Iraqi Kurds Brace For War

Sulimaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan. --The lights of the city sparkled in the hard night of cold winter, thankfully signaling the end of a long journey. This was my third trip in two years and as I approached the city I have become so fond of, I thought back to the first time I arrived in the sweat of a searing summer in 2001, new to the ways of Kurdish culture and its tortured history.

Back then, the Kurds were plugging away like Sisyphus with his rock, pushing upward--against all odds--with their vision of a society that respects human rights, values the rule of law, and simply takes care of its people. Under the protection of U.S. and British warplanes since 1991, the Kurds were governing themselves for the first time in their history. With no experience in democratic processes, they were intent on carving out a little piece of freedom in a part of the world hostile to them as a large independent-minded ethnic minority, and hostile to anything that might expose the regional lie that a police state is the only viable government in a militarized Middle East.

Today, the rock seems to have reached inertia and threatens to roll back over them and down the mountain to an uncertain destiny.

Powerful players plan war in Iraq for their own strategic interests but the purported goal of a U.S. war against Iraq also intersects with the goal of the Iraqi people: to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Few Iraqis would argue against the need, indeed the desperate desire, for regime change.

But a war to force that change can, in a few weeks, sweep away all the Kurds have managed to achieve in the past decade. They can only hope it will make their current isolated enclave superfluous and move them forward to take their rightful place in a new Iraq that includes equal rights for all of its people: Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Turkoman and Assyrian Christians.

"War is horrible. No one wants war," says one Kurdish minister. "But still, it is better than the domination of this regime." And Kurds would know on both accounts. They have been at war with the Ba'th regime for more than 30 years.

War Jitters

On the surface, all seems the same in Sulimaniyah, a city I appreciate for both its fierce nationalism and its love of music, poetry and a general good time. On a sunny day after Friday prayers, the streets fill with people shopping, visiting neighbors, dining in local kebab shops, or enjoying fresh-squeezed fruit juice. Internet cafes are packed, as is McDonalds, whose uniformed workers serve up pizza, burgers and Pepsi under golden arches.

Groups of teenage girls in platform shoes and blue jeans walk hand-in-hand, their long thick hair pulled back neatly in barrettes. Groups of older women carry bundles of food from the bazaar on their heads, their long black capes flowing behind them to reveal colorful house dresses underneath. Farmers and their families from nearby villages wait at the bus stop on Salim Street for the small blue and white buses to move them about the sprawling city of 800,000 people.

But beneath the facade of normalcy lurks the palpable sense that war is near to hand and generates excited optimism as much as fear by both locals and the scruffy pack of more than 75 international journalists who have filtered in like vultures with confident knowledge that a feeding fest is near. Last June, I ran into two reporters in four weeks. Mobile phones buzz as government officials scramble to facilitate interview requests, drivers find they have wheels of gold, and anyone who speaks any English is suddenly a richly paid translator.

But most Kurds have few opportunities to cash in on the war and can only sit and wait to see what happens. Sultana, whose 10-member family has lived in a single room in an abandoned dormitory since the last war, is looking forward to the next one. Her family abandoned two houses and a business and fled Kirkuk when Iraqi troops brutally retook the city after the uprising failed in 1991. After months on the Iranian border, they came to Sulimaniyah because Kirkuk remained under Iraqi government control, and as Kurds they were banned from return.