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Iraqi Kurdistan: We visit an oasis of calm
22.3.2008
By Martin Phillips In Erbil, Iraq's Kurdistan region
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March 22, 2008
Smoke from the goatherds’ fires drifted across the
valley below as dust blew around the simple
headstones in the hillside graveyard.
Rekan Abid was five years old, a child of Halabja.
The Iraq she briefly knew was neglected, persecuted
and finally obliterated by Saddam Hussein’s chemical
weapons in a terrifying show of his brutality.
Now, all that is left of Rekan is the name on her
grave.
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Allied
invasion of Iraq.
For much of the country the joy of liberation from
the evil of Saddam’s hated regime has turned into a
nightmare. Brave British troops are among those who
have paid with their lives – the cost of trying to
bring peace. |
Kurds celebrating Newroz, the new Kurdish year in
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region, March 21, 2008 |
But for Halabja, at
least, the invasion has brought happiness and
increasing prosperity.
Shaheen Faris was born five years ago. The bombs
that rocked his cradle heralded the Allied invasion
and the overthrow of Saddam.
Now, playing happily in a new city centre park,
surrounded by laughter, he has a future.
Shaheen is growing up in ‘The Other Iraq’, the
peaceful Iraq, far from the bombings and bloodshed
of Basra and Baghdad. The Iraq that is rarely heard
of in Britain.
This is the Iraq free of sectarian violence,
slaughter and kidnappings,www.ekurd.net
where every day new
homes and facilities are being built; where women
are treated as equals and Westerners are welcomed
with open arms and a smile – not bullets.
Shaheen’s father Shkwan said: “I remember March 20,
2003, with happiness. It makes me very glad.” He and
his family live in Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan
region of northern Iraq, a world away from the
killing fields to the south.
Shkwan, a lieutenant in Kurdish army the Peshmerga
(translation: “those who face death”) was injured in
the resistance to Saddam’s attempted ethnic
cleansing of Kurds after the first Gulf War in 1990.
He still carries four pieces of shrapnel in his
body.
When the West’s Safe Haven status for the Kurds
forced Saddam to withdraw in 1992, he took away all
the bank deposits.
His sanctions against the Kurds, on top of the UN
sanctions on Iraq, left the region in crisis.
Rival Kurdish factions the KDP and PUK tore each
other apart, just as the Sunnis and Shi’ites are
doing now to the south.
Shaheen’s mother Layla still bears the scars where a
bullet took away most of the bottom half of her leg
in that conflict.
But the Kurds found a way to cooperate and the
overthrow of Saddam in 2003 allowed them to become a
self-governing region in a federal Iraq – this haven
of peace.
Shkwan said: “For our people, it was like a new
birth.”
Fewer than 200 coalition forces remain in the
Kurdish-governed region, which successfully polices
itself.
In the capital’s main hotel armed visitors hand in
their weapons at reception in return for a cloakroom
ticket, and retrieve them when they leave.
Everywhere there is new building – new apartments,
tourist resorts, a new shopping centre in Erbil
where AK47s have become fashion accessories. And
there is new money.
An aqua-park and a tenpin bowling alley for the
capital, finished last year, have introduced the
people of Erbil to pleasures they never knew under
the old regime.
Bowling manager Sanger Perdwad, 26, said: “Saddam
spent the country’s money only on what he wanted –
the military, his palaces and fancy cars and trips
to Europe for him and his family.
“The Kurdish people, especially, he did not take
care of. Now we take care of ourselves.”
This week marked also the 20th anniversary of the
chemical attack on Halabja, the most notorious and
devastating deed by Saddam.
He killed some 182,000 of his own Kurdish people and
destroyed more than 3,000 Kurdish Iraqi villages
near the border with Iran.
At least 5,000 Kurdish men, women and children died
in Halabja alone, including five-year-old Rekan Abid.
And three brothers. And her six sisters. And her
mother and father.
Only her brother Aras Abid Akram, now 40, survived
from a family of 25.
The first wave of rocket attacks left his body
lacerated by shrapnel.
Aras, now a representative of the Save The Children
charity in Halabja, said: “I pleaded with my family
to leave me. There was no need for us all to die, I
told them.
“They covered me with a blanket and they went to
take shelter in the cellar of the house next door.
“When more rockets hit the house they were all
killed.”
A photo of his family’s dead bodies,www.ekurd.net
in a pile, is on his
office wall as a grim reminder.
Sarkhel Ghafar was just nine at the time of the
attack, which killed his brother, 13, and his
father.
Now he is manager of the Halabja monument to the
dead. He said: “It was like Doomsday as the sky went
dark. I survived by an act of God. Many families,
like me, did not know where their relatives died.
This monument is our grave.
“All of the families were happy with news of the
invasion five years ago because Saddam was our
biggest enemy.”
Meanwhile, they are seeing their town rebuilt like
the rest of the thriving Kurdish region.
Halabja is getting two new schools, a health centre,
a hotel and agriculture college.
Nechirvan Barzani, prime minister of the Kurdistan
region, said: “Having emerged from the darkness of
dictatorship into the light of democracy, we are
determined not to squander this opportunity.
“We believe that Iraq can be a free, democratic,
federal, secular, and pluralistic country if
sufficient efforts are dedicated to this goal.
“The Kurdistan region can be an example to the rest
of the country in achieving peace, stability,
democracy and economic development. We are
determined to avoid the problems that have bedeviled
the rest of the country.”
It is all a far cry from the devastation across the
rest of Iraq. In Erbil, posters boast that the
5,000-year-old city is the longest inhabited place
in the world.
Now they hope this cradle of civilisation can lead
the way to the birth of a new, healed Iraq.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, thesun
co.uk
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