KIRKUK, Iraq — Even by the skewed standards of a country where millions are homeless or in exile, the squalor of the Kirkuk soccer stadium is a startling sight.
On the outskirts of a city adjoining some of Iraq’s most lucrative oil reserves, a rivulet of urine flows past the entrance to the barren playing field.
There are no spectators, only 2,200 Kurdish squatters who have converted the sporting dugouts, stands and parking lot into a refugee city of cinder-block hovels covered in Kurdish political graffiti, some for President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
These homeless Kurds are here not for soccer but for politics. They are reluctant players in a future referendum to decide whether oil-rich Tamim Province in the north and its capital, Kirkuk, will become part of the semiautonomous Kurdish regional government or remain under administration by Baghdad.
Under the Iraqi Constitution the referendum is due before Dec. 31. But in a nation with a famously slow political clock, one of the few things on which Kirkuk’s Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen communities agree is that yet another political deadline is about to be missed.
This unstable city can ill afford much more delay and uncertainty. The fusion of oil, politics and ethnic tensions make Kirkuk one of the most potentially explosive places in the country, and its fate is seen as a crucial issue by all sides in the debate about whether Iraq will eventually be partitioned among Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs.
What rankles the stadium’s impoverished Kurds most is that while they remain in a foul-smelling limbo, on the other side of town some of the Arabs who were forcibly moved here by Saddam Hussein still live in comfortable suburbs, a legacy of the dictator’s notorious 1980s Anfal campaign to depopulate Kurdish areas and “Arabize” Tamim.
Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.
THINGS ARE SO MUCH BETTER IN IRAQ
BAGHDAD -- Seven inmates were killed Monday when mortar shells slammed into an Interior Ministry jail here, Iraqi security officials said. A few miles south, fire broke out at one of Iraq's main oil refineries, a possible case of sabotage.
There were conflicting reports about the cause of the blaze, but police said a Katyusha rocket hit a gas tanker.
More than 450 attacks have been carried out against Iraq's oil installations or industry employees since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, said analysts who monitor security issues related to energy. Attacks occurred Friday and Saturday in the northern oil hub of Baiji.
Police, meanwhile, announced the arrest of four suspects in the weekend assassination of a popular police chief in the southern province of Babil.
Maj. Gen. Qais Hamza Mamouri and two bodyguards were killed Sunday in Hillah, capital of the predominantly Shiite Muslim province, after a bomb hit his convoy. The suspects, police said, were found to have significant traces of explosives on their bodies.
In the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, a police colonel and two officers were killed when gunmen opened fire on their convoy. In Baghdad, the manager of the Rashad mental and psychiatric hospital was gunned down while driving home.
The violence was the latest reminder of the dangers Iraqis continue to face, despite significant security improvements throughout the country in recent months.
As the nation on Monday observed Human Rights Day, an annual international event, some Iraqis said they felt only slightly better off than when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq.
Key concerns include the treatment of detainees, growing violence against women and the fear of speaking out openly on political matters for fear of sectarian retaliation -- issues that underscore the unfulfilled goal of the invasion: bringing Iraq greater freedoms.
"Before 2003, there were [human rights] violations, but not like the violations we are seeing today," said Omar Jabouri, human rights advisor to Vice President Tariq Hashimi, who has been an outspoken critic of the treatment of detainees since the start of the war.
Jabouri said about 32,000 people were being held by Iraqi security forces. The number being held by U.S.-led coalition forces is 25,500, according to the U.S. military
U.S. military officials say they have gone to great lengths to eliminate abuses at their detention facilities in Iraq.
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.
"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.
"It felt like prison," says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming "20/20" investigation. "I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened."
Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.
"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.
"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.
Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.
According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by "several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally."
Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.
THINGS ARE SO MUCH BETTER IN IRAQ
BAGHDAD -- Seven inmates were killed Monday when mortar shells slammed into an Interior Ministry jail here, Iraqi security officials said. A few miles south, fire broke out at one of Iraq's main oil refineries, a possible case of sabotage.
There were conflicting reports about the cause of the blaze, but police said a Katyusha rocket hit a gas tanker.
More than 450 attacks have been carried out against Iraq's oil installations or industry employees since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, said analysts who monitor security issues related to energy. Attacks occurred Friday and Saturday in the northern oil hub of Baiji.
Police, meanwhile, announced the arrest of four suspects in the weekend assassination of a popular police chief in the southern province of Babil.
Maj. Gen. Qais Hamza Mamouri and two bodyguards were killed Sunday in Hillah, capital of the predominantly Shiite Muslim province, after a bomb hit his convoy. The suspects, police said, were found to have significant traces of explosives on their bodies.
In the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday, a police colonel and two officers were killed when gunmen opened fire on their convoy. In Baghdad, the manager of the Rashad mental and psychiatric hospital was gunned down while driving home.
The violence was the latest reminder of the dangers Iraqis continue to face, despite significant security improvements throughout the country in recent months.
As the nation on Monday observed Human Rights Day, an annual international event, some Iraqis said they felt only slightly better off than when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq.
Key concerns include the treatment of detainees, growing violence against women and the fear of speaking out openly on political matters for fear of sectarian retaliation -- issues that underscore the unfulfilled goal of the invasion: bringing Iraq greater freedoms.
"Before 2003, there were [human rights] violations, but not like the violations we are seeing today," said Omar Jabouri, human rights advisor to Vice President Tariq Hashimi, who has been an outspoken critic of the treatment of detainees since the start of the war.
Jabouri said about 32,000 people were being held by Iraqi security forces. The number being held by U.S.-led coalition forces is 25,500, according to the U.S. military
U.S. military officials say they have gone to great lengths to eliminate abuses at their detention facilities in Iraq.
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