Kurds living in fear of war

By Jim Muir BBC correspondent, Iraqi Kurdistan

It is an anxious time for Kurdish city dwellers

The Kurds of northern Iraq are bracing themselves to be caught up once again in the tides of a war which offers both risks and chances, but over whose course they will have little control.

For most Iraqi Kurds, the very thought of war evokes an instant reflex fear - chemicals.

In March 1988, at least 5,000 Kurds perished in one hour when Saddam Hussein's forces dropped chemical bombs on the eastern town of Halabja.

Fears of another chemical attack led to a panic-stricken mass flight of the Kurds into the northern and eastern mountains three years later, when Saddam's troops counter-attacked to quell the uprising which followed Iraq's expulsion from Kuwait.

There's nothing at all to protect us Anwar, Kurdish resident

In the city of Suleimanieh, Maryam is one of many people preparing to flee again if hostilities break out.

"We will send our six-month-old baby to relatives across the border in Iran if the war breaks out," she says. "We're afraid the regime will use chemical weapons against us, like they did before.

"We don't want the same tragedy to happen again. We'll leave the cities, because they're always in danger."

Already, rental prices in remote mountain areas have shot up, as city-dwellers secure bolt-holes. Many have stockpiled food and fuel. Those who have managed to find them have bought gas-masks, but there are very few on the market.

"There's nothing at all to protect us," said Maryam's neighbour, Anwar. "Even the simplest thing - which is to give out masks to people to protect them against chemical attacks - hasn't been done.

"If they really want to help us, they should do it in advance, not when it's too late."

Insecure enclave

Kurdish leaders said the US had promised to supply protective masks, but nothing has happened.

Small wonder that the current expectation of war evokes mixed feelings on the part of most Kurds.

"We don't want war, we just want to live in peace," said Abdul Hameed, a nut vendor. "We don't want the American army here in Kurdistan.

The Kurds fear the possibility of chemical attacks

"It's not in the interest of the Kurds. If they come, they'll be after their own interests, not ours."

But Nader Hussein, a carpet merchant, disagreed.

"I want to see the region rid of Saddam Hussein," he said. "We have to live in freedom, if not for us, then at least for the coming generation."

"We want Saddam removed, but I don't want the US army here because it's foreign and we don't want foreign occupation," added Salwa Dawud, a housewife.

Since 1991, the Iraqi Kurds have run their own affairs in the northern Iraq enclave, protected by a western air umbrella that has kept Saddam's forces at bay. Some have prospered, others subsisted.

But their existence in this quasi-independent little entity - split in two by bitter fighting between the two main factions, the KDP and the PUK, in the mid-1990s - is historically tenuous and insecure.

Only a solid arrangement with a stable government in Baghdad would give the Kurds the kind of security they yearn for.

While many Kurds may dream of unity and independence, they know that any move in that direction would bring unremitting hostility from powerful neighbours with their own potentially restive Kurdish minorities.

"We have resigned ourselves to accepting the fate of geography and history on our people," says Barham Saleh, Prime Minister of the PUK-run half of the enclave.

"We believe salvation for the Kurdish people lies in a democratic federal Iraq that will remove the spectre of genocide and chemical and biological weapons being used against our people again."

Turkish interests

War is always an uncertain business, but the Kurds' insecurities are heightened by doubts over two vital sets of intentions - those of the Americans, and those of their powerful neighbours, the Turks.

If the war goes ahead and Saddam is overthrown, the US will clearly have the major say in what fills the vacuum. Washington officials have made it clear they currently favour an indeterminate period of US military rule before a civilian Iraqi Government takes over.

That casts in doubt the Kurds' ambition to be granted federal autonomy within a pluralistic, democratic parliamentary system.

"It depends on the future of the campaign," the PUK leader Jalal Talabani told the BBC. "If this dictatorship will be finished, if there will be a democratic, parliamentarian system which allows the Kurdish people to have federation within the framework of Iraq, then we have a good chance of achieving the purposes of our people.

"But if they replace this dictatorship with another one, we will lose something."

Further pressure comes from the north, where Turkey is hyper-sensitive about anything that could be construed as a Kurdish move towards independence.

The Kurds have been told that in Washington's complex and tense negotiations with Turkey over the use of Turkish bases as a springboard for the western attack, the US agreed to Ankara's insistence that Turkish troops should also cross the border into northern Iraq, ostensibly to cope with a possible wave of refugees from the fighting.

Kurdish leaders - especially the KDP, whose guerrillas control the country south of the Turkish border - are outraged and deeply suspicious of Turkish intentions.

"There's no reason, no pretext for the entry of Turkish or any regional forces to Kurdistan," KDP leader Masoud Barzani told the BBC. "It will complicate the situation, and the results will not be to anybody's benefit at all."

"What we are afraid of is that the real motive is not humanitarian, but another ulterior motive, political strategic, in order to squeeze us and arrest the progress we have made," senior KDP official Hoshyar Zebari explained.

"We've made it absolutely clear that our goal is not the establishment of an independent Kurdish state. This Turkish move is very dangerous and would really create very, very severe complications," he added.

As the price for keeping the Turks out, Kurdish leaders are said to have offered to sign a formal agreement pledging not to seek independence, and not to allow their Pesh Merga guerrillas to enter the important nearby oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk (currently held by the Baghdad government) in the event of war.

Reports from Ankara said the Turks were demanding that the US ensure that after the overthrown of Saddam, there should be only one Iraqi army and that the Kurdish factions should be disarmed. Also that any future federal arrangement should be on a geographical, not ethnic, basis.

The situation is fraught with dangers and potential complications. If, for example, the majority-Kurdish people of Kirkuk were to stage an uprising (as happened in 1991), would the Turks take that as sufficient provocation to trigger intervention?

"The problem is that the Iraqi people still don't know what America wants," said KDP leader Masoud Barzani. "They're not sure of their fate, they live in a state of alarm, even those who want to overthrow this regime don't know what will follow.

"So the whole Iraqi people is living in a state of anxiety, a state of insecurity."