It really is a travesty that nobody in the Western MSM is covering the growing escalation in hostilities between the Kurdish authorities and Maliki. There are a few exceptions like Leila Fadel of McClatchy…

Kurdish forces have detained Murad Kashtu al Asi three times in the isolated district of Sinjar in Nineveh province. First, they beat him and accused him of being a terrorist and a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a mostly Sunni Arab political party. The second time, they detained him for several hours, he said.

The third time, they hit him in the face with the butts of their guns. "If you leave alive this time, then work with us or we will kill you," he said his captors told him. He was held six days and released Sunday after U.S. forces intervened on his behalf, he said.

The Kurds never charged him with a crime and even called him their "brother." His offense was working with an Arab party in territory that the Kurds covet. "We don’t want you to be with Arabs anymore . . . if they controlled the area (the existence of the) Yazidis will end," Asi recalled.

Asi is a member of the ancient Yazidi sect, most of whom consider themselves Kurdish. In the complex and often violent landscape of Iraq, the community, estimated at a few hundred thousand, is at the center of a tug of war over land between mostly Arab Iraq to the south and mostly Kurdish Iraq to the north.

Stories like Asi’s have been ignored all too often by many that are privy to it, as Leila went on to point out…

The issue is so sensitive that many Western officials won’t talk about Kurdish intimidation on the record. Residents who’ve complained to U.N. officials about intimidation by Kurdish forces are often subject to detention by those forces within hours of their meetings with the officials.

The US General responsible for Mosul and Nineveh province has gone on the record with several papers. From Leila’s…

"The whole front of where the (Kurdistan Regional Government) borders the rest of Iraq from Sinjar through Kirkuk on down to Khanaqeen is timed for a misstep, especially a military misstep," said Brig. Gen. Tony Thomas, the U.S. commander in Nineveh province. "We’ve got a real challenge and a crisis on our hands." [...]

Thomas said he’d seen little evidence of extrajudicial killings during his 14-month tour. "We hear allegations all the time. You’ll hear about Kurdish pressure; it will be everything from economic and political pressure to more concerning forced apprehension and murder," he said.[...]

"They’re definitely caught in the middle, and our job is just to make sure that we can protect the area," said Thomas, speaking of the minority groups. "It’s a political hot potato right now that we’re trying to contain."

In Aswat Aliraq, Thomas continued…

“It can’t be put off any longer. The pressure has become so intense that something has to give,” he said.
Brigadier General Tony Thomas, the top U.S. commander in Mosul, said Maliki increasingly “sees the Kurds, specifically the Peshmerga, as a militia, unauthorised, shouldn’t be there.”
What many forget, he says, is that Peshmerga were invited to help keep the peace in some of Iraq’s most troublesome areas.
Thomas said Kurds are more nervous about what they see as Baghdad’s growing unilateralism as U.S. troops prepare to leave.
“They literally said, ‘We must be armed because as soon as you leave, we see this coming … (Maliki) is going to attack us as soon as you turn away,’” Thomas said.

I don’t subscribe to the same alarmist view, as Maliki can ill afford to militarily confront the Kurds. However, Maliki is trying to actively undermine the Kurds by all sorts of means…

Maliki wanted to change the constitution few days ago [although he was a member of the parliament committee that supervised the writing of the constitution] because:

Basically, responsibility should be given to the federal government, which undertakes building and protecting the country,

Maliki felt there is no need to hide the deep differences between Baghdad and Irbil, especially after a statements made by the President of the Kurdistan region “Barzani” in Washington, expressed his readiness to host U.S. military bases in Kurdistan region if Baghdad refused to sign the security agreement with Washington.

Needless to say the Kurds issued a swift rebuke…

Kurdish politicians rejected the calls of Nouri al-Maliki to reconsider the relations of Kurdistan region and Iraqi provinces with the center, considering such calls “unconstitutional” and causing Maliki to lose his legitimacy as the prime minister of Iraq.

Falah Mustafa, head of the foreign relations directorate in the Kurdistan regional cabinet, told Aswat al-Iraq “if we want to reinforce Iraq, then this should be achieved by strengthening regions and provinces, which is contrary to what al-Maliki is aiming for.”

Of course, both the US and Kurdish officials blame the tension on AQ-I…

U.S. military officials blamed Sunni Muslim al Qaeda or similar Islamist groups in Mosul, which they say is the last big city in Iraq still with a large al Qaeda presence.
“Kurds control the provincial governing council after most Sunnis boycotted local polls in 2005, but the balance of power in Mosul could change in elections due by late January,” the paper noted.
“Christians, who are believed to number around 250,000 to 300,000 in the province, could be a swing vote, wooed by Kurds or Arabs in a fight for power,” according to the newspaper.
“Local Iraqi Army units in Mosul are mainly made up of Kurds. Arabs in the area scornfully refer to them as “Peshmerga,” the name for former guerrilla fighters that make up the security forces of the autonomous Kurdish region further north,” it said.
Bashar Fahdil, a shopkeeper in Mosul, like other Arabs says Kurdish soldiers share blame for ongoing violence. When civilians are attacked, he said, “Kurdish soldiers just watch.”
“The Arab families in our neighbourhood know we have no fault in any sectarian or ethnic treason,” Um Reezan, a Kurdish housewife in eastern Mosul said. “But there are people who think only superficial thoughts, and sometimes they hint at us.”
Colonel Dildar Jamel Mohammed, a Kurd who commands an Iraqi Army battalion in western Mosul, said insurgents were stoking ethnic tension and trying to sabotage security.
“Al Qaeda uses this as a tool,” he said, referring to the Sunni Islamists who, in Iraq, are almost all Arabs.
Ambassador Thomas Krajeski, a senior U.S. official in Baghdad, described the ancient city on the Tigris River as “where all the fault lines that exist in Iraq come together.
“It is a place where Kurd and Arab officials can solve some of these key issues: what does it mean to be a federal Iraq?”

Strange that they continue to ignore the real reasons…