Gareth Smyth: Kurdish memories
Financial Times
By Gareth Smyth in Tehran
March 19 2004

Northern Iraq has become the centre of a Kurdish renaissance, as the inspiration of Kurdish autonomy spreads to the 15m Kurds in Turkey, the 6m in Iran and the 1m in Syria.

This is not a renaissance driven by politics. "It's the right to sing, the right to dance," an Iranian Kurdish fighter now in Sweden once told me.

Yet just a year ago, as the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein began, the Kurds of Iraq fled to the mountains terrified of chemical bombardment.

I well remember the eerie sense of driving down into Arbil as all the other traffic - families crammed with bedding on trucks, tractors and cars - went the other way.

When the war started, the Kurds feared the worst. Around 60 per cent of the Iraqi army was deployed in northern Iraq, and the Kurds knew well what it was capable of.

"Experience has made me pessimistic," said Kamil Ajal, a 39-year-old Kurdish peshmerga, as we stood on an old fort in Chamchamal, under 2km from the first Iraqi positions, just bombed by US missiles.

"My house has been destroyed four times," he calmly continued. "Once, in that field over there, I saw the regime's helicopters kill with rockets an innocent woman and her daughter. I would like to see a democratic regime - but I fear that in the end the world will allow Saddam to annihilate us."

In Chamchamal hospital, Musa Mrad, the director, admitted he could do little to help if things went wrong. There were no masks for chemical attacks and for conventional attacks, he would try to keep people alive until they reached Suleimaniyah hospital 60 km away.

Abdulrahman Mustapha, a man of 60, sat by the side of the road to Kalar, waiting for a van to return from the electrical grinding mill, so he could load the sacks of flour onto his donkey and take them to Biarush, his village, half an hour away. "My tribe were nomads before we settled down around 50 years ago," he said, with irony. "During the war against Iran, the regime levelled our village and took us to a collective town. In the intifada of 1991 we fled to Iran but returned and rebuilt our original village. If Saddam knows this, he will behead us."

As the war progressed and Kurdish forces pushed forward, the fear gradually lifted.

I went to Mosul with Hoshyar Zebari, a leading Kurdish official and now Iraq's interim foreign minister.

For Hoshyar, this was his first time back in his home city for 28 years. As we arrived with two jeep-loads of peshmerga fighters, there was small arms fire and the occasional explosion in the city, but Hoshyar pointed at the river, explaining how as a young man he'd swum from one bridge to another. A few years later he'd smuggled out his wife and two children on donkeys through Turkey into Iran.

We visited Hoshyar's old house, where I sensed he was remembering his two bothers killed by Saddam because of Hoshyar's activism.

In the villages around Kirkuk and Khanaqin I saw Kurds returning to villages from where they'd been displaced by Saddam's "Arabisation" programme over three decades.

At Tapa Chermu, near the Iranian border north-west of Khanaqin, I witnessed the first family from the Palani clan climb down from a truck 28 years after they were uprooted to a camp in Anbar province in south-west Iraq.

"Watan, watan ('homeland')," said Samir Jamil Habib, a man in his 60s raising his arms skyward in gratitude, delighted he could now die in his ancestral lands.

Remarkably, I found little desire for revenge among the Kurds. Samad Ali Bahram, a 53-year-old refugee in the muddy Banislawa camp near Arbil, his teeth recently knocked out by Baathist security police, could distinguish in his pain and anger between "Saddam, the mad dog" and the Arabs who had been his neighbours.

There were always pundits predicting civil war. There still are. And there has been an extraordinary amount of US mismanagement in the past year, especially in delaying Kurdish resettlement in Kirkuk.

But, by and large, the peace has held and there has been progress. "The worst is over," said Hoshyar Zebari, when we went to Mosul.

When you remember the 4,500 destroyed villages, the uncounted mass graves and the blood on the walls of the torture chambers you have to say he's right.

Also in Mosul, I met Ahmad Hassan al-Jabouri, an Arab from Tikrit who had spent four years on death row in Abu Ghraib prison.

"Executions were on Sunday and Wednesday, so you can say I died twice a week for four years," he said. "Can you imagine what that's like?"

I told him flat out that, thankfully, I couldn't.

Gareth Smyth covered the war in northern Iraq from early February to late April