TIME: Lying in Wait in
Kurdistan
Monday, March 03, 2003
By MICHAEL WARE / HALABJA
Along a vast front line snaking through northern
Iraq, in bunkers and staging posts only a few miles
from an estimated 50,000 anti-Baghdad Kurdish
fighters, Saddam Hussein has stationed tens of
thousands of badly fed, sadly equipped conscripts
from his I and V Corps of the Iraqi army. But the
Kurdish fighters, known as the peshmerga (those who
face death), are not worried about their enemy's
proximity. These bedraggled Iraqi soldiers are
unwilling to die for a leader they loathe.
Saddam has made a different calculation. He believes
that in the event of war, fear of his wrath and
uncertainty over his demise will press his men into
one last battle. Crossing the heavily mined
no-man's-land near the Kurdish town of Chamchamal in
recent weeks, two Iraqi deserters have brought tales
of a buildup. They say Saddam is pushing heavy armor
and ammunition forward. A Kurdish security official,
among the first to interrogate the men, says, "They
don't want to, but Baghdad is ordering these units to
fight."
As U.S. forces continue to encircle Iraq in a looming
military action, Saddam's troops are preparing for
possible showdowns with both American and Kurdish
forces. But the Kurdish fighters seem more concerned
about the presence of another foe: Ansar al-Islam,
the terrorist-backed, Baghdad-aligned militia based
in Kurdistan, whom they know to be a far fiercer
enemy than the Iraqis.
Along the Iraqi front, all units have been put on
full alert. Just north of the Iraqi-held oil city of
Kirkuk, a side road likely to be used by U.S. combat
troops is being buttressed with Iraqi tanks, "all
camouflaged so only the gun barrels are obvious,"
says an officer at a nearby Kurdish gun position. In
this district around Qurtan Jukoy, the Iraqis have
closed many of the smaller roads used by civilians
passing between the lines. For more than 10 days,
Iraqi engineers have been gouging deep trenches to
slow the approach of soldiers.
The peshmerga are watching and waiting, eager to
engage. On the main artery from the Kurdish city of
Arbil to Kirkuk, Kurdish fighters man a gun post at
Dawla Bakrah. They claim to have recently exchanged
fire with the Iraqi heavy guns sighting their
position. Taxi drivers, pumped by both sides for
intelligence, have warned the peshmerga of recent
activity that appears to involve the placing of
explosives on the roads. Rumors are trickling in of
Saddam's men sealing off Kurdish quarters in Kirkuk
at night to bury mysterious barrels. Farther east in
the tiny hamlet of Taqtaq, peshmerga deputy commander
Dlawer speaks of Iraqi rocket batteries arriving at
Kirkuk.
Not far from the Iraqi city of Mosul sit at least
three key oil fields. Peshmerga fighters in Shaykh
Shirwan village, surrounded on three sides by
Baghdad's V Corps, say reconnaissance teams and
intelligence sources have spotted tanks being dug in
around the oil wells over the low rise separating the
forces. Until two weeks ago, 2nd Lieut. Ali Qadir
Jadir was with one of those tanks. A Kurdish
conscript, he deserted from the 34th Armor Brigade of
the V Corps' 1st Mechanized Division, leaving behind
155 men and 28 tanks. The weary junior officer was
not the only one in his unit inclined to surrender.
By his account, "all they think about, from the cooks
to the officers and even the Republican Guard
embedded with us, is how they're going to give up in
a couple of weeks."
For the peshmerga, it's more welcome evidence that
the battle may already be won. "When the war starts
we'll need a big committee to take care of
prisoners," says a Kurdish official on the Dawla
Bakrah line. "It will be out of control, far more
than we expect." The Kurds believe Iraqi conscripts
will raise their hands in the air once it's clear
that Saddam is finished and the Americans are
guaranteeing amnesty.
Civilian administrators in Saddam's provinces sense
which way the wind is blowing. A local businessman
told Kurdish intelligence agents that he had met with
a top Iraqi official in a northern city. When the
businessman asked for a travel certificate allowing
movement from the Kurdish area to Iraqi territory,
the official advised him to wait a month and receive
the permission from the Kurds. "We've already
discussed this and decided to stay in our homes when
the war begins and wait to see whether you come to
execute us or free us," the official confided.
Nearby, a grittier enemy is priming for battle. In a
small pocket of northeastern Iraq, up to 700
well-trained, battle-hardened terrorists backed by
al-Qaeda await U.S. forces, eager to enmesh them in a
repeat of the Afghan confrontations in Tora Bora and
the Shah-i-Kot Valley. They are the Kurdish Islamic
militants of the Ansar al-Islam militia,
fundamentalists who have imposed a Taliban-like order
on the villages they now control. Western and local
intelligence sources say the militants receive
support from Saddam's state security agencies and
hard-line Iranian interests as well as al-Qaeda
veterans from Afghanistan and elsewhere.
For more than a year, Ansar has waged a bloody
military campaign against the secular administration
of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two
political parties controlling the Kurdish region in
northern Iraq. In the snow-clad mountains looming
over the hamlet of Halabja, where 5,000 people were
killed in a 1988 Iraqi chemical bombardment,
peshmerga front lines are hit almost daily by mortar
barrages. The jihadists, known to decapitate and burn
prisoners alive, overran a Kurdish position Dec. 4 of
last year, massacring more than 40 men. Now their
supply lines are feverishly channeling materiel
forward, including new 120-mm mortars that have begun
raining down on Kurdish trenches. In the past month,
these extremists have been fortifying their bunkers,
bolstering their numbers. Last week trucks visible
through field binoculars delivered the latest batch
of reinforcements.
General Sheik Jaffa, who directs the front-line
Kurdish forces, believes Ansar is bent on war with
America. He claims that the audiotape allegedly made
by Osama bin Laden that aired on al-Jazeera Arabic
satellite news network in February was aimed at these
fighters. Their increased activity suggests they are
answering bin Laden's call to assist Saddam in any
U.S.-led war.
While the Pentagon is focused on overthrowing Saddam,
it is not overlooking Ansar. In the Kurdish eastern
city of Sulaymaniya, there is speculation in
political and military circles that an American
offensive against the Ansar redoubts may kick-start
the broader war against Saddam. After Ansar thrashed
the Kurds in December, a U.S. intelligence team
toured the peshmerga front lines. On a few occasions
since then, Westerners have been seen coming and
going from the Kurdish bases around Halabja. Last
week soldiers told Time that a convoy of pickups with
tinted windows left General Jaffa's compound with an
escort of local bodyguards that contained "U.S.
officers."
For months the peshmerga had opted not to go on the
offensive, not daring to assault Ansar's mine-laden
defensive positions. Last week that changed. On the
eve of Feb. 15, 10 Kurdish commandos took the fight
to the terrorists. They stole up on an isolated enemy
bunker and briefly captured it, killing an unknown
number of the 25 militants they found. Three nights
later, they did it again. They have been emboldened
by their belief that a U.S.-backed offensive is
imminent. Jaffa won't be drawn out on any such plans
and refuses to discuss the possibility of U.S.
involvement in his operations. But he seems to be
counting on it. "This is a war, and they attack us,"
he says. "We must fight them in many different ways
until we launch the last great offensive."