Analysis: Worries over growing violence in northern Iraq amid the fight for Baghdad

24 people were killed in this car-bombing in Kirkuk in September.

KIRKUK, Iraq Bombings and shootings have increased in Iraq's north as part of an Arab-Kurd power struggle, even as U.S. and Iraqi forces fight to stabilize violence-torn Baghdad. In Kirkuk, car bombings grew five-fold last month, and hundreds of Kurdish families have fled the north's biggest city, Mosul.

The bloodshed is not nearly on the scale of the capital, where thousands have died in recent months in a wave of sectarian killings and insurgent attacks. In the provinces where Mosul and Kirkuk are located, the toll has been several hundred during the summer.

But the creeping violence in the north — a region U.S. officials had hoped was getting more stable — underlines the difficulty in keeping all of Iraq's potential hotspots under control at once.

It also suggests growing strains in another of Iraq's communitarian divides. Baghdad has been suffering from violence between Sunni and Shiite death squads. In the north, the tensions are between Arabs and Kurds, who claim the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as part of their autonomous zone of Kurdistan to the north.

The violence has also begun to take on the grisly nature of Baghdad's sectarian killings: In recent months, authorities in Kirkuk and Mosul have found bodies dumped in the city, their hands bound with signs they were tortured before their deaths.

Read the rest at the International Herald Tribune

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