Kurds, Secure in North Iraq, Are Cool to a U.S. Offensive
The New York Times
July 8, 2002
"Mr. Barzani coupled this bitterness with a reminder that Washington's
hawkishness on Iraq is led by a president whose father,
many Iraqi Kurds contend, let them down in 1991."
By JOHN F. BURNS
ERBIL, Iraq, July 6 - As the United States considers ways of accomplishing President
Bush's call for an end to Saddam
Hussein's rule in Iraq, Washington's goal of a "regime change" in Baghdad is running
into strong reservations from Iraqi
Kurdish leaders who would be crucial allies in any military campaign.
These leaders, interviewed in their strongholds in northern Iraq in the last week,
say flatly that they would be reluctant to join
American military operations that put Kurds at risk of an onslaught by Iraqi troops
of the kind they suffered after the Persian
Gulf war in 1991. A Kurdish uprising then that was encouraged
by the first President Bush was brutally suppressed by Mr.
Hussein, and American forces failed to intervene as thousands of Kurds
were killed.
No group has suffered more from Mr. Hussein's 23-year-old rule than the Kurds,
who lost tens of thousands of lives to Iraqi
offensives in the 1980's and 90's. The most brutal attacks, cited by
the present President Bush recently as part of the
justification for toppling the Iraqi ruler, involved Iraqi use
of poison gas at Halabja and dozens of other towns and villages in the
northern Kurdish districts during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988.
Still, no Iraqis have benefited more from Western support in the last
decade than the Kurds. Protected by a "safe haven"
declared by the United Nations and a "no-flight zone" patrolled
by American and British warplanes, the Kurds, with barely
40,000 troops and only light weapons, have built a 17,000-square-mile
mini-state that arcs across a 500-mile stretch of Iraqi
territory bordering Syria, Turkey and Iran.
The threat of Western airstrikes has kept Iraqi armored battalions
immobilized to the south, often within artillery range of
Kurdish strongholds like Erbil, a sprawling city of 750,000 people
250 miles north of Baghdad. In this "liberated area" of
soaring mountains, fertile foothills and semi-desert, the Kurds
have built a society with freedoms denied to the rest of Iraq's
population.
The Kurdish-controlled area has opposition parties and newspapers, satellite
television and international telephone calls, and
an absence of the repressive apparatus that has prompted
international human rights organizations to brand Mr. Hussein's
Iraq a terror state.
The drawback is that all this exists outside international law,
and could be made permanent only by a new government in
Baghdad that embraced freedoms for all of Iraq.
But while an American-led military campaign to topple
Mr. Hussein holds out the possibility of making their freedoms more
secure, the Kurdish leaders, backed by almost every Kurd who discussed the issue,
said Washington would be asking them to
put all they have gained from their decade of autonomy at risk of a fresh Iraqi offensive.
"We are not ready to take any risks, and if we are not sure of the
outcome of any step, then we are not ready to take that step,
because we are not sure of improving our circumstances,"
Massoud Barzani, leader of one of the two main Kurdish political
groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said at his mountaintop headquarters
outside Salahuddin, north of Erbil.
He added, alluding to the centuries of oppression Kurds suffered from Turks,
Arabs and Persians, "This is a golden era for Iraqi
Kurds."
Their concerns are so deep that the Kurds have set aside political
differences among themselves to speak with a common voice
on the possibility of American action against Mr. Hussein. After
a history of internecine strife, including a brief civil war in
1996, Mr. Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani's
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan have divided the northern
territory into two separate areas, each with its own government and army.
But at their respective headquarter cities, Erbil and Sulaimaniya,
the reluctance of the Kurds to support American moves
against Mr. Hussein is expressed in virtually identical terms.
Leaders in both cities said officials from the Pentagon, the State
Department, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency
visited the Kurdish territory this year to
discuss American options, and had also met with Kurds in Washington and Europe.
At one meeting in Europe this spring, Kurdish officials in Sulaimaniya said,
Mr. Barzani and Mr. Talabani, bitter rivals for
years, sat down together to meet with American officials.
Their main message, the Kurdish officials said, was that Washington
should not expect Kurds to subordinate their own safety to American priorities.
"Nobody has suffered more from Saddam than
the Kurds," one senior official said. "We told the Americans,
`This time, the Kurds will put their own interests first, and last.' "
Although the Kurds' fear of again being abandoned by the
United States seemed real, the greater fear seemed to be of Mr.
Hussein. An official in Erbil acknowledged that the Kurdish leaders,
in publicly discouraging American military action, were
signaling to the Iraqi leader that the Americans, not the Kurds,
were his adversaries. "Saddam is our shadow," the official said.
"He's always there, right behind us, and we don't want him to think
that we're drawing the Americans in to overthrow him."
Concern among the Kurds seems certain to increase with the failure
in Vienna on Friday of the latest talks between the United
Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, and Iraqi officials aimed at resuming
United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq. The
inspections are to determine whether Baghdad is continuing
efforts toward building nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,
as Washington has charged, and to destroy any programs that are found.
Many United Nations members, including important American allies,
see a resumption of weapons inspections, suspended
after Mr. Hussein drove inspectors from Baghdad in 1998,
as the only way of forestalling American military action. United
Nations and Iraqi officials said talks would continue in Europe in coming months,
but Washington viewed the Vienna meeting
as a watershed. Iraqi officials placed blame for the
talks' failure on an "American plot" to prepare for a military attack.
In an American-led campaign, Kurdish territory would be a crucial platform for a ground assault.
In one plan discussed in Washington, American forces, with Kurdish
and other Iraqi opposition fighters, would seek to replicate
the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, using the Kurdish-controlled areas
and troops much as the territory and troops of
the Afghan Northern Alliance were used.
But the Kurdish leaders, in the interviews, said they would resist
any American actions aimed at toppling Mr. Hussein unless
Washington gave "guarantees" in advance. They said these would
include an undertaking that a future Iraqi government would
adopt a democratic political system, with a federal structure
that provided for wide-ranging Kurdish autonomy in the north.
In effect, this would require Washington to promise that Kurds would
maintain effective control of the area they now rule. But
it is far from certain that other Iraqi opposition groups drawing support
from the country's Arabs would agree, partly because of
the Baghdad's reliance on revenues from the north's oil fields.
The Kurdish leaders spoke with a sharp edge of distrust for the
United States, which they said had "betrayed" Iraqi Kurds at
crucial moments in the past, most recently during the Iraqi onslaught
against the Kurdish uprising in 1991. Mr. Barzani and
other leaders also referred bitterly to events in 1975,
when the United States encouraged Iraqi Kurds to ally themselves with
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran in a territorial dispute with Iraq,
only to back a reconciliation between Iran and Iraq that
left the Kurds exposed to a military crackdown by Baghdad.
Mr. Barzani coupled this bitterness with a reminder that Washington's
hawkishness on Iraq is led by a president whose father,
many Iraqi Kurds contend, let them down in 1991.
After American troops liberated Kuwait, then stopped at Iraq's southern
border, the first President Bush encouraged Kurds in
northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south to "take matters into their own hands."
He then withheld American military
support when their uprisings drew savage retribution from Baghdad.
When they discuss American plans, the Kurdish leaders reserve
their harshest condemnation for any attempt to topple Mr.
Hussein by C.I.A.-led covert action, possibly by fomenting
a military coup. Reports from Washington have said Mr. Bush this
year strengthened a presidential directive authorizing the C.I.A.
to mount covert operations inside Iraq with the aim of toppling
Mr. Hussein, and authorized American agents to kill him if necessary in self-defense.
But Barham Salih, who heads the government in the eastern half of the Kurdish
territory under the authority of Mr. Talabani,
said American officials had been told bluntly that the Kurds
would oppose any attempt to topple Mr. Hussein by a coup. "We
are not interested in exchanging one dictator for another," Mr. Salih said.
"We want a democratic, pluralistic, responsible
government in Iraq, and that cannot come from a coup."
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