|
A Changing Northern Iraq
An Online Report from Ivan Watson in Duhok, Iraq
This essay was filed for npr.org by NPR correspondent Ivan Watson, who has been reporting from northern Iraq and traveling with Kurdish fighters and U.S. Special Forces.
NPR's Ivan Watson, pictured here reporting from Afghanistan in 2002.
Photo: NPR News
|
April 20, 2003 -- The best night of sleep I've had since Iraq's northern front crumbled was in
Duhok, an affluent smuggling town nestled among mountains in the
Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq.
After nearly two weeks in "liberated" Iraq, this was the first time I was
not jarred awake by mysterious explosions or gunfire.
Since the Gulf War, the Kurdish enclave, known as Iraqi Kurdistan, has been
a U.S. and British protectorate; a piece of Iraqi territory that was out of
Baghdad's jurisdiction, thanks to an air shield provided by patrolling
warplanes.
With the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, the frontline separating this
region from the rest of the country has virtually dissolved. It's now only
marked by bunkers and trenches that -- earlier this month -- were still
occupied by Iraqi troops.
The Iraqi soldiers have disappeared, but this boundary continues to serve as
an invisible dividing line between order and chaos.
In the countryside just beyond the Kurdish zone, billowing smoke from
numerous fires has become a routine sight as looters commit their daily acts
of arson. Discarded Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery
litter the highways; some of the vehicles have been stripped down to their
chassis. Entire villages stand empty. Their Arab residents have abandoned
their farms and homes, fearing the wrath of long-persecuted Kurds who have
swooped down from their safe haven in the mountains to reclaim homelands
denied them by Saddam's policy of ethnic cleansing. When I tried to
approach one of these ghost villages, a lone, unidentified gunman appeared
on the rooftop of a mud-brick house and fired a single warning shot that
sent my vehicle racing away.
In urban areas, the situation is also unsettling. Fires continue to burn in
the northeastern city of Mosul. As the government in Baghdad crumbled,
Mosul's residents tore their own city apart. Hotels, hospitals, stores and
houses now stand gutted. At the entrance to side streets, small barricades
of cinderblocks and scrap metal are being used to block off neighborhoods
from marauding looters. In front of the U.S. military headquarters
established at the local airport stand a line of agitated Iraqis; each
desperate for help after they watched invading Kurds -- or in some cases,
their own neighbors -- rob them blind.
Amid this chaos, Iraqi Kurdistan -- once one of the country's most
underdeveloped regions -- is now a mountainous island of stability and
prosperity. U.S. troops may be struggling to bring order to the rest of Iraq,
but the Kurdish factions here remain firmly in control of the region they
have ruled for more than a decade. In the weeks since Baghdad fell, Duhok
has become a magnet for residents south of the front line.
For the first time here, I saw Arabs wearing traditional dishdasha robes and
checkered head-dresses yelling in Arabic into a local telephone at a Kurdish
restaurant, or wandering dumbstruck through the gleaming aisles of the
recently constructed Dream City supermarket.
There, you can browse through shelves stocked with smuggled Turkish goods
that were banned from Baghdad-controlled Iraq by economic sanctions; all to
an easy-listening soundtrack provided by Mariah Carey and Bryan Adams.
At Dream City, my translator abruptly asked for an advance of her salary so
that she could buy Easter gifts for her children. Nuha, a Chaldean Catholic
Christian from Kirkuk, breathlessly told me it was the most beautiful store
she'd ever seen.
Elsewhere in Duhok, satellite dish salesmen were making a killing. One
store owner told me he'd sold more than 100 satellite receivers in the past
week, up five times from the week before. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis were
force fed a strict diet of state-controlled media. They faced stiff fines
and imprisonment if security forces caught them with satellite dishes or
short-wave radios tuned to international frequencies.
During my brief stay in Duhok, I met a Mosul resident who told me he had
traveled north for the day just to make a phone call to his relatives in
Europe. During the war, Iraqis lost all telephone circuits to the outside
world. In Kirkuk and Mosul, dozens of Iraqis approach journalists daily
with scraps of papers bearing the hand-written phone numbers of siblings and
children living in Germany, Denmark and Detroit. Periodically, I have
broken down and handed over my phone. On these occasions, some people began
weeping, as they spoke with anxious relatives for the first time since the
war. In many cases, they simply re-assured family members that they had not
been killed by American airstrikes.
Before jumping back into a battered Toyota for the drive back to Kirkuk,
Nuha took one last look at Duhok. "That bastard Saddam," she said, as she
pointed at a street bustling with shiny new taxis, bookstores brimming with
non-government newspapers, and Internet cafes that could never exist under
the Ba'athist regime. "If it wasn't for him, we could have had all this."
In Depth
 Hear NPR reports by Ivan Watson
NPR News Coverage of the War in Iraq
|
