Iraq Getting Their Way

By Lisa Beyer

If we had a king,

He would be worthy of his crown;

He should have a capital

And we would share his fortune.

Turk and Persian and Arab

Would all be our slaves.

-- Kurdish verse popular in the 1920s

The slaves are out of the question, but the capital and the fortune are looking more attainable than ever to Iraq's Kurdish minority. After struggling for most of this century for control of their homeland, which happens to sit atop some of Iraq's richest oil fields, the Kurds have wrested large portions of it from Saddam Hussein's disheveled forces. Though their gains are far from irreversible, this time the Kurds appear to have a chance of holding on and, in the end, winning at least a form of autonomy. Says a beaming Hoshyar Zebari, spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party: "This is the nearest we've ever come to achieving our objectives."

The successes of the Kurds in Iraq's north as well as those of predominantly Shi'ite rebels staging a simultaneous uprising in the south have plainly spooked Saddam. Last weekend in an apparent bid to soothe popular discontent, Saddam relinquished one of his posts, that of Prime Minister, and named a new 24-member Cabinet. The new Prime Minister, Saadoun Hammadi, formerly deputy PM, is a Shi'ite and, within the context of the ruling Baath Party, is considered a moderate. But the changes are unlikely to convince the Iraqi masses that the regime has truly turned over a new leaf, especially since the ironhanded Interior Minister, Ali Hassan Majid, has kept his job. "The Cabinet is window dressing," says a U.S. government expert on Iraq. "It doesn't make any decisions anyway."

Saddam is not the only one worried about the Kurds; the allies, who, by enfeebling Saddam, made the Kurdish victories possible, are concerned too. The Kurdish leadership professes a modest aim -- autonomy within a democratic Iraq. But suspicions run deep that the real agenda is, as it has been in the past, independence, a break from Baghdad clean and neat. That is an outcome $ none of the allies desire. For one thing, they do not want to be held responsible for Iraq's partition. For another, the Kurds in Turkey, Syria, Iran and the Soviet Union might come down with separatist fever as well.

At the same time, the allies are rooting for Saddam's downfall, a result the Kurdish uprising may be making more likely. The conflicting objectives of keeping Iraq whole and bringing Saddam down have produced what a close adviser to President Bush frankly calls a "muddle" in U.S. policy. While refusing to give actual aid to the rebels, Washington has hampered Saddam's ability to subdue them by refusing to allow Iraqi warplanes to fly. The U.S. enforced that prohibition last week when it shot down two Iraqi Su-22 fighter-bombers in northern Iraq. Washington, however, has so far turned a blind eye to Iraqi helicopter attacks on the rebels.

For the Kurds, the dearth of support for their cause is nothing new. They first began to seek independence for Kurdistan, which encompasses 28 million people in an area roughly the size of Thailand, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I. The Treaty of Sevres in 1920 promised them an independent state, but it was never ratified. Later that year, Britain annexed the oil-rich Kurdish region of Mosul to Iraq, then a British mandate. Intermittent insurgencies against Baghdad have followed ever since, and Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Syria have also remained restive.

Life under non-Kurdish rulers has not been easy. Teaching the Kurdish language is prohibited in Iranian and Syrian schools. In Turkey singing a Kurdish ditty can bring a jail term. Syria has revoked the citizenship of many of its Kurds to punish their rebelliousness. Iraq has expelled tens of thousands of Kurds from their homes, and in 1988 gassed the town of Halabja, killing 5,000 people. The world community scarcely took notice.

Over the years, the Syrians, Iranians and Turks have quietly supplied military aid to Iraqi Kurds. But the assistance was only enough to create a nuisance for Baghdad, never enough to enable the Kurds to break loose.

In their latest campaign the rebels claim that in addition to their 30,000 fighters, called the peshmerga (those who face death), they have on their side some 20,000 defectors from the regular military and another 200,000 militiamen. But these figures are believed to be greatly exaggerated. "If you add them up," says a senior British diplomat, "the fighting should have ended some time ago."

Yet there is no denying that the Kurds have made serious advances. After the relatively easy task of capturing barren countryside, last week they began to move on the cities, including Kirkuk, a metropolis of nearly 1 million people and the heart of Iraq's oil-producing north.

The Kurds have always been tough fighters; Saladin, the nemesis of the Crusaders, was a Kurd. But this time, they have been helped by a convergence of propitious factors. Because Baghdad at first considered the unrest in the Shi'ite areas more threatening, it moved troops in the north southward, giving the guerrillas a more open field. Popular disgust with Saddam's disastrous Kuwaiti adventure fertilized the ground. "Uprising is an art," says Jalal Talabani, Damascus-based leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "There must be a climate for it."

Though there is no indication that the Kurds are coordinating military tactics with the insurrectionists in the south, both Kurdish and Shi'ite groups belong to the Joint Action Committee formed by Iraqi opposition organizations in December. Still, the ambitions of the Kurds, who are Sunnis, and the Shi'ites, who want a fundamentalist government in Baghdad, are hopelessly in conflict. Last week Talabani said bluntly, "There will not be an Islamic regime in Iraq." Meanwhile, the Shi'ites suspect that in victory Kurdistan would bolt from the republic at the first opportunity. Outsiders are equally skeptical that the Kurds would settle for autonomy. "As the first step, yes," says Michael Lazarev, an expert on the Kurds at Moscow's Institute of the Middle East. "But I am sure they are still dreaming of a Kurdistan of their own."

Such a prospect makes leaders in Turkey, Iran, Syria and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union uneasy. It is not that the Kurds spread across these countries are likely to join arms and fight en masse for a united homeland. Tribal loyalties have prevented the Kurds from developing that kind of cohesion. In fact, Kurds have at times betrayed their fellow nationals, as when Iraqi Kurds in the early 1970s conspired against Iranian Kurds in return for Tehran's support for the Iraqi group's fight against Baghdad. But the fear is that if the Kurds in Iraq succeed in gaining self-rule, Kurds elsewhere may be emboldened to fight harder for their rights as well.

Turkey has put the Kurds on notice that it may use force to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq. Ankara has a historic , claim on Iraq's Mosul province which it might use as a pretext for such a move. That might in turn prompt Iran and Syria to seize their own pieces of Iraq. Two weeks ago, Turkish officials met with Iraqi Kurdish leaders for the first time. In exchange for that rare acknowledgment of their legitimacy, the Kurds apparently promised Ankara that they would not foment rebellion among their brethren in Turkey.

While Iraqi Kurds have been speaking with increasing confidence that their day has come, Saddam has surely not finished fighting them. If his forces are able to consolidate their gains in the south, they will soon turn their guns on the rebels in the north. After a permanent truce is reached with the allies, Saddam will presumably be able to fly his combat planes again and thus bomb the Kurds from the air.

Of course, Saddam may not last long enough to see the battle out. The allies continue to hope that one of his officers will depose him. Many Kurdish leaders say they would be happy to work with a military junta. According to Zebari, his group has even written to army commanders pledging support for a military coup. Yet a new man in a uniform in Baghdad might not be any better for the Kurds than the old one. "The military establishment in Iraq has a very bad history," says Sami Abdul Rahman, leader of the Kurdistan Popular Democratic Party. "They are chauvinistic and dictatorial."

The armed forces, which are dominated by Sunni Arabs, are also aware that both the Shi'ites and the Kurds are revolting not just against Saddam but against Sunni subjugation as well. Preserving Sunni predominance would thus require quashing the rebels' aspirations. For the Kurds, a capital and a fortune may yet prove as illusory as those slaves.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Washington, Scott MacLeod/Damascus and William Mader/London