Kurds play
guessing games over Iraqi army's stomach for a fight
CHAMCHAMAL,(Southern
Kurdistan), Oct 20 (AFP) If it is indeed true that an army marches on
its stomach, then Saddam Hussein's men won't be going too far -- or so Kurdish
fighters living in their shadow are hoping.
"Last week
they raided one of our villages," recounted Hekmat Mohammad, who commands
a peshmerga -- or Kurdish militia -- checkpost that separates this northern
enclave from Baghdad-held soil.
"And what did
they do? They stole 700 sheep!" he grinned, obviously finding it amusing
that an army better known for its blitzkrieg campaigns and brutal gas attacks
was now prone to rustling livestock.
"They're
hungry, and they all keep a set of civilian clothes in their bags for when the
fighting starts."
With hundreds of
traders and travellers shuttling across the line of control on a daily basis,
local Kurdish officials assert they have gleaned enough information from their
network of informants to suggest Saddam's regular army will not put up much of
a fight outside his main urban centres.
"When there
is news of an imminent US attack, they move their positions back or rotate the
soldiers. They have conscripts here who are not fed so well, so we think they
are afraid of defections," said Tareq Rashid Ali, the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK) mayor of this town of around 70,000 people.
"But when it
looks like an attack won't happen soon, they move forward and harass us a
little bit," he added, pointing through his town-centre office window to
Iraqi bunkers visible on a barren ridgeline just a few kilometres (little more
than a mile) away.
A further 30
kilometres (20 miles) down the road from Chamchamal is Kirkuk, a city claimed
by the PUK and the other main faction in the enclave -- the Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP) -- as their regional capital of a future, federal Iraq.
Around a third of
Iraq's oil is tapped in the zone that stretches west from Kirkuk to Mosul --
and Saddam has in the past fought hard to retain control of it. Officials said
the same can be expected again if the US does attack.
The PUK said the
Iraqi army has for several weeks been concentrating its forces, including
members of the "better fed" elite Republican Guard, and heavy arms
inside Kirkuk's residential areas.
"They've been
digging trenches and bringing in tanks, long-range rockets and anti-aircraft
guns into densely-populated areas," said Mayor Tareq Rashid, who
originally hails from Kirkuk and keeps a close eye on developments there.
Hekmat, the
checkpost commander, also said those non-Arab residents not yet expelled under
Saddam's "Arabisation" policy -- throwing out Kurds and bringing
Sunni Muslim Arabs in -- were being told to stay indoors for much of the day
while transport facilities had been prepared to evacuate Baath party loyalists
and their families when the need arises.
The claims were
impossible to verify -- foreign journalists cannot cross from the Kurdish
enclave to government-held areas -- but several dozen travellers arriving in
the Kurdish zone from Kirkuk gave similar accounts of intensifying Iraqi
military activity.
So while the
residents of Chamchamal may not be too concerned about the regular troops on
the hill -- even though they outnumber and outgun the peshmerga -- Mayor
Rashid Ali said he was taking no chances given the feared Republican Guard
were less than an hour's drive away.
"We've
already trained a civil defence force so everyone knows what to do in an
emergency. Unfortunately we have no gas masks, but people here are brave and
they are staying put for the time being," he told AFP.
"But Saddam
is like a wild animal, a mad dog, who can attack at any time. We are doing all
we can, but we are just guessing." |
