IRAQ - Kurdistan Issue.

Kurds in the constitutional panel, fearing they might be sidelined during inter-Arab haggling over federalism, have raised the stakes in their talks with Shiite and Sunni Arab representatives about the future structure of the Iraqi state. They have issued a striking visual reminder of their demand for self-government, in the form of a map of "historic Kurdistan". It shows Kurdish territory covering all of northern Iraq and even running southwards along the Iranian border as far as Kut, 100 km south-east of Baghdad.

With pressure on the drafting committee mounting to meet the Aug. 15 deadline, Kurdish negotiators are upping the ante. Privately, Kurdish negotiators laugh at the idea of a Kurdistan which "almost goes to Baghdad" and admit that the territorial demands implied by the map are negotiable. Still, the map is meant to remind the committee of the virtual veto power the Kurds can exercise in the nation-building process.

The Kurds say the constitutional issues dearest to them - including the status of oil-rich Kirkuk - are still far from being resolved. While the Shiite sectarian bloc holds a slight majority in parliament, the current government could be formed only after three months of intricate horse-trading which left important governmental posts in Kurdish hands. The Kurds bolstered their autonomy, while disputes over ethnically mixed Kirkuk were deferred until later. The Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), Iraq's US-drafted interim constitution, calls on the transitional government to undo the former regime's demographic changes in and around Kirkuk and allow Kurds to move back to areas which had been "Arabised".

Kurdish negotiators are under mounting pressure to deliver results to a separatist-minded Kurdish constituency in the north. The Financial Times on July 27 quoted an anonymous Kurdish political adviser as saying: "The [Kurdish] politicians who come down to Baghdad are regarded as a bunch of softies. Some back-country Kurds even call them traitors".

To release pressure on the home front, Kurdish constitutional negotiators say they are approaching the new Iraq as a voluntary union which the Kurdish people can take some time to evaluate. They have asked for the right to hold an internal referendum in eight years' time so that the Kurdish provinces can choose whether to remain a part of Iraq.

Since the US and UK imposed a "no-fly zone" in the 1990s, the three self-governed Kurdish provinces have fostered a strong sense of independence. But neighbouring countries, especially Turkey, remain extremely wary of any talk of "Kurdistan" as a sovereign state.

What If It's Civil War: The first signs that top US officials in Baghdad were revising their thinking about what they might accomplish in Iraq came a year ago. As Iraq resumed its sovereignty after the period of American occupation, the new US team which arrived in late June 2004, then headed by Ambassador Negroponte, had a withering term for the optimistic approach of their predecessors, led by L. Paul Bremer III.

The new team called the departing ones "the illusionists", for their conviction that America could create a democracy on the ruins of Saddam's medieval brutalism. One American military chief began his first encounter with US reporters by asking: "Well, gentlemen, tell me: Do you think that events here afford us the luxury of hope?" It seemed clear then the Bush administration, for all its public optimism, had begun substituting more modest goals for the idealists' conception. How much more modest has become clearer in the 12 months since.

From the moment US troops crossed the border 28 months ago, the specter hanging over the American enterprise in this country has been that Iraq, freed from tyranny, can prove to be so fractured - by politics and sect, by culture and geography, by the suspicion and enmity sown by repression - that it would spiral inexorably into civil war. If it did, opponents of the US-led invasion had warned, American troops could get caught in the crossfire between Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans, secularists and believers - reduced, in the grimmest circumstances, to the common target of many contending militias. Now events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true.

The violence is ever more centred on sectarian killings, with Salafi insurgents targeting Shiite Arab and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. There are reports of Shiite Arab death squads, some with links to the interior ministry, retaliating by abducting and killing Sunni religious imams and community leaders.

The past two weeks have seen such a quickening of these killings, particularly by the Salafis, that many Iraqis are saying civil war has already begun. That at least some senior officials in Washington understand the gravity of the situation seems clear from remarks made at the Foreign Press Centre in Washington three weeks ago by Ambassador Khalilzad, who arrived in Baghdad last week to begin as Negroponte's successor.

In his remarks, Khalilzad abandoned a convention which had bound senior US officials when speaking of Iraq - to talk of civil war only if reporters raised it first, and then only to dismiss it as a beyond-the-fringe possibility. Using the term twice in one paragraph, he spoke of civil war as something America must do everything to avoid. He said "Iraqis of all communities and sects, like people everywhere, want to establish peace and create prosperity". But he added: "I do not underestimate the difficulty of the present situation".

One measure of doubts afflicting Washington has been a hedging in upbeat assessments which US generals usually offer, coupled with a resort to numbers groomed to show progress in curbing the insurgents which seems divorced from realities on the ground. An example of the new "metrics" has been a rush of figures on the build-up of Iraq's army and police - a programme known to reporters embedded on joint operations as one beset by inadequate training, poor leadership, inadequate weaponry and low morale. Those involved in the programme offer impressive-sounding figures - including the fact that, by mid-June, the Iraqi forces had been given 306m rounds of ammunition, roughly 12 bullets for each of Iraq's 25m people. But when a senior US officer involved was asked whether the Americans might end up arming the Iraqis for civil war, he paused for a moment, then nodded and said "Maybe".

The war's wider pattern has always held the seeds of an all-out sectarian conflict, with the insurgency rooted in a Sunni Arab minority dispossessed by the toppling of Saddam. Most of the insurgents' victims have been Shiite Arabs, the majority community who have been the main political beneficiaries of Saddam's demise. Shiite Arabs have died in countless hundreds at their mosques and marketplaces, their deaths celebrated on Salafi Websites by Zarqawi's group. Zarqawi has called Shiites "monkeys" and their religion an affront to God.

Recently it was the turn of the small town of Mussayeb, where 98 people died as a suicide bomber blew himself up under a tanker full of LPG by a local Shiite mosque. More than 100 others were wounded. The big majority of the victims were Shiite Arabs.

Iraq's top Shiite religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has urged Shiites not to retaliate, but to focus instead on the US-sponsored electoral process, which brought Shiite parties victory on Jan. 30 and is likely to do so again in voting for a full, five-year government in December. But this time Sistani, his patience spent, demanded that the transitional government, led by Shiites, "defend the country against mass annihilation".

If that was a call for tougher military action against Salafi bombers, it played into a situation made all the more volatile in recent months by signs that hardline Shiites had begun to hit back. There are persistent reports of Shiite death squads in police uniforms abducting, torturing and killing Sunni religious imams, community leaders and others.

In Baghdad, a police commando unit composed mainly of Shiites raided a hospital in July and abducted 13 Sunni men accused of being insurgents. Sixteen hours later, the bodies of 10 were delivered to a morgue, the victims of suffocation in a locked metal-topped police van in temperature nearing 120 degrees.

Even the new Iraqi forces, hailed by the Bush administration as the key to an eventual US troop withdrawal, seem as likely to provoke a civil war as to prevent one. The 170,000 Iraqi men already trained are dominated by Shiite Arabs and Kurds, in a proportion even higher than the 80% those groups represent in the population.

Though there are thousands of Sunni Arabs in the forces, including some generals, Iraqi units sent to the worst hot spots are often dominated by Shiite Arabs and Kurds, some recruited from sectarian militias deeply hostile to Sunni Arabs. The contempt this provokes was voiced by Dhari al-Badri, a Baghdad University professor with a home in Samarra', a Sunni Arab town north of Baghdad. Citing the militias of the two largest Shiite political parties, and of the Kurds, he said: "The Iraqi army in Samarra' is Badr, Da'wa and Pesh Merga. The people [there] feel that the army does not come to serve them, but to punish them. The people hate them".