Iraq Border Town Reawakens as Refugees Return Home : Kurds: After a month in mountains, grizzled men embrace and head for the barbershop. Mosques and churches reopen, and fresh produce appears in shops.

Scars run deep in this battered border town, but emerging from municipal pain and bitterness is an undeniable recognition that Zakhu is once again a good place in which to be a barber.

Under an allied military umbrella, Kurdish refugees are returning in growing numbers from border camps to their homes in northern Iraq. Life is seeping back into Zakhu and surrounding villages.

Grizzled veterans of a month in the mountains embrace on streets that yawned empty and fearful a week ago. They kiss ritualistically on the cheeks--one, two, three, four. Their lips touch. Then, likely as not, they head for one of Zahku’s many busy barbershops. A truism along the Turkish-Iraqi border this spring is that men don’t shave in camps where children die for want of clean water.

“I’ve cut off the beards of more than two dozen friends, and many others,” said the owner of one shop where the talk flowed as fast as his scissors on a bright sunny morning of homecoming.

His friends laughed derisively at one mountain-tanned taxi driver who had fled with his mother and father and insisted that life in the camps hadn’t been hard--almost a vacation.

No one laughed at the sad-faced tea-shop owner in a scraggly brown beard who returned to announce that his mother had been shot and killed by Turkish soldiers as she fought with other refugees for a loaf of bread.

Townsfolk guess that 6,000 to 7,000 people have already returned to a town that had perhaps 50,000 residents before the Iraqi army’s savage suppression of a Kurdish rebellion against President Saddam Hussein triggered massive flight.

They have come back believing the United States and its allies will protect them. But they come back wary.

“I will tell you about Zakhu, but I will not tell you my name,” said one white-haired man improbably wearing a suit and tie. “I am thinking of tomorrow.”

And of yesterday. Zakhu echoed to the gunfire of summary executions not long ago. It is a pleasant if undistinguished valley town that is a microcosm of national Iraqi suffering and a particular victim of its deep-seated Kurdish nationalism.

Many of Zakhu’s sons died in Iraq’s eight-year war against Iran. Others died in the sands of the Persian Gulf. When Kurdish insurgents seized the town in March, collaborators with Hussein’s government died. When Hussein’s troops came, insurgents died--and civilians. More died in the refugee camps.

“Now we are safe--but only as long as the Americans and the British remain,” said a bank worker named Salim.

The foreign military presence, embodied by a machine-gun-mounted patrol car of American MPs that draws every kid in sight when it stops for more than a few seconds, is what is drawing Zakhu’s people back.

“Zakhu’s not Iraq any more. It’s just like America now,” one refugee said enthusiastically as his hometown came into view after a dusty ride back from a camp where he buried a 3-year-old daughter.

Not quite. Most shops are still closed, there is no electricity, the water supply is erratic and people are jumpy.

Still, local mosques, three churches and Iraqi-government schools are open even if worshipers and students are still mostly remarkable by their absence. There are fresh produce, dry goods, cigarettes and clothes for sale. The shoe shops are busy--there has been a lot of walking this spring.

And a lot of stealing. Many residents have returned to find their homes looted. Townsfolk who remained, many of them Christians, accuse Iraqi soldiers who left the town as allied forces arrived.

Traffic, on the streets and on the sidewalks, is 10 times what it was a week ago when at least 300 heavily armed Iraqi police officers calculatingly intimidated Zakhu.

Only 50 police are left, with pistols only, and they cluster around the shell of a concrete city hall burned by briefly jubilant insurgents. Hussein’s loyalists are still inside, besieged through panes of broken glass by municipal workers demanding back pay and housewives jostling for ration books good at city markets where local supplies are being augmented by foodstuffs donated through the United Nations.

There is no gasoline in town--the Iraqi government hasn’t sent any--so Zakhu motorists drive the 40 miles south to Dohuk to fill up. Families haul supplies and foodstuffs not available in Zakhu from the Iraqi-controlled city of Mosul, 60 miles away, enduring the jeers of Iraqi soldiers at checkpoints along the road.

One new industry celebrates Zakhu’s fragile return to civility: the sale to allied soldiers of Iraqi currency. Crisp new 25-dinar notes cost $10, not a good exchange rate but a good souvenir, for the bills bear the stern visage of Hussein.

As its people lurch home, the busiest spot in town is a riverside aid station manned by Capt. Ronald Buckley, a doctor from Chicago, and four Navy medics. They see about 400 patients per day, most of them children; most of them, like those still in the mountains, troubled by dehydration and diarrhea.

Of creature comforts, Middle Eastern-style, Zakhu has one: The first shish kebab parlor has reopened. A city is reborn.