Iraq: Defeat And Flight

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

Beset by the Arabs, Turks and Iranians who surround them, the Kurds say they have no friends save the mountains. And it was to the mountains that hundreds of thousands of -- some say as many as 3 million -- Kurds fled last week for refuge from the wrath of Saddam Hussein.

It had all seemed so different for a brief spring of hope. Taking advantage of Saddam's humiliation in Kuwait, the Kurds liberated the major northern cities of Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk. They blessed Haji Bush for initiating their salvation, granting the American President the title earned by Muslims who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. They were certain that the U.S. and its allies -- who had repeatedly urged Iraqis to throw off Saddam's yoke -- would come to their aid. But their joy lasted for only one cruel moment. By the end of March, Saddam's loyal forces had crushed the rebellion, and the Kurds awoke to their perpetual nightmare: defeat and flight.

And so hundreds of thousands of beaten rebels and terrified civilians commandeered Toyotas, donkey carts, bicycles and buses to flee the battle zone and the retribution of Iraqi troops. Columns of people and vehicles, sometimes 50 miles long, snaked into the hills. Families packed themselves into the scoops of bulldozers. Tractors dragged trailers overloaded with passengers. Tourist buses wheezed desperately up the mountain roads. Near the Turkish border, a tall, eagle-faced man strapped 14 members of his family -- including seven children, his wife and his grandmother -- and innumerable pots, kettles, basins and chicken coops to a huge John Deere tractor. As he helped extract the car of a Western journalist mired in a bog, he spat out a complaint: "Why? Why do you Americans allow this to happen? Saddam will kill us all -- men, women and children. Why doesn't Bush do something? Why should all my children die? Why?"

The Kurds had no patience for geopolitical explanations. They were bitter at what they considered the betrayal of the U.S. Two weeks earlier, Washington seemed to promise that it would protect them from Saddam's unbridled use of air power, but now they were under constant fire from the sky. "We complained 10 times to the Americans that the Iraqis were using fixed-wing aircraft against us. We never received a reply," said an aide to Massoud Barzani, the commander in chief of the rebels. "One might think the U.S. and Mr. Bush want to see all the Kurds massacred."

If even the enemy of their enemy would not prove to be their friend, there were only the mountains to run to. The journey ahead was painful and for some nearly impossible. Outside the town of Kalak an elderly woman, wounded in the leg, sat helplessly by the side of the road, sweat pouring from her face. Beyond lay the snowcaps and hunger and the cries of unshod children sobbing from frostbite. But below and behind were worse fates: fire and death and tales of terror.

Against Kirkuk, a city of nearly a million, Saddam had unleashed an indiscriminate barrage from tanks, helicopter gunships, heavy artillery, Katyusha rockets and ground-to-ground missiles. The Kurds reported raids by Sukhoi bombers as well -- despite the coalition ban on Iraq's use of fixed- wing aircraft. Kamal Kirkuki, a member of the Kurdish resistance, claimed that more than 100,000 women and children had been captured around the city. "If the Iraqis act true to form," he said, "they will all be butchered." One horror story was being passed from mouth to mouth: of Kurdish infants strapped to the flanks of attacking Iraqi tanks. Whether such tales are true or exaggerated, the Kurds have good reason to fear reprisals from a government that has systematically set out to destroy their culture and homeland.

Nor were the Kurds Saddam's only new victims. While civilians throughout Iraq struggled to replace shattered power plants and water lines -- not to mention scrounging for food -- the regime also threw its energy into smashing the Shi'ites in the south who want Saddam's secular Baathist regime replaced by Islamic rule. In the five weeks since the liberation of Kuwait, Baghdad has retaken every major rebel-held city and town, sometimes with terrifying vindictiveness.

Saddam took aim first at the south, where he gathered the remnants of his defeated army and the armor that escaped the allies into a loyal force that rapidly overwhelmed the weak and ill-equipped Shi'ite insurgents. He dispatched two Republican Guard divisions that had been stationed around Baghdad to ensure the efficiency of the Iraqi troops that had failed so miserably against the allied coalition. This time it was the Shi'ite rebels who were doomed to failure. They lacked a joint command-and-communications system and were dependent largely on weapons and ammunition abandoned by Iraqi soldiers as they fled the allies. The holy sites of Karbala and Najaf, so meticulously avoided by coalition bombing raids, were reportedly ravaged. In some cases targeted with napalm and phosphorus, thousands of civilians streamed toward the southern sector of the country occupied by U.S. troops. Ordered not to intervene, American soldiers could offer little more than food, water and medical assistance.

In the north, things were different, and for almost a month the Kurds lived a dream. An uprising that began on March 4 in the town of Rania spread like a sandstorm to engulf all Iraqi Kurdistan. The peshmerga (those who face death), as the rebel fighters are called, did not need to capture towns, as local Iraqi Kurdish militiamen spontaneously joined the rebellion. Fighter Kamal Kirkuki repeated joyfully to all who would listen, "We Kurds are finally free." Jails were thrown open; prisoners set at liberty. Kurds spoke openly of their travails without fear of retribution from Baghdad's once omnipresent spies. Even the discovery of the horrors of Saddam's torture camps -- corpses studded with maggots, canisters of rotting human flesh stored at local outposts of the dreaded Estikhbarat (military intelligence), prisoners who had not seen the light of day for so many years that they thought they were still living in the 1970s -- seemed a catharsis before the new era of freedom.

Less than 20 miles north of Erbil, commander in chief Barzani was granting confident interviews from his luxurious new headquarters -- the concrete villa of Saddam Hussein in the hill town of Salahuddin. "We realize that an independent Kurdistan is out of the question," he told TIME. "All we want is the right to till our land in peace, the right to local government, the right to speak our language and have it taught in our schools." The rebel leader's bodyguard lounged around in the pink-and-beige interior, staring out through floor-to-ceiling windows at the snowy mountains glowing pink in the sunset. For Barzani, the rapid ouster of the regime from Kurdistan was vindication for his father Mustafa, who died in exile in 1979 after his own uprising against Baghdad failed. "We were all taken by surprise at the swiftness of our victory," Barzani acknowledged.

But defeat was equally swift. With the south subdued, Saddam was able to move 100,000 more troops north, rapidly outnumbering the Kurdish fighters. Within a week government forces had relieved the siege of Mosul, the third largest city in Iraq. In the same period, Kirkuk, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Zakhu and other Kurdish-occupied cities were reconquered.

The Kurds fought back bravely. But there was a stylized, almost medieval < ferocity to their resistance. The peshmerga were dressed in turbans and baggy khaki trousers. Along with their AK-47s, SAMs and submachine guns, they carried a traditional dagger stuck into their sashes. "I am very happy," said one peshmerga. He pointed toward the battle zone to indicate the source of his joy: "War." Possessed of an incredible sense of honor, the peshmerga buried all the Iraqi soldiers they killed with full military honors. Explained Idriss Makmoud, a peshmerga commander: "That is the honorable way." Attempting to retake Kirkuk, a band of warriors came under attack from Iraqi helicopter gunships near the town of Altun Kupri. As the aircraft came around again and again, the peshmerga opened fire. Suddenly a line of men rose up, wrapped their arms round one another and sang and danced. Only the setting sun prevented the helicopters from slaughtering them all.

Just three days after Barzani spoke to TIME, his headquarters was a shambles as the commander tried to pull his forces together. For want of a better communications system, handwritten requests for supplies and assistance, scribbled on pieces of children's notepaper, were passed from soldier to soldier until they reached the chief. There was little opportunity to consider each message. Hearing news that Kirkuk had fallen to the Iraqis, Barzani waved off a request for an interview. Said an aide: "We can't hold the cities. We cannot deal with ground-to-ground missiles, helicopters, warplanes and heavy artillery. How can boys and old men stand up to the Republican Guard?" His advice: "Leave as quickly as possible. The battle for the plains is over. Now we must continue the battle in the mountains."

Civil wars inevitably result in mass migration, but the forced exoduses out of Iraq's north and south seemed almost as much the product of deliberate policy. In Kurdistan babies have reportedly been suffering from marasmus and kwashiorkor, diseases usually brought on by the severe malnutrition endemic to countries like Sudan and Ethiopia. The infants' limbs were stringy, their faces shrunken to their skulls, their eyes filled with pus. "There are many of them like this in this region," said Dr. Sabry Hassan of the Zakhu General Hospital, "but we have nothing to keep them alive with." Since the Kuwait invasion last August, Saddam has channeled his country's meager supplies to his power base in central Iraq, thereby imposing a kind of selective starvation on his Shi'ite and Kurdish enemies.

Before fleeing to the hills, Barzani complained of his people's predicament. "We have two blockades," he said, "one from Baghdad, which purposely starved Kurdistan of food and medicine, and the U.N. blockade, which strangled Iraq. Now the U.N. is talking about emergency food relief for Iraq, but does it really believe Saddam will feed the Kurds? No, he will let them starve. And those he does not starve he will order his troops to kill."

As refugees, not only were the Kurds more numerous than the Shi'ites but their prospects were more dire. The mountains presented a formidable rampart of bare stone, their soaring cliffs and giant crevices providing few navigable passes to borders across which few would be welcome. As they trekked up into the barren ranges, the Kurds saw constant reminders of their brutalized past: rusting pipes, a few foundation stones, the ruins of a gristmill, the skeletal remnants of Kurdish villages demolished by Baghdad during earlier repression.

In some places the escape track became a mess of mud; many abandoned their cars and trucks to wade through the bog. Sentries, set up every 3,300 ft., watched the skies for approaching enemy helicopters, which they called "damnation birds." Not all destinations were reachable. Syria, for example, was arrived at by crossing the Tigris on a boat and a prayer, through some 30,000 mines planted in the riverbank on the Iraqi side. The peshmerga boats that ferried refugees were at the mercy of incoming Iraqi shells, and the few bridges had already been blown up. By last week, Baghdad had completely shut down the escape route into Syria.

So the Kurds headed north and east toward Turkey and Iran. It was impossible to estimate the number bottled up at those borders. Tehran claimed that 1 million to 2 million Kurds were seeking sanctuary in Iran and that 200,000 had entered its territory. Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati announced that his country would continue to keep its frontiers open to the refugees. Iran's generosity toward the Kurds is hardly based on altruism: it is designed partly to mollify Iran's own restless Kurdish minority, which makes up 9% to 12% of the population, and partly to improve the country's deplorable human-rights image.

Despite pressure from Washington and London, Turkey's borders were closed. "We are trying to help the refugees on both sides of the border," President Turgut Ozal said. "There are already 100,000 of them inside Turkey and another 150,000 in Iraq. The number is much higher than we can handle."

Turkey's problem is that it already has 7 million to 14.5 million Kurds on its territory. For a decade, Turkey has been trying to suppress Kurdish agitation for autonomy in its eastern provinces. Ankara believes even an autonomous Kurdish region in the area would seduce Turkish Kurds into sedition and secession. Many Turkish military men argue that Saddam is using the refugees to take revenge on Turkey for standing with the coalition. "If Saddam wanted to annihilate these people, he could have done it easily," a Turkish officer allegedly said. "He has not done it. He is pushing them toward us." Though he remained unspecific, Ozal has said he would not object to allied action. Said he: "The most important thing is to stop the aggression by Saddam Hussein. If pressure is put on him and the necessary measures are taken, then I think this can be solved like Kuwait."

Some Western analysts also believe that Saddam is engaging in a kind of demographic sabotage. "The refugees are being buzzed and shot at by gunships from behind," said a British diplomat, "clearly with intent to force them toward the borders." Kurdish leader Kirkuki agreed: "The Iraqis are continuing to herd us to these rocky cemeteries in order to rid themselves of the Kurdish problem once and for all."

Caught between a furious army and a closed border, the Kurds are forced to cling to their cold, granite friends. Supplies must traverse precipitous land routes to reach them, hampered in part by the dilapidation of the two bridges in the area of the Turkish border. Ankara, however, does not appear to be in any hurry to come in with repairs.

With a straight face, Baghdad has denied that it is attacking innocent civilians and has cynically claimed that it was only taking "proper action against those few who decided to take the law into their hands and have attacked the state." While Iraqi troops have been indiscriminately blasting through the south and north, Baghdad Radio has been calling on the refugees to "return home and enjoy the victory and security that is everyone's." No one has anything to fear, the radio has insisted, "except those who committed crimes of killing, burning and stealing or who took up weapons in the face of the government." Exhausted by flight, a few thousand Kurds reportedly took up the offer and returned to Sulaymaniyah late last week.

Most, however, continued to the hills. Somewhere between Turkey and Iraq, the mountains are providing shelter for farmer-poet Mohammed Said and his wife and children. A few weeks ago, during the brief brush with freedom, he had allowed a display of ethnic pride: "I am the rose of Eden, I am the flame that lights the Kurdish darkness, I am the offspring of the Mittani, the Kassites, the Hurrians and the Medes. I am cousin to Alexander the Great, and the juice of the pomegranate drips from my lips like wine." Finally, he said, the suffering of his people was over. "We could not speak our language or play our music for fear of death. Now all this has changed."

It has not. Whether in Iraq or Turkey, Syria or Iran, the Kurds are destined to remain an orphan nation.

With reporting by William Mader/London and James Wilde/Altun Kupri