Kurds Take Airstrike on Village in Stride

Many Kurds are deeply grateful for the war on Iraq, so they prefer to look on the bright side when their U.S. allies make a mistake.

It’s a shame, they say, that a U.S. warplane attacked this village of shepherds in friendly territory Tuesday morning, but at least the bombs hit the house of Haji Shaban -- despised for miles around as the man who once shook Saddam Hussein’s hand.

Shaban was slightly injured in the foot, most of his sheep were killed, and his house was badly damaged. A 7-year-old boy in another house was seriously wounded in the bombing, said Azad Hawezy, a local Kurdish official. The boy’s father suffered minor wounds.

The bombs, at least 12 of them, destroyed three mud-brick houses and left more than 200 sheep dead. Dirt paddocks behind a few homes were covered with the animals’ flyblown carcasses Wednesday. Razor-edged shrapnel, some pieces 10 inches long, littered the ground, along with fragments of tail fins that no one here doubted came from U.S. munitions. It was a miracle the damage wasn’t much worse, Hawezy said.

Ten miles away, in the town of Qushtapa, the news that Shaban was one of the victims turned 85-year-old resident Zainab Ali Brindar’s scowl to a smile. “Let it happen to him, because he has received a lot since he met Saddam,” she sniffed.

In 1985 or ‘86, before this area of northern Iraq became an autonomous Kurdish region, the Iraqi president visited the plain and attributed the bounty of wheat and barley to his visionary leadership. Locals can’t remember the exact date; they would rather forget he was ever here.

With state television recording the event, Hussein called Shaban over for a chat, asked him his name, what his village needed and shook his hand, villagers and local Kurdish officials recalled Wednesday.

Shaban asked Hussein for a special identity card, apparently to prove his connections -- and cover his back -- when the president was long gone from the area, a Kurdish fighter in the village said.

“Saddam told him, ‘Now every Iraqi is seeing you, so you don’t need any ID,’ ” said the fighter, who did not want his name published.

Shaban apparently took Hussein at his word, and from then on, the shepherd graced with a tyrant’s handshake lorded it over anyone he could.

“Whenever the regime’s governor came, Haji Shaban would insult him too,” the fighter said. “Because he had shaken Saddam’s hand, no one could touch him.”

Shaban was said to be in a local hospital Wednesday for treatment of his wounds, but he could not be located for comment.

In 1988, during the Anfal campaign -- in which tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds were gassed or killed by other means and many more were driven from their homes -- Hussein had much of Qurshaqlu leveled. The remainder was handed over to Arab settlers.

Kurdish guerrillas took the village back during a 1991 uprising. They brought many Kurdish villagers home, but the sun-bleached stone rubble of their original houses is still strewn about. Tuesday’s bombing added a few new ruins.

At least one warplane started attacking the village of about 200 around 3 a.m., said Sulaiman Bapeer, 52, whose family of 10 scattered into the fields, screaming and crying out to one another in the dark.

The plane kept circling, and the bombs kept dropping, for about two hours, until the imam’s call to prayer echoed from a nearby mosque, he said. Bapeer, his wife and their children, ages 10 to 20, piled onto his tractor and fled.

Bapeer said at least 40 fighters from the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, which controls northwestern Iraq, were in Qurshaqlu at the time. The village is several miles from the Iraqi army’s front-line positions on a ridgeline south of Irbil.

At least one bomb hit a Russian-made antiaircraft gun that the fighters had on a rooftop, Bapeer said. Bombs also destroyed the fighters’ Volkswagen car and Shaban’s prized Toyota pickup, he said.

Kurdish officials denied that the fighters had a camp in the village, but the KDP’s yellow flags were flying over several buildings here Wednesday. A reporter suggested that an allied pilot might have bombed the village because he thought the antiaircraft gun was manned by Iraqi soldiers, but the shepherd said he doubted that.

“During the night, how could he see this antiaircraft gun?” he asked.

U.S. pilots can see clearly at night because they have modern equipment, an interpreter explained.

“Then how come they couldn’t see the sheep?” Bapeer asked.

Two U.S. soldiers were in a nearby village, working with Kurdish fighters during the airstrikes, so there should have been sufficient cooperation to prevent an accident, Hawezy said. Bapeer said villagers pleaded with the fighters to make the bombing stop and were told that a radio call was made. But after a break, the aircraft resumed its strikes.

An adobe house on a flat-topped hill overlooking the village suffered the worst damage. The manager of a water project lived there, with his wife and sons, to guard a concrete reservoir that supplies water to farmers.

The hill is one of several across the plain that were built in Babylonian times as signal towers so that one village could communicate with the next by setting fires, said Tahir Barzany, 38, a local academic who has studied them.

Qurshaqlu hill now has a deep bomb crater on top, and the reservoir is scorched black and peppered with shrapnel holes. The manager’s home, where the 7-year-old boy suffered injuries to his arms and legs, is in ruins.

The sheep are the toughest loss for the villagers to take because they were the sole source of income, Bapeer said. Even as the animals were dying, villagers rushed them to market, hoping to earn half-price for any that survived the journey.

Abdul-Rahman Mustafa Salih, whose flock was nearly wiped out, stands to lose as much as $400 a month, Bapeer said. Salih and the other shepherds would be grateful if the United States paid compensation, Bapeer added, careful not to sound greedy.

“They are here to help us, and they have made a mistake,” he said. “We would be very pleased if they get rid of that dictator for us. We don’t blame the U.S., but they should know that the villagers suffered a great loss.”