THE GREAT TERROR
  By:  JEFFREY GOLDBERG

  In northern Iraq, there is new evidence of Saddam Hussein's genocidal
  war on the Kurds and of his possible ties to Al Qaeda.

  THE NEW YORKER
  Issue of 2002-03-25
  Posted 2002-03-25
  
  April 2, 2002 

In the late morning of March 16, 1988, an Iraqi Air Force helicopter appeared over the city
of Halabja, which is about fifteen miles from the border with Iran. The Iran-Iraq War was
then in its eighth year, and Halabja was near the front lines. At the time, the city was home to
roughly eighty thousand Kurds, who were well accustomed to the proximity of violence to
ordinary life. Like most of Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja was in perpetual revolt against the
regime of Saddam Hussein, and its inhabitants were supporters of the peshmerga, the
Kurdish fighters whose name means "those who face death."

A young woman named Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad was outside her family's house,
preparing food, when she saw the helicopter. The Iranians and the peshmerga had just
attacked Iraqi military outposts around Halabja, forcing Saddam's soldiers to retreat. Iranian
 Revolutionary Guards then infiltrated the city, and the residents assumed that an Iraqi
counterattack was imminent. Nasreen and her family expected to spend yet another day in
their cellar, which was crude and dark but solid enough to withstand artillery shelling, and
even napalm.

"At about ten o'clock, maybe closer to ten-thirty, I saw the helicopter," Nasreen told me. "It
was not attacking, though. There were men inside it, taking pictures. One had a regular
camera, and the other held what looked like a video camera. They were coming very close. 
Then they went away."

Nasreen thought that the sight was strange, but she was preoccupied with lunch; she and her
sister Rangeen were preparing rice, bread, and beans for the thirty or forty relatives who
were taking shelter in the cellar. Rangeen was fifteen at the time. Nasreen was just sixteen,
but her father had married her off several months earlier, to a cousin, a thirty-year-old
physician's assistant named Bakhtiar Abdul Aziz. Halabja is a conservative place, and many
more women wear the veil than in the more cosmopolitan Kurdish cities to the northwest and
the Arab cities to the south.

The bombardment began shortly before eleven. The Iraqi Army, positioned on the main road
from the nearby town of Sayid Sadiq, fired artillery shells into Halabja, and the Air Force
began dropping what is thought to have been napalm on the town, especially the northern
area. Nasreen and Rangeen rushed to the cellar. Nasreen prayed that Bakhtiar, who 
was then outside the city, would find shelter.

The attack had ebbed by about two o'clock, and Nasreen made her way carefully upstairs to
the kitchen, to get the food for the family. "At the end of the bombing, the sound changed,"
she said. "It wasn't so loud. It was like pieces of metal just dropping without exploding. We
didn't know why it was so quiet."

A short distance away, in a neighborhood still called the Julakan, or Jewish quarter, even
though Halabja's Jews left for Israel in the nineteen-fifties, a middle-aged man named
Muhammad came up from his own cellar and saw an unusual sight: "A helicopter had come
back to the town, and the soldiers were throwing white pieces of paper out the side." In
retrospect, he understood that they were measuring wind speed and direction. Nearby, a man
named Awat Omer, who was twenty at the time, was overwhelmed by a smell of garlic and
apples.

Nasreen gathered the food quickly, but she, too, noticed a series of odd smells carried into
the house by the wind. "At first, it smelled bad, like garbage," she said. "And then it was a
good smell, like sweet apples. Then like eggs." Before she went downstairs, she happened to
check on a caged partridge that her father kept in the house. "The bird was dying," she said.
"It was on its side." She looked out the window. "It was very quiet, but the animals were
dying. The sheep and goats were dying." Nasreen ran to the cellar. "I told everybody there
was something wrong. There was something wrong with the air."

The people in the cellar were panicked. They had fled downstairs to escape the
bombardment, and it was difficult to abandon their shelter. Only splinters of light penetrated
the basement, but the dark provided a strange comfort. "We wanted to stay in hiding, even
though we were getting sick," Nasreen said. She felt a sharp pain in her eyes, like stabbing
needles. "My sister came close to my face and said, 'Your eyes are very red.' Then the
children started throwing up. They kept throwing up. They were in so much pain, and crying
so much. They were crying all the time. My mother was crying. Then the old people started
throwing up."

Chemical weapons had been dropped on Halabja by the Iraqi Air Force, which understood
that any underground shelter would become a gas chamber. "My uncle said we should go
outside," Nasreen said. "We knew there were chemicals in the air. We were getting red eyes,
and some of us had liquid coming out of them. We decided to run." Nasreen and he relatives
stepped outside gingerly. "Our cow was lying on its side," she recalled. "It was breathing
very fast, as if it had been running. The leaves were falling off the trees, even though it was
spring. The partridge was dead. There were smoke clouds around, clinging to the ground.
The gas was heavier than the air, and it was finding the wells and going down the wells."

The family judged the direction of the wind, and decided to run the opposite way. Running
proved difficult. "The children couldn't walk, they were so sick," Nasreen said. "They were
exhausted from throwing up. We carried them in our arms."

Across the city, other families were making similar decisions. Nouri Hama Ali, who lived in
the northern part of town, decided to lead his family in the direction of Anab, a collective
settlement on the outskirts of Halabja that housed Kurds displaced when the Iraqi Army
destroyed their villages. "On the road to Anab, many of the women and children began to
die," Nouri told me. "The chemical clouds were on the ground. They were heavy. We could
see them." People were dying all around, he said. When a child could not go on, the parents,
becoming hysterical with fear, abandoned him. "Many children were left on the ground, by
the side of the road. Old people as well. They were running, then they would stop breathing
and die."

Nasreen's family did not move quickly. "We wanted to wash ourselves off and find water to
drink," she said. "We wanted to wash the faces of the children who were vomiting. The
children were crying for water. There was powder on the ground, white. We couldn't decide
whether to drink the water or not, but some people drank the water from the well they
were so thirsty."

They ran in a panic through the city, Nasreen recalled, in the direction of Anab. The
bombardment continued intermittently, Air Force planes circling overhead. "People were
showing different symptoms. One person touched some of the powder, and her skin started
bubbling."

A truck came by, driven by a neighbor. People threw themselves aboard. "We saw people
lying frozen on the ground," Nasreen told me. "There was a small baby on the ground, away
from her mother. I thought they were both sleeping. But she had dropped the baby and then
died. And I think the baby tried to crawl away, but it died, too. It looked like 
everyone was sleeping."

At that moment, Nasreen believed that she and her family would make it to high ground and
live. Then the truck stopped. "The driver said he couldn't go on, and he wandered away. He
left his wife in the back of the truck. He told us to flee if we could. The chemicals affected
his brain, because why else would someone abandon his family?"

As heavy clouds of gas smothered the city, people became sick and confused. Awat Omer
was trapped in his cellar with his family; he said that his brother began laughing
uncontrollably and then stripped off his clothes, and soon afterward he died. As night fell, the
family's children grew sickerÑtoo sick to move.

Nasreen's husband could not be found, and she began to think that all was lost. She led the
children who were able to walk up the road.

In another neighborhood, Muhammad Ahmed Fattah, who was twenty, was overwhelmed by
an oddly sweet odor of sulfur, and he, too, realized that he must evacuate his family; there
were about a hundred and sixty people wedged into the cellar. "I saw the bomb drop,"
Muhammad told me.
  
"It was about thirty metres from the house. I shut the door to the cellar. There was shouting
and crying in the cellar, and then people became short of breath." One of the first to be
stricken by the gas was Muhammad's brother Salah. "His eyes were pink," Muhammad
recalled.
  
"There was something coming out of his eyes. He was so thirsty he was demanding water."
Others in the basement began suffering tremors.

March 16th was supposed to be Muhammad's wedding day. "Every preparation was done,"
he said. His fiancé, a woman named Bahar Jamal, was among the first in the cellar to die.
"She was crying very hard," Muhammad recalled. "I tried to calm her down. I told her it was
just the usual artillery shells, but it didn't smell the usual way weapons smelled. She was
smart, she knew what was happening. She died on the stairs. Her father tried to help her, but
it was too late."

Death came quickly to others as well. A woman named Hamida Mahmoud tried to save her
two-year-old daughter by allowing her to nurse from her breast. Hamida thought that the
baby wouldn't breathe in the gas if she was nursing, Muhammad said, adding, "The baby's
name was Dashneh. She nursed for a long time. Her mother died while she was nursing. But
she kept nursing." By the time Muhammad decided to go outside, most of the people in the
basement were unconscious; many were dead, including his parents and three of his siblings.

Nasreen said that on the road to Anab all was confusion. She and the children were running
toward the hills, but they were going blind. "The children were crying, 'We can't see! My
eyes are bleeding!' " In the chaos, the family got separated. Nasreen's mother and father were
both lost. Nasreen and several of her cousins and siblings inadvertently led the younger
children in a circle, back into the city. SomeoneÑshe doesn't know who led them away from
the city again and up a hill, to a small mosque, where they sought shelter. "But we didn't stay
in the mosque, because we thought it would be a target," Nasreen said. They went to a small
house nearby, and Nasreen scrambled to find food and water for the children. By then, it was
night, and she was exhausted.

Bakhtiar, Nasreen's husband, was frantic. Outside the city when the attacks started, he had
spent much of the day searching for his wife and the rest of his family. He had acquired from
a clinic two syringes of atropine, a drug that helps to counter the effects of nerve agents.
 He injected himself with one of the syringes, and set out to find Nasreen. He had no hope.
"My plan was to bury her," he said. "At least I should bury my new wife."

After hours of searching, Bakhtiar met some neighbors, who remembered seeing Nasreen
and the children moving toward the mosque on the hill. "I called out the name Nasreen," he
said. "I heard crying, and I went inside the house. When I got there, I found that Nasreen was
alive but blind. Everybody was blind."

Nasreen had lost her sight about an hour or two before Bakhtiar found her. She had been
searching the house for food, so that she could feed the children, when her eyesight failed. "I
found some milk and I felt my way to them and then I found their mouths and gave them
milk," she said.

Bakhtiar organized the children. "I wanted to bring them to the well. I washed their heads. I
took them two by two and washed their heads. Some of them couldn't come. They couldn't
control their muscles."

Bakhtiar still had one syringe of atropine, but he did not inject his wife; she was not the
worst off in the group. "There was a woman named Asme, who was my neighbor," Bakhtiar
recalled. "She was not able to breathe. She was yelling and she was running into a wall,
crashing her head into a wall. I gave the atropine to this woman." Asme died soon afterward.
"I could have used it for Nasreen," Bakhtiar said. "I could have."

After the Iraqi bombardment subsided, the Iranians managed to retake Halabja, and they
evacuated many of the sick, including Nasreen and the others in her family, to hospitals in
Tehran.

Nasreen was blind for twenty days. "I was thinking the whole time, Where is my family? But
I was blind. I couldn't do anything. I asked my husband about my mother, but he said he
didn't know anything. He was looking in hospitals, he said. He was avoiding the question."

The Iranian Red Crescent Society, the equivalent of the Red Cross, began compiling books
of photographs, pictures of the dead in Halabja. "The Red Crescent has an album of the
people who were buried in Iran," Nasreen said. "And we found my mother in one of the
albums." Her father, she discovered, was alive but permanently blinded. Five of her siblings,
including Rangeen, had died.

Nasreen would live, the doctors said, but she kept a secret from Bakhtiar: "When I was in
the hospital, I started menstruating. It wouldn't stop. I kept bleeding. We don't talk about this
in our society, but eventually a lot of women in the hospital confessed they were also
menstruating and couldn't stop." Doctors gave her drugs that stopped the bleeding, but they
told her that she would be unable to bear children.

Nasreen stayed in Iran for several months, but eventually she and Bakhtiar returned to
Kurdistan. She didn't believe the doctors who told her that she would be infertile, and in
1991 she gave birth to a boy. "We named him Arazoo," she said. Arazoo means hope in
Kurdish. "He was healthy at first, but he had a hole in his heart. He died at the age 
of three months."

I met Nasreen last month in Erbil, the largest city in Iraqi Kurdistan. She is thirty now, a
pretty woman with brown eyes and high cheekbones, but her face is expressionless. She
doesn't seek pity; she would, however, like a doctor to help her with a cough that she's had
ever since the attack, fourteen years ago. Like many of Saddam Hussein's victims, she tells
her story without emotion.

During my visit to Kurdistan, I talked with more than a hundred victims of Saddam's
campaign against the Kurds. Saddam has been persecuting the Kurds ever since he took
power, more than twenty years ago. Several  old women whose husbands were killed by
Saddam's security services expressed a kind of animal hatred toward him, but most people,
like Nasreen, told stories of horrific cruelty with a dispassion and a precision that
underscored their credibility. Credibility is important to the Kurds; after all this time, they
still feel that the world does not believe their story.

A week after I met Nasreen, I visited a small village called Goktapa, situated in a green
valley that is ringed by snow-covered mountains. Goktapa came under poison-gas attack six
weeks after Halabja. The village consists of low mud-brick houses along dirt paths. In
Goktapa, an old man named Ahmed Raza Sharif told me that on the day of the attack on
Goktapa, May 3, 1988, he was in the fields outside the village. He saw the shells explode
and smelled the sweet-apple odor as poison filled the air. His son, Osman Ahmed, who was
sixteen at the time, was near the village mosque when he was felled by the gas. He crawled
down a hill and died among the reeds on the banks of the  Lesser Zab, the river that flows by
the village. His father knew that he was dead, but he couldn't reach the body. As many as a
hundred and fifty people died in the attack; the survivors fled before the advancing
Iraqi Army, which levelled the village. Ahmed Raza Sharif did not return for three years.
When he did, he said, he immediately began searching for his son's body. He found it still
lying in the reeds. "I recognized his body right away," he said.

The summer sun in Iraq is blisteringly hot, and a corpse would be unidentifiable three years
after death. I tried to find a gentle way  to express my doubts, but my translator made it clear
to Sharif that I didn't believe him.

We were standing in the mud yard of another old man, Ibrahim Abdul Rahman. Twenty or
thirty people, a dozen boys among them, had gathered. Some of them seemed upset that I
appeared to doubt the story, but Ahmed hushed them. "It's true, he lost all the flesh on his
body," he said. "He was just a skeleton. But the clothes were his, and they were still on the
skeleton, a belt and a shirt. In the pocket of his shirt I found the key to our tractor. That's
where he always kept the key."

Some of the men still seemed concerned that I would leave Goktapa doubting their
truthfulness. Ibrahim, the man in whose yard we were standing, called out a series of orders
to the boys gathered around  us. They dispersed, to houses and storerooms, returning
moments later holding jagged pieces of metal, the remnants of the bombs that poisoned
Goktapa. Ceremoniously, the boys dropped the pieces of metal at my feet. "Here are the
mercies of Uncle Saddam," Ibrahim said.

2. THE AFTERMATH

The story of Halabja did not end the night the Iraqi Air Force planes returned to their bases.
The Iranians invited the foreign press to record the devastation. Photographs of the victims,
supine, bleached of color, littering the gutters and alleys of the town, horrified the world.
Saddam Hussein's attacks on his own citizens mark the only time since the Holocaust that
poison gas has been used to exterminate women and children.

Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, who led the campaigns against the Kurds in the late
eighties, was heard on a tape captured by rebels, and later obtained by Human Rights Watch,
addressing members of Iraq's ruling Baath Party on the subject of the Kurds. "I will kill them
all with chemical weapons!" he said. "Who is going to say anything? The international
community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to them."
Attempts by Congress in 1988 to impose sanctions on Iraq were stifled by the Reagan and
Bush Administrations, and the story of Saddam's surviving victims might have vanished
completely had it not been for the reporting of people like Randal and the work of a British
documentary filmmaker named Gwynne Roberts, who, after hearing stories about a sudden
spike in the incidence of birth defects and cancers, not only in Halabja but also in other parts
of Kurdistan, had made some disturbing films on the subject. However, no Western
government or United Nations agency took up the cause.

In 1998, Roberts brought an Englishwoman named Christine Gosden to Kurdistan. Gosden
is a medical geneticist and a professor at the medical school of the University of Liverpool.
She spent three weeks in the hospitals in Kurdistan, and came away determined to help the 
Kurds. To the best of my knowledge, Gosden is the only Western scientist who has even
begun making a systematic study of what took place in  northern Iraq.

Gosden told me that her father was a high-ranking officer in the Royal Air Force, and that as
a child she lived in Germany, near Bergen-Belsen. "It's tremendously influential in your
early years to live near a concentration camp," she said. In Kurdistan, she heard echoes of
the German campaign to destroy the Jews. "The Iraqi government was using chemistry to
reduce the population of Kurds," she said. "The Holocaust is still having its effect. The Jews
are fewer in number now than they were in 1939. That's not natural. Now, if you take
out two hundred thousand men and boys from Kurdistan "an estimate of the number of
Kurds who were gassed or otherwise murdered in the campaign, most of whom were men
and boys "you've affected the population structure. There are a lot of widows who are not
having children."

Richard Butler, an Australian diplomat who chaired the United Nations weapons-inspection
team in Iraq, describes Gosden as "a classic English, old-school-tie kind of person." Butler
has tracked her research since she began studying the attacks, four years ago, and finds it
credible. "Occasionally, people say that this is Christine's obsession, but obsession is not a
bad thing," he added.

Before I went to Kurdistan, in January, I spent a day in London with Gosden. We gossiped a
bit, and she scolded me for having visited a Washington shopping mall without appropriate
protective equipment. Whenever she goes to a mall, she brings along a polyurethane bag
"big enough to step into" and a bottle of bleach. "I can detoxify myself immediately," she said.

Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience
chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than
the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system
several years agoÑthat what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. "For Saddam's
scientists, the Kurds were a test  population," she said. "They were the human guinea pigs. It
was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, 
and the most effective means of delivery."

The charge is supported by others. An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former
director of Saddam's nuclear-weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the
attack on Halabja military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it
wearing protective clothing, in order to study the dispersal of the dead. "These were field
tests, an experiment on a town," Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the
Army's procedures that day in Halabja. "The doctors were given sheets with grids on them,
and they had to answer questions such as 'How far are the dead from the cannisters?' "

Gosden said that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to investigate
the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. "It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest that the
West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the
DNA," she told me. "I've seen Europe's worst cancers, but, believe me, I have never seen
cancers like the ones I saw in Kurdistan."

According to an ongoing survey conducted by a team of Kurdish physicians and organized
by Gosden and a small advocacy group called the Washington Kurdish Institute, more than
two hundred towns and villages across Kurdistan were attacked by poison gas far more than
was previously thought in the course of seventeen months. The number of victims is
unknown, but doctors I met in Kurdistan believe that up to ten per cent of the population of
northern Iraq nearly four million people has been exposed to chemical weapons. "Saddam
Hussein poisoned northern Iraq," Gosden said when I left for Halabja. "The questions,
then, are what to do? And what comes next?"

3. HALABJA'S DOCTORS

The Kurdish people, it is often said, make up the largest stateless nation in the world. They
have been widely despised by their neighbors for centuries. There are roughly twenty-five
million Kurds, most of them spread across four countries in southwestern Asia: Turkey, Iran,
Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds are neither Arab, Persian, nor Turkish; they are a distinct ethnic
group, with their own culture and language. Most Kurds are Muslim (the most famous
Muslim hero of all, Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders, was of Kurdish origin), but there
are Jewish and Christian Kurds, and also followers of the Yezidi religion, which has its roots
in Sufism and Zoroastrianism. The Kurds are experienced mountain fighters, who tend
toward stubbornness and have frequent bouts of destructive infighting.

After centuries of domination by foreign powers, the Kurds had their best chance at
independence after the First World War, when President Woodrow Wilson promised the
Kurds, along with other groups left drifting and exposed by the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire, a large measure of autonomy. But the machinations of the great powers, who were
becoming interested in Kurdistan's vast oil deposits, in Mosul and Kirkuk, quickly did the
Kurds out of a state.

In the nineteen-seventies, the Iraqi Kurds allied themselves with the Shah of Iran in a
territorial dispute with Iraq. America, the Shah's patron, once again became the Kurds'
patron, too, supplying them with arms for a revolt against Baghdad. But a secret deal
between the Iraqis and the Shah, arranged in 1975 by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
cut off the Kurds and brought about their instant collapse; for the Kurds, it was an ugly
betrayal.

The Kurdish safe haven, in northern Iraq, was born of another American betrayal. In 1991,
after the United States helped drive Iraq out of Kuwait, President George Bush ignored an
uprising that he himself had stoked, and Kurds and Shiites in Iraq were slaughtered by the
thousands. Thousands more fled the country, the Kurds going to Turkey, and almost
immediately creating a humanitarian disaster. The Bush Administration, faced with a
televised catastrophe, declared northern Iraq a no-fly zone and thus a safe haven, a tactic that
allowed the refugees to return home. And so, under the protective shield of the United States
and British Air Forces, the unplanned Kurdish experiment in self-government began.
Although the Kurdish safe haven is only a virtual state, it is an incipient democracy, a home
of progressive Islamic thought and pro-American feeling.

Today, Iraqi Kurdistan is split between two dominant parties: the Kurdistan Democratic
Party, led by Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, whose General
Secretary is Jalal Talabani. The two parties have had an often angry relationship, and in the
mid-nineties they fought a war that left about a thousand soldiers dead. The parties, realizing
that they could not rule together, decided to rule apart, dividing Kurdistan into two zones.
The internal political divisions have not aided the Kurds' cause, but neighboring states also
have fomented disunity, fearing that a unified Kurdish population  would agitate for
independence.

Turkey, with a Kurdish population of between fifteen and twenty million, has repressed the
Kurds in the eastern part of the country, politically and militarily, on and off since the
founding of the  modern Turkish state. In 1924, the government of AtatŸrk restricted the use 
of the Kurdish language (a law not lifted until 1991) and expressions of Kurdish culture; to
this day, the Kurds are referred to in nationalist circles as "mountain Turks."

Turkey is not eager to see Kurds anywhere draw attention to themselves, which is why the
authorities in Ankara refused to let me cross the border into Iraqi Kurdistan. Iran, whose
Kurdish population numbers between six and eight million, was not helpful, either, and my
only option for gaining entrance to Kurdistan was through its third neighbor, Syria. The
Kurdistan Democratic Party arranged for me to be met in Damascus and taken to the eastern
desert city of El Qamishli. From there, I was driven in a Land Cruiser to the banks of the
Tigris River, where a small wooden boat, with a crew of one and an outboard motor, was
waiting. The engine spluttered; when I learned that the forward lines of the Iraqi Army were
two miles downstream, I began to paddle, too. On the other side of the river were
representatives of the Kurdish Democratic Party and the peshmerga, the Kurdish guerrillas, 
who wore pantaloons and turbans and were armed with AK-47s.

"Welcome to Kurdistan" read a sign at the water's edge greeting visitors to a country that
does not exist.

Halabja is a couple of hundred miles from the Syrian border, and I spent a week crossing
northern Iraq, making stops in the cities of Dahuk and Erbil on the way. I was handed over
to representatives of the Patriotic Union, which controls Halabja, at a demilitarized zone
west of the town of Koysinjaq. From there, it was a two-hour drive over steep mountains to
Sulaimaniya, a city of six hundred and fifty thousand, which is the cultural capital of Iraqi
Kurdistan. In Sulaimaniya, I met Fouad Baban, one of Kurdistan's leading physicians,
who promised to guide me through the scientific and political thickets of Halabja.

Baban, a pulmonary and cardiac specialist who has survived three terms in Iraqi prisons, is
sixty years old, and a man of impish good humor. He is the Kurdistan cošrdinator of the
Halabja Medical Institute,  which was founded by Gosden, Michael Amitay, the executive
director of the Washington Kurdish Institute, and a coalition of Kurdish doctors; for the
doctors, it is an act of bravery to be publicly associated with a project whose scientific
findings could be used as evidence if Saddam Hussein faced a war-crimes tribunal. Saddam's
agents are everywhere in the Kurdish zone, and his tanks sit forty miles from Baban's office.

Soon after I arrived in Sulaimaniya, Baban and I headed out in his Toyota Camry for
Halabja. On a rough road, we crossed the plains of Sharazoor, a region of black earth and
honey-colored wheat ringed by jagged, snow-topped mountains. We were not travelling
alone. The Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service, is widely reported to have placed a
bounty on the heads of Western journalists caught in Kurdistan (either ten thousand dollars
or twenty thousand dollars, depending on the source of the information). The areas around
the border with Iran are filled with Tehran's spies, and members of Ansar al-Islam, an
Islamist terror group, were said to be decapitating people in the Halabja area. So the Kurds
had laid on a rather elaborate security detail. A Land Cruiser carrying peshmerga guerrillas
led the way, and we were followed by another Land Cruiser, on whose bed was mounted an
anti-aircraft weapon manned by six peshmerga, some of whom wore black balaclavas. We
were just south of the American- and British-enforced no-fly zone. I had been told that, at the
beginning of the safe-haven experiment, the Americans had warned Saddam's forces to stay
away; a threat from the air, though unlikely, was, I deduced, not out of the question.

"It seems very important to know the immediate and long-term effects of chemical and
biological weapons," Baban said, beginning my tutorial. "Here is a civilian population
exposed to chemical and possibly biological weapons, and people are developing many
varieties of cancers and congenital abnormalities. The Americans are vulnerable to these
weaponsÑthey are cheap, and terrorists possess them. So, after the anthrax attacks in the
States, I think it is urgent for scientific research to be done here."

Experts now believe that Halabja and other places in Kurdistan were struck by a
combination of mustard gas and nerve agents, including sarin (the agent used in the Tokyo
subway attack) and VX, a potent nerve agent. Baban's suggestion that biological weapons
may also have been used surprised me. One possible biological weapon that Baban
mentioned was aflatoxin, which causes long-term liver damage.

A colleague of Baban's, a surgeon who practices in Dahuk, in northwestern Kurdistan, and
who is a member of the Halabja Medical Institute team, told me more about the institute's
survey, which was conducted in the Dahuk region in 1999. The surveyors began, he said, 
by asking elementary questions; eleven years after the attacks, they did not even know which
villages had been attacked.

"The team went to almost every village," the surgeon said. "At first, we thought that the
Dahuk governorate was the least affected. We knew of only two villages that were hit by the
attacks. But we came up with twenty-nine in total. This is eleven years after the fact."

The surgeon is professorial in appearance, but he is deeply angry. He doubles as a pediatric
surgeon, because there are no pediatric surgeons in Kurdistan. He has performed more than a
hundred operations for cleft palate on children born since 1988. Most of the agents believed
to have been dropped on Halabja have short half-lives, but, as Baban told me, "physicians
are unsure how long these toxins will affect the population. How can we know agent half-life
if we don't know the agent?" He added, "If we knew the toxins that were used, we could
follow them and see actions on spermatogenesis and ovogenesis."

Increased rates of infertility, he said, are having a profound effect on Kurdish society, which
places great importance on large families. "You have men divorcing their wives because
they could not give birth, and then marrying again, and then their second wives can't give
birth, either," he said. "Still, they don't blame their own problem with spermatogenesis."

Baban told me that the initial results of the Halabja Medical Institute-sponsored survey show
abnormally high rates of many diseases. He said that he compared rates of colon cancer in
Halabja with those in the city of Chamchamal, which was not attacked with chemical
weapons. "We are seeing rates of colon cancer five times higher in Halabja than in
Chamchamal," he said.

There are other anomalies as well, Baban said. The rate of miscarriage in Halabja, according
to initial survey results, is fourteen times the rate of miscarriage in Chamchamal; rates of
infertility among men and women in the affected population are many times higher than
normal. "We're finding Hiroshima levels of sterility," he said.

Then, there is the suspicion about snakes. "Have you heard about the snakes?" he asked as
we drove. I told him that I had heard rumors. "We don't know if a genetic mutation in the
snakes has made them more toxic," Baban went on, "or if the birds that eat the snakes were 
killed off in the attacks, but there seem to be more snakebites, of greater toxicity, in Halabja
now than before." (I asked Richard Spertzel, a scientist and a former member of the United
Nations Special Commission inspections team, if this was possible. Yes, he said, but such a
rise in snakebites was more likely due to "environmental imbalances" than to mutations.)

My conversation with Baban was suddenly interrupted by our guerrilla escorts, who stopped
the car and asked me to join them in one of the Land Cruisers; we veered off across a wheat
field, without  explanation. I was later told that we had been passing a mountain area that
had recently had problems with Islamic terrorists.

We arrived in Halabja half an hour later. As you enter the city, you see a small statue
modelled on the most famous photographic image of the Halabja massacre: an old man,
prone and lifeless, shielding his dead grandson with his body.

A torpor seems to afflict Halabja; even its bazaar is listless and somewhat empty, in marked
contrast to those of other Kurdish cities, which are well stocked with imported goods (history
and circumstance have made the Kurds enthusiastic smugglers) and are full of noise and
activity. "Everyone here is sick," a Halabja doctor told me. "The people who aren't sick are
depressed." He practices at the Martyrs' Hospital, which is situated on the outskirts of the
city. The hospital has no heat and little advanced equipment; like the city itself, it is in a
dilapidated state.

The doctor is a thin, jumpy man in a tweed jacket, and he smokes without pause. He and
Baban took me on a tour of the hospital. Afterward, we sat in a bare office, and a woman
was wheeled in. She looked seventy but said that she was fifty; doctors told me she 
suffers from lung scarring so serious that only a lung transplant could help, but there are no
transplant centers in Kurdistan. The woman, whose name is Jayran Muhammad, lost eight
relatives during the attack. Her voice was almost inaudible. "I was disturbed psychologically
for a long time," she told me as Baban translated. "I believed my children were alive." Baban
told me that her lungs would fail soon, that she could barely breathe. "She is waiting to die,"
he said. I met another woman, Chia Hammassat, who was eight at the time of the attacks and
has been blind ever since. Her mother, she said, died of colon cancer several years ago, and
her brother suffers from chronic shortness of breath. "There is no hope to correct my vision,"
she said, her voice flat. "I was married, but I couldn't fulfill the responsibilities of a wife
because I'm blind. My husband left me."

Baban said that in Halabja "there are more abnormal births than normal ones," and other
Kurdish doctors told me that they regularly see children born with neural-tube defects and
undescended testes and without anal openings. They are seeingÑand they showed
me children born with six or seven toes on each foot, children whose fingers and toes
are fused, and children who suffer from leukemia and liver cancer.

I met Sarkar, a shy and intelligent boy with a harelip, a cleft  palate, and a growth on his
spine. Sarkar had a brother born with the same set of malformations, the doctor told me, but
the brother choked to death, while still a baby, on a grain of rice.

Meanwhile, more victims had gathered in the hallway; the people of Halabja do not often
have a chance to tell their stories to foreigners. Some of them wanted to know if I was a
surgeon, who had come to repair their children's deformities, and they were disappointed to
learn that I was a journalist. The doctor and I soon left the hospital for a walk through the
northern neighborhoods of Halabja, which were hardest hit in the attack. We were trailed by
peshmerga carrying AK-47s. The doctor smoked as we talked, and I teased him about his
habit. "Smoking has some good effect on the lungs," he said, without irony. "In the attacks,
there was less effect on smokers. Their lungs were better equipped for the mustard gas,
maybe."

We walked through the alleyways of the Jewish quarter, past a former synagogue in which
eighty or so Halabjans died during the attack. Underfed cows wandered the paths. The
doctor showed me several cellars where clusters of people had died. We knocked on the gate
of one house, and were let in by an old woman with a wide smile and few teeth. In 
the Kurdish tradition, she immediately invited us for lunch.

She told us the recent history of the house. "Everyone who was in this house died," she said.
"The whole family. We heard there were one hundred people." She led us to the cellar,
which was damp and close. Rusted yellow cans of vegetable ghee littered the floor. The
room seemed too small to hold a hundred people, but the doctor said that the estimate
sounded accurate. I asked him if cellars like this one had ever been decontaminated. He
smiled. "Nothing in Kurdistan has been decontaminated," he said.

4. ALANFAL

The chemical attacks on Halabja and Goktapa and perhaps two hundred other villages and
towns were only a small part of the cataclysm that Saddam's cousin, the man known as Ali
Chemical, arranged for the Kurds. The Kurds say that about two hundred thousand were
killed. (Human Rights Watch, which in the early nineties published "Iraq's Crime of
Genocide," a definitive study of the attacks, gives a figure of  between fifty thousand and a
hundred thousand.)

The campaign against the Kurds was dubbed al-Anfal by Saddam, after a chapter in the
Koran that allows conquering Muslim armies to seize the spoils of their foes. It reads, in part,
"Against them" your enemies "make ready your strength to the utmost of your power,
including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your
enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know. Whatever
ye shall spend in the cause of Allah, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated 
unjustly."

The Anfal campaign was not an end in itself, like the Holocaust, but a means to an endÑan
instance of a policy that Samantha Power, who runs the Carr Center for Human Rights, at
Harvard, calls "instrumental genocide." Power has just published " 'A Problem from Hell,' "
a study of American responses to genocide. "There are regimes that set out to murder every
citizen of a race," she said. "Saddam achieved what he had to do without exterminating
every last Kurd." What he had to do, Power and others say, was to break the Kurds' morale
and convince them that a desire for independence was foolish.

Most of the Kurds who were murdered in the Anfal were not killed by poison gas; rather, the
genocide was carried out, in large part, in the traditional manner, with roundups at night,
mass executions, and anonymous burials. The bodies of most of the victims of the
AnfalÑmainly men and boysÑhave never been found.

One day, I met one of the thousands of Kurdish women known as Anfal widows: Salma Aziz
Baban. She lives outside Chamchamal, in a settlement made up almost entirely of displaced
families, in cinder-block houses. Her house was nearly emptyÑno furniture, no heat, just a
ragged carpet. 

We sat on the carpet as she told me about her family. She comes from the Kirkuk region, and
in 1987 her village was uprooted by the Army, and the inhabitants, with thousands of other
Kurds, were forced into a collective town. Then, one night in April of 1988, soldiers went
into the village and seized the men and older boys. Baban's husband and her three oldest sons
were put on trucks. The mothers of the village began to plead with the soldiers. "We were
screaming, 'Do what you want to us, do what you want!' " Baban told me. "They were so
scared, my sons. My sons were crying." She tried to bring them coats for the journey. "It was
raining. I wanted them to have coats. I begged the soldiers to let me give them bread. They
took them without coats." Baban remembered that a high-ranking Iraqi officer named Bareq
orchestrated the separation; according to "Iraq's Crime of Genocide," the Human Rights
Watch report, the man in charge of this phase was a brigadier general named Bareq
Abdullah al-Haj Hunta.

After the men were taken away, the women and children were herded onto trucks. They were
given little water or food, and were crammed so tightly into the vehicles that they had to
defecate where they stood. Baban, her three daughters, and her six-year-old son were taken
to the Topzawa Army base and then to the prison of Nugra Salman, the Pit of Salman, which
Human Rights Watch in 1995 described this way: "It was an old building, dating back to the
days of the Iraqi monarchy and perhaps earlier. It had been abandoned for years, used by
Arab nomads to shelter their herds. The bare walls were scrawled with the diaries of
political prisoners. On the door of one cell, a guard had daubed 'Khomeini eats shit.' Over the
main gate, someone else had written, 'Welcome to Hell.' "

"We arrived at midnight," Baban told me. "They put us in a very big room, with more than
two thousand people, women and children, and they closed the door. Then the starvation
started."

The prisoners were given almost nothing to eat, and a single standpipe spat out brackish
water for drinking. People began to die from hunger and illness. When someone died, the
Iraqi guards would demand that the body be passed through a window in the main door.
"The bodies couldn't stay in the hall," Baban told me. In the first days at Nugra Salman,
"thirty people died, maybe more." Her six-year-old son, Rebwar, fell ill. "He had diarrhea,"
she said. "He was very sick. He knew he was dying. There was no medicine or doctor. He
started to cry so much." Baban's son died on her lap. "I was screaming and crying," she said.
"My daughters were crying. We gave them the body. It was passed outside, and the soldiers
took it."

Soon after Baban's son died, she pulled herself up and went to the window, to see if the
soldiers had taken her son to be buried. "There were twenty dogs outside the prison. A big
black dog was the leader," she said. The soldiers had dumped the bodies of the dead outside
the prison, in a field. "I looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths
of the dogs. The dogs were eating my son." She stopped talking for a moment. "Then I lost
my mind."

She described herself as catatonic; her daughters scraped around for food and water. They
kept her alive, she said, until she could  function again. "This was during Ramadan. We
were kept in Nugra Salman for a few more months."

In September, when the war with Iran was over, Saddam issued a general amnesty to the
Kurds, the people he believed had betrayed him by siding with Tehran. The women,
children, and elderly in Nugra Salman were freed. But, in most cases, they could not go
home; the Iraqi Army had bulldozed some four thousand villages, Baban's among them. She
was finally resettled in the Chamchamal district.

In the days after her release, she tried to learn the fate of her husband and three older sons.
But the men who disappeared in the Anfal roundups have never been found. It is said that
they were killed and then buried in mass graves in the desert along the Kuwaiti border, but
little is actually known. A great number of Anfal widows, I was told, still believe that their
sons and husbands and brothers are locked away in Saddam's jails. "We are thinking they are
alive," Baban said, referring to her husband and sons. "Twenty-four hours a day, we are
thinking maybe they are alive. If they are alive, they are being tortured, I know it."

Baban said that she has not slept well since her sons were taken from her. "We are thinking,
Please let us know they are dead, I will sleep in peace," she said. "My head is filled with
terrible thoughts. The day I die is the day I will not remember that the dogs ate my son."

Before I left, Baban asked me to write down the names of her three older sons. They are
Sherzad, who would be forty now; Rizgar, who would be thirty-one; and Muhammad, who
would be thirty. She asked me to find her sons, or to ask President Bush to find them. "One
would be sufficient," she said. "If just one comes back, that would be enough."

5. WHAT THE KURDS FEAR

In a conversation not long ago with Richard Butler, the former weapons inspector, I
suggested a possible explanation for the world's indifference to Saddam Hussein's use of
chemical weapons to commit genocide that the people he had killed were his own citizens,
not those of another sovereign state. (The main chemical-weapons treaty does not
ban a country's use of such weapons against its own people, perhaps because at the time the
convention was drafted no one could imagine such a thing.) Butler reminded me, however,
that Iraq had used chemical weapons against another country Iran during the eight-year
Iran-Iraq War. He offered a simpler rationale. "The problems are just too awful and too
hard," he said. "History is replete with such things. Go back to the grand example of the
Holocaust. It sounded too hard to do anything about it."

The Kurds have grown sanguine about the world's lack of interest.  "I've learned not to be
surprised by the indifference of the civilized world," Barham Salih told me one evening in
Sulaimaniya. Salih is the Prime Minister of the area of Kurdistan administered by the
Patriotic Union, and he spoke in such a way as to suggest that it would be best if I, too,
stopped acting surprised. "Given the scale of the tragedy we're talking about large numbers
of victims I suppose I'm surprised that the international community has not come in to help
the survivors," he continued. "It's politically indecent not to help. But, as a Kurd, I live with
the terrible hand history and geography have dealt my people."

Salih's home is not prime ministerial, but it has many Western comforts. He had a satellite
television and a satellite telephone, yet the house was frigid; in a land of cheap oil, the
Kurds, who are cut off the Iraqi electric grid by Saddam on a regular basis, survive on
generator power and kerosene heat.

Over dinner one night, Salih argued that the Kurds should not be regarded with pity. "I don't
think one has to tap into the Wilsonian streak in American foreign policy in order to find a
rationale for helping the Kurds," he said. "Helping the Kurds would mean an opportunity to
study the problems caused by weapons of mass destruction."

Salih, who is forty-one, often speaks bluntly, and is savvy about Washington's enduring
interest in ending the reign of Saddam Hussein. Unwilling publicly to exhort the United
States to take military action, Salih is aware that the peshmerga would be obvious allies of
an American military strike against Iraq; other Kurds have been making that argument for
years. It is not often noted in Washington policy circles, but the Kurds already hold a vast
swath of territory inside the countryÑincluding two important dams whose destruction could
flood BaghdadÑand have at least seventy thousand men under arms. In addition, the two
main Kurdish parties are members of the Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National
Congress, which is headed by Ahmad Chalabi, a London-based Shiite businessman; at the
moment, though, relations between Chalabi and the Kurdish leaders are contentious.

Kurds I talked to throughout Kurdistan were enthusiastic about the idea of joining an
American-led alliance against Saddam Hussein, and serving as the northern-Iraqi equivalent
of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. President Bush's State of the Union Message, in which
he denounced Iraq as the linchpin of an "axis of evil," had had an electric effect on every
Kurd I met who heard the speech. In the same speech, President Bush made reference to
Iraq's murder of "thousands of its own citizensÑleaving the bodies of mothers huddled over
their dead children." General Simko Dizayee, the chief of staff of the peshmerga, told me,
"Bush's speech filled our hearts with hope."

Prime Minister Salih expressed his views diplomatically. "We support democratic
transformation in Iraq," he saidÑ half smiling, because he knows that there is no chance of
that occurring unless Saddam is removed. But until America commits itself to removing
Saddam, he said, "we're living on the razor's edge. Before Washington even wakes up in
the morning, we could have ten thousand dead." This is the Kurdish conundrum: the Iraqi
military is weaker than the American military, but the Iraqis are stronger than the Kurds.
Seven hundred Iraqi tanks face the Kurdish safe haven, according to peshmerga
commanders.

General Mustafa Said Qadir, the peshmerga leader, put it this way: "We have a problem. If
the Americans attack Saddam and don't get him, we're going to get gassed. If the Americans
decided to do it, we would be thankful. This is the Kurdish dream. But it has to be done
carefully."

The Kurdish leadership worries, in short, that an American mistake could cost the Kurds
what they have created, however inadvertently: a nearly independent state for themselves in
northern Iraq. "We would like to be our own nation," Salih told me. "But we are realists. All 
we want is to be partners of the Arabs of Iraq in building a secular, democratic, federal
country." Later, he added, "We are proud of ourselves. We have inherited a devastated
country. It's not easy what we are trying to achieve. We had no democratic institutions, we
didn't have a legal culture, we did not have a strong military. From that situation, this is a
remarkable success story."

The Kurdish regional government, to be sure, is not a Vermont town meeting. The leaders of
the two parties, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, are safe in their jobs. But there is a
free press here, and separation of mosque and state, and schools are being built and pensions
are being paid. In Erbil and in Sulaimaniya, the Kurds have built playgrounds on the ruins of
Iraqi Army torture centers. "If America is indeed looking for Muslims who are eager to
become democratic and are eager to counter the effects of Islamic fundamentalism, then it
should be looking here," Salih said.

Massoud Barzani is the son of the late Mustafa Barzani, a legendary guerrilla, who built the
Democratic Party, and who entered into the ill-fated alliance with Iran and America. I met
Barzani in his headquarters, above the town of Salahuddin. He is a short man, pale 
and quiet; he wore the red turban of the Barzani clan and a wide cummerbund
across his baggy trousersÑthe outfit of a peshmerga.

Like Salih, he chooses his words carefully when talking about the possibility of helping
America bring down Saddam. "It is not enough to tell us the U.S. will respond at a certain
time and place of its choosing," Barzani said. "We're in artillery range. Iraq's Army is
weak, but it is still strong enough to crush us. We don't make assumptions about the
American response."

One day, I drove to the Kurdish front lines near Erbil, to see the forward positions of the
Iraqi Army. The border between the Army-controlled territory and the Kurdish region is
porous; Baghdad allows some Kurds nonpolitical Kurds to travel back and forth between
zones.

My peshmerga escort took me to the roof of a building overlooking the Kalak Bridge and,
beyond it, the Iraqi lines. Without binoculars, we could see Iraqi tanks on the hills in front of
us. A local official named Muhammad Najar joined us; he told me that the Iraqi forces
arrayed there were elements of the Army's Jerusalem brigade, a reserve unit established by
Saddam with the stated purpose of liberating Jerusalem from the Israelis. Other peshmerga
joined us. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and we were enjoying the weather. A man named
Aziz Khader, gazing at the plain before us, said, "When I look across here, I imagine
American tanks coming down across this plain going to Baghdad." His friends smiled and
said, "Inshallah" God willing.  Another man said, "The U.S. is the lord of the world."

6. THE PRISONERS

A week later, I was at Shinwe, a mountain range outside Halabja, with another group of
peshmerga. My escorts and I had driven most of the way up, and then slogged through fresh
snow. From one peak, we could see the village of Biyara, which sits in a valley between
Halabja and a wall of mountains that mark the Iranian border. Saddam's tanks were an
hour's drive away to the south, and Iran filled the vista before us. Biyara and nine other
villages near it are occupied by the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, or Supporters of Islam.
Shinwe, in fact, might be called the axis of the axis of evil.

We were close enough to see trucks belonging to Ansar al-Islam making their way from
village to village. The commander of the peshmerga forces surrounding Biyara, a veteran
guerrilla named Ramadan Dekone, said that Ansar al-Islam is made up of Kurdish Islamists
and an unknown number of so-called Arab Afghans Arabs, from southern Iraq and
elsewhere, who trained in the camps of Al Qaeda.

"They believe that people must be terrorized," Dekone said, shaking  his head. "They believe
that the Koran says this is permissible." He pointed to an abandoned village in the middle
distance, a place called Kheli Hama. "That is where the massacre took place," he said. In late
September, forty-two of his men were killed by Ansar al-Islam, and now Dekone and his
forces seemed ready for revenge. I asked him what he would do if he captured the men
responsible for the killing.

"I would take them to court," he said.

When I got to Sulaimaniya, I visited a prison run by the intelligence service of the Patriotic
Union. The prison is attached to the intelligence-service headquarters. It appears to be well
kept and humane; the communal cells hold twenty or so men each, and they have kerosene
heat, and even satellite television. For two days, the intelligence agency permitted me to
speak with any prisoner who agreed to be interviewed. I was wary; the Kurds have an
obvious interest in lining up on the American side in the war against terror. But the
officials did not, as far as I know, compel anyone to speak to me, and I did not get the sense
that allegations made by prisoners were shaped by their captors. The stories, which I later
checked with experts on the region, seemed at least worth the attention of America and other
countries in the West.

The allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam has received funds directly from Al
Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with Al Qaeda
operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in
Baghdad in 1992; that a number of Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been
secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents
smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into
Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam's
regime and Al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.

When I asked the director of the twenty-four-hundred-man Patriotic Union intelligence
service why he was allowing me to interview his prisoners, he told me that he hoped I would
carry this information to American intelligence officials. "The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. haven't
come out yet," he told me. His deputy added, "Americans are going to Somalia, the
Philippines, I don't know where else, to look for terrorists. But this is the field, here." Anya
Guilsher, a spokeswoman for the C.I.A., told me last week that as a matter of policy the 
agency would not comment on the activities of its officers. James Woolsey, a former C.I.A.
director and an advocate of overthrowing the Iraqi regime, said, "It would be a real shame if
the C.I.A.'s substantial institutional hostility to Iraqi democratic resistance groups was
keeping it from learning about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda in northern Iraq."

The possibility that Saddam could supply weapons of mass destruction to anti-American
terror groups is a powerful argument among advocates of "regime change," as the removal of
Saddam is known in Washington. These critics of Saddam argue that his chemical and
biological capabilities, his record of support for terrorist organizations, and the cruelty of
his regime make him a threat that reaches far beyond the citizens of Iraq.

"He's the home address for anyone wanting to make or use chemical or biological weapons,"
Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident, said. Makiya is the author of "Republic of Fear," a study
of Saddam's regime. "He's going to be the person to worry about. He's got the labs and the
know-how. He's hellbent on trying to find a way into the fight, 
without announcing it."

On the surface, a marriage of Saddam's secular Baath Party regime with the fundamentalist
Al Qaeda seems unlikely. His relationship with secular Palestinian groups is well known;
both Abu Nidal and Abul Abbas, two prominent Palestinian terrorists, are currently believed
to be in Baghdad. But about ten years ago Saddam underwent something of a battlefield
conversion to a fundamentalist brand of Islam.

"It was gradual, starting the moment he decided on the invasion of Kuwait," in June of 1990,
according to Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the University of Haifa. "His calculation was
that he needed people in Iraq and the Arab worldÑas well as God to be on his side when he
invaded. After he invaded, the Islamic rhetorical style became overwhelming" so
overwhelming, Baram continued, that a radical group in Jordan began calling Saddam "the
New Caliph Marching from the East." This conversion, cynical though it may be, has opened
doors to Saddam in the fundamentalist world. He is now a prime supporter of the
Palestinian Islamic Jihad and of Hamas, paying families of suicide bombers ten thousand
dollars in exchange for their sons' martyrdom. This is part of Saddam's attempt to harness the
power of Islamic extremism and direct it against his enemies.

Kurdish culture, on the other hand, has traditionally been immune to religious extremism.
According to Kurdish officials, Ansar al-Islam grew out of an idea spread by Ayman
al-Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Osama bin Laden's
deputy in Al Qaeda. "There are two schools of thought" in Al Qaeda, Karim Sinjari, the
Interior Minister of Kurdistan's Democratic Party-controlled region, told me. "Osama bin
Laden believes that the infidels should be beaten in the head, meaning the United States.
Zawahiri's philosophy is that you should fight the infidel even in the smallest village, that
you should try to form Islamic armies everywhere. The Kurdish fundamentalists were
influenced by Zawahiri."

Kurds were among those who travelled to Afghanistan from all over the Muslim world, first
to fight the Soviets, in the early nineteen-eighties, then to join Al Qaeda. The members of the
groups that eventually became Ansar al-Islam spent a great deal of time in Afghanistan,
according to Kurdish intelligence officials. One Kurd who went to Afghanistan was Mala
Krekar, an early leader of the Islamist movement in Kurdistan; according to Sinjari, he now
holds the title of "emir" of Ansar al-Islam.

In 1998, the first force of Islamist terrorists crossed the Iranian border into Kurdistan, and
immediately tried to seize the town of Haj Omran. Kurdish officials said that the terrorists
were helped by Iran, which also has an interest in undermining a secular Muslim
government. "The terrorists blocked the road, they killed Kurdish Democratic Party cadres,
they threatened the villagers," Sinjari said. "We fought them and they fled."

The terrorist groups splintered repeatedly. According to a report in the Arabic newspaper
Al-Sharq al-Awsat, which is published in London, Ansar al-Islam came into being, on
September 1st of last year, with the merger of two factions: Al Tawhid, which helped to
arrange the assassination of Kurdistan's most prominent Christian politician, and whose
operatives initiated an acid-throwing campaign against unveiled women; and a faction called
the Second Soran Unit, which had been affiliated with one of the Kurdish Islamic parties. In
a statement issued to mark the merger, the group, which originally called itself Jund
al-Islam, or Soldiers of Islam, declared its intention to "undertake jihad in this region" in
order to carry out "God's will." According to Kurdish officials, the group had between five
hundred and six hundred members, including Arab Afghans and at least thirty Iraqi Kurds
who were trained in Afghanistan.

Kurdish officials say that the merger took place in a ceremony overseen by three Arabs
trained in bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan, and that these men supplied Ansar al-Islam
with three hundred thousand dollars in seed money. Soon after the merger, a unit of Ansar
al-Islam called the Victory Squad attacked and killed the peshmerga in Kheli Hama.

Among the Islamic fighters who were there that day was Rekut Hiwa Hussein, a slender,
boyish twenty-year-old who was captured by the peshmerga after the massacre, and whom I
met in the prison in Sulaimaniya. He was exceedingly shy, never looking up from his hands 
as he spoke. He was not handcuffed, and had no marks on the visible parts of his body. We
were seated in an investigator's office inside the intelligence complex. Like most buildings in
Sulaimaniya, this one was warmed by a single kerosene heater, and the room temperature
seemed barely above freezing. Rekut told me how he and his comrades in Ansar al-Islam
overcame the peshmerga.

"They thought there was a ceasefire, so we came into the village and fired on them by
surprise," he said. "They didn't know what happened. We used grenades and machine guns.
We killed a lot of them and then the others surrendered." The terrorists trussed their
prisoners, ignoring pleas from the few civilians remaining in the town to leave them 
alone. "The villagers asked us not to slaughter them," Rekut said. One of the leaders of
Ansar al-Islam, a man named Abdullah al-Shafi, became incensed. "He said, 'Who is saying
this? Let me kill them.' "

Rekut said that the peshmerga were killed in ritual fashion: "We put cloths in their mouths.
We then laid them down like sheep, in a line. Then we cut their throats." After the men were
killed, peshmerga commanders say, the corpses were beheaded. Rekut denied this. "Some of
their heads had been blown off by grenades, but we didn't behead  them," he said.

I asked Rekut why he had joined Ansar al-Islam. "A friend of mine joined," he said quietly.
"I don't have a good reason why I joined." A guard then took him by the elbow and returned
him to his cell.

The Kurdish intelligence officials I spoke to were careful not to oversell their case; they said
that they have no proof that Ansar al-Islam was ever involved in international terrorism or
that Saddam's agents were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. But they do have proof, they said, that Ansar al-Islam is shielding Al Qaeda
members, and that it is doing so with the approval of Saddam's agents.

Kurdish officials said that, according to their intelligence, several men associated with Al
Qaeda have been smuggled over the Iranian border into an Ansar al-Islam stronghold near
Halabja. The Kurds believe that two of them, who go by the names Abu Yasir and Abu
Muzaham, are high-ranking Al Qaeda members. "We don't have any information about
them," one official told me. "We know that they don't want anybody to see them. They are
sleeping in the same room as Mala Krekar and Abdullah al-Shafi" the nominal leaders of
Ansar al-Islam.

The real leader, these officials say, is an Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Wa'el, and who,
like the others, spent a great deal of time in bin Laden's training camps. But he is also, they
say, a high-ranking officer of the Mukhabarat. One senior official added, "A man named
Abu Agab is in charge of the northern bureau of the Mukhabarat. And he is Abu Wa'el's
control officer."

Abu Agab, the official said, is based in the city of Kirkuk, which is predominantly Kurdish
but is under the control of Baghdad. According to intelligence officials, Abu Agab and Abu
Wa'el met last July 7th, in Germany. From there, they say, Abu Wa'el travelled to
Afghanistan and then, in August, to Kurdistan, sneaking across the Iranian border.

The Kurdish officials told me that they learned a lot about Abu  Wa'el's movements from one
of their prisoners, an Iraqi intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammad, and they
invited me to speak with him. Qassem, the Kurds said, is a Shiite from Basra, in southern
Iraq, and a twenty-year veteran of Iraqi intelligence.

Qassem, shambling and bearded, was brought into the room, and he genially agreed to be
interviewed. One guard stayed in the room, along with my translator. Qassem lit a cigarette,
and leaned back in his chair. I started by asking him if he had been tortured by his captors.
His eyes widened. "By God, no," he said. "There is nothing like  torture here." Then he told
me that his involvement in Islamic radicalism  began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met
Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Qassem said that he was one of seventeen bodyguards assigned to  protect Zawahiri, who
stayed at Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, but who, he said, moved around surreptitiously. The
guards had no idea why Zawahiri was in Baghdad, but one day Qassem escorted him to one
of Saddam's palaces for what he later learned was a meeting with Saddam himself.

Qassem's capture by the Kurds grew out of his last assignment from the Mukhabarat. The
Iraqi intelligence service received word that Abu Wa'el had been captured by American
agents. "I was sent by the Mukhabarat to Kurdistan to find Abu Wa'el or, at least,
information about him," Qassem told me. "That's when I was captured, before I reached
Biyara."

I asked him if he was sure that Abu Wa'el was on Saddam's side. "He's an employee of the
Mukhabarat," Qassem said. "He's the actual decision-maker in the group"ÑAnsar
al-IslamÑ"but he's an employee of the Mukhabarat." According to the Kurdish intelligence
officials, Abu Wa'el is not in American hands; rather, he is still with Ansar al-Islam.
American officials declined to comment.

The Kurdish intelligence officials told me that they have Al Qaeda members in custody, and
they introduced me to another prisoner, a  young Iraqi Arab named Haqi Ismail, whom they
described as a middle- to high-ranking member of Al Qaeda. He was, they said, captured by
the peshmerga as he tried to get into Kurdistan three weeks after the start of the American
attack on Afghanistan. Ismail, they said, comes from a Mosul family with deep connections
to the Mukhabarat; his uncle is the top Mukhabarat official in the south of Iraq. They said
they believe that Haqi Ismail is a liaison between Saddam's intelligence service 
and Al Qaeda.

Ismail wore slippers and a blanket around his shoulders. He was ascetic in appearance and,
at the same time, ostentatiously smug. He appeared to be amused by the presence of an
American. He told the investigators that he would not talk to the C.I.A. The Kurdish
investigators laughed and said they wished that I were from the C.I.A.

Ismail said that he was once a student at the University of Mosul but grew tired of life in Iraq
under Saddam Hussein. Luckily, he said, in 1999 he met an Afghan man who persuaded
him to seek work in Afghanistan. The Kurdish investigators smiled as Ismail went on to say
that he found himself in Kandahar, then in Kabul, and then  somehow here he was
exceedingly vague in an Al Qaeda camp. When I asked him how enrollment in an Al Qaeda
camp squared with his wish to seek work in Afghanistan, he replied, "Being a soldier is a
job." After his training, he said, he took a post in the Taliban Foreign Ministry. I asked him
if he was an employee of Saddam's intelligence service. "I prefer not to talk about that," he
replied.

Later, I asked the Kurdish officials if they believed that Saddam provides aid to Al
Qaeda-affiliated terror groups or simply maintains channels of communication with them. It
was getting late, and the room was growing even colder. "Come back tomorrow," the senior
official in the room said, "and we'll introduce you to someone who will answer 
that question."

7. THE AL QAEDA LINK

The man they introduced me to the next afternoon was a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian Arab,
a smuggler and bandit from the city of Ahvaz. The intelligence officials told me that his most
recent employer was bin Laden. When they arrested him, last year, they said, they found a
roll of film in his possession. They had the film developed, and the photographs, which they
showed me, depicted their prisoner murdering a man with a knife, slicing his ear off and then
plunging the knife into the top of the man's head.

The Iranian had a thin face, thick black hair, and a mustache; he wore an army jacket,
sandals, and Western-style sweatpants. Speaking in an almost casual tone, he told me that he
was born in 1973, that his real name was Muhammad Mansour Shahab, and that he had
been a smuggler most of his adult life.

"I met a group of drug traffickers," he said. "They gave us drugs and we got them weapons,"
which they took from Iran into Afghanistan. In 1996, he met an Arab Afghan. "His name
was Othman," the man went on. "He gave me drugs, and I got him a hundred and fifty
Kalashnikovs. Then he said to me, 'You should come visit Afghanistan.' So we went to
Afghanistan in 1996. We stayed for a while, I came back, did a lot of smuggling jobs. My
brother-in-law tried to send weapons to Afghanistan, but the Iranians ambushed us. I killed
some of the Iranians."

He soon returned with Othman to Afghanistan, where, he said, Othman gave him the name
Muhammad Jawad to use while he was there. "Othman said to me, 'You will meet Sheikh
Osama soon.' We were in Kandahar. One night, they gave me a sleeping pill. We got into a
car and we drove for an hour and a half into the mountains. We went to a tent they said was
Osama's tent." The man now called Jawad did not meet Osama bin Laden that night. "They
said to me, 'You're the guy who killed the Iranian officer.' Then they said they needed
information about me, my real name. They told Othman to take me back to Kandahar and
hold me in jail for twenty-one days while they investigated me."

The Al Qaeda men completed their investigation and called him back to the mountains.
"They told me that Osama said I should work with them," Jawad said. "They told me to
bring my wife to Afghanistan." They made him swear on a Koran that he would never betray
them. Jawad said that he became one of Al Qaeda's principal weapons smugglers. Iraqi
opposition sources told me that the Baghdad regime frequently smuggled weapons to Al
Qaeda by air through Dubai to Pakistan and then overland into Afghanistan. But Jawad told
me that the Iraqis often used land routes through Iran as well. Othman ordered him to
establish a smuggling route across the Iraq-Iran border. The smugglers would pose as
shepherds to find the best routes. "We started to go into Iraq with the sheep and cows,"
Jawad told me, and added that they initiated this route by smuggling tape recorders from
Iraq to Iran. They opened a store, a front, in Ahvaz, to sell electronics, "just to establish
relationships with smugglers."

One day in 1999, Othman got a message to Jawad, who was then in Iran. He was to smuggle
himself across the Iraqi border at Fao, where a car would meet him and take him to a village
near Tikrit, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's clan. Jawad was then taken to a meeting
at the house of a man called Luay, whom he described as the son of Saddam's  father-in-law,
Khayr Allah Talfah. (Professor Baram, who has long followed Saddam's family, later told
me he believes that Luay, who is about forty years old, is close to Saddam's inner circle.) At
the meeting, with Othman present, Mukhabarat officials instructed Jawad to go to Baghdad,
where he was to retrieve several cannisters filled with explosives. Then, he said, he was to
arrange to smuggle the explosives into Iran, where they would be used to kill anti-Iraqi
activists. After this assignment was completed, Jawad said, he was given a thousand
Kalashnikov rifles by Iraqi intelligence and told to smuggle them into Afghanistan.

A year later, there was a new development: Othman told Jawad to smuggle several dozen
refrigerator motors into Afghanistan for the Iraqi Mukhabarat; a cannister filled with liquid
was attached to each motor. Jawad said that he asked Othman for more information. "I said, 
'Othman, what does this contain?' He said, 'My life and your life.' He said they" the Iraqi
agents "were going to kill us if we didn't do this. That's all I'll say.

"I was given a book of dollars," Jawad went on, meaning ten thousand dollars a hundred
American hundred-dollar bills. "I was told to arrange to smuggle the motors. Othman told
me to kill any of the smugglers who helped us once we got there." Vehicles belonging to the
Taliban were waiting at the border, and Jawad said that he turned over the liquid-filled
refrigerator motors to the Taliban, and then killed the smugglers who had helped him.

Jawad said that he had no idea what liquid was inside the motors, but he assumed that it was
some type of chemical or biological weapon. I asked the Kurdish officials who remained in
the room if they believed that, as late as 2000, the Mukhabarat was transferring chemical or
biological weapons to Al Qaeda. They spoke carefully. "We have no idea what was in the
cannisters," the senior official said. "This is something that is worth an American
investigation."

When I asked Jawad to tell me why he worked for Al Qaeda, he replied, "Money." He would
not say how much money he had been paid, but he suggested that it was quite a bit. I had one
more question: How many years has Al Qaeda maintained a relationship with Saddam
Hussein's regime? "There's been a relationship between the Mukhabarat and the people of Al
Qaeda since 1992," he replied.

Carole O'Leary, a Middle Eastern expert at American University, in Washington, and a
specialist on the Kurds, said it is likely that Saddam would seek an alliance with Islamic
terrorists to serve his own interests. "I know that there are Mukhabarat agents throughout
Kurdistan," O'Leary said, and went on, "One way the Mukhabarat could destabilize the
Kurdish experiment in democracy is to link up with Islamic radical groups. Their interests
dovetail completely. They both have much to fear from the democratic, secular experiment
of the Kurds in the safe haven, and they both obviously share a hatred for  America."

8. THE PRESENT DANGER

A paradox of life in northern Iraq is that, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children
suffer from the effects of chemical attacks, the child-mortality rate in the Kurdish zone has
improved over the past ten years. Prime Minister Salih credits this to, of all things, sanctions
placed on the Iraqi regime by the United Nations after the Gulf War because of Iraq's refusal
to dismantle its nonconventional-weapons program. He credits in particular the program
begun in 1997, known as oil-for-food, which was meant to mitigate the effects of sanctions
on civilians by allowing the profits from Iraqi oil sales to buy food and medicine. Calling
this program a "fantastic concept," Salih said, "For the first time in our history, Iraqi citizens
all citizensÑare insured a portion of the country's oil wealth. The north is a testament to the
success of the program. Oil is sold and food is bought."  I asked Salih to respond to the
criticism, widely aired in the West, that the sanctions have led to the death of thousands of
children. "Sanctions don't kill Iraqi children," he said. "The regime kills children."

This puzzled me. If it was true, then why were the victims of the gas attacks still suffering
from a lack of health care? Across Kurdistan, in every hospital I visited, the complaints were
the same: no CT scans, no MRIs, no pediatric surgery, no advanced diagnostic equipment,
not even surgical gloves. I asked Salih why the money designated by the U.N. for the Kurds
wasn't being used for advanced medical treatment. The oil-for-food program has one
enormous flaw, he replied. When the program was introduced, the Kurds were promised
thirteen per cent of the country's oil revenue, but because of the terms of the agreement
between Baghdad and the U.N.Ña "defect," Salih saidÑthe government controls the flow of
food, medicine, and medical equipment to the very people it slaughtered. Food does arrive,
he conceded, and basic medicines as well, but at Saddam's pace.

On this question of the work of the United Nations and its agencies, the rival Kurdish parties
agree. "We've been asking for a four-hundred-bed hospital for Sulaimaniya for three years,"
said Nerchivan Barzani, the Prime Minister of the region controlled by the Kurdish
Democratic Party, and Salih's counterpart. Sulaimaniya is in Salih's territory, but in this case
geography doesn't matter. "It's our money," Barzani said. "But we need the approval of the
Iraqis. They get to decide. The World Health Organization is taking its orders from the
Iraqis. It's crazy."

Barzani and Salih accused the World Health Organization, in particular, of rewarding with
lucrative contracts only companies favored by Saddam."Every time I interact with the U.N.,"
Salih said, "I think, My God, Jesse Helms is right. If the U.N. can't help us, this poor,
dispossessed Muslim nation, then who is it for?"

Many Kurds believe that Iraq's friends in the U.N. system, particularly members of the Arab
bloc, have worked to keep the Kurds' cause from being addressed. The Kurds face an
institutional disadvantage at the U.N., where, unlike the Palestinians, they have not even
been granted official observer status. Salih grew acerbic: "Compare us to other liberation
movements around the world. We are very mature. We don't engage in terror. We don't
condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what
we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national
authority of Mr. Arafat. We have spent the last ten years building a secular, democratic
society, a civil society. What has he built?"

Last week, in New York, I met with Benon Sevan, the United Nations
undersecretary-general who oversees the oil-for-food program. He quickly let me know that
he was unmoved by the demands of the Kurds. "If they had a theme song, it would be 'Give
Me, Give Me, Give Me,' " Sevan said. "I'm getting fed up with their complaints. You can tell
them that." He said that under the oil-for-food program the "three northern
governorates"ÑU.N. officials avoid the word "Kurdistan"Ñhave been allocated billions of
dollars in goods and services. "I don't  know if they've ever had it so good," he said.

I mentioned the Kurds' complaint that they have been denied access to advanced medical
equipment, and he said, "Nobody prevents them from asking. They should go ask the World
Health Organization" which reports to Sevan on matters related to Iraq. When I told Sevan
that the Kurds have repeatedly asked the W.H.O., he said, "I'm not going to pass
judgment on the W.H.O." As the interview ended, I asked Sevan about the morality of
allowing the Iraqi regime to control the flow of food and medicine into Kurdistan. "Nobody's
innocent," he said. "Please don't talk about morals with me."

When I went to Kurdistan in January to report on the 1988 genocide of the Kurds, I did not
expect to be sidetracked by a debate over U.N. sanctions. And I certainly didn't expect to be
sidetracked by crimes that Saddam is committing against the Kurds nowÑin particular
"nationality correction," the law that Saddam's security services are using to implement a
campaign of ethnic cleansing. Large-scale operations against the Kurds in Kirkuk, a city
southeast of Erbil, and in other parts of Iraqi Kurdistan under Saddam's control, have 
received scant press attention in the West; there have been few news accounts and no
Security Council condemnations drafted in righteous anger.

Saddam's security services have been demanding that Kurds "correct" their nationality by
signing papers to indicate that their birth records are false that they are in fact Arab. Those
who don't sign have their property seized. Many have been evicted, often to
Kurdish-controlled regions, to make room for Arab families. According to both the
Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, more than a hundred
thousand Kurds have been expelled from the Kirkuk area over the past two years.

Nationality correction is one technique that the Baghdad regime is using in an over-all
"Arabization" campaign, whose aim is to replace the inhabitants of Kurdish cities, especially
the oil-rich Kirkuk, with Arabs from central and southern Iraq, and even, according to 
persistent reports, with Palestinians. Arabization is not new, Peter Galbraith, a professor at
the National Defense University and a former senior adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, says. Galbraith has monitored Saddam's anti-Kurdish activities since before the
Gulf War. "It's been going on for twenty years," he told me. "Maybe it's picked up speed, but
it is certainly nothing new. To my mind, it's part of a larger process that has been under way
for many years, and is aimed at reducing the territory occupied by the Kurds and at
destroying rural Kurdistan."

"This is the apotheosis of cultural genocide," said Saedi Barzinji, the president of Salahaddin
University, in Erbil, who is a human-rights lawyer and Massoud Barzani's legal adviser.
Barzinji and other Kurdish leaders believe that Saddam is trying to set up a buffer zone
between Arab Iraq and Kurdistan, just in case the Kurds win their  independence.
To help with this, Barzinji told me last month, Saddam is trying to rewrite Kirkuk's history,
to give it an "Arab" past. If Kurds, Barzinji went on, "don't change their ethnic origin, they
are given no food rations, no positions in government, no right to register the names of their
new babies. In the last three to four weeks, hospitals have been ordered, the maternity wards
ordered, not to register any Kurdish name." New parents are "obliged to choose an Arab
name." Barzinji said that the nationality-correction campaign extends even to the dead.
"Saddam is razing the gravestones, erasing the past, putting in new ones with Arab names,"
he said. "He wants to show that Kirkuk has always been Arab."

Some of the Kurds crossing the demarcation line between Saddam's  forces and the Kurdish
zone, it is said, are not being expelled but are fleeing for economic reasons. But in camps
across Kurdistan I met refugees who told me stories of visits from the secret police in the
middle of the night.

Many of the refugees from Kirkuk live in tent camps built on boggy fields. I visited one such
camp at Beneslawa, not far from Erbil, where the mud was so thick that it nearly pulled off
my shoes. The people at the campÑseveral hundred, according to two estimates I heardÑare 
ragged and sick. A man named Howar told me that his suffering could not have been
avoided even if he had agreed to change his ethnic identity.

"When you agree to change your nationality, the police write on your identity documents
'second-degree Arab,' which they know means Kurd," he told me. "So they always know
you're a Kurd." (In a twist characteristic of Saddam's regime, Kurdish leaders told me, Kurds
who agree to "change" their nationality are fined for having once claimed falsely to be
Kurdish.)

Another refugee, Shawqat Hamid Muhammad, said that her son had gone to jail for two
months for having a photograph of Mustafa Barzani in his possession. She said that she and
her family had been in the Beneslawa camp for two months. "The police came and knocked
on our door and told us we have to leave Kirkuk," she said. "We had to rent a truck to take
our things out. We were given one day to leave. We have no idea who is in our house."
Another refugee, a man named Ibrahim Jamil, wandered over to listen to the conversation.
"The Arabs are winning Kirkuk," he said. "Soon the only people there will be Arabs, and
Kurds who call themselves Arabs. They say we should be Arab. But I'm a Kurd. It would
be easier for me to die than be an Arab. How can I not be a Kurd?"

Peter Galbraith told me that in 1987 he witnessed the destruction of Kurdish villages and
cemeteries "anything that was related to Kurdish identity," he said. "This was one of the
factors that led me to conclude that it is a policy of genocide, a crime of intent, 
destroying a group whole or in part."

9. IRAQ'S ARMS RACE   

In a series of meetings in the summer and fall of 1995, Charles Duelfer, the deputy executive
chairman of the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM the now defunct
arms-inspection team met in Baghdad with Iraqi government delegations. The subject was
the status of Iraq's nonconventional-weapons programs, and Duelfer, an American diplomat
on loan to the Unite