Fears Grow in Village U.S. Cited as Threat

In the muddy alleys of this village, where geese skitter and children skip over puddles, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is known as a “big man” who made a big mistake.

The 7,500 residents here live amid a patchwork of bean and wheat fields and don’t often contemplate the larger forces beyond a wrinkle of encircling mountains. But the world arrived in a thunderous echo nearly two weeks ago when Powell showed a slide to the U.N. Security Council identifying Khurmal as home to a poison factory for terrorists. The villagers winced.

“A great politician like Colin Powell should have looked at a map,” said Mullah Marwan Ismail Hussein.

The satellite photograph in Powell’s report was of a compound in the northern Iraqi village of Sargat, about three miles, or a 30-minute mountainous drive, away. Sargat is a stronghold of Ansar al-Islam, a guerrilla group with ties to Al Qaeda.

The people of Khurmal live daily with the whirlwind battles between Ansar fighters and forces of the ethnic Kurdish government in this region. Now, as winter rains blow across the valley, Khurmal, a village accustomed to misfortune, is jittery. The residents are worried that cruise missiles and smart bombs will whistle toward them as part of a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“The name of Khurmal was wrong,” said Abdullah Mohammed Hassan, a laborer who lives with his family in a cinderblock house with no plumbing. “We don’t have enough electrical power to make such chemical weapons. It’s unfair this village could be bombed. There are no chemicals here.”

The U.S. State Department has said that it knows the alleged poison factory is in Sargat but that Powell used Khurmal as a geographic indicator because it is the largest village in the area. The compound, according to the Bush administration, was designed to manufacture deadly agents such as cyanide and ricin for terrorist attacks.

Ali Bapir, the local leader of Komaly Islami, the Muslim group that controls Khurmal, said he sent a letter to Powell declaring that “you’re a big man. In your speech to the Security Council, you held up a slide saying Khurmal was the site of a chemical factory....This is a lie. Do not act on false information.”

Khurmal’s fate has often been tied to the whim of others. This swath of northern Iraq has long been the scene of a struggle between radical Islam and secularism. Khurmal is a kind of border town of opposing ideologies. Many here do not embrace religious extremism, but because of their proximity to Ansar, whose guerrillas meander through the bazaar, their needs are not met by U.N. programs and by the regional government, led by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

“You can feel the economic state here is very weak,” said Hassan, noting that Khurmal has unclean drinking water, pocked roads and no electricity. “Even 1% of project services aren’t getting here because of the fighting.”

With its grass-roofed homes, Khurmal is an undistinguished smudge on the landscape. Its market bustles with sales of chickens and fruit and with girls in colored scarves running through the crowds, taking care not to be spattered by mud from passing tractors.

The village remembers 1988, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launched chemical weapons and killed 5,000 people in neighboring Halabja. It remembers the Kurdish uprising of 1991. And it recalls the civil war of 1996 and the fighting that broke out when Ansar took up arms in 2001.

The villagers believe that another round of bloodshed is coming. Powell’s satellite photograph convinced its farmers and blacksmiths that no place is invisible in a world watched from high overhead. Such understanding leads to a sense of vulnerability. And generations of vulnerability have left mullahs such as Bapir walking to prayers surrounded by bodyguards with Kalashnikovs.

“We are helpless,” Bapir said in anticipation of a possible American attack. “If a rocket comes in this village, we can’t protect ourselves.”

When asked why Ansar fighters -- considered terrorists by the U.S. -- are allowed to move freely through his territory, Bapir said he does not have the power to tell Ansar families to leave. He added that he condemns Ansar’s tactics but that “maybe America itself is the first terrorist.”

Those interviewed in the shadow of the mountains along the Iranian border are more suspicious of a possible U.S.-led war on Iraq than are most Kurds. In Mullah Marwan Ismail Hussein’s yard, a conversation about the photograph Powell displayed led to criticism of what are seen here as the United States’ global aspirations.

“There’s not enough electricity and food for the people, so how can there be a chemical weapons factory?” Hussein asked. “The U.S. wants to monopolize the petrol of the Middle East. The U.S. wants the whole world to be one colony under itself.... Everyone knows Israel has nuclear and chemical weapons, and it’s allowed to use them. It’s just an American game.”

As more village men gathered, Hussein had another thought.

“This issue for us is the globalization America calls for,” he said. “It cannot do it in a peaceful way.”

He added that Washington has shifting motives: “Why didn’t the U.S. declare war on Iraq when Saddam bombed the Kurds with chemical weapons?”

Ibrahim Ali Karim is a carpenter. He stood in a drizzle the other day, his boots sinking into mud. Beyond him, a man worked fields of winter grass, and across the road, children played in an alley of pooled water and cow tracks. A veiled woman whisked past; a man on a donkey galloped alongside a barbed-wire fence.

Karim pointed to a mountaintop hidden in clouds. On the other side, he said, was where Powell’s photograph was taken. In Sargat. Not Khurmal.

“The U.S. has its own plan,” Karim said. “I think the U.S. economy is collapsing, and that is why America is trying to take control of the oil fields in the gulf.”