Arabs Secretly Helping Kurds Fight Hussein

A collapsing front line in northern Iraq usually sends Arabs and Kurds fleeing in opposite directions, further dividing civilians into enemy camps.

But in this village near a strategic highway linking the Iraqi army’s two last bastions in the north, four young Arab men cast their lot with the Kurdish fighters.

One is Ahmad Hameed Muhamad, a lanky 20-year-old cattle herder, who rejected Saddam Hussein’s doctrine that Kurdish fighters are mukharib -- the destroyers -- and turned against the regime’s army instead.

“Thank God they are gone,” Muhamad said in broken Kurdish on Monday, a day after Iraqi forces retreated a mile up the road to the garrison town of Gwer. “They are not good. They killed my brother in cold blood.”

Muhamad said he returned to rescue almost 200 head of cattle from his home village of Gameshtapa, in a no man’s land just across the Great Zab River from the new Iraqi front line. Kurdish fighters loaned three men to help him bring the cows to safer ground, he said.

The Kurdish peshmerga, which means those who face death, are indeed brave, but they don’t take that kind of risk for just any Arab villager. Muhamad had a right to ask a special favor.

He and his three friends are members of an Arab underground that has been secretly helping the Kurdish fighters long before the U.S.-led war on Iraq began three weeks ago, said Adil Bakir Hamad, local commander for the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls the region.

“There are a lot of others,” he said. “Even before the bombardment, there was cooperation between Arabs and Kurds, but it was a secret underground because they were afraid of the Iraqi regime.”

As Iraqi troops withdraw in the north, the curtain is being pulled back on a clandestine force of ordinary Arabs who worked with Kurdish fighters to chip away at Hussein’s armor. Many continue to risk their lives in Iraqi-held territory to speed the end of a dying regime.

Kurdish officials are reluctant to talk about their covert operations in areas still under the control of Hussein’s security forces because the battles to take the northern cities of Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest, and Kirkuk have not yet begun.

The Arab underground is a crucial part of still-limited operations by Kurdish fighters and U.S. Special Forces that are tying down about 80,000 regular Iraqi army troops on the northern front, said Hoshyar Zebari, the Kurdistan Democratic Party spokesman.

Before the war, the Iraqi opposition that includes the KDP argued that organized uprisings in cities such as Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk were essential to a quick victory.

U.S. war planners rejected that strategy “because they wanted to do everything themselves,” Zebari said. They are now reconsidering, he added, and Arabs and Kurds are waiting for the order to execute plans laid long ago.

“We have teams operating behind enemy lines, sometimes including Special Forces,” Zebari said in an interview Tuesday. “They are passing on messages to [Iraqi] army officers, to other people, to disorient them. There is some light sabotage activity.”

Three months ago, an official of the ruling Baath Party was assassinated in Muhamad’s village. A party delegation soon came looking for Muhamad’s older brother, Hussein, 32.

Hussein, a father of three, immediately came under suspicion since he had deserted the Iraqi army and spoke some Kurdish, said Muhammad, who insisted his brother was innocent.

Muhamad recognized one of the visitors as Karim Naif, whom Muhamad said is the commander of a Baath Party paramilitary group in the area. He knew the two men with Naif only by their first names, Ali and Umer.

He recalled that when they saw his brother, “one of the Baath Party members called him to come closer. When he did, Karim Naif shot him in the head with a Kalashnikov” assault rifle.

Muhamad was risking his life by talking about the killing and naming names, with the Iraqi army only a mile away.

The Kurdish checkpoint at Abu Shita is defended by a few dozen Kurds, backed by a unit of Special Forces that can quickly call in airstrikes.

But if the Iraqi troops are forced to retreat from Gwer, they will lose the road link between Mosul and Kirkuk, so they may fight hard to hold it.

Muhamad says he isn’t worried: “I’m not afraid of the Iraqi troops because I feel they are totally defeated.”

Hussein’s loyalists are likely to have a long memory, and they consider people such as Muhamad traitors to their Arab blood.

Kurds, who make up about 20% of Iraq’s population, are believed to be descendants of Indo-European tribes that began migrating to the region about 3,500 years ago. They have a different language and culture than Iraq’s Arab majority.

Officially, Hussein’s Baathist ideology promoted the unity of all Iraqis. But he killed several hundred thousand Kurds in the 1980s, some of them with poisonous gas, and destroyed whole villages. Human-rights experts called it genocide.

Hussein sent in Arab settlers to replace Kurds driven from their land in the hope of tightening his grip over the country. But it is on the periphery, where Arab and Kurdish villagers continued to mingle as they have for generations, that Hussein’s regime has been slowly eroding for years, Zebari said.

“We’ll see as this war unfolds that those divides were artificial, and encouraged by Saddam to maintain his rule through divide and conquer,” Zebari said.

About six Kurdish families lived in Abu Shita under Iraqi rule, but fled east to the mainly Kurdish-controlled city of Irbil as heavy U.S. bombing destroyed the Iraqis’ front lines.

A huge bomb crater up the road, in the village of Hawera, is deep enough to swallow two stacked cars. Direct hits by smaller bombs left two pickup trucks in pieces scattered across the pavement. About 1,500 Arab villagers escaped west to Gwer with the Iraqi troops. Hussein Muhamad Ahmad was one of 20 Arabs who stayed behind. He said he and the others decided they had to protect what little they have, no matter who rules them next.

“Whether it is America, or Saddam, it’s all the same to us,” shrugged Ahmad, 49. “We are all poor people. We want schools for our children, hospitals and a peaceful life. But we want someone to be fair to us.”

The Kurdish fighters who helped Muhamad retrieve his cattle have not been as obliging to the other Arabs. Just as Muhamad worked secretly for them, they are suspicious that Hussein’s regime may have planted Arab spies behind their lines.

Ahmad and his neighbors want to go to Gwer, they say, to bring relatives and food back to Abu Shita. They are especially worried about 500 sheep abandoned nearby, he said.

But the Kurdish fighters have orders not to let the Arabs leave for now. Hamad, the peshmerga commander, visited the other Arabs on Monday morning and told them to call him directly if they were worried about any strangers in the village. But he wouldn’t bend on the travel restriction, Ahmad complained. “He said they won’t let us go to Irbil, and we are not allowed to go to Gwer,” he added. “We have already run out of bread and food. What should we do?”

Turning to fighter Jalal Khanameer, who was standing guard with a sniper’s rifle on the muddy lane, Ahmad pleaded again for permission to leave. “We will promise the peshmerga forces that no bullet will come from this village toward them,” he said.

His friend, Qahtar Ibrahim Abdullah, 28, is trying to leave with nine members of his family, several of them young men who glowered from their front gate.

“What’s our destiny now?” Abdullah asked.