*Saddam's Offensive By: William Safire   April 8, 2002 The New York Times WASHINGTON --

Sixty Islamic terrorists, trained in Afghanistan by Osama bin Laden, are holed up in the town of Biyara in northern Iraq, guests of Saddam Hussein. Their assignment is to infiltrate the no-flight zone and to kill the Kurdish leaders, who Saddam assumes will be allied with the U.S. in his overthrow.

This is the same assignment that Al Qaeda performed for the Taliban last Sept. 9, when a terrorist suicide team murdered the most popular Afghan leader, Ahmed Massoud. That assassination was intended to weaken anti-Taliban forces if the U.S. responded to the Sept. 11 attacks by hitting Osama's base in Afghanistan. 

Ten days ago, a suicide team of three terrorists was dispatched by Saddam's Qaeda affiliate into the Kurdish area of Iraq protected by the U.S. and British air forces. A Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani (no kin to the Taliban), was meeting in Sulaimaniya with the U.S. diplomats Ryan Crocker and David Pearce. 

With that meeting guarded by scores of Kurdish pesh merga fighters, the terrorists targeted the home of Barham Salih, 41, the pro-Western regional prime minister. Their grenades and gunfire missed his appearance at his front door by 10 seconds. Five Kurdish guards were killed and two of the assassins died in the return fire. 

The third terrorist was wounded and caught. "I came to kill and be killed," he pleaded, but the pesh merga — many of whose relatives were ambushed, captured and beheaded by Saddam's Islamic surrogates two months ago — saved him for interrogation. He is the source of the intelligence about the 60 Qaeda terrorists in Biyara carrying out Saddam's assassination plans.

That intelligence seems of little interest to our C.I.A., which failed to inform members of the National Security Council of this incident until my query two days ago. Maybe it has no agents on the ground (though our diplomats were); maybe its director is distracted by his high-visibility diplomatic chores; maybe it is sulking because the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker went where no spook had gone before. 

Whatever the excuse, it's unlikely that one dollar of our $30 billion intelligence budget (which includes covert operations) has gone to provide one automatic rifle, one mortar, or one anti-tank rocket to the 70,000 Kurdish fighters who would make up our most dependable indigenous ally in any coalition to overthrow Saddam. 

President Bush constantly evokes Saddam's poison gas attack in 1988 on the Kurds in Halabja, killing many thousands of innocents, as evidence of the dictator's willingness to use weapons of mass destruction. Understandably, neither he nor Colin Powell wants to recall the elder Bush's blunder that allowed Saddam to keep his gunships and slaughter Kurds who trusted us to support their uprising after our Persian Gulf victory. 

Ever since that debacle, we have protected the Kurds and they are grateful for our air cover. As a result, they have built the only democratic government and rudimentary free-enterprise system in the Middle East since the birth of Israel. Contrast the Kurds' recent progress with that of Palestinians — a people burdened with corrupt leaders, kept in squalid refugee camps for generations by Arab despots and fed a diet of hatred. 

Afflicted by tribal tensions at the start of their decade of freedom, the two Kurdish factions have come together. After Saddam's recent assassination attempt, the urbane Jalal (let's use his first name) was embraced by Massoud Barzani, as 100,000 Kurds marched through a heavy rain at the murdered guards' funeral. Kurds now dream of an autonomous region within a democratic Iraq, which would be acceptable to Turkey with its large Kurdish minority. 

If Bush is serious about overthrowing Saddam before that avatar of arrogance gets the power to obliterate Washington, he cannot count on a colonels' coup or a coat-holding coalition of craven caliphs. We have already had to begin abandoning our bases in Saudi Arabia. Joining us in liberating Iraq will be Brits, Turks and Kurds. 

The Kurds, though fierce fighters, cannot be provided with modern arms and trained to use them overnight. Saddam, allied with bin Ladenesque cadres, has begun his offensive — diplomatic at the U.N., economic with oil-embargo threats, terrorist to his north. Time is short for our counterattack.