In the rubble of the hillside village of Shwan, a few miles north of Kirkuk, Kurdish women with cigarettes in their mouths mix cement, while children lug jerrycans of water and the men give orders. At least 30 families in the village, destroyed by Saddam Hussein in 1987 during his ferocious Anfal ("booty") campaign to Arabise northern Iraq, have returned in the past year or so, apparently enticed back by tonnes of free cement and grants of $1,000 (some say more) per family from the local office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (puk), one of the two parties that runs Iraq's Kurdish region. Shwan is just one of dozens of Kurdish villages razed by Mr Hussein that are re-emerging. This alarms Iraqi Arabs. They see the Kurds forcibly grabbing back more of northern Iraq-including the area around Kirkuk that holds the country's richest oilfields—and extending their domain closer to Baghdad and the Arab heartland.
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