Two years after the US stormed into Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein and seven weeks after 8m Iraqis overcame the fear of incipient civil war to wrest back control of their future at the polls, Iraq is locked in a potentially dangerous political stalemate.

The constituent assembly elected on January 30 has been sworn in, but the two largest blocs within it - the victorious "Shia list" and the Kurds - have so far been unable to agree on the formation of a provisional government. The main reason for that is Kirkuk, a microcosm of nearly all the ethnic, religious, tribal and resource-linked tensions that threaten to combine and combust to wreck Iraq's future.