As the sun lowers over Kirkuk, crowds of young Arabs and Turkmen take to the streets waving Iraqi flags, dancing and honking car horns in celebration after central government forces retook the disputed, ethnically mixed northern city from Kurdish control this week. “Iraq is one again,” shouts an elderly man in a long white robe. “Everyone will soon accept this.” A few blocks away, where Kurdish flags still fly, young men at the only café puff water pipes and talk of revenge. They cannot accept the humiliating loss of a city they believed would be the heart of an independent Kurdish state their leaders promised to make a reality. “We’ll only bear one or two weeks of this — after that, if our leaders don’t act, we’ll take this into our own hands,” says Haitham, 24, a phone salesman. He awoke to find his shop pocked with bullet holes a day earlier and has not gone back since. Just weeks earlier, northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government held an independence referendum, ignoring international objections and arguing the moment was right to jump-start secession talks with Baghdad. The Kurdistan Democratic party of Masoud Barzani, the Kurdish president, argued the Kurds had helped a US-led coalition push Isis back to a few remaining pockets in Iraq and Syria. Now, the ruling party argued, the regional shake-up gave Kurds room to achieve their dream of statehood. Instead, one of the west’s top regional allies is in danger of being ripped apart at the seams. Faultlines are deepening between Kurds and Arabs and Turkmen, between Kurdish factions, and between Kurdish leaders and their own people. Many Kurds are outraged at how quickly their forces withdrew from a string of disputed areas that the KRG’s peshmerga fighters battled to capture after Isis swept through northern Iraq in 2014.