KIRKUK, Iraq — Qader Abdullah Rasoul visited Kirkuk Stadium the day it opened and thought it beautiful. The lush turf was newly laid, and the stands were smooth concrete, steeply tiered to seat tens of thousands of soccer fans. Odai Hussein himself, son of Saddam, attended, and on that day in 1986 Iraq's national team beat Saudi Arabia 2-1.

Now Rasoul lives in the stadium along with 2,500 others, mostly Kurds. They inhabit mud and cinder-block huts beneath the stands, in the parking lots and the luxury boxes, and it's no longer beautiful. It's a dirty, sewage-ridden slum and Rasoul is the unofficial mayor.

"We apologize to the youth of Kirkuk because this is a place for sport," he said. "But where else can we go?"

The answer is nowhere, for the time being. Five years after the birth of a new Iraq, Kirkuk is under Kurdish control, at least for now, and at the center of national debate over whether it will join the semiautonomous Kurdistan region or remain under federal control.

Saddam's government pushed Rasoul and his family from their Kirkuk home in 1997, part of a strategy to assert central government control over the province. In 2003, in the first weeks after Saddam fell, they left a rented house in Ramadi to return. The radio was full of talk of a new Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds were doing the same.

But Rasoul returned to nothing.

He has a job as a phys-ed teacher but doesn't earn enough to buy a house in a country where mortgages are almost unheard-of. Housing prices have risen, and he can't even afford to rent.

So a room under the stadium is home for his wife, their six children and him — a temporary solution, he once thought.

His neighbors elected him as their representative because he had at least a degree from a technical institute.

He pestered the local government until it installed pipes for drinking water; water runs through them for about two hours every eight days.

But he hasn't found a home for anyone.

"I failed," he said. "More than 10 times we went to the governor, parliament, the Kurdistan government, and they have never found a solution for residence. We are still in between. For me, personally, I wish I could go back to Ramadi."