved party" should attempt to change the demographic makeup of Kirkuk before its final status is determined.

These days, the Kurds don't have a lot of friends in the region. But that may be changing. In a recent article in the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described an increasing Israeli presence in Iraqi Kurdistan. "Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria," Hersh wrote.

An alliance between the two makes a lot of sense. For the Kurds, it provides a powerful ally, friendly with the United States, to train their commando units for deployment against potential Iraqi or other Arab enemies. For the Israelis, it allows them to infiltrate agents into their arch-nemesis, Iran, as well as hostile Syria. Certainly the Israelis would be delighted with the creation of a friendly, independent Kurdistan.

Israeli officials, not surprisingly, denied the story. The U.S. State Department refused to comment, but a senior CIA official confirmed Hersh's report. After the article came out, Kurdish leaders vehemently denied its veracity, calling it "baseless" and a "vile campaign against the Kurds." The denials were so adamant that they brought to mind my mother's favorite Shakespearean phrase: "Thou doth protest too much." For what it's worth, when I was in Kurdistan I asked Kurds whether they knew about an Israeli presence, and none said they did.

On a brutally hot day (every day in Iraq's summer can be categorized as "brutally hot" "extremely brutally hot" or "really very extremely brutally hot") I took a trip to Kirkuk. By coincidence, it was July 1 -- the original date for the first day of Iraqi self-governance. I made the one-hour drive from Erbil in the company of a Kurdish driver and translator and a fellow reporter. In the course of planning our trip to Kirkuk, we had received all sorts of advice as to how to stay safe. One Kurdish man we spoke to insisted that we should travel only in the company of some armed peshmerga. Another Kurd suggested we hire one of the many Western security companies working in Iraq. We would travel in a convoy of armored SUVs with a small cadre of very heavily armed men who would dress us in bulletproof vests and loosely encircle us whenever we got out of the car to interview someone. (The cost would have been at least a thousand dollars for the day). Some people tried to strongly discourage us from going at all. Most Westerners we met -- CPA employees concluding their jobs or embassy employees commencing their jobs (in some cases those were one in the same) were on "lockdown" during a number of days leading up to and following the transition of power, in anticipation of heightened violence. This meant no leaving their fortified compounds or secured hotels.

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