1. Kurdish Leaders Deny They Signed Statement Supporting Poll Delay
(Peyamner.com) 11/27
2. PUK Statement: Kurd Parties Support January Elections, But Flexible
(Associated Press) 11/28
3. Kurdish Political Forces Reorganize Themselves Ahead of Elections
(Peyamner.com) 11/18
4. Ankara Concerned by Kurd Moves to Delay Polls (Turkish Daily News) 11/19
5. Nechirvan Barzani Seeks Poll Delay on Account of Winter Weather
(Turkish Daily News) 11/25
6. Welcome to Kurdistan, While it Lasts (Independent) 11/23
7. Kurds Help Keep Order in Mosul (Boston Globe) 11/18
8. Militants Try to Stoke Arab-Kurd Violence in Mosul Area (Associated
Press) 11/19
9. Deployment of Kurdish Troops in Mosul Alarms Arabs (Reuters) 11/21
10. KDP Office in Mosul Attacked as US Troops Attempt to Restore Order
(Peyamner.com) 11/16
11. Peshmerga Convoy Ambushed Near Mosul, 3 Dead (Reuters) 11/24
12. O'Leary/Salih: Kurds’ Convincing Argument for English over Arabic
(Financial Times) 11/19
13. Alan Kabki: Young Kurds Have Right to Develop Cultural, Linguistic
Roots (Financial Times) 11/23
14. Iraq FM Hoshyar Zebari: Profile of Kurd Guerrilla Turned Iraqi
Statesman (Daily Star) 11/24
15. New Book Projects Voices of the Kurds after Saddam (FrontPageMagazine)
11/22
16. Kurd Govt. Gives Cash Incentives to Scrap Pre-1995 Vehicles (IWPR) 11/23
17. Sabah Salih: Of Halabja, the Kurds, and American Politics (Kurdistan
Observer) 11/26
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Kurdish leader denies they signed statement on poll delay
Peyamner.com
November 27, 2004

IRBIL, Kurdistan - Kurdistan Democratic Party refuted on Saturday claims
that they have signed a collective statement in Baghdad regarding a call
for a possible postponement of the Iraqi general elections set for January
30 next year.

"There has been a misunderstanding in this issue. We have not requested a
deferment of the elections as Kurds. On the contrary we are always prepared
for the poll to be carried out," Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani,
who also is a top official of the KDP, told Peyamner.com.

More than 15 Iraqi political factions including the two main Iraqi Kurdish
parties, KDP and PUK, gathered on Friday in Baghdad, calling for a
rescheduling of the elections in light of the ongoing violence throughout
the country. A collective statement was issued at the end of the two-hour
afternoon meeting at the Baghdad home of Dr. Pachachi, a leading Iraqi figure.

KDP says that it is in favour of a postponement of the elections of
different reasons.

"As we mentioned in the last press conference, we requested a delay only if
the winter temperature would deteriorate," Mr Barzani said clarifying that
snowfall in the northern mountainous parts of Iraqi Kurdistan could
dramatically reduce the number of the poll participants.

Mean while US Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte said on Saturday that the
elections would take place at the promised date without postponement. Mr
Negroponte said that the security condition of Iraq is "adequate enough"
for the elections.

In a related development Iraqi electoral commission has said it will
consider a request from leading political parties to delay general
elections scheduled for 30 January.

"But if other Iraqi Arab groups call for a postponement we will not stand
on their way. Kurds will not oppose it." Mr Barzani said reiterating that
if elections held the Kurdish group will require that elections are
deferred in Kirkuk province until population census is completed.

---------

2) PUK Statement says both major Kurdish parties ready for elections on Jan. 30
Associated Press
November 28, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's two major Kurdish political parties are ready to
take part in national elections on Jan. 30 as planned but would not object
if "other political powers" want the vote postponed in other areas, a party
Web site said Saturday.

The Web site of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said that the party issued
a joint statement with the Kurdistan Democratic Party expressing their
common "readiness to participate at the scheduled time."

"The two parties are ready to participate in the elections at the scheduled
time because there are no barriers or problems in Kurdistan that require
postponement," the statement said.

"But if other political powers asked the Iraqi parties to postpone it
because of the deterioration in the situation in some Iraqi areas, we won't
oppose their decision until the situation improves in those areas and the
elections could be conducted in a better way."

The statement did not appear on the KDP Web site and efforts to contact
party officials were unsuccessful because of the late hour.

Members of the two parties attended a meeting Friday at the home of Sunni
Arab elder statesman Adnan Pachachi in which 17 groups called on the
government to postpone the election because of the security crisis.

The government rejected the call Saturday, and key figures of the majority
Shiite Muslim community demanded that the vote go ahead as planned on Jan. 30.

Kamal Mohi Eldin, the spokesman of the PUK, said in a statement Saturday
that his party sent a representative to the meeting at Pachachi's home but
had not signed the statement urging a delay in the vote.

------

3) Kurdish political forces reorganize themselves ahead of elections
Peyamner.com
November 18, 2004

SALAHADDIN, Kurdistan - In the first round of talks the two main Iraqi
Kurdish political parties said to have reached common grounds regarding the
promised national and regional Iraqi elections set for January next year.

The second meeting between Kurdish leaders, Masoud Barzani (KDP) and Jalal
Talabani (PUK) is to take place in Dukan on Thursday. Diplomatic sources
said here that the Dukan summit is most likely to be attended by top Iraqi
officials including President Ghazi Al-Yawar and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi.

The Kurdish leaders indicated that they will be holding talks with Iraqi
political forces while Kurds already have taken a common position regarding
the elections.

"We, as Kurds, have an agenda of our own for the meeting which will be
presented at tomorrow's summit," KDP leader Barzani said adding that Kurds
will participate in the elections as Kurds and Kurdistanis if they failed,
in his words, to come "to an agreement" with the Iraqi political forces.

Mean while a PUK statement that was published ahead of today's meeting says
that Patriotic Union of Kurdistan will oppose elections in Kirkuk province
before a full compliance of the §58 of the Interim Administration Law,
according to which all Kurdish refugees must return to their cities prior
to elections. PUK says that since this is not the fact regarding the
displaced Kurdish refugees, they will ask for a suspension of the election
in the whole of the province.

The statement says also that PUK and KDP have "almost" the same view of
Kirkuk in connection to the January vote.

------

4) Ankara examines Kurdish poll move
Turkish Daily News
November 19, 2004

Turkey said it was examining a move by two Kurdish groups running northern
Iraq to delay municipal polls in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, whose control
is disputed among Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs.

Leaders of the two major Iraqi Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), have agreed on the
necessity of delaying the January municipal elections in the oil-rich city
of Kirkuk until the government settles the issue of Kurds returning to
their former homes.

Massoud Barzani, leader of the KDP, and Jalal Talabani, head of the PUK,
reached an agreement during talks on Wednesday about the election, said
Azad Jindyany, director of the PUK media office.

"It's too early to say anything. Let's first get first-hand information,"
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told reporters yesterday when asked to
comment on the Kurdish move.

Turkish officials said the relevant documents regulating the election
calendar in Iraq would be examined to see whether a delay in the January
elections would be possible. But they commented that the Kurdish proposal
did not seem feasible.

The request by the KDP and the PUK is to be assessed by an autonomous
election board supervising the Iraqi polls. Local elections are due to be
held in each Iraqi province simultaneously with parliamentary elections
across the country.

"An agreement between the two Kurdish parties is not enough," said the
Ankara office of the Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITC), an umbrella organization
for Iraqi Turkmens.

"The only institution authorized to delay or postpone elections in Iraq is
the Iraqi Higher Commission for Elections, an independent body," a
statement faxed to the Turkish Daily News said.

Barzani and Talabani were to meet with Iraqi President Ghazi al-Yawer and
Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to discuss the election issue, but the
meeting had not taken place before the TDN went to press.

The ownership of the city is a disputed matter among Kurds, Arabs and the
Turkmens, who have close relations with Turkey. Turkish officials
frequently warn that Ankara would not let the city fall under the control
of a single group, namely the Iraqi Kurds.
Fair play

Kurdish leaders would like more Kurds to return to ethnically mixed Kirkuk
before the election. A large Kurdish vote in the election would reaffirm
the Kurds' claim that the city should be part of the Kurdish autonomous region.

The Kurds revoked Article 58 of Iraq's interim Constitution, which states
that all Iraqis, including the Kurds displaced under Saddam Hussein's
regime, have the right to return to their homes and receive compensation.

"They agreed that elections should not take place unless the government
addresses the Kurds' problems first according to Article 58 of Iraq's
interim Constitution, which ensures the Kurds' normalization in Kirkuk,"
Jindyany said.

Regional sources said elections would weaken the Kurdish grip on Kirkuk's
municipal assembly if they were held in January as planned. Kurdish groups
currently control 70 percent of the assembly and have firm control over the
local administration.

"It seems they want this postponement because they see they will not manage
to get the desired outcome in Iraq and northern Iraq in elections," the ITC
said, describing the Kurdish request as a move to ensure a majority before
going to polls. "We deem this to be a lack of trust for the people of Iraq."

Kurds also want a local election commission to be disbanded, seeking a
greater representation in it.

The commission is authorized to determine who is eligible to vote in local
elections, and Kurds fear the commission will not let thousands of Kurds
who have recently returned to Kirkuk vote because they do not have
residence records in Kirkuk.

Only one member of the eight-member commission is Kurdish.

---------

5) Barzani asks for delay in Iraqi polls
Turkish Daily News
November 25, 2004

An Iraqi Kurdish leader repeated a call yesterday for postponement of
elections in the war-torn country, slated to take place on Jan. 30, citing
the bad weather conditions that plague the Kurdish region at that time of
the year.

"Iraqi Kurds are ready to participate in polls, but weather conditions in
the region where the Kurds live will be unfavorable, and it will be covered
by snow by the end of January," Nechirvan Barzani, a senior official of the
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which runs part of northern Iraq, saida
press conference in the northern Iraqi city of Arbil.

This is the second time in a week that Iraqi Kurds are calling for a delay
in the elections. Last week, the KDP and a second Kurdish group, the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), agreed that local elections in Kirkuk,
a city which has an ethnically mixed population and rich oilreserves,
should be postponed until more Kurds return to their former homes in the city.

Local elections are scheduled to take place simultaneously with the
parliamentary elections in each province.

The Iraqi government has said it was determined to ensure that elections
would take placeat the scheduled time, and participants of an international
conference on Iraq in Egypt said the government should do its best to make
sure as many people as possible participate in the Jan. 30 elections.

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, addressing a closed-door session of
the conference on Tuesday, said the elections should take place as
scheduled and not exclude any part of Iraqi society.

------

6) Welcome to Kurdistan (while it lasts)
Independent
Charles Glass
23 November 2004

Irbil - In a small government office on the edge of the Iraqi Kurdish
capital, three oil paintings show better than words what is driving Iraq
towards separation. The first is a dark circle of old men in traditional
Kurdish costumes seated on the ground. The others depict two stages in the
last great Kurdish tragedy. Refugees trudge a serpent's path through the
mountains in one, and the same refugees sit forlornly beside open tents in
the other.

Mohammed Ihsan, who is 38 and took his doctorate in law from the University
of London, tells visitors what the pictures mean. "He is teaching them to
be Kurds," Ihsan says of a man smoking a cigarette in the first portrait.
"He" is Mullah Moustafa Barzani, the father of modern Kurdish nationalism
who died a defeated warrior in Washington in 1979.

The next two in the triptych depict the escape and arrival of 1991, when
the Kurds having rallied to the Americans who instigated and betrayed
their revolution fled over the border to Turkey and Iran. Ihsan knows
about the flight of 1991. He was part of it. "It was a good thing," he says
of a time when thousands of Kurds died. "It united us." The fourth and
fifth panels the present and future have yet to be painted.

Iraqi Kurdistan today might be represented by peasants rebuilding the
villages that Saddam Hussein destroyed, towns governed by Kurds rather than
Arab appointees from Baghdad or Kurds picnicking under their own flag. What
would the artist see in the future: an independent state, a province within
a federal Iraq or another flight to the mountains? The Kurds fear chaos in
the USbacked, interim-governed Arab Iraq is spreading north. Some Kurds
would welcome this as the excuse to secede from Iraq and declare the
Kurdish independence most want. Others, mainly in the leadership, believe
secession would lead to a permanent state of war with the Arab south and,
eventually, the loss of all their gains since 1991.

Dr Mohammed Ihsan is minister for human rights in the two north-western
Kurdish provinces governed by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed
by Massoud Barzani, son of the legendary Mullah Moustafa. The third Kurdish
province, Suleimania, is under the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK),
whose leader is Jalal Talabani. Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani have agreed to
unite their Kurdish administrations after the January elections, if there
are elections.

Both Kurdish zones have human rights ministries, whose officials have full
access to jails and prisons, promote women's and children's rights and
preach civil rights in schools. Human rights have become paramount to a
people whose basic right that to life was abused for 30 years by Baghdad
with the complicity of the Kurds' American and British allies. Ministries
of human rights do not figure in the Arab world or in the other two states
where Kurds live in large numbers, Turkey and Iran. Whatever happens in the
rest of Iraq, the Kurds are determined never to return to horrors of the
past, even under fellow Kurds.

"Welcome to Kurdistan of Iraq" says the banner over the bridge from Turkey.
It would be easier for the Kurds to erase "of Iraq" than to paint out
Kurdistan. "Iraq means nothing to me," Dr Ihsan says. "I am not proud of
Iraq." Kurds would fight and die for Kurdistan; but they would desert the
army as many did in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war rather than die for
Iraq. Even in Mosul, where they are fighting Arab insurgents, they say
their goal is to protect Kurdish neighbourhoods and Erbil, which is less
than an hour's drive away.

Hiro Talabani, the wife of the PUK leader Jalal, says that people cannot
forget what the Arab armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors did to
the Kurds. "But, believe me," she adds, "we will go through it again, if
our future goes back to our Arab brothers. There is a little Saddam in the
mind of every one of them."

Nowhere is the divergence between the Kurdish leadership and the populace
so evident as over the issue of independence. Kurdish leaders have drawn
red lines, minimum demands to guarantee their self-government within Iraq
and to prove to their electorate that autonomy is almost as good as full
independence.

No stable Arab government in Baghdad not that one is emerging would accept
the Kurds' conditions for remaining part of Iraq. The first Kurdish demand
is for control of the oil city of Kirkuk, whose Kurdish majority was
reduced or eliminated. The Arabisation programme, an Arab version of
Zionist land confiscation, dispossessed Kurds and replaced them with Arab
Shia settlers. All Kurds say Saddam's ethnic cleansing must be reversed,
the Shia compensated and sent back to the south and Kirkuk incorporated
into the Kurdish administrative area.

Another red line means reversing Saddam's provincial boundary changes that
merged parts of Kurdish provinces into Arab governorates. Restoring the
pre-Saddam boundaries would add as much as 25 per cent to the existing
Kurdish zone above the Green Line that they have controlled since 1991. It
would also give the Kurds significant mineral wealth.

Another red line has been drawn around the Iraqi armed forces: no Iraqi
army may enter the Kurdish zone without the approval of the Kurdish
parliament. A whole generation here and the young are a majority has
never seen an Arab soldier or policeman. Those old enough to remember would
be more adamant in preventing their return.

Some of these demands were incorporated into the Transitional
Administrative Law the Kurds signed with Baghdad on 8 March this year.
Kurdish autonomy is hovering perilously close to independence. The Arabs,
weaker than the Kurds at present, are unlikely to accept Kurdish dictates
forever.

The Arabs see the Kurds, whom they used to dismiss as illiterate
mountaineers, taking too much. The Kurds themselves see their leaders
giving away their freedom. Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani must be sensitive to
their own people, who elected their parties in 1992. "There is public
opinion here," says the KDP minister of state Falah Moustafa Bakir in
Erbil. "It does not want Kurds to make concessions."

Two million of the four million Kurds living in the Kurdish regional
government zone signed a petition demanding a referendum on independence. A
recent opinion survey, in the independent weekly Hawaliti (Citizen), showed
44 per cent would vote against the two ruling parties, the KDP and PUK, in
regional parliamentary elections.

One reason is the perception that the parties are conceding too much to
Baghdad. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Kurdish official
acquiescence to Baghdad's demand that nothing be done to return Kirkuk's
Kurdish former residents to their homes. Thousands of these internally
displaced people went back to Kirkuk, to live in shanty towns. Some are in
hovels in the local football stadium, including the confines of the men's
lavatories. Most of them say they cannot live much longer without running
water, electricity, clinics, jobs or schools.

Kurdish leaders may be leaving the status quo in Kirkuk to make a success
of federal Iraq, but it is a federal state their followers do not want.
Most Kurds are uneasy about committing Kurdish peshmergas (guerrilla
fighters) to the federal army and the Iraqi National Guard. The deputy
commander of the PUK's peshmergas, Moustafa Sayed Kadir, told me of plans
to transfer 32,000 peshmergas from the PUK and KDP to the Baghdad
government. "They will serve inside and outside Kurdistan," he said.

When I suggested that large numbers of Kurdish peshmergas fighting in Arab
areas would provoke Arab hostility, he agreed, "You're right. It's crazy to
send 10,000 peshmergas to Arab Iraq. I don't want Arab soldiers here or
peshmergas there. We have no choice. This is the tax we pay as a result of
our Iraqi-ness."

The gravest danger of asking peshmergas to fight for the US in Iraq is to
the estimated two million Kurds who live outside the Kurdish zone. "Arabs
are starting to see the Kurds as they see the Israelis," says the law
professor Nouri Talabany, who heads the Kurdish election commission. And
the insurgents have accused the Kurds who had Israeli help for their
rebellions in the late 1960s and early 1970s of working with Israeli
agents in Iraq.

Mr Barzani and Mr Talabani deny the charge, saying they need no Israeli
help. Extremist mullahs have called on followers to kill Kurds because of
the Kurdish alliance with the Americans. Many Kurds have been killed in
Baghdad, Mosul and other cities because they are Kurds. Hundreds of Kurdish
and Christian families have fled the Arab areas for security within the
Kurdish protectorate. This trickle is a momentary function of insecurity
under the US and the Iraqi interim government, or it is the start of a
massive population transfer. "We are a different nation," the KDP chief,
Massoud Barzani, says. "Kurds are not Arabs. We happen to live in a place
called Iraq. Federalism gives us the right to control our areas. The time
is past for the centre to control Kurdistan. We are giving up many of our
rights to live in a united Iraq. They are not giving up anything."

Iraq is in fact, if not in law, two countries. Kurds refer to their area as
Kurdistan and the rest as "Iraq". If the insurgents win and the Americans
leave, the Arabs may try to punish the Kurds for their "betrayal" of Iraq
by having become America's Gurkhas.

One day, while I was with a Kurdish government minister, a call came from a
minister in the Baghdad government. The Kurdish minister became angry and
told him: "Your authority stops at Baquba." Baquba is a town just south of
the Green Line between Kurdish and Arab Iraq.

If Baghdad tries to extend its authority north of Baquba, there will be one
more war to add to the others that erupted when the US and Britain invaded.
Then, the artist can complete his series in harsh shades of charcoal.

CENTURY OF CONFLICT

1918 British forces occupy the oil-rich Ottoman vilayet of Mosul, bringing
extensive Kurd population areas under British rule

1943 Mullah Mustafa Barzani leads second uprising

1946 August British RAF bombing forces Kurdish rebels over border into Iran
after second uprising

1958 14 July Monarchy overthrown in a coup. Iraq is declared a
republic.Constitution recognises Kurdish "national rights" and Mullah
Mustafa Barzani returns from exile

1961 KDP is dissolved by the Iraqi government after Kurdish rebellion in north.

1979 President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr is succeeded by Vice-President Saddam
Hussein. Mullah Mustafa dies, his son Massoud Barzani takes over at KDP

1980 Outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq. KDP forces work closely with Iran

1988 Iran-Iraq war draws to a close, Iraqi forces launch the "Anfal
Campaign" against the Kurds. Tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians and
fighters are killed. Thousands more die in a poison gas attack on the town
of Halabjah near the Iranian border.

1991 Iraqi forces expelled from Kuwait, Kurds rise up against Saddam but
the rebellion halted as US refuses support; 1.5 millions Kurds flee but
Turkey closes the border forcing hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in
mountains.

1991 April Coalition forces announce a "safe haven" on the Iraqi side of
the border. Aid agencies launch a massive aid operation to help the refugees


-------

7) In Mosul, Kurds help keep order
Boston Globe
By Thanassis Cambanis
November 18, 2004

MOSUL, Iraq -- Real power on Iraq's streets often lies in the hands of men
like Sadi Ahmed Pire.

Iraqi police fled in the face of the insurgent offensive in Mosul that
began last week, and only a handful of Iraqi Army troops stayed behind when
their colleagues went to assist the US-led attack on Fallujah.

That's where Pire and his fighting force came in.

In name, Pire is a politician, head of the Mosul bureau of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan. In theory, the Kurdish peshmerga militia has been fully
absorbed into the Iraqi National Guard.

In practice, however, in a society whose increasingly inadequate national
institutions are dissolving under the pressure of a sustained insurgency,
the Kurdish political parties and their peshmerga fighters have maintained
tight discipline -- as well as loyalty to the American presence.

That makes Pire and his soldiers in Mosul an undeniable fact on the ground,
part of the patchwork of locally powerful groups across Iraq that exercises
control and provides security.

It is not the police or the governor appointed by Baghdad who really runs
Mosul, but rather, a constellation of groups -- insurgents and Arab
nationalists on the west bank of the Tigris River, Kurdish political
parties and militia on the east bank, and Turkomen in pockets throughout
the city.

This week, nearly 2,000 Kurdish reinforcements streamed down the mountain
to Mosul from the Kurdish city of Erbil, some in Iraqi National Guard
uniforms, some wearing the gray-wool baggy pants and vests of the
peshmerga, and some in civilian clothes. Half of them fall under Pire's
command, the rest under his counterpart from the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

In a lesson on the way many things get done in Iraq, Pire was among those
making the trip from his base in Erbil to Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city
and its number-two trouble spot after Fallujah.

Part party boss, part spymaster, part militiaman, Pire lorded over a
waiting room about seven hours, ordering tea, issuing military commands,
meeting with informants, interrogating a prisoner.

In the past few months, Pire has survived three assassination attempts. He
employs 25 guards and two heavily armored vehicles, including a gun truck,
for the one-hour dash to Mosul.

Along the route, dozens of peshmerga materialize at every intersection to
clear traffic out of his convoy's path.

His PUK party headquarters in Mosul can resemble a small military garrison.
About 500 fighters are based at the party office, and another 500 at
sub-offices fall under Pire's command.

Pire, 54, approaches his job with vigor and good humor as he works to
protect minority Kurds in Mosul, to gather intelligence on the insurgency,
and to represent the PUK in the ever-present competition with the rival
Kurdistan Democratic Party.

"Let me show you what my peshmerga found!" he crowed to a salon full of
visitors, brandishing a rusty, blood-spattered blade that his fighters
discovered in a car after a firefight with insurgents.

Then he got down to business.

An informer from the Ba'athist wing of the insurgency held a whispered
conference with Pire in his office. A Kurdish resident reported the
threatening activities of Arab gunmen in his neighborhood. Local commanders
came for their orders and updated Pire on the military operations underway
to sweep insurgents from their strongholds across the river.

He scheduled a meeting with the provincial governor for a group of visiting
reporters. "He's waiting for you. He'll be in his office," Pire said. Just
then, insurgents opened fire on the compound and unleashed a series of
mortars. "Unfortunately, I don't think there's a safe way for you to get
there," he said.

Just before lunch, one of his branch offices was attacked. "Bring the
wounded here!" he shouted into one of the four telephones on his desk.

"Let's eat!" he ordered his companions, in the same tone.

After a feast of lamb, chicken, and stuffed cabbage leaves at a house next
door, Pire returned to his office to resume his meetings, breaking briefly
to interrogate a wounded insurgent arrested after the firefight at the
branch office.

"Terrorist!" he spit, before pulling out his digital camera to snap a
picture of the man lying on the floor of a makeshift cell in a puddle of
blood.

Back at his desk, Pire held forth to another informant, while showing a
second visitor glossy prints of corpses from a shoot-out Friday at the
Mosul headquarters.

Dozens of men packed his outer waiting room until sunset, remaining
patiently through bursts of gunfire, mortar attacks, and the evening call
to prayer.

Pire would not predict how long the fighting would last in Mosul, or
whether the Kurds would be forced to call upon thousands of peshmerga
reserves in the city -- a move that could escalate ethnic clashes between
Arabs and Kurds. US forces continued to move through insurgent strongholds
yesterday, reportedly meeting little resistance.

For now, Pire wants to use his power to keep Mosul's Kurds safe without
provoking the ire of the national government in Baghdad, whose authority
has been absent from the city's streets.

His men call him "the general," for reasons evident Friday, when he picked
up a machine gun and joined his fighters at the compound wall during a
previous attack on the PUK headquarters.

When darkness fell, Pire ordered his entourage to drive back to Erbil
through the rain. One guard waved toward the city, where bursts of
machine-gun fire from insurgents echoed through the gathering darkness, and
made the motion of a knife passing over his neck. His message was clear:
Mosul's fighters want to kill anyone who would try to stop them.

"I'm sure we'll make it back home alive," Pire said with a smile.

-------

8) Militants try to stir Arab-Kurd violence
Associated Press
by Mariam Fam
19 November 2004

Insurgents battling U.S. and Iraqi forces in the northern city of Mosul
have been trying to drag the Kurdish minority into their fight and set off
a sectarian war, Kurdish and Arab officials say.

Violence against Kurds has escalated in recent days, officials say. The
offices - and officials - of Kurdish political parties have been attacked.
Insurgents fired on a truck carrying Kurdish peshmerga fighters. And at
least one Kurd was said to have been beheaded in Mosul, a largely Sunni
Arab city.

"They are trying to ignite the flames of sedition between Arabs and Kurds,"
Khasro Gouran, Mosul's Kurdish deputy provincial governor, said by
telephone from Mosul. "They want the Kurds to react and the peshmerga to
come in (from outside Mosul) so there would be sectarian strife in the city."

"They won't succeed because the Kurdish leadership is aware of their
plans," Gov. Duraid Kashmoula, an Arab, said of the insurgents.

The Kurds are not the only ones under attack. During the latest bout of
violence, masked men have stormed police stations, looting and burning
some. They've also set up their own checkpoints and set cars ablaze,
prompting the Americans to launch military operations to oust fighters from
their stronghold in the city.

Gouran said that in recent days three Kurds were killed, including at least
one whose decapitated body was discovered with the head placed on the back.

The two main Iraqi Kurdish parties are mostly secular U.S. allies that have
a bloody history of animosity with some militant Islamic groups and Baath
Party loyalists, both believed to be active in the Mosul insurgency. The
parties have long been targets.

The Kurdish minority generally lives in peace with Mosul's Arab majority,
although land and property disputes have in the past created some tensions.

When the militants overpowered Mosul's police force, which U.S. and Iraqi
officials say is infiltrated by insurgents, the local government called in
reinforcements, some of which came from the mostly quiet Kurdish region.

Gouran said some of the Iraqi National Guard reinforcements rushed to the
city came from the Kurdish provinces of Dohuk and Irbil. He said many of
their members were former peshmerga, a term that refers to the Kurdish
militia that fought former Baghdad governments.

In addition, Kurdish political parties called in peshmerga fighters to
guard their offices. The Kurdish militia proved harder for insurgents to
overpower than the police - in some cases killing or capturing their attackers.

The solution offered its own problems: The fact that many of the National
Guardsmen were Kurds and former peshmerga members didn't sit well with some
of the city's Arab residents.

Kurdish and Arab officials took pains to stress that National Guardsmen
were members of Iraq's security forces regardless of their ethnicity or
their religion and that no peshmerga fighters were patrolling the streets.

"The Kurds have no intention to take over Mosul or to `Kurdicize' it,"
Gouran said. "The relationship between Kurds and Arabs in Mosul is strong."

Such assurances fail to ease the concerns of some.

"There has been an escalation in armed attacks against the Kurds and this
proves that the Arabs don't agree to let the Kurds control the situation in
the city, " said Salem Ghanim Aziz, an Arab resident.

He said that having Kurdish forces could complicate matters, arguing that
Arab residents might want to take revenge against the Kurdish fighters from
the north that some blame for taking part in the looting that swept through
Mosul when it fell during last year's U.S.-led invasion.

"This is an Arab city and we don't accept strangers," said another Arab
resident, who identified himself only as Abu Omar. He said he doesn't
accept the presence of Kurdish National Guardsmen any more than that of the
militants.

Some Kurdish residents said they heard Arab neighbors gloating over recent
attacks on the Kurdish parties.

Officials say such sentiments are not widespread and mostly come from Arabs
who belonged to the former regime, pointing to Arab-Kurdish intermarriages
and amicable relations in the city.

"People say that the Kurds have ethnic designs on the city," said an Arab
provincial council member who didn't want his name used for fear of
retaliation. "But some of these people have Wahhabi thoughts and others are
the disadvantaged members of the former regime who wear the mask of Arab
nationalism."

Similarly, he said, some were circulating rumors that other security
reinforcements dispatched from Baghdad were Shiites coming to rule over the
Sunni majority.

He said the reinforcements were only trying to "prevent Mosul from becoming
another Fallujah."

Many in Mosul say they are tired of the violence that has shattered the
normalcy of their lives and restricted their movement under a curfew
imposed on the city.

One Arab resident who asked that his name not be used said he wanted calm
to return to Mosul, be it at Kurdish or Arab hands.

"Don't they say this is a unified Iraq? Let them come from the north or the
south as long as they restore security," he said. "Let's forget this talk
about ethnicity and religion."

"We're living in hell," he said. "We want to able to go out to the market.
We're sick of this.

---------

9) Deployment of Kurdish troops in Mosul alarms Arabs
Reuters
By Luke Baker
November 21, 2004

MOSUL - As U.S. forces try to regain control of Iraq's third largest city,
they are turning to their old allies the Kurds to keep the peace in Mosul.

That has caused resentment among some Arabs and Kurdish troops have been
killed in at least one incident -- three Kurds were found shot dead in the
mainly Arab city on Sunday.

In the 10 days since Sunni Arab insurgents overran parts of Mosul, looting,
burning and in several cases blowing up police stations, reinforcements
have been sent in from across the nearby northern Kurdish region,
especially Dohuk and Arbil.

A battalion of Iraq's paramilitary National Guard has been sent in from
both those towns and another could soon join them, raising the total to
around 1,800 men, U.S. commanders say.

While now in National Guard uniform and answerable to the Iraqi Defense
Ministry in Baghdad, most of the Kurds were until recently "peshmerga"
fighters, a well-organized and feared force set up by Kurdish leaders in
the mountains who, with U.S. help, fought Saddam Hussein's army to a
standstill after the Gulf War.

Their deployment has provoked consternation among some Arab residents who
fear that the Kurds, who want a fully independent state in northern Iraq,
are trying to expand their territory onto the oil-rich plain to the south
of their strongholds.

"Nobody wants the Kurdish army here," said Abeet Ranam, 40, an Arab
storeowner in an upscale neighborhood of northeastern Mosul. "There have
been Kurds living here for centuries and that is fine. But we do not want
the Kurdish army."

In the west of the city on Sunday, a Reuters reporter saw the bodies of
three National Guards, shot in the back of the head. A note by the bodies
read: "These are peshmerga soldiers."

The U.S. military said troops found the bodies of nine National Guards in
Mosul on Saturday, similarly shot. It was not clear whether they were
Kurds. An Arab guerrilla group posted a video on a Web site saying it
showed two Kurdish "spies" being shot in Mosul.

Another group said it had beheaded two National Guards.

ETHNIC MIX

Mosul's two million people are among Iraq's most ethnically and religiously
diverse communities. As well as Arabs and Kurds, who mostly share a common
Sunni Muslim faith, there are also Turkish-speaking Turkmen, Christian
Assyrians and Yazidis.

The city, in the far north of Iraq on the banks of the Tigris, has its
roots in the 8th century when it was an important stopover on the caravan
route from the Mediterranean to India.

"The people of Mosul don't like outsiders, that's it. Whether it's Kurds or
Arabs from outside, they are not welcome," said Ala, a translator for U.S.
forces who is half Kurdish and half Arab.

For the U.S. military, the public suspicions about the Kurdish National
Guard units have created a conundrum.

For well over a decade, the Kurds have been Washington's strongest ally in
Iraq against Saddam. Now, with Mosul threatening to turn to chaos after
most of the city's 4,000 police deserted, the Kurds are again proving
staunch allies.

"They're well-organized, fierce and get the job done," said Captain Robert
Lackey, a company commander with the U.S. Stryker Brigade, which is
responsible for northern Iraq.

"They understand how we operate and what we need to do, so it's great to
have them working with us."

Out on the streets of Mosul, the Kurdish National Guards are far more
effective than Arab peers, U.S. commanders say. Many Arab Guards are simply
not turning up to work, partly out of fear of reprisals by insurgents
against them or their families.

"For the Kurds, this isn't their neighborhood, this isn't their town, so
they have nothing to fear," said Lieutenant Noel Rodriguez, a Stryker
Brigade platoon commander.

In one southeastern neighborhood where a police station was blown up last
week, Kurdish National Guard units have moved in.

The Kurdish commander was barely able to communicate in Arabic. One man in
the street pointed in alarm to the Kurdish flag on the commander's uniform
-- and absence of Iraqi symbols.

U.S. commanders say they are aware of such sensitivities but dismiss
suggestions that they could stoke ethnic conflict.

(Additional reporting by Maher al-Thanoon in Mosul)

------

10) KDP office attacked as the US assault on Mosul continues
Peyamner
November 16, 2004

IRBIL, Kurdistan- Four rebels were killed and three others were injured
when the Kurdistan Democratic Party's headquarters was attacked by
unidentified gunmen in eastern Mosul Monday afternoon, Hasan Ali, a KDP
spokesman in Mosul told Peyamner.com.

"We are not sure how many attackers took part in the assault but bystanders
say that "terrorists" from at least two vehicles opened fire at our
building," Mr Ali said adding that the attackers were chased away and fled
the sight when KDP peshmergas replied the attack and killed 4 of the
assailants. Mr Ali did not say whether the KDP had suffered any
human-casualties.

Reports said on Monday that Iraqi forces including Kurdish units had been
deployed to Mosul where fierce clashes have broken out as US troops pound
what could be the last refuge of the militant rebels of Ansar al Sunna. KDP
officials here said that the Kurdish units were deployed at Baghdad's
request clarifying that Kurds were operating as part of Iraqi National
Guard (ING).

Kurdish leaders fear that in case of their contribution to the raids on
non-Kurdish cities, the insurgency would reach their controlled areas and
the 2.2 million Kurds living outside Kurdistan would be at a risk zone for
retaliations by Arab militants.

Kurdish leaders categorically refuted previous claims that Kurdish
battalions had taken part in Fallujah attacks earlier this year in March.

------

11) Kurdish Fighters Killed in Northern Iraq
Reuters
November 24, 2004

ARBIL - Gunmen ambushed a convoy of Kurdish militiamen as they traveled to
the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday, killing three and wounding
nine, hospital sources in the nearby town of Arbil said.

Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad, erupted in violence earlier this month
as U.S. forces fought guerrillas in the rebel stronghold of Falluja.

Over the past week, at least 20 bodies of Iraqi police, National Guardsmen
and Kurdish militiamen have been found in Mosul. The group led by al Qaeda
ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Washington's top foe in Iraq, has claimed
responsibility for killing them.

In Kirkuk, gunmen opened fire on National Guard soldiers late on Tuesday,
killing one guardsman and a civilian, the U.S. military said in a
statement. The military said soldiers had stopped to help the civilian with
his car when gunmen drove past and fired at them.

--------

12) Kurds have convincing grounds for choosing English as their second
primary language
Financial Times
From Prof Brendan O'Leary and Mr Khaled Salih.
19 November 2004

Sir, Damjan De Krenjevic-Miskovic and Nikolas Gvosdev of the Nixon Center
have taken it upon themselves to instruct Kurds in Iraq that Arabic rather
than English should be their second language ("Kurds should not let
language deepen divisions", November16 ). Their arguments are specious,
especially the suggestion that for Kurds not to learn Arabic is "to embrace
their resentments".

That many Kurds have chosen English (or "American") as their primary second
language is evidence of Kurdistan's progress, and should be welcomed.
English is the lingua franca of advanced scientific and medical journals,
and of international governmental and business organisations; and it is the
emergent public language of the European Union that Kurdistan's neighbour,
Turkey, may soon join.

It is equally in the interests of Arab Iraq to have English as its second
language, not least to bridge the three deficits in the Arab-speaking world
identified by the Arab Human Development Report of 2002; namely, the
democracy deficit, the female equality deficit and the knowledge deficit.
Kurdistan's comparative success in these three domains owes much to the
prevalence of European second languages among its diaspora and residents.
English, as a post-colonial and a world language, is the appropriate
impartial link medium for a pluri-national, federal and democratic Iraq in
which both Arabic and Kurdish will be official languages.

The Nixon Center's writers risibly suggest that imposing Serb on Kosovar
Albanians or Greek on Turkish Cypriots would have delivered peace in these
polities. They exemplify the tyrannous majoritarian mentality that causes
unnecessary linguistic conflict in many parts of the world.

Brendan O'Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA191042 , US and Khaled Salih, Senior Lecturer
in History, University of Southern Denmark, DK- 5230Odense, Denmark
Constitutional Advisers to the Kurdistan National Assembly.

------

13) Young Kurds are discovering their cultural roots
Financial Times
From Mr Alan Kabki.
23 November 2004

Sir, Damjan De Krnjevic-Miskovic and Nikolas Gvosdev, in their article
"Kurds should not let language deepen divisions" (November16 ) describe
young Kurds in semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan not speaking Arabic as "a
disturbing trend". They seem not to be happy that young Kurds prefer,
besides Kurdish, to learn English instead of Arabic. They forget that Kurds
are not Arabs (or Turks or Iranians), and that they have been forced for
centuries to speak Arabic (or Turkish and Persian in Turkey and Iran).

They talk about "language separation" as a cause of "dissolutions of a
panoply of other shared political, social and economic interests". First of
all, Arabic is not a common language between Arabs and Kurds, which means
it is not a matter of separation at all.

Second, these shared political, social end economic interests do not exist
between Arabs and Kurds. The artificial union within Iraq is based on force
and mass murders by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. The price of this
"union" was the lives of thousands of Kurds. For Kurds this is not a
"union" but subordination to Arabs.

Mr De Krnjevic-Miskovic and Mr Gvosdev's comparison of the Kurdish issue
with the problems in the Balkans is wrong: Kurds are divided into four
countries and desire to reunite with their families and language companions
and not with their age-old oppressors. Recently more than 1.7m signatures
were collected in Iraqi Kurdistan from people calling for a referendum
about the future of Kurdistan. This is the desire of the Kurds to separate
from their occupiers and to unite with other parts of Kurdistan.

Do the authors want Kurds to become Arabs and learn the "lingua regionala"
Arabic? What about the Kurds divided into Iran, Turkey and Syria? Should
also they melt in the culture and language of these countries?

This is not about Iraq only - it is also about Kurdistan. This is not about
language only - it is also about recognition of a nation and its
participation in the political field. Maybe even more important, it is
about the young Kurds' rediscovery of their roots. The authors make the
same mistake as Tito and Atatürk did in Yugoslavia and Turkey,
respectively. Do not forget: there are between30 m and40 m Kurds living in
Kurdistan.

Alan Kabki, Almere, The Netherlands

---------

14) Iraq's FM Hoshyar Zebari: guerrilla turned statesman
Blunt on country's future: 'If we lose, the region will be hell'
Daily Star
by Borzou Daragahi
24 November 2004

BAGHDAD / For years, Hoshyar Zebari was a guerrilla diplomat, shuttling
secretly between different countries in sometimes futile attempts to build
up goodwill for Iraq's Kurdish minority as well as procure weapons,
recruits and political support for the Kurds' decades-long armed struggle
against Saddam Hussein.

Now as Iraq's foreign minister at this week's summit on Iraq's future at
Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the affable, plain-talking Zebari has come in from
the cold, speaking with candor about his past triumphs and future hopes for
forging a democratic Iraq and the consequences of failure.

The stakes, for both Iraq and the world, are high, he says.

"If we lose, the region will be hell," Zebari said at his office in the
Iraqi Foreign Ministry building in Baghdad. "It will be a graveyard for
democracy."

Zebari describes himself as a soldier carrying out the orders of his boss,
Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which rules the
northwestern half of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish enclave. Indeed, through the
1980's, Zebari was a Peshmerga, battling Saddam Hussein from the mountains
of Kurdistan.

Saddam executed two of his brothers in retaliation for Zebari's activities.
His warrior years, he says, prepared him well for life as Iraq's top diplomat.

Last month in Baghdad, his guards defused a car filled with hundreds of
pounds of explosives heading for his convoy.

"The one strain is that here you are always on alert," says the 52-year-old
native of Aqrah, an Iraqi town near Mosul.

Though he travels in diplomatic circles across the world, his old habits
die hard. Underneath his suit, he packs a Smith & Wesson. "This is small
and very effective for self-defense," he says, fidgeting with the revolver.
"It's not an offensive weapon."

Zebari, educated in Jordan and England, built a reputation for himself as a
hardworking Kurdish political leader among the Iraqi exiles and regional
political leaders with his excellent command of English and his ability to
be both soft-spoken, while remaining straightforward. He was long the
London representative for Iraq's rogue Kurds.

Once, after a visit to Tehran several months before the U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq, he announced before the press that he'd met with Iran's
ultra-secretive clerical rulers and learned that they supported "regime
change" in Iraq.

He described details of his trip, naming those with whom he'd chatted and
disclosing outcomes of conversations with some of Iran's most mysterious
figures: the chiefs of intelligence, defense and the expediency council.

A few weeks later he was wrapped in a trench coat on a barren Kurdish
mountain road at dusk, awaiting a convoy carrying Danielle Mitterand, the
wife of the late French president and a longtime champion of the Kurdish cause.

His critics mention his role as a high-ranking member of a political party
that once teamed up with Saddam against a rival Kurdish group and has had
fractious relations with other Iraqi factions. Despite this, he was chosen
as the speaker for the Iraqi opposition conference just before the war in
northern Iraq, his voice bluntly trying to explain the goals of the
opposition to skeptical journalists, U.S. politicians and exile groups.

These days, he says, he uses candor with world leaders. In numerous recent
trips to Iran and Syria, both countries said to be supporting insurgents in
Iraq to subvert Washington's aims, he holds frank discussions with both
countries' leaders, whom he knows intimately following years of
back-channel talks.

"I have told them, 'The U.S. is now your neighbor ... and you want them
out,'" he says. "'We, as Iraqis, want foreign troops out. If you want these
forces out, help the Iraqi government accelerate the democratic process. If
you have a representative government through elections, this government
will not let these troops on its soil to fight you.'"

He says he's particularly upset at Gulf states like Qatar, who publicly
claim to want peace and democracy for Iraq, but allow fiery clerics calling
for jihad and television stations like Al-Jazeera - which he likened to a
mouthpiece for the insurgency - operate from their soil.

He said he plans to raise these issues at Sharm el-Sheikh.

"I will explain, 'We need more from you;'" he said, "'more cooperation,
more intelligence sharing, more coordination to fight terrorism, to prevent
people from crossing your borders. And that's what we expect from you.'"

But he concedes that Iraq's security woes cannot be blamed on Iraq's
neighbors alone.

"We need to perform, to be more aggressive, to have a very clear security
plan. And that depends on us, on our resources. And then, if they insist on
continuing to interfere, that will be an act of war."

--------

15) Hell is over: Voices of the Kurds after Saddam
FrontPageMagazine
By Shawn Macomber
22 November 2004

In 1982 , a close friend of Kurdish freedom fighter Salah Ameydi was
captured by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Secret Police. They brought him back
to his village, and seized his wife and eight-month-old son. The new
parents were then tied up and made to watch as their baby was burned to
death in front of them with a hot iron. When the agents were finished with
the child, they forced the husband to watch as his wife was brutally raped
by four Iraqi soldiers. The husband was then dragged off to Abu Ghraib and
tortured for years on end as a "political prisoner."

His crimes: He was Kurdish and he was alive.

As unimaginable as it sounds, Ameydi and his friend can count themselves as
lucky that they both survived Hussein's genocide. This was dubbed, "Al
Anfal" by the Ba'athists: "The Great Battle Against Non-Believers." The
purge killed somewhere near182 , 000Kurdish men, women and children,
including5 , 000in one day alone when the Iraqi Air Force dropped chemical
weapons on the village of Halapja.

Ameydi's story is just one of dozens presented in a new oral history of the
Kurdish struggle under Saddam Hussein, Hell is Over ( 208pages, Lyons
Press, $22.95). In2003 , war correspondent Mike Tucker traveled throughout
Iraqi Kurdistan conducting interviews with Kurds from all walks of life
which are presented unexpurgated and with little commentary. At last, the
Kurdish people tell their own stories.

Kurdish resistance fighters, or peshmerga, some of whom have been fighting
Saddam since1960 , tell of guerilla battles against a well-armed Iraqi foe.
In the early years they fired at Iraqi jets with nothing more than old
bolt-action British rifles. Kurdish women tell of being forced to watch
their husbands and sons tortured, or, just as often, being taken away in
the night, never to return. Sons tell of stories of fathers they will never
know. One man tells of hiding from the Iraqi army in a cave with a pregnant
woman who had to go through the pain of childbirth without making a single
sound - any noise would have alerted the Iraqis, and they all would have
been summarily executed. A father tells of a daughter so tormented by
marauding Iraqi killers she literally went mad.

For good measure, there are also interviews with U.S. soldiers about the
sheer horror of uncovering mass graves. One soldier recounts finding the
skeleton of an infant with a bullet hole in the back of its head.

"Americans have no idea of the horror Saddam perpetrated," U.S. Army
Specialist Eric Debault tells Tucker. "All this was on my mind, standing
there in the desert, looking at the skulls and bones. I would consider
Saddam as the Anti-Christ...Saddam ranks right up there with Hitler,
Stalin, Mussolini - with every brutal dictator who has ever carried out
crimes against humanity."

The tragic, brutal thread running through the entire book is that of
animalistic brutality and torture: Beatings administered with chains, mower
blades, wooden bats, and pipes. Electric charges administered to various
parts of the body, including the genitals. Men drowned standing up. Common
criminals enlisted to help Iraqi guard in the beating of prisoners.

In presenting these interviews in their entirety, Tucker has gotten out of
the way of the victims and produced one of the most moving accounts about
the terrors of pre-war Iraq. There is none of the phony context of a Dan
Rather newscast, nor is this a simple recitation of facts that slowly
dilutes them of their impact. The emotion and humanity of the victims is on
full display. They are angry, and sad, and traumatized, yet still proud and
defiant.

Tucker uses the last chapter of the book to make an impassioned plea on
behalf of the Kurdish people, who now see themselves as firm allies with
America in the War on Terror: Do not take the Kurdish people for granted
again. Their wounds still smart from Kissinger turning a blind eye to
genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1975 and the failure of the American
government to support the 1991 uprising against the Ba'athists. Despite it
all, they have stood by America, and in their interviews, more than one
Kurd expresses love for America and an interest in becoming, "the51 st
state." Kurdish forces, backed by American Special Forces took Mosul early
in the war. They have since been ordered out of the city, and the keys have
been handed over to "reformed" former Ba'athists. In this global war, it is
as important to know our true allies as our enemies. We must stand by the
Kurds this time. This liberation must not be a sweet dream between
nightmarish realities.

Some see America's war with Iraq as having begun three years ago, while
others take the long view and push the origins of the conflict back to 14
years ago when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Kurds war, however,
stretched over the course of more than four decades. For them, the events
of the last year was "no rush to war."

"Oh, I cried on April9 ,2003 , I wept," a Kurdish man, Kawa Fathi Massom,
tells Tucker. "My daughter asked me, 'Why are you crying?' And I looked
into the eyes of my children and I told them that all their lives I'd lied
to them. That I'd always told them they'd have promising futures but that I
knew I was lying and I hated myself for that...I can say, with my soul at
peace, that now, my children, you have a future, and we have the Americans
to thank for this."

If the daily news out of Iraq has numbed you to the struggle, pick up a
copy of Hell is Over for a dose of moral clarity and an unflinching look at
the monstrous enemy we face in this clash of civilizations.

Hell is Over by Mike Tucker is available from the FrontPage Magazine
Bookstore for $22.95.

Shawn Macomber is a staff writer at The American Spectator and a
contributor to FrontPage Magazine. He also runs the website Return of the
Primitive.

--------

16) Make Mine a Mercedes
Car owners PUK area take advantage of new KRG scheme to get old bangers off
the road.
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Rebaz Mahmood in Sulaimaniyah
November 23, 2004

A few kilometres east of the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, in an area as
big as a football stadium, drivers are lining up to watch their cars get
crushed in the jaws of a wrecking machine.

The piles of crushed vehicles are now stacked as high as three-storey
buildings, following a decision by the governing authorities to use
financial incentives to get environment-damaging old vehicles off the roads.

In areas under the control of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, PUK, party,
one of the two controlling parties in the Iraqi Kurdish region, the
authorities have ordered all cars built before 1995 to be taken off the
road and destroyed. In return, drivers are given a cash loan to help them
upgrade to newer models.

Buses and taxis are also covered by the ruling. Bus owners are getting cash
advances of seven million Iraqi dinars (5,000 US dollars) to buy models
produced after 1995, while taxi drivers are offered four and a half million
Iraqi dinars to upgrade.

The offer has proved tempting for some people who are keen to get into the
taxi business but were previously unable to afford a vehicle.

Karwan Ahmed owned a 2002 Hyundai, but wanted to buy his own taxi. Like a
number of other people, when the new ruling was introduced, he bought a
1986 model taxi and took it to be destroyed. He then picked up the loan,
traded in his Hyundai and bought a brand new taxi.

The advance is just that, and car owners are supposed to pay the money back
to the government in quarterly installments over a seven-year period. To
guarantee that people pay up, the government uses the driver’s property as
collateral. As a result, anyone who doesn’t own property can’t get the cash.

Ahmed’s friend Najmadeen Ahmed Saeed had also hoped to take advantage of
the cash loan to buy a taxi, but with nothing to offer as collateral, he
was refused.

Muhammed Jalal, the man in charge of administering the exchange programme,
said the scheme had been introduced because " old cars harm the environment
and do nothing for the national economy".

He explained that since the fall of the Baathist regime in 2003, imported
cars have streamed into Iraq’s previously closed markets. "Unfortunately,
it seems that the more cars we destroy, the more vehicles come into this
area," added Jalal. "But at least soon we’ll have to go to a museum if we
want to see old cars."

Shamal Mahmood Muhammed, a member of the recently-formed vehicle
destruction committee, and a representative of the transport and
communications ministry, said six billion Iraqi dinar (40,000 dollars) have
so far been given to the almost 1,300 car owners whose vehicles have been
destroyed.

Cars registered in governorates outside Sulaimaniyah are currently exempt
from the ruling. "We can’t afford to roll the project out at the moment. We
can only prioritise Sulaimaniyah-registered cars," said finance and economy
ministry representative Diler Abas.

While car owners may be happy with the new move, the province’s car
salesmen are delighted. The ruling has meant much more business for
Sulaimaiyah dealers as people look to trade up.

"Brand new cars are hard to come by these days," said car salesman Othman
Muhammed Jaff. "We’re importing new models from other cities to meet
demand, even though it’s more expensive. This decision has been great for
my profit margins."

At a competing car lot, salesman Ahmed Qadir agreed, adding that the
increased demand in Sulaimaniyah had forced up car prices in neighbouring
cities. "But despite the prices, people are still buying," he grinned.

Rebaz Mahmood is an IWPR trainee.

--------

17) Of Halabja, the Kurds, and American Politics
KurdistanObserver.com
By: Dr. Sabah Salih
November 26, 2004

Each of the many tombstones in this football-size cemetery bears a cluster
of names. There are families of three, five, six, or even seven. There are
little brothers and sisters, young mothers, grandmothers, and grandfathers.
There are the Kawas, Azads, Rizgars, as well as the Sheerns, Chinars, and
Ronaks, and many others. These ordinary names address you in silence, bit
by bit telling their stories. April was at its peak, having transformed the
hilly landscape into a kaleidoscope of translucent greens, reds, yellows,
and whites. Snow had melted from the nearby mountain slopes but the peaks
were still brilliantly white. Two brothers were playing with a toy car they
themselves had fashioned out of scrap metal left behind by the army. A
young mother was breastfeeding her three-month-old while her two-year-old
slept peacefully at her side. A grandmother was making the rounds in the
neighborhood in search of listeners for her usual litany of complaints
against old age. A grandfather, bedridden by a stroke, was counting his
blessings, having all those obedient grandchildren for company. For these,
and for many others, life suddenly stopped.

No, nature was not to blame. This was the work of manan Arab man, a Muslim
man too. In fuller detail, a museum near the cemetery tells these people’s
stories. The simple mud houses are intact. The occupants’ basic belongings
are still there. There are also the animals, the chickens, the ducks, and
the geese. There are dozens of cheap rubber shoes strewn around, men’s in
black, women’s and children’s in bright blues, reds, and yellows. They had
sat down for lunch, a simple meal of yogurt and bread and hot tea. This was
to be their last meal. No more laughter, no more cries, no more dreaming.
Unknown to them, a silent killer was on the loosea killer like nothing they
had seen before, a killer that even nature did not have anything like it in
its arsenal. Some five thousand lives would perish. It would be the end as
well for the birds and animals. Brooks and the streams would become deadly.

The unspeakable horrors confront you the moment you enter the museum:
mothers and children in a tight embrace, fathers desperately trying to
shield small children from something they had no idea what it was. It was
something so unusual, so unexpected; it was something the world had made a
solemn promise after Hiroshima not to use again. But now the world was
caught off guard a second time. This time around the culprit was an Arab
man, a Muslim man. For his monstrous action he had found justification in
the Koran; he even named it after a verse from the book: Anfal.

In that year, 1986, Halabja made the headlines. The scenes were too
horrific to be ignored. But the spin almost immediately began. Arab League
representative at the time, Clovis Maqssoud, briskly made the rounds in
Washington and New York, first, denying that the attack had even occurred
and, then, when confronted with the evidence, rushed blindly to defend
Saddam. The pattern was repeated throughout much of the Arab and Muslim
regions, where Israel and the West were, once again, roundly condemned for
conspiring to defame an Arab ruler. Elsewhere, the Turks, always at the
ready to try and defame anything Kurdish, described the chemical attack as
much ado about nothing. Much of Europe didn’t want to be bothered either;
everyone was after the mighty dollar and Saddam had plenty to spare.
America under Ronald Reagan was in this too. After a gentle slap on the
wrist, Iraq’s Tariq Aziz left George Shultz’s State Department a satisfied
man.

Then came Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and, suddenly, Halabja was
here, Halabja was there, Halabja was everywhere. Halabja was now repackaged
to provide moral justification for London and Washington’s decision to
evict Saddam from Kuwait by force. For George Bush senior Halabja was proof
that Saddam was worse than Hitler. For Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
Halabja was proof why the world needed to keep Saddam in a box and why the
world needed to be continuously wary of his intentions. In the end Saddam
was cut down to size but was left in power, something the dictator rightly
interpreted as a nod from London and Washington that the fuss over Halabja
was just a fuss and not much else. Shortly afterwards, when the regime went
on a killing spree against the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the
south, both London and Washington kept their distance from Halabja,
preferring now to describe events in Iraq as a largely internal affair.
Then came Bill Clinton’s turn to have his way with Halabja. Portraying
himself as a man of peace, Clinton nonetheless felt a need to periodically
bomb Saddam, now openly thumbing his nose at America. Once again, Halabja
was conveniently called upon to provide the moral justification. The
affable Bill Cohen, Clinton’s second defense secretary, after one such
bombing, chose Halabja’s most potent imagea dead man lying face down on the
door step of his home holding a baby in his armto quash the rising anti-war
rhetoric. Halabja, in a classic case of appropriation, was now made to
serve a non-Kurdish agenda.

More recently, in the run-up for the current war in Iraq, demand for
Halabja soared. It now occupied the center stage in the Bush
administration’s moral argument for going after Saddam. This was not
entirely bad for Halabja. Bush gave it a voice, legitimacy, and
recognition. For that the Kurds were understandably grateful. But something
big was left out of Halabja: it’s Kurdishness. Halabja was now offered as
proof of Saddam’s determination to acquire and use chemical weapons. But
sadly Halabja as part of a wounded nation’s struggle against successive
Arab tyrannies was largely left outa strategy Colin Powell repeated at
Halabja itself during his September 2003 visit; at the opening of the
museum, Powell delivered a speech that was designed to undercut rather than
promote Kurdish nationalism. He portrayed Halabja as a largely Iraqi, not a
Kurdish, affair. The Turks, the Iranians, and the Syrians, not
surprisingly, were gratified.

Then, as the American presidential race got into full swing, Halabja was
pushed aside. For many in the John Kerry camp, the very mention of Halabja
was tantamount to an oath of allegiance to Bush and the Republican Party.
In some quarters, Halabja would even get the standard Michael Moore
responsea lie, the whole thing was a lie, and you know it," followed by, "
Who the Kurds? You mean, Bush’s stooges?" If there was one thing the Kerry
campaign succeeded in solidifying, it was this willful disregard for
Kurdish suffering. Eager to be seen trying to build bridges with the Arab
and Islamic worlds, John Kerry felt a need to impose a tight embargo on the
Kurdish narrative.

The actual villain, indeed, for Kerry was not the man responsible for
genocide against the Kurdish people but Bush and his policies. Kerry never
got tired of reminding what he called "Middle Class America" that the
effort to oust the dictator was "the wrong war at the wrong time." In doing
so, Kerry brought considerable harm to the Kurdish cause. Kerry’s rhetoric,
by refusing to make statements about Saddam’s horrendous crimes against the
Kurdish people, invalidated the horrors of Halabja for his supporters,
turning a killing field into a mere footnote of no significance. To be
critical of Bush, for Kerry simply meant to be uncritical of Saddam. For
the Kurds, this was like sending icicles down their throat.

For their part, the Republicans, forced by circumstance to take up much of
the traditionally leftist vocabulary of liberation and democracy and big
government, have been a little more forthcoming in giving the Kurdish
narrative a hearingbut only when suiting their purposes. And now that the
elections are over and Condoleezza Rice is taking over the State
Department, there is hardly any mention of the Kurds. The anti-Bush camp,
smarting from its defeat, is too busy trying to figure out how to win in
2008 than to worry about the fate of a people it treated with cold
indifference. And the administration, buoyed by the Republican victory, is
in no mood to listen to anyone but its own voices.

The result has been a situation where the majority of pundits and academics
who opposed the intervention in Iraq in the first place are now trying to
rehabilitate Saddam and portray his regime as the real victim. Fascist
butchers are being hailed as the moral equivalent of America’s founding
fathers, and as Christopher Hitchens writes in "Bush’s Secularist Triumph"
(slate.com, Nov. 9, 2004), "blood-maddened thugs in Iraq" are routinely
referred to as "the voice of the oppressed," which is another way of saying
that the real oppressor is Bush, not Saddam. The intellectual atmosphere is
such that if you do not revile Bush and condemn the whole foray into Iraq
with blind obedience, as America’s greatest current writer, novelist Tom
Wolfe, observes in The Guardian (Nov. 1, 2004), you would be considered
something like a child molester. For Maureen Dowd of the New York Times,
Bush doesn’t just "battle primitivism"; he "courts primitivism" (Nov. 7,
2004). For her colleague, Thomas Friedman, Bush has made it difficult for
Americans to agree on "what America is" (Nov. 4, 2004).

At one level, such antagonism should not be taken seriously at all, for, as
the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek ably demonstrates in "Over the
Rainbow" (London Review of Books, Nov. 4, 2004), it is not some benign
truth that the anti-Bush rhetoric is registering but rather the usual
ideological baggage that comes with preaching at the already converted.
Rather than being an example of deep thinking, it is in fact a prohibition
against thinking: its aim is totalitarian, promoting one particular point
of viewand it is just thatover all the others. One of its ridiculous
assumptions is that in reelecting Bush the American people have once again
shown themselves to be the bad guys and, by extension, the Europeans to be
the good guys, even though the vast majority of the descendents of the
Enlightenment opted to side first with tyranny in the run-up to the war and
now openly in Hitchens’s words with "theocratic saboteurs in Iraq." Another
is that such rhetoric is a complete misreading of America: the Americans
reelected Bush because the majority of them are like Bush. To believe
otherwise is to believe in an imaginary America. As Tom Wolfe succinctly
puts it, "I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by
East-coast pretensions."

But at another level, such antagonism has been very damaging to the Kurdish
narrative; in the Left’s vocabulary the Kurd is no longer a victim but a
collaborator with an imperial power bent on sucking up the last drop of an
oppressed people’s oil. As vague and sloppy as this line of thinking is,
its emotional impact cannot be ignored: many easily fall for it. Sadly, for
them thinking about Iraq remains forever locked within the ideological
simplicity of such framework. It is a rhetoric within which the beheaders
and silencers of the word are glorified as "nationalist" fighters and those
opposing them as misguided colonial servants. To believe in such rhetoric
is to be willing to abdicate thinking, or, to paraphrase Jurgen Habermas,
to commit oneself to the opposite of truth, reason, and justice.

Dogma aside, these days the Kurdish narrative is being harmed in another
way. The Bush administration is quietly and not so quietly trying to
undercut the Kurdish identity. This is no exaggeration. In all their
official and no-so official references to Kurdistan, American officials
make the point not to mention the K-wordKurdistan. Theirs is indeed a
vocabulary designed to preserve Iraq as an Arab entity and give the Kurds
at best a subordinate role. The administration’s intellectual ally, the
Nixon Center, has even gone as far as lecturing the Kurds pompously on why
Arabic, rather than English, ought to be their second language; in the
words of Damjan De Krenjevic-Miskovic and Nikolas Gvosdev, who probably
until very recently couldn’t even locate Kurdistan on a map, for the Kurds
not wanting to learn Arabic is tantamount "to embrace their resentments"
(Financial Times, Nov. 20, 2004). Writing from the gaudy corridors of the
American academy, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole advocates in
all serious the scraping of the very idea of Kurdistan as a cultural and
geographic entity in favor of an Iraq organized around its 18 provinces,
something even Saddam’s pan-Arab agenda never dared to raise. What makes
this kind of thinking possible is not the resources of logic and dialect
and a willingness to give a story a fair hearing but the willingness to
suspend all that, as Paul Bremer was in the habit of sheepishly doing every
time the Kurdish situation was on the agenda.

The point here is that the Kurdish point of view does not seem to matter
anymore, neither to the Bush administration nor to the ever increasing
coterie of so-called Middle Experts like Cole and many othersdespite the
fact that Kurdistan, as a people and a culture and a shared experience, has
really no connection to Iraq, as Boston Globe’s Thanassis Cambanis (Nov.
14, 2004) and The Independent’s Charles Glass have recently found out with
relative ease (Nov. 23, 2004). Not making an effort to understand the
Kurdish reality is to engage in a colonialist enterprise of the worst kind:
disregarding a people’s right to be heard.

A recent visit to Kurdistan by former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon and Qatar,
Mark G. Humbley, confirms much of what I have been saying. Speaking
recently at the World Affairs Council of Western Massachusetts, Mr. Humbley
said, "There is no consular office, no financial help coming from us. We
could also support more English language programs. Right now, they are
learning English from the French".

Sabah Salih is Professor of English at Bloomsburg University, USA

Washington Kurdish Institute (WKI)
www.kurd.org