ZAKHO (Iraqi Kurdistan): Lieutenat Massoud Rushdi likes to spend Newroz, the Kurdish new year, picnicking with his family in the brilliant green hills outside Zakho.
With thousands of others from this pleasant border town in north west Iraqi Kurdistan, he usually feasts on stuffed tomatoes and vine leaves and links arms to dance to traditional Kurdish songs.
Friday was different. Massoud’s wife and two sons packed clothes and food into their truck and left town.
It was not fear of President Saddam’s chemical weapons, but the knowledge that Turkish tanks could soon come thundering across the bridge over the Zakho river and crush the Iraqi Kurds’ 12-year experiment in self-rule. “We decided that it was not safe for them to stay,” said Massoud, a recent graduate from the Zakho military academy.
He waved an ageing but polished Kalashnikov in the direction of hundreds of Turkish military vehicles visible two miles away across the river plain.
“If Turkey wants to help us fight Saddam, they are welcome. But if they come here to prevent us being free, we have the right to defend ourselves.”
The prospect of a large Turkish incursion into the Kurdish autonomous areas has been occupying senior Washington officials as they seek to persuade Ankara to open up its airspace for US jets.
Citing anxieties about a flood of refugees, the safety of Iraq’s Turkmen population, the risk of attacks by Turkish Kurd separatists hiding in Iraqi territory, and above all the need to keep Iraqi Kurds in check, Ankara seems bent on entering an area it has long viewed as its own back yard.
The Kurds of Zakho are preparing to resist. “We don’t want to be liberated from Sadddam only to be oppressed by Turkey,” said Ahmed Barmani, a car mechanic who sports a tattoo of the legendary Kurdish rebel leader Mustaffa Barzani on his forearm. “I hate Turkey more than I do Saddam.”
He joined his childhood friend Massoud to dig themsleves into a defensive position overlooking the river. “Wherever they try to cross, we’ll be ready for them,” he said.
The two friends were not alone. Several hundred peshmerga (meaning those who face death), from the villages around Zakho, could be seen taking up positions in the hills.
There is little the lightly armed fighters could do to stop the Turks, Nato’s second largest army. But Babekir Zebari, regional commander of the Kurdish military forces, said life would be made very difficult for Turkey if it tried to occupy the self-rule area.
“If they disturb our situation, we will disturb theirs,” he warned. “Saddam has been unable to defeat us; neither will the Turkish generals.”
Turkey already has a sizeable military presence in the region with the agreement of the Kurdish authorities to keep watch on the separatist guerillas of the PKK, who waged a bloody campaign against Ankara until the arrest of their leader Abdullah Ocalan caused them to seek sanctuary in the mountains of northern Iraq.
“All Turkish concerns could be addressed without troops entering Iraq,” said Mr Zebari.
Kurds, he said, have promised to work with a new democratic government in Baghdad, and will not make a move on the contested city of Kirkuk. They will move to disarm the PKK, and the rights of the Turkmen in Iraqi Kurdistan are guaranteed.
Since February, when Turkey voted down a proposal to let tens of thousands of US troops use bases for an invasion of Iraq, most people believe the US has been developing contingency plans for deploying a smaller, more lightly armed force into northern Iraq.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
