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Kurds tell of Kirkuk in shadow By Paul Watson LOS ANGELES TIMES DIANA, Iraq - The northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk is like a grenade primed to explode in Saddam Hussein's clenched fist. His army has blocked most escape routes in an effort to stop civilians from fleeing. His security forces are going door to door rounding up young Kurdish men in a campaign to prevent an uprising, according to residents who escaped. Interviewed in villages and shelters many miles apart in the Kurdish-ruled autonomous region of northern Iraq, Kurds who escaped Kirkuk by bribing soldiers or hiring smugglers give consistent accounts of what has been happening in the oil-rich city of 400,000. Iraqi officials, they say, are visiting every home in Kurdish districts of Kirkuk to check the names of anyone inside against those on government-issued ration cards for U.N. food aid. Anyone whose name is not listed on the cards is loaded into a police van and hauled off for interrogation -- or worse, the refugees said. Nazanin Mohammed Ali now lives here in the village of Diana in a school classroom with 13 other people, most of them her children. She said she paid smugglers in Kirkuk to sneak herself and her 10 children past Iraqi army lines Wednesday, the day Iraq closed off the city. They charged her $4, only slightly less than an Iraqi government worker's monthly salary, for each child. She had to leave her husband and two sons, ages 17 and 23, behind. She said soldiers won't let Kurdish males of fighting age leave the city, which has been targeted by coalition airstrikes for several days. "We had to leave the men at the checkpoint," Ali said, sitting on the edge of a school desk bench that she shared with four of her children. "Police and soldiers are searching the lanes, and coming to our houses. "They search every house, and then go to the roofs, where they stay. It's just like a base for them. They force people to bring them food and water." The only furniture in the Alis' new home is six desks, where the family stacks small, knotted cloth bundles holding the only belongings they were able to carry to this mountain refuge, about 90 miles west of Irbil. They line their shoes up on the windowsill and walk barefoot on icy cold floors so that they won't track thick mud in from the streets and soil the floor where they sleep. Several refugees, and the officials who register them here, say Iraqi authorities gave little warning before declaring the roads from Kirkuk closed at noon Wednesday. By then, the security forces' search operations were well under way, Ali said. "First they came and said, 'We are only looking for guns,'" she said. "Then they came back the next day and took prisoners. They even arrested one woman in our neighborhood. We don't know what happened to her." Ali's husband told her he saw a leaflet circulating in Kirkuk calling for people to join Kurdish guerrillas and rise up against Saddam's forces. There are many guerrillas, called peshmerga, in Kirkuk, Ali claimed proudly. "Every family has one peshmerga or two," she said. "But they are in secret places. Even we don't know where they are." The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party -- which control the autonomous Kurd enclave in northern Iraq -- both have armed, underground resistance movements in Kirkuk. The PUK's totals about 5,000 members. Last week, according to officials in the city of Sulaymaniah, 61 Kurdish underground members were lined up and executed at the Khalid Garrison, a sprawling base and airfield controlled by Saddam's Republican Guards. Other members were arrested and accused of being spies for the United States when they were found attempting to make calls on satellite phones. Until the 1980s, the overwhelming majority of Kirkuk's people were Kurds. But under the ruling regime's "Arabization" policy, thousands of Arab families were resettled in Kirkuk in a drive to make Arabs dominant. Kurdish guerrillas seized control of Kirkuk during the uprising that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But when Saddam's forces launched a counteroffensive and Western forces didn't intervene, the Iraqi army crushed the rebellion and exacted revenge. Kurds now stuck in Kirkuk fear the same kind of bloodbath if Iraqi troops decide to stand and fight any U.S. military assault on the city, Ali said. She and her family are among about 3,000 displaced people from areas under Iraqi control, as well as the autonomous Kurdish region, who have taken refuge in Diana, said Ashki Abdulla, who heads the local emergency committee. About 10 of the families are Arabs, he said; the rest are Kurds. The city has shut down its schools to house the displaced people until workers can finish erecting U.N. tents in a meadow turned to ankle-deep mud. About 230 tents are ready for families to move in, camp supervisor Muhammad Sa'id Mustafal said. _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk