Analysis: Iraq is already enduring two wars. Could it survive a third?

A policeman inspects the site of a car bomb that targetted U.S. troops in Kirkuk today

The governor's office in this tense city had rarely been so crowded. Friends, colleagues and officials were queuing to congratulate Abdul Rahman Mustafa on surviving the second assassination attempt on him within a fortnight.

A suicide bomber blew himself up on Tuesday when the governor's motorcade slowed for roadworks. The armour-plated car was badly damaged, but the only fatality besides the bomber was an Iraqi civilian. Still shaken two hours later, Mr Mustafa told me he was undeterred and would carry on.

Like every other Iraqi city, Kirkuk has seen a rising tide of violence. Two years ago you could drive there from Baghdad. This time I reached it by coming south from the relative safety of Kurdistan in an armoured pick-up with five Kurdish peshmerga soldiers in the back.

The main hazard is the roadside bomb - 663 have gone off already this year, with another 334 detected before they did any harm. They are almost always targeted at officials, police or US and Iraqi army convoys. Kirkuk has so far been spared the carnage of Baghdad and Basra, where car bombs and mortars are launched at crowds of civilians.

Indeed Kirkuk is the story of a war that hasn't happened. With a mixed population of Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans vying to control a province rich in oil, it was the place which most analysts focused on in the first weeks after the US toppled Saddam Hussein. It seems long ago now, but the argument then was that if violence were to break out in the "new Iraq", it would pit Arabs against Kurds, not Sunni against Shia, and the cockpit would be Kirkuk.

Whether Iraq is in the midst of a civil war or an insurgency has become a crucial question in the US, with obvious policy implications. For Iraqis it is academic. They see both wars happening together, with the chaos further compounded by criminal gangs who kidnap and murder for cash.

In Kirkuk, by contrast, there is only an insurgency. Ethnic war has not broken out. The picture is not so good in the other Iraqi territories with large Kurdish populations, many of which the Kurds call historically theirs. Tens of thousands of Kurds are being intimidated to leave Mosul in slow-motion ethnic cleansing. In Khanaqin, in eastern Iraq, thousands of Arab settlers who had been brought in by Saddam Hussein were summarily evicted in 2003.

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