Telegraph (UK)

By Amberin Zaman in Sina Village, northern Iraq
30/11/2000

THE precarious peace that has brought the good life to many Kurdish refugees is coming
under threat due to recent violations of United Nations sanctions against Iraq.

With the growing number of non-authorised flights to the Iraqi capital, the perception among
the Kurds is that it will not be long before sanctions against Baghdad are lifted. That would
leave the Kurds in a precarious position. Kurdish independence remains as elusive as ever.

British and American fighter jets which have been patrolling the no-fly zone over northern
Iraq since its 2.5 million Kurds were defeated by Baghdad when they rebelled at the end of
the Gulf war.

As three consecutive booms shake the earth, sending scores of shrieking children into the
school courtyard, three horseshoe-shaped puffs of smoke scar the deep blue Kurdish sky.
However, the anti-aircraft missiles being fired by Saddam Hussein's forces plummet to the
ground without hitting their targets. Murat Jindi is a teacher in the village 10 miles outside
Dohuk, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. He said: "Saddam is firing again and no one
seems to be ready to stop him."

With sanctions being broken on a near-daily basis in recent months, the Kurds are feeling at
their most vulnerable since their mass exodus in April 1991 to the Iranian and Turkish
borders to flee the wrath of Saddam's Republican Guards.

Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdish regional government, said: "We are
deeply concerned about the way things are going." The regional government is led by the
Kurdistan Democratic Party and controls the northern two thirds of the Kurdish enclave.

The last time the Iraqi Kurds received security guarantees from the Amercians was during a
meeting last June in Washington with Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser in the
Clinton administration. Just a 15-minute drive away, a battalion of Iraqi tanks deployed in
the village of Qustapa is poised to strike at any moment. Mr Barzani said: "What can we do
against tanks and helicopters? We only have guns."

Encouraged by neighbouring Turkey and Iran, the two main Iraqi Kurdish factions,
Massoud Barzani's KDP and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan have been locked
in a bloody power struggle since 1994. International sympathy for the Kurds waned further
after Mr Barzani invited Iraqi troops in August 1996 to help him to seize control of Erbil,
the main Kurdish city.

The brief invasion led to the collapse of a CIA-backed Iraqi opposition movement and led to
the permanent removal of US and British officers from the enclave and to its partitioning
into the KDP-controlled north and PUK-controlled south. International support for a deal
with Baghdad which would allow the Kurds to set up a federal government is facing stiff
resistance, not only from Saddam but from Turkey, which fears that it would encourage its
own 12 million Kurds to make similar demands.

In an effort to dilute Kurd claims to the region, the Ankara government has stepped up
support for Iraq's estimated 1.5 million Turcomen minority and is arming and training a
500-man Turcomen force based in Erbil. It is also putting the final touches to a new border
post with Iraq, which would bypass the Kurdish-controlled region, depriving the Kurds of
income and boosting trade with Baghdad.

Yet life has never been so good for the Kurds, thanks to billions of dollars earned from taxes
levied on a thriving illicit fuel and luxury goods trade with Iran, Iraq and Turkey. With an
additional £850 million earmarked for the Kurds under the UN's oil-for-food programme for
Iraq, the standard of living in the north is visibly higher.
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com

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