Mess mess mess.

They could at least wait until the US figures out who owned the property, but more importantly, until compensation could be given to those living there, or buy-out options for those wanting to return.

What is it with people not having patiences.... Damn it, why can't people wait a month or two so things get done right.

If they look around the world, the one thing they should not do is wait.

If your home is taken by the government in ethnic cleansing, and settlers are paid by the government to go in and take the land, and then the government gets rid of the old documents and issues new documents, saying the title belongs to the colonists, the world will pretty much stand against your "right of return" unless you retake you land by force.

By every example in the world, the Kurds are going to get their homes back only if they take them by force. That is sad but true.

Why reversing ethnic cleansing (read: genocide) is considered by some to be difficult?

Our problem is that in case any Kurd has ever read a newspaper they know that we go with "facts on the ground." I can think of quite a number of cases, including several in the region, where the US position is that whoever has what when the fighting ends, is the important issue, and not a land title. I can not think of one case were we say: lets go get the legit land titles from 20 years ago.

Sounds like the Kurds just know how we do it.

The entire Kurdistan situation is, far and away, the greatest single danger remaining in the area. Kurdistan is now closer than it has been since 1919, and the Dream remains alive.

Fast Forward to a "democratic" Iraq, sometime in the future. One of the hallmarks of a democracy is Freedom of Movement. Kurd will want to move to Kirkuk. And why not? That's what a Democracy allows them to do!

OTOH, that means they will get to vote there too. So eventually, they will become the dominant voting bloc in the area. Just no question about that.

Side Issue: Remember when the Iraq Gubmint Archives were burned, and how Property Records were destroyed. Hold That Thought!

Property claims centuries old (they have unresolved family feuds that predate the discovery of the Americas) will be overlooked in that area. Traditional family-owned properties just Will be reclaimed. No question about that.

Now, shift focus Northward a tad, and remember our Friend -- Turkey.

Turkey gives not a damn about the legitimacy of land claims, traditional or otherwise. Its foreign policy is simple and straightforward: If the Kurds control Kirkuk, it means they also control the oil field as well. That gives them funding in Substantial Amounts. Probably even enough to, say, start to do a little Nation-Building on their own, perhaps.

Turkey has 20k-30k troops hanging out just across its own border, and is quite perfectly prepared to Go To War with anyone who would allow the Kurds to control anything of the sort. And yes -- that would include the US presence in the area. They were all hot to do that before they were called off during the war.

Unlike the USofA, those folks have Very Long Memories. They are still Deeply Fromaged about matters more than a thousand years old, viz the whole Shia/Sunni Schism et al. A mere few years or so is nothing at all.

Turk have been every bit as opppressive to the Kurds as Saddam ever was. True -- they didn't use Gas -- but Dead Is Dead, and whether by artillery & small arms or gas is almost irrelevant. Point is, killing Kurds is considered by the Turks to be a quite reasonable thing, in that it is a sort of Preventive War (where have we heard that before?) necessary for their own National Survival. And since Preventive War is now a legitimate policy internationally, what's to prevent them from undertaking one on their own initiative?

And once we're gone, who will stop them?

Fascinating place, the Middle East. Proof of the Murphy's Law Corollary known as Zymurgy's Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics:

Once you open a can of worms, the only way to get them back in is to use a larger can.

That one is the Greatest Danger in the area. When that war starts, three, possibly four nations join in.

Just like what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s when Russia and Turkey fought the US and Western Europe, because we got involved in centuries-old quarrels while trying to stop ethnic cleansing.

Didn't that happen Don, just like you're predicting it will here?

for Gabriel:

No.

Where do you come up with these over-simplified and incorrect comparisons?

Turk/Kurd -- longstanding territorial claim competition in a current form.

Turk-Russian/Balkans -- no current territorial claims, but on the Turk side there are fellow Muslims, and on the Russian side, a history of Pan-Slavism and all that goes with that.

History. Live it, learn it, remember it. Don't revise it.