Kurds in north keep up hope -and guard

Missing was the face of the despised dictator who destroyed the town. The pieces left were scrawled with graffiti.

"This is the whore that did it," he said of Saddam.

Though Sherwan Hussein - no relation to the Iraqi leader - had come to see his old home in hopes of one day returning, he appreciated neither its gentle hills nor their blanket of yellow flowers. To visit them could have meant his life.

"It is not beautiful for me," said the 31-year-old Kurdish taxi driver. "Now it's just a minefield."

His only pleasure came from the sound of American war planes and from the dark puffs of smoke that rose from behind the distant serrated ridge line.

"This makes me very happy," he said. "I wish the coalition would finish this in one hour."

The border between Saddam's army and the Kurds has always been set by the dictator or by American bombs.

In 1991, it was the American no-fly zone that pushed Saddam out of the north and allowed the Kurds their autonomy.

Three years ago, the Iraqis pulled back even more. And this week, the American bombs drove the enemy back 8 miles farther to the hills just beyond Hussein's village.

What used to be the last Kurdish checkpoint on the road into Iraqi-controlled territory was empty - the Kurdish peshmerga fighters had moved across the divide to an Iraqi checkpoint.

The road between the two was potholed where mines had been removed. Concertina wire warned against venturing into the fields. The yellow flag of the Kurdistan Democratic Party flew over what had once been heavily bombed Iraqi trenches.

A few miles down the road, a Kurdish front-line commander didn't blink when a loud explosion came from the Iraqi positions behind him.

"If they decide they want to come back and take this area, we will fight," he said.

He speculated that the Iraqis had retreated to take cover among the civilians. From an abandoned hilltop entrenchment, he pointed to the nearest Iraqi positions.

"If the Americans bomb these hills, then we can take the bridge behind them," he said.

Then came the soft whump of a mortar, and the peshmergas hurried to their trucks and back toward the safety of their own checkpoint.