SARGALO, Kurdistan-Iraq, April 18
(Reuters) - Sher Mohammed smiles as he gestures to the rocky hill a
few hundred metres away from the window of the mansion he calls
"Freedom Castle" in the soaring mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Not so long ago, he lived in a cramped and dirty cave on the other
side of the hill, fighting Saddam Hussein's army and its chemical
weapons.
"I am so lucky," says the 55-year-old former peshmerga guerrilla
leader. "In my dreams, I never thought the day would come when we
could live in our own land.
"(The contrast) is between the earth and the sky. The difference is
too much to explain."
Sher Mohammed took his family to the safety of London for a decade,
where he earned good money owning and running a Mongolian
restaurant, and has returned to Iraq a rich and powerful man.
An aspiring politician and wine maker, he runs a contracting company
in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, 330 km (205 miles) north of
Baghdad, and is the unofficial mayor or godfather for about 10
villages -- 15,000 people -- not far from the Iranian border.
Kurdistan's peshmergas -- "those who are ready to die" in Kurdish --
have fought rule from Baghdad in the dusty plains to the south for
six decades and are now playing a major role in the autonomous
province which leads Iraq in growth and security.
They head army units, run the police and the administration and even
guard the borders with Turkey and Iran.
GUERRILLA ARMY
Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani led the guerrilla army
his father founded and in which many of his ministers fought,
including Kurdistan Deputy Prime Minister Omar Fatah.
Life for the peshmergas was harsh.
Fatah's wife, Kafia Sulaiman, who heads the Kurdistan Women's Union,
was also a guerrilla and remembers the times fighting in the
mountains as Saddam's army closed in after the end of the
eight-year-war against Iran allowed it to shift its focus to the
Kurds.
"We were like an island," she says, drawing on a cigarette in a
plush restaurant in the hills above Sulaimaniya. "We were
surrounded. Our links with the main headquarters were cut off."
Many peshmergas were badly wounded by the chemical weapons the army
used in the 1980s, a lethal cocktail of mustard gas and nerve
agents. Iraq's was the first army in the world to use chemical
weapons on its own people.
"They were blinded," she says. "They couldn't see anything. We had
to take their hands and lead them."
Saddam and his cousin Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, who earned the nickname
"Chemical Ali" for using chemical weapons against the Kurds, face
trial soon on genocide for a seven-month pogrom in 1988 that killed
about 100,000 people, mainly civilians.
Sher Mohammed remembers the mustard gas, which he says smelled like
garlic and turned the grass yellow. He fled to Iran after he was
blinded by a chemical attack. It was months before he could see
again at all. He has still not regained the sight of his right eye.
BREAD AND WATER
Food was always a problem in the hills and the caves. Often, whole
families survived on nothing more than bread and water.
"It was a very difficult time," he says. "Almost all the time,
people would just have bread with water, or bread with yoghurt. Even
the rich people could only afford to have meat very rarely."
Some Kurds are not happy about the peshmergas' stranglehold on
power, believing partisan fighters do not always make good
administrators.
Critics say a major problem is that the peshmergas are bound mostly
to one of the two main Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish
Democratic Party or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
"It is very bad. They are monopolising power," says former peshmerga
doctor Mahmoud Othman, now a leading Kurdish politician and member
of the national parliament.
"This is not what we need. We need technocrats, we need skilled
people, we should have independents. They don't leave anything for
anyone else.
"There are a lot of people who can come back from outside."
Major Mohammed Najib, a former guerrilla and now the police chief of
Kurdistan's Qaradagh district near Sulaimaniya, believes it is the
peshmergas alone who have paved the way for the autonomy and
economic growth the region enjoys now.
"I am sitting behind this desk, with this rank, in this uniform,
because of my comrades' blood," he says proudly.
Reuters Top |
® 