Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revitè de Presse-Press Revù'!w-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro
de la Prensa-Basm Özeti
Over dinner one night, Salm argued that the Kurds should not be regarded with pity, "I don't think one has to tap into the Wilsonian
streak in American foreign poliey in order to find a rationale for helping the Kurds," he said, "Helping the Kurds would mean an
. opportunity to study the problems caused by weaponS of mass destruction."
Salm, who is forty-one, often speaks bluntly, and is savvy aboutWashington's enduring interest.in ending thereign of Saddam
Hussein. Unwilling publicly to exhort the United States to take military action, Salih is aware that the peshmerga would be obvious
allies of an American military strike against Iraq; other Kurd~ have been making that argument for years. It is not often noted in
Washington policy circles, but the Kurds already hold a vast swath of tenitory inside the country-including two important dams
whose destruction could flood Baghdad-é!nd have at least seventy thousand men under arms. In addition, the two main Kurdish
parties are members of the Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, which is headed by Ahmad Chalabi, a London-based
Shiite businessman; at the moment, though, relations between Chalabi and the Kurdish leaders are contentious. .
Kurds italked to!throughout Kurdistan were enthusiastic about the idea of joining an American-led alliance against Saddam Hussein,
and serving as the northern-Iraqi equivalent of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. President Bush's State of the Union Message, in
which he denounced Iraq as the linchpin of an "axis of evil," had had an electric effect on every Kurd I met who heard the speech. In
the same speech, President Bush made reference to Iraq's .murder of "thou.sands of its own citizens-leaving the bodies of mothers
huddled over their dead children." General Simko Dizayee, the chief of staff of the peshn1erga , told me, "Bush's speech filled our hearts
withhope."
Prime Minister Salm expressed his \jews diplomatically. "We support democratic transformation in Iraq," he said- half smiling,
because he knows that there is no chance of that occurring unless Saqdam is removed. But until America commits itself to removing
Saddam, he said, "we're living on the razor's edge. Before Washington even wakes up in the morning, we could have ten thousand
dead." This is the Kurdish conundrum: the Iraqi military is weaker than the American military, but the Iraqis are stronger than the
Kurds. Seven hundred Iraqi tanks face the Kurdish safe haven, according to peshmerga commanders .
.General Mustafa Said Qadir, the peshmerga leader, put it this way: "We have a problem. If the Amerieans attack Saddam and don't get
him, we're going to get gassed. If the Americans decided to do it, we would be thankful. This is the Kurdish dream. But it has to be
done carefully."
The Kurdish leadership worries, in short, that an American mistake could cost the Kurds what they have created, however
inadvertently: a nearly independent state for themselves in northern Iraq. "We would like to be our own nation," Salih told me. "But
we are realists. All we want is to be partners of the Arabs of Iraq in building a secular, democratic, Jederal country." Later, he added,
"We are proud of ourselves. We have inherited a devastated country. It's not easy what.we are trying to achieve. We had no
democratic institutions, we didn't have a legal culture, we did not have a strong military, From that situation, this is a remarkable
success story."
The Kurdish regional government, to be sure, is npt a Vermont town meeting. The leaders of the two parties, MassoudBarzani and
Jalal Talabani, are safe in their jobs~ But there is a free press here, and separation of mosque and state, and schools are being built and
pensions are being paid. InErbil and in Sulaimaniya, the Kurds have built playgrounds on the ruins of Iraqi Army torture centers. "If
America is indeed looking for Muslims who are eager to become democratic and are eager to counter theeffects of Islamie
fundamentalism, then it should be looking here," Salih said.
Ma,ssoud Barzani is the son of the late Mustafa Barzani, a legendary guerrilla, who built the Democratic Party, and who entered into
the ill-fated alliance with Iran and America. I met Barzani in his headquarters, above the townof Salahuddin. He is a short man, pale
and quiet; he wore the red turban of the Barzani clan and a wide cummerbund across his baggy trousers-the ou Hit of a peshmcrga .
Lik,e Salih, he chooses his words ca:efully when talking about the possibility of helping America bring down Saddam. "It is not enough
to tell us the U.S. will respond at a certain time and place of its choosing," Barzani said, "We're in artillery range. Iraq's Army is weak,
but it is still strong enough to crush us. We don't make assumptions about the American response."
One çiay, I drove to the Kurdish front lines near Erbil, to see the forward positions,of the Iraqi Army. The border between the
Army-controlled territory and the Kurdish region is porous; Baghdad allows some Kurds-nonpolitical Kurds-to travel back and
forth between zones.' ..
My peshmerga escort took me to the roof of a building overlooking the Kalak Bridge and, beyond it, the Iraqi lines. Without
binoculars, we could see Iraqi tanks on the hills in front of us. A local official named Muhammad Najar joined us; he told me that the
Iraqi forces arrayed there were elements of the Army's Jerusalem brigade, a reserve unit established by Saddam with the stated
purpose of liberating Jerusalem from the Israelis. Other peshmerga joined us. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and we were enjoying the
weather. A man named Aziz Khader, gazing at the plain before us, said, "When I look across here, I imagine American tanks coming
downacross this plain going to Baghdad." His friends smiledand said, "Inshallah"-God w~lling. Another man said, "The U.S, is the
lord of the world.': .
6. THE PRISONERS
",
A week later, I was at Shinwe, a mountain range outside Halabja, with another group of peshmerga. My escorts and I had driven
most of the way up, and then slogged through fresh snow. From one peak, we could see the village of Biyara, which sits in a valley
between Halabja and a wall of mountains that mark the Iranian border, Saddam's tanks were an hour's drive away to the south, and
Iran filled the vista before us. Biyara and nine otl~er villages near it are occupied by the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, or Supporters
pf Islam. Shinwe, in fact, might be called the axis of the axis of evil. .
We were close enough to see trucks belonging to Ansar al-Islam making their way from village to village. The commander of the
peshmerga forces surrounding Biyara, a veteran guerrilla named Ramadan Dekane, said that Ansar al-Islam is made up of Kurdish
Islamists and an unknown number of so-called Arab Afghans-Arabs, from southern Iraq and elsewhere, who trained in the camps
of Al Qaeda. .
"They believe that people must be terrorized,"
Dekane said, shaking his head, "They believe that the Koran says this is permissible."
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