A Place Apart in Iraq

Sahib Ali Abbas hopped onto a bus and rode until the date palms turned scarce and the mountains rose, big and wrinkled and waiting for snow.

The Shiite Muslim carpenter and five friends had left the bloodshed of central Iraq to head north toward Kurdistan. The language changed and glances turned suspicious. It was another country, but it wasn’t. After police interrogated him and decided he wasn’t a terrorist, a contractor handed him a tool belt and a sack of nails.

Like thousands of Arabs from troubled southern and central Iraq, Abbas, who left Baqubah several months ago, has found a more prosperous life in the democratic, free-market Kurdish region. Protected from Saddam Hussein’s armies for 12 years by a “no-fly” zone patrolled by U.S. and British planes, the ethnic Kurds in effect raised a nation within a nation. Their clattering cities represent what many want for the rest of Iraq.

“There’s a big difference between the south and here,” Abbas said, stepping over metal rods and a pile of rocks on an apartment building construction site. “The Kurds are rich and educated. We’re tired of poverty in the south. I look around at all this construction and see many, many Arabs just like me.”

Authorities say 2,000 to 6,000 Sunni and Shiite Muslim Arabs have migrated to the Sulaymaniya region since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq two years ago. They are laborers, doctors, waiters, professors. There is even a civil aviation engineer hired from Baghdad because the Kurds lacked the experts to build an airport. Reliable statistics are scarce, but estimates suggest that the number of Arab migrants is steadily rising and may total more than 20,000 across northern Iraq, which is home to 3.5 million to 4 million Kurds.

Recent Kurdish history is a lesson in reversal of fortune. Regimes based in Baghdad brutalized the north for generations. Sunni Arabs, who were dominant under Hussein, were taught that Kurds, who are not Arabs, were beneath them; the Kurds’ political voice was muted, and hundreds of thousands of them were killed.

Then the no-fly zone, established after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, transformed the region. Kurdish mountain guerrillas traded their baggy pants and bandoliers for the suits of politicians and businessmen, negotiating multimillion-dollar deals in oil, technology and retailing with Iran, Turkey and Dubai.

Over time, the Kurds fashioned a sprawling mountain bazaar. They couldn’t get McDonald’s, so they created MaDonal. They had cellphones before Baghdad. Internet cafes became hangouts for the young, and satellite TV dishes sprang up in the poorest villages. Not all is laissez faire -- the main Kurdish political parties control much development. Patronage and corruption fuel many endeavors, diplomats and Kurdish officials say, and poverty in rural areas is high.

Kurds make up about 18% of the country’s population. But thanks to high turnout, a unified Kurdish party appears to have won a quarter of the vote in last month’s national election, which would give the north a large role in the new government.

“The Kurds are prosperous,” said Naif Sabhan Khalaf, a Sunni Arab councilman in the oil city of Kirkuk. “They have smart political leaders who have taken advantage of things. Other provinces should follow this example. Western businesses tell me they are going to the north because there’s security there, unlike places such as Tikrit, which are still ablaze.”

Not everyone in Iraq is quick to praise the Kurds, most of whom are Sunnis.

Iraq has been a nation of resentment and suspicion for decades. One ethnic or religious group’s good fortune has meant another’s suffering. As Sunni Arabs’ hold loosened after the fall of Hussein, Shiites and Kurds emerged as the prominent forces.

Iraqi Arabs often wince when they credit the Kurds and often describe the north’s achievements as a conspiracy by Washington to control Iraq. Kurds were America’s ally in the war to topple Hussein, and many Arabs believe they betrayed the country’s sovereignty.

“The Kurds depend on the Americans,” said Mikdad Mustaf Ahmet, a writer in Kirkuk, a contested, multiethnic city south of Sulaymaniya whose new government the Kurds are expected to control.

“America is using the Kurds to change the political show,” Ahmet said. “There are secret deals. The Kurds want to take Kirkuk for the petrol. They want to draw Kirkuk into their autonomous region.”

The main street in Sulaymaniya is a grid of Kurdish aspirations. Lots are cleared, holes are dug, cement mixers churn, wood beams are hewn and hammered, and skeletons of cinderblock buildings rise in perpetual dust. Twenty construction sites dot the street, and building projects for the district government alone are expected to cost more than $740 million. The commercial and service industries have grown by 200% in recent years, according to the Kurdistan Finance Ministry.

“People from Ramadi and Fallouja want to copy what we have, which is good, because when they come here they help our economy,” said Othman Ismail Shwani, deputy finance minister of the Kurdistan regional government. “For 45 years, the Kurdish struggle was an armed struggle. Things have changed, and now the best way to prosper is through diplomacy and a strong economy.”

Shaaban Nooradin draws a paycheck amid the construction clatter on the main street. Standing in muddy boots and watching girls pass in winter dresses, the 19-year-old Sunni Arab moved here from Kirkuk and was hired by a Turkish company building a government office. When he could find work at home, he painted cars for $136 a month. He earns nearly $400 a month in Sulaymaniya.

“The pay here is good and fair,” he said. “A lot of young Arabs like me, even married guys, are coming north to work. They treat us good. On New Year’s Eve, though, they forced the Arabs to go home because they thought terrorists might be planning something here. They let us back in later.”

Ali Ibrahim Bayaty is a hematologist from Mosul. When he got his medical license last year, the Iraqi Health Ministry assigned him to a hospital in Tikrit.

“I wasn’t going to work in the city of the despot Hussein,” said Bayaty, a Sunni Arab, standing in the afternoon sun in a clinic here. “I came to a safe place. The Kurds needed my expertise, and I needed security. It was a nice union. I hope the situation in the north prevails over all of Iraq so I can return home, get married and complete my life.”

When asked whether he would consider marrying a Kurd, he said: “Why not a Kurdish wife? Marriage is what’s in the soul. It’s not about nationality.”

Arabs from conservative religious communities in the south find the north permissive. Women are unveiled, liquor is sold in shops, the Jihad Mosque has been closed and extremist clerics are under surveillance by intelligence agencies. Many of the new arrivals struggle with Kurdish syntax. They live in rooms provided by employers and travel home once a month, giving their paychecks to wives and mothers and having their clothes mended and washed.

“My wife and six children stay at our home in Mosul,” said Akram Aziz Aabar, a Shiite who oversees a crew at a site for a government office. “All of us are from Mosul. I know these guys. I pick them and give them a chance to work. We’re doing well. I’m not into politics. I’m a laborer, and I only care about my family.”

A few blocks away, clothes ripped, his thin beard dusty, the carpenter Abbas climbs down from the second floor of a new apartment building. He walks past exposed metal rods and rows of concrete blocks. He has a wife in Baqubah. They are too poor, he says, to have children. He’ll see her in a few days, when the bus takes him out of the mountains to where the land flattens and the heat rises.

“Everything is messed up in the south,” he said. “The only thing I know about the future is that the number of Iraqis killed will go up. I’m lonely and tired, and if it wasn’t for this work, I couldn’t do it.”

When Abbas works, he is silhouetted against a former prison run by Hussein’s Interior Ministry. Kurds were interrogated and tortured there. Thousands died.

Bullets and grenades shattered the outside walls during a 1991 Kurdish uprising. There was no desire to repair the building or to tear it down. The Kurds turned it into a museum.