Grim Kurds prepare to suffer in new war

By STEPHAN FARIS
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
Saturday, March 1st, 2003

KALAK, Iraq - All that lies between this small Kurdish village and the Iraqi front line is about half a mile of no-man's land and a cemetery holding the bones of those killed when the Iraqi troops came through in 1991.

Two Peshmerga soldiers - a Kurdish word for those that face death - crouch in a small building in northern Iraq watching Iraqi soldiers check Jordanian oil trucks. One gestures toward the distant skyline at an Iraqi bunker or lone soldier every 200 yards.

"Saddam," he says, pointing. His finger moves along the ridge line "Saddam. Saddam. Saddam. Saddam."

From their independent enclave in northern Iraq, the Kurds are busy preparing for war.

Most preparations are not military. They know a full-scale Iraqi assault would crush them. When the war comes, they will rely on American troops.

But in the regional capital of Erbil, the Kurdish administration is preparing camps for what they think could be as many as 500,000 refugees from southern Iraq.

At the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the Kurds revolted but were routed by Iraqi forces. Aware that vengeful Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had gassed entire Kurdish villages in the past, hundreds of thousands of terrified Kurds fled into the icy mountains of southern Turkey, where many died of exposure.

To avoid a repeat of the catastrophe, the Kurds have drafted evacuation plans for their major cities to disperse concentrated populations into about 3,000 villages.

"If you bomb Erbil, you will kill thousands," said Karim Sinjari, the interior minister for the section of Kurdish Iraq controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party. "But in a village, it will be 100."

The government is short on medicine, fuel, food, tents and - the words that are on everybody's lips - gas masks.

"Our people hear in the news that the Kuwaitis and Israelis are being given gas masks," Sinjari said. "We have no resources for that."

Instead, some are putting plastic sheeting over their windows. Others are gathering cloth to make into makeshift chemical tents. Still others have rented rooms near the Iranian border. When the war comes, they will head there.

For those left behind without gas masks, the Kurdish government has suggested they create homemade ones by wrapping ashes and salt in a cloth and breathing through it.

"We don't know if it will work," said Kalil Yagoob, 26. "But we'll have to try."

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