During an informal conversation with the only other American woman I met in Kurdistan -- a young, dedicated Southerner working for a Christian NGO -- I asked what precautions she took when going to Kirkuk. "Not nearly enough," she said. "I mean, I carry a nine millimeter, but..."

In the end, we decided that low-key would be safest. We started out early in the morning in a new model BMW. ("I think BM is a very good car," our translator said. We advised him to consider not dropping the "W" when talking to Americans.) The road ran flat and straight though the countryside. Uneven mounds of recently harvested wheat punctuated the fields along the road. We sped along, passing other cars, tractor-trailers, and pickup trucks. In the back of many of the pickups, kids -- boys in T-shirts and sweatpants and girls in granny-nightgown-type dresses -- stood up in the beds and bobbingly clung to the truck cabs.

Other advice I received before the trip: If I had to go to Kirkuk, I should at all costs avoid the Arab neighborhoods. I would be safe in Kurdish neighborhoods, but I would be as good as dead in Arab neighborhoods, Kurds told me. The advice to avoid Arab neighborhoods stemmed, in part, from the ongoing attacks on Westerners by Arab groups: the kidnappings and assassinations of contractors and aid workers, the ambushes against U.S. troops.

The violence has amped up Kurdish mistrust. Throughout Kurdistan, peshmerga man an endless number of checkpoints. Kurds mostly get waved through, while Arabs, my translator told me, almost always get carefully searched. Precautions like this may have helped keep the region safe, but it's a kind of racial profiling that doesn't do much for Arab-Kurdish relations.

Hassib Rozbayani, who holds the title of assistant mayor for resettlement and compensation for Kirkuk, lives in a single-story home a mile or so from what had just recently been the CPA compound in Kirkuk. Now the compound is being used by representatives of the U.S. and British embassies and their support staff (the ratio is something like six embassy employees to 100 support staff). I spoke to Rozbayani at his home in Kirkuk shortly after we arrived in the city. Weeks earlier, July 1 had been declared a national holiday in celebration of the hand-over of the government. The premature hand-over made the day a little anticlimactic, but it remained a holiday nonetheless and all government offices were closed. When my translator reached Rozbayani on his cell phone, he generously invited us to come by his house on his day off. We got a little lost finding his house and stopped to ask directions from a soda vendor on the side of the road who pointed us in the right direction. Our driver, Dashti, peeled out and U-turned toward the correct street. Throughout that whole day, he drove like a cop in a car chase. Though we didn't venture out of Kurdish neighborhoods, having a couple of Westerners in the back seat of the car was risky, to say the least. And so he did whatever necessary to avoid being stuck in traffic, turning down side streets and alleys anytime we hit congested roads. It wasn't exactly comfortable, but it was comforting.

When we reached Rozbayani's house, a guard out front (holding a Kalashnikov, the weapon of choice for guards all across Iraq) went to announce us. In the last year, a number of Kurdish political figures have been assassinated in Kirkuk. Having an armed guard goes with the territory. Rozbayani led us into the living room, where his own rifle leaned against the couch. He sat down next to it and began chain-smoking cigarettes. With his longish wild hair, he looked more like an aging rock star than a politician. The city power had gone off and, as he talked, the lights of the living room dimmed and rebrightened with the variations in the generator.

Rozbayani said that right now in Kirkuk there are 70 refugee camps of varying sizes. Despite the money going to some returnees, most Kurds have returned with almost nothing. The situation in the camps is very bad, he told me, but he, too believed the Kurds had to reclaim Kirkuk. He was angry at the CPA for what he referred to as "negative support" of the refugees. Though he had asked repeatedly for assistance, the CPA had refused to provide any aid at the camps, he said. In some cases, Rozbayani said, U.S. soldiers had expelled the refugees from camps and arrested those who refused to leave. He firmly believed (as did Hady, Erbil's governor) that the United States had been pressured by Turkey to discourage the Kurds from returning to Kirkuk. Other Kurds I spoke to who worked with the CPA on the refugee question said that throughout its tenure, the CPA promised help and asked for patience. A CPA staffer I spoke to declined to comment. Given the volatility of the issue, it seems clear that the CPA is doing what it can to placate both sides (without really pleasing either).

Understandably, Arabs in Kirkuk don't want or intend to relinquish their homes. But Arabs have been forced out from homes in Kirkuk and other rural areas of Kurdistan. Inside Kirkuk, ongoing harassment campaigns by both sides keep tensions high. Kurds fire shots at Arab homes, Arabs fire shots at Kurdish refugee camps. Assassinations have become a daily occurrence. Arabs have said that if the Kurds push too hard, they will fight back. They warn that Arabs from all over Iraq, including Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters in the south, will come join the fight.

In Kirkuk's current situation, there are no winners. Kurdish families return to Kirkuk every day hoping to effortlessly reclaim their former lives. Instead, they end up slogging it out in one of the miserable refugee camps throughout the city.

The Kirkuk sports stadium sits in a garbage-strewn, desolate corner of Kirkuk. As we approached it, I noticed a series of hand-painted signs along the road that depicted a young girl throwing her trash in a garbage can -- the remnants of a long-abandoned anti-litter campaign.

Jerry-built shelters made of mud, straw, flattened cooking-oil cans and empty rice sacks surrounded the stadium. Shallow ditches of raw sewage linked the houses and scrawny, nearly featherless chickens pecked at the edges of the sewage in search of something edible.

We parked in the shadow of the stadium walls. Refugee families had made good use of the stadium, building shelters against its curving walls. Some curious kids and adults came to greet us, but many were sleeping off the intense afternoon heat or working in fields outside the city. Then, too, a lot of missing husbands and fathers had been killed years ago in Saddam's murderous anti-Kurd campaigns.

We spoke to a woman who had returned to Kirkuk right after the fall of Saddam. It seemed most of the refugees in that camp had arrived not long after the end of the war, anxious to get back to their former city. They had imagined they would receive help from the United States and from their own Kurdish political parties, but they had received virtually nothing. (The woman said that the Americans had come once and given out some dishware. They made a list of needs and never came back.)

Bad as the conditions were at the stadium, the Kurdish refugees there are better off than those living in other Kirkuk sites where canvas tents act as the only shelter. Though the refugees have chosen on their own to return, I can't help thinking that they have become the demographic pawns in a struggle over oil and power and real estate.

Those refugees, like all other Iraqi Kurds, believed the invasion and Saddam's ouster would mean a tremendous step into prosperity. Make no mistake, the Kurds are grateful to be rid of Saddam. Talk to any Kurd about the United States and the first thing you're likely to hear is how happy they are that Saddam is gone. But with their future in the new Iraq so uncertain, and their old pal the U.S. so unreliable, the Kurds feel more isolated than ever. Control of Kirkuk ("the city of black gold," Rozbayani called it) represents their best chance for a strong position in the new Iraq. "If Iraq doesn't return Kirkuk, it could cause civil war," Hady told me that afternoon in his office.

A Kurdish-American I met doing business in Iraq put it another way. "Trust me," he said. "They are going to the gym. They are getting ready."

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