May 24, 2002 
On the day that President Bush called for action against Iraq, Amberin Zaman reports from Northern Iraq on Saddam's repression of the Kurds. 

'Not Bush, not Blair, only the Almighty Allah can punish Saddam in the way he deserves," said the Kurdish ambulance driver, shielding his only good eye from the Iraqi sun. "I hope it will be very slow and very painful."

Ferhad Mohammed Karim, 50, lost his left eye after enduring seven months of non-stop torture by Saddam's security forces in an Iraqi jail.

Mr Karim was thrown out of Iraq's main oil-producing northern province, Kirkuk, in February after refusing to sign papers identifying himself as an Arab.

"They beat me, they starved me, they threatened to kill my children and finally blinded me, but I refused," said Mr Karim. "I was born a Kurd and will die a Kurd."

Like hundreds of other Iraqi Kurdish refugees sheltering in the Bardakahraman camp on the outskirts of the Kurdish-controlled city of Sulaymaniyah, Mr Karim is among the most recent victims of Saddam's decades-long "Arabisation" campaign.

The Iraqi leader's aim is to ethnically cleanse all non-Arabs from Kirkuk, where the majority of Iraq's vast oil reserves are extracted, and in so doing crush any putative attempt by Kurds and a Turkic-speaking minority known as the Turcomens to claim the region for their own.

That is what the Iraqi Kurds tried to do during their failed rebellion against the dictator at the end of the Gulf war. Thousands of Kurds perished after the American-led coalition failed to protect them from advancing Iraqi troops and helicopter gunships, having encouraged them to rise up against Saddam.

An international outcry that followed television pictures of millions of Kurdish refugees huddled in the snow-capped mountains along the borders of Turkey and Iran prompted the allies to set up the Kurdish "safe haven" north of the 36th parallel protected by American and British fighter planes.

Iraqi Kurdish leaders insist that Kirkuk needs to be incorporated into the Kurdish federal administration which they demand should be established in exchange for their support for an American-led "regime-changing operation" in Baghdad.

Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, leaders of the rival Kurdish factions governing Iraqi Kurdistan, are said to have raised the Kirkuk issue during secret talks in Germany this month with US officials.

Their demands have deepened Turkish suspicions that the Iraqi Kurds, for all their denials, are seeking to establish an independent state, viable only if they control Kirkuk. Turkey has threatened to intervene militarily should the Iraqi Kurds seek to break away from Baghdad, fearing that the emergence of an independent Kurdish state on its borders would re-ignite nationalism among its own estimated 12 million Kurds.

"Kirkuk is a highly explosive issue, we have to keep the Turks as comfortable as possible. Their intervention would produce chaos," said Barham Saleh, a senior official from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controls the eastern part of the Kurdish enclave.

"We cannot say it is a Kurdish city. Arabs, Turcomens and Assyrians have lived there for centuries too."

Western diplomats estimate that 150 families are driven out of Kirkuk every month. Thousands are thought to be making their way illegally in rickety boats to Europe after crossing into neighbouring Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Mr Saleh said that since 1991 some 70,000 refugees have poured into the eastern part of the enclave controlled by his party. "They are putting huge pressure on our economy, we can barely cope."

Saddam's assassination tactics have in the past also included financial rewards to Arabs who take Kurdish wives as well as Arabising Kurdish and Turcomen names.

Back in the Bardakahraman camp, Cemile Ahmad gestured towards a mud hut where she and her nine children have lived since 1997.

She said: "Life is that of a dog. We have no sewage, no running water, and scorpions and snakes have become our worst enemies after Saddam."

She and fellow refugees rely on meagre rations of flour, rice and sugar provided by the local government. With no fuel to burn in the winter and appalling sanitary conditions exacerbated by the summer heat, many children succumb to starvation and disease.

Munira Farid, a 27-year-old mother of four, was expelled from Kirkuk this month after her husband, a farmer, refused to join Saddam's Al-Quds, or Jerus 

Its soldiers allegedly include male relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers, who are being resettled in Kirkuk, together with thousands of Iraqi Arabs.

"The Iraqis seized all our property, we have nothing left," said Mrs Farid. Still, like many here, she said she has no regrets about leaving her home. "We may live in misery, but here, at least, we are free to call ourselves Kurds."
 

American planes destroyed two Iraqi air defence targets in the southern "no-fly" zone yesterday, the US military said