Letter From Northern Iraq: Wartime Friendships
The American invasion of Iraq is a happy occasion for the country's five million Kurds, mainly because it foreshadows the removal of Saddam Hussein, who committed acts of genocide against them. But it is also welcomed because it has been accompanied by an invasion of foreign journalists-a rare sight in northern Iraq for more than a decade. For Kurdish leaders, the arrival of the world's press means that they will finally receive attention in proportion to their numbers. It has annoyed the Kurds that the dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis, a conflict that encompasses roughly eleven million people, is a preoccupation of the media, while the Kurds, who number about twenty-five million (most Kurds live in Turkey and Iran), receive only occasional notice, usually when they are being starved or gassed. Now the Kurds have stumbled on their main chance, and are pleased to be able to share with the world their wish for equality within a democratic Iraq.
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Letter From Northern Iraq: Waiting At The Front
Last week, on a freezing night in a blacked-out bunker outside Halabja, a city in the mountains of northeastern Iraq, the officers of a Kurdish guerrilla unit drank tea and laid out in vivid detail what they would do to President Bush if he fell into their hands. "I would kiss him one thousand times," the company commander, Sheikh Fattah, said. "I would carry him on my shoulders and shout songs to him," another officer, Farouk Khaled, added. "I would sacrifice one thousand sheep and two thousand chickens for him," a third officer, Mam Siamand, said.
These salutes to Bush-very much unlike the sort of thing that is said about the President elsewhere in Iraq and in the rest of the world-went on for some time. The guerrillas fall under the command of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or P.U.K., the enthusiastically pro-American party that controls most of the eastern sector of Kurdish Iraq, or Kurdistan. They are known as peshmerga, or "those who face death," and they were happy yet anxious; the night before, American cruise missiles had struck the positions of the two Islamist groups who control the territory a half mile to the east. It was midnight, and I was told by peshmerga leaders that a second round of missile attacks would begin in about three and a half hours.
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