Kurds Fear a Massacre as Iraq Moves to Crush Rebels

Fierce battles are taking place between Iraqi troops and Kurdish rebels in the rugged mountains of northern Iraq, and a “bloody massacre” may be in the offing, Kurdish sources reported Wednesday.

Reports have been circulating among Western military attaches here that Baghdad intends to use its cease-fire with Iran as an opportunity to crush the Kurdish insurgency in the northeastern part of the country.

The military operation is “for us a matter of life or death. A bloody massacre is awaiting the civilian population. We believe that the Iraqi authorities will use chemical weapons in this operation,” the Kurdish Democratic Party said in a statement.

The statement said that the leader of the Kurdish party, Massoud Barzani, has appealed from his headquarters in Kurdistan to U.N. Secretary General Javier Peres de Cuellar and world leaders to insist that the Iraqi government “prevent the coming human tragedy.”

The group asserts that about 15,000 guerrillas and 30,000 militiamen are under arms in the contested area near the Turkish and Iranian borders. The Kurdish rebels are insisting on more autonomy and have been fighting a sporadic guerrilla war against Iraq for years.

For its part, the Baghdad government has declared that the Kurds already have far more autonomous status regarding religion, language and local rule than Kurdish inhabitants of Turkey, Iran, the Soviet Union and Syria.

Further, the Baghdad regime considers the Kurdish guerrillas, as one Western diplomat here put it, “not just rebels but traitors.”

“The Baghdad government believes the Kurds were fighting them at the very time their backs were against the wall fighting the Iranians,” he added.

Kurdistan has been closed to foreigners, but reports reaching Baghdad suggest that the Iraqis are employing elite Republican Guards to fight the Kurds. The Iraqis also are engaged in a program of forced resettlement of the Kurds from their mountain retreats.

Ostensibly, this is being done to bring the Kurds into the contemporary world of modern, secular Iraq.

“But that also means that they are resettled in valleys near the highways, where Iraqi army tanks can get to easily if they want to teach the Kurds a lesson,” one diplomat observed.

Recalcitrant villages have been bombed or shelled. The rebel group said that Iraqi jets had bombed eight Kurdish villages over the weekend, killing and wounding many people. In turn, guerrillas killed 180 Iraqi soldiers and shot down a helicopter gunship, according to the statement.

Iran has supported the Kurdish rebels by providing supplies and sanctuary across the border.

But, according to analysts here, the Kurds are well aware that if a peace settlement is announced in the Iran-Iraq War in talks that begin today in Geneva, it will likely lead to a crackdown on any armed resistance in Kurdistan.

“The poor Kurds,” one Western diplomat said. “They really have no political future. They are people without a homeland.”