Kurds fear chemical attacks

SULAYMAN and his wife live alone in a two-roomed house in the mountains of northern Iraq. Now, as war looms, more than 30 relatives have come to stay, fearing possible chemical attacks on their cities.

Women and children crowd around a wood stove in one room while, outside in the pouring rain, their menfolk unload sacks of potatoes and rice.

The scene is repeated in dozens of villages high in the Kurdish mountains. “The reason we’re here is because we are afraid of chemical attacks, we don’t want to end up like the people of Halabja,” said Selman, Sulayman’s son, who arrived with his wife and four children from Dohuk, some 100 km to the southeast.

The memory of Halabja, where some 5,000 Iraqi Kurds were killed in a 1988 chemical attack by Baghdad, haunts breakaway northern Iraq.

But few said they planned to flee Iraq altogether and try to cross into neighbouring Iran or Turkey.

Selman said he had been among the many thousands who tried to enter Turkey when the Iraqi army crushed a Kurdish uprising against President Saddam Hussein at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

Turkish troops stopped the Kurds from crossing the border. Many died from hunger and exposure on the mountains trying to get in before food and shelter eventually arrived.

“When we tried to cross the border, the Turks beat us and shot at us,” said Selman. “That’s why we won’t go there.

“We would prefer to die here in our homeland than go to Turkey,” cousin Ababekir chipped in.

This time Turkey says it plans to send troops into northern Iraq to set up a buffer zone to bring aid to displaced Kurds.

But the Kurds have had more time to prepare for war than in 1991 and have spent weeks stockpiling food and planning a safe place of refuge with relatives far away from the front lines.

Most people in northern Iraq suspect Turkey’s real motive is to quash Kurdish dreams of autonomy in a post-Saddam Iraq. “If the Turks come here, we’ll fight them,” said Selman.

“For us, there is no difference between them and Saddam.”

Nearby a group of men struggled in the wind and rain to put up a tent for those who could not fit in the house. Other families settled in at the village school.

Despite the hardship, few were downbeat.

“We’re happy the Americans are coming,” said Selman. “That means we’ll soon get rid of Saddam.”

Meanwhile, Sulayman, the taciturn host, surveyed the crowd of sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews and nieces around him.

“Hopefully, the war will be over quickly,” he said.