Mainstream News On Barzani/Saddam T

[kurd-l at burn.ucsd.edu]

From: Arm The Spirit <ats at etext.org>
Subject: Mainstream News On Barzani/Saddam Terror In South Kurdistan

Iraqi Troops Capture Kurdish City 

By WAIEL FALEH 
Associated Press Writer 
Sunday, September 1, 1996 7:47 am EDT 

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraqi forces and an allied Kurdish faction appeared to
be in full control of Irbil, the main Kurdish city in northern Iraq, and the
government warned the United States on Sunday not to intervene in the region. 

The official Iraqi News Agency said another northern city, Sulaymaniya, was
calm. There were widespread, unconfirmed reports it was being shelled. 

President Saddam Hussein's forces stormed Saturday into Irbil, part of the
Kurdish "safe haven", to dislodge one Kurdish faction, the Patriotic Union
of Kurdish, and allow a second, the Kurdish Democratic Party, to move in. 

It was the largest military attack by Saddam's army in five years and it
immediately set off alarm bells in the United States, where President
Clinton put U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf on high alert. 

Iraq said it planned to withdraw quickly, but U.S. officials and Kurdish
opposition forces said they were skeptical. 

There were sketchy reports of scattered fighting in Irbil on Sunday, but
most accounts suggested it was no more than a mopping up operation by Iraqi
forces. Even the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan acknowledged that it had
lost control of the city. 

PUK spokesman Latif Rashid said Iraqi "intelligence and security people are
actively working in Irbil, searching houses and writing down names of PUK
activists and sympathizers."

Rashid, speaking from London, said there were reports that Saddam's forces
were "storming houses and stealing property the same way Saddam's army did
in Kuwait" following a 1990 invasion. 

Iraqi forces were not supposed to go near Irbil, which is 12 miles inside
the Kurdish safe haven carved out by the U.S.-led forces after the 1991 Gulf
War. 

Iraq said it launched the attack because the PUK had been cooperating with
Iraq's longtime enemy, Iran. 

Iraq said its forces "would return to their former positions very soon," the
state-run Iraqi News Agency quoted an unidentified government spokesman as
saying late Saturday night. It did not give any timetable. 

Iraq's state-run media warned the United States and its Western allies not
to intervene on behalf of the Kurds. 

"The Iraqi people ... are ready to provide an example that will inevitably
remind the Americans of the Vietnam complex," al-Jumhouriya newspaper said
in a front-page editorial.

"The Kurdistan autonomous region, since 1991, has been an unbearable hell
because the Americans and the British with their supporters have turned the
region into a theater for fighting through the slogan of safe haven," said
Al-Qadissiya, a daily newspaper run by Iraq's military. 

There were persistent rumors Sunday of shelling in Sulaymaniya, a stronghold
of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. 

The PUK said Saturday night that Iraqi forces were shelling the town of
Chemchemal, 18 miles away, and appeared head toward Sulaymaniya, one of its
strongholds. 

However, Iraq's state-run news agency said Sulaymania was quiet Sunday. 

"The people stressed that the city has not come under any shelling," the
Iraqi News Agency said. 

Western forces have monitored the Kurdish safe haven from bases in southeast
Turkey, and there were no ground forces in place to prevent the advance by
Iraqi troops and tanks. 

In Washington, the Pentagon said it had no information on whether Iraqi
troops were showing signs of pulling back. A quick withdrawal could avert a
showdown with Western forces. 

Saddam chaired a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council, the top
decision-making body, on Saturday, and the government said afterward that it
did not intend to retake control of northern Iraq -- at this time. 

"The (Iraqi) political leadership has not yet decided to re-establish
government administration in the (Kurdish) autonomous region and will leave
this until the circumstances mature," the statement said. 

But, it warned, "we believe our action was a clear message to those who
conspired against their homeland," a reference to the PUK and its alleged
links with Iran. 

The PUK said 450 Iraqi tanks took part in Saturday's offensive, adding that
30,000 Iraqi forces had massed in recent days in preparation for the attack. 

There were no confirmed casualty figures, but the PUK and other sources
spoke of dozens of dead and wounded. 

Iraq regards the Kurdish safe haven as a violation of its sovereignty. The
safe haven in northern Iraq covers 17,000 square miles of mountain terrain
bordering Iran, Turkey and Syria. 

The Western countries set up the safe area to protect the Kurds from
Saddam's military after a failed 1991 rebellion in which the KDP and PUK
joined forces. 

The Kurdish factions have opposed the Baghdad government for decades. But
since the safe haven was established they have mostly quarreled with each
other. 

The United States mediated a cease-fire last year between the Kurdish
factions. But it collapsed Aug. 17 when the two groups resumed fighting amid
differences over customs revenues from a road between Turkey and northern Iraq. 

----
 
Iraq's Neighbors View Assault on Kurds With Concern

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 1 1996; Page A35
The Washington Post 

JERUSALEM, Aug. 31 -- Iraq's armored assault on its rebellious Kurdish north
today raised the prospect once again of a realignment of power in a region
that has seen several in recent years.

None of Iraq's neighbors was prepared to make a public accounting on this,
the first day. But Turkey, which could be most affected by the events in
northern Iraq, made itself clear on one count: It would not tolerate a
repeat of the exodus of Iraqi Kurds into Turkey's southern mountains that
accompanied the last such Iraqi attack in 1991.

"Turkey is determined not to allow a new migratory movement to its own
borders from northern Iraq," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement from
Ankara. "It will take all necessary measures to prevent such developments."

About 2 million Kurds fled to Turkey after the Baghdad government crushed a
failed rebellion in the wake of Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War
at the hands of an American-led alliance. The allies forced an end to
President Saddam Hussein's assault on the north that year, banning flights
by Iraqi combat aircraft there and establishing a "safe haven."

Syria and Iran, which also have restive Kurdish populations and a common
interest in suppressing Iraqi power, issued no declarations tonight. Their
ultimate reaction, analysts said, is likely to turn on whether Iraqi capture
of the city of Irbil marks a restoration of Baghdad's power in the Kurdish
north or a prelude to a new setback at the hands of Western foes.

Unconfirmed reports from Irbil said Iran had dispatched troops across its
border with Iraq to defend the Iranian-backed Kurdish faction that was the
target of today's assault, but there were no reports of clashes with Iraqi
troops.

In Jordan, which has allied itself in recent months with American-led
efforts to topple Saddam, government officials said they would not allow
Jordanian soil to be used to support any intervention in the fighting.
Jordan played host to an American air expeditionary force of 30 F-16 and
F-15 strike fighters from April to June and permitted them to fly more
than 900 missions to police a "no-fly zone" declared by the United States
and its allies in southern Iraq.

Jordan has expressed discomfort for some time with what it regards as an
unstable status quo in its powerful neighbor to the east: Strict economic
sanctions weaken Iraq, and allied aircraft prevent Iraqi forces from
exerting full control over rebellious Kurds in the country's north and
Shiite Muslims in the south.

"When you leave a central government in power that has lost control of its
north and south, and when you leave an embargo in place, it's a very
dangerous recipe," said one official speaking for the Jordanian government
on condition of anonymity. "You have to expect that countries in the
region can use this power vacuum to their own advantage."

But Jordanians cautioned the United States against expecting direct support
for an effort to strike another blow against Saddam. King Hussein's dramatic
shift against Iraq -- which included his embrace last year of defector
Hussein Kamel Hassan Majeed, Saddam's son-in-law who was promptly killed
when he returned to Iraq in February -- has been unpopular among Jordan's
intelligentsia and much of the public.

The Associated Press, citing U.S. diplomatic sources, reported that
Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote Turkish Foreign Minister Tansu
Ciller, asking her country "to persuade Iraq to stay out of northern Iraq
and to explain the `dark consequences' " of its intervention there.

Among the motivating factors for Turkey is the prospect of another long
delay in the opening of a joint oil pipeline with Iraq. Until the weekend
military assault, Iraq was poised for its first
oil sales since imposition of the U.N. embargo that followed its invasion of
Kuwait in 1990. Turkey counted on the pipeline to recoup what it says are
$23.7 billion in losses since the trade embargo against its southern
neighbor began.

Iraq was one of Turkey's major trading partners before the war, and Prime
Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who assumed power in June as head of a coalition
led by his conservative Islamic party, supports normalization of ties. A
Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the AP that
the weekend offensive was "untimely and unfortunate."

Here in Israel, the government generally has supported Kurdish autonomy in
northern Iraq and has strong historical ties to the Kurdish Democratic Party
of Massoud Barzani. But Barzani's apparent invitation to Saddam to intervene
against his rival faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Jalal
Talabani, appears to have left Israel with little appetite for either side.

"If you had one hopeful result [from the gulf war], it was the Kurdish
autonomy," said a Foreign Ministry official. "But at the end of the day it's
the Kurds who are messing things up. The rivalry between the two factions
is ending all hope of a national future." 

----

Kurdish Feuds Put U.S. In Quandary

By Jonathan C. Randal and John Mintz
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 1, 1996; Page A34 

By capturing a Kurdish city in a haven patrolled by U.S. and other
international warplanes, Saddam Hussein has challenged President Clinton to
respond. But any U.S. action risks drawing America further into a region
troubled by Kurdish rivals and bitter feuds, meddling by powerful neighbors
and countless betrayals of the Kurdish people's ancient nationalist longings. 

The 22 million Kurdish people, almost all of them Sunni Moslems, are mostly
spread across lands in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan,
and they constitute the world's largest ethnic group without a nation of
its own. The American-led air umbrella, created over Kurdish areas in
northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, gave the Kurds their best
shot at achieving autonomy in a half-century. 

But in December 1994 an old rivalry between the Kurdish Democratic Party
(KDP) led by Massoud Barzani, and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK) led to a resumption of factional fighting that in the last
20 months has killed 4,000 of the 3.5 million
Kurds in Iraq. It was a revival of this fighting that triggered the latest
military confrontation, which culminated in this weekend's Iraqi capture of
Irbil, the unofficial Kurdish capital. 

A problem for the United States is that each Kurdish faction is now loosely
allied with a country that Washington has long despised. 

Talabani's PUK has been accused by its rivals of having recently accepted
arms and other help from neighboring Iran. The PUK has denied it, but the
charge makes it harder for the United States to intervene on the PUK's behalf. 

Meanwhile Barzani's KDP is now aligned with Saddam, having invited his
troops into the Kurdish area of Iraq. That is remarkable news because in the
1980s the Iraqi leader gassed, uprooted and assassinated Kurdish civilians
by the tens of thousands. 

Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, embarrassed Barzani yesterday by
revealing the contents of a letter the KDP leader was said to have written
to Saddam Hussein on Aug. 22, asking for his military help. According to
Aziz, Barzani addressed Saddam as "your excellency," and "pleaded" with him
to "interfere to help us to ease the foreign threat" from Iran. 

Kurdish and U.N. sources reported from Irbil that Barzani's soldiers worked
alongside Iraqi troops as they captured the city without much resistance
from Talabani's PUK, and that they
moved immediately into PUK offices there. PUK forces were said to be still
fighting in and around the city. 

Some Kurdish activists and experts on the region believe that this crisis
could have been averted if the Clinton administration had more forcefully
denounced a brief Iranian incursion into the Kurdish area of Iraq several
weeks ago, and had worked harder to broker a peace agreement between the
feuding factions. 

"This is a result of us not taking a stronger position earlier this year,"
said Kathryn Porter, president of the Human Rights Alliance, a private
Washington-based group that tries to
mediate among the Kurdish factions. "We should have worked harder to bring
the two sides to peace." 

The United States has hosted repeated talks between the two factions aimed
at a reconciliation, most recently in discussions in London mediated by a
State Department official. Porter, however, accused the State Department of
coming up short, such as in its failure to secure $1 million to establish a
mediation organization in Irbil. 

"With this action, Saddam is asserting his power, saying, 'I can't be
ignored,'" said Barham Saleh, a representative of Talabani's PUK in
Washington who has requested U.S. military help in reversing Saddam's
incursion. "Saddam's calculation is the U.S.A.'s response won't be adequate
or timely. . . He's making a challenge to the credibility of American power.
Everybody [in the U.S. leadership] realizes the consequences of a failure to
confront Saddam." 

To most Iraqi Kurds, Saddam is a butcher remembered for the gassing and
wholesale destruction of Kurdish villages in the 1980s. 

After an unsuccessful uprising against Saddam at the end of the Gulf War,
many Kurds fled north of the 36th parallel, which the United States and its
allies established as a "no-fly" zone
that Saddam's military aircraft were barred from entering. 

The United States tried to broker a Kurdish peace, but it was broken in 1994
when the PUK became enraged that the KDP was failing to share revenue from
illicit oil trade with Turkey. The PUK, which controls about 70 percent of
the Iraqi Kurdish population, took over Irbil in that year. 

Continued sporadic American mediation efforts, conducted in Ireland and in
Kurdistan itself in 1995 and early 1996, failed to do more than preserve a
fragile cease-fire. The U.S.-financed Iraqi National Congress, a
Kurdish-based opposition group designed to topple Saddam, withered as a
result of the infighting. 

Moreover, the Clinton administration never followed through with plans to
finance a small monitoring force of neutral Kurds and other opposition
forces to heal the KDP-PUK breach and reinvigorate the congress, according
to Kurdish and other critics of the U.S. role. 

Indeed, those observers note, Washington gave regional powers the impression
of washing its hands of the congress and the Kurds in favor of the
Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, an opposition group consisting mainly of
former Iraqi intelligence agents who had defected. Iran stepped into the
virtual void in 1995, attempting to step up its influence with every passing
month. The PUK, deprived by the KDP of revenue and foreign access through
Turkey, became more dependent on Iran. 

Late last month, Iran was sufficiently emboldened to launch a major
incursion deep into Iraqi Kurdistan, ostensibly to close down the operations
of Iranian Kurdish nationalists. Diplomats and regional powers concluded
that Iran, by launching the incursion, was thumbing its nose at Washington
and was willing to promote further fighting among the Kurds. The KDP charged
that the Iranians left behind vast quantities of arms, ammunition and other
materiel with the PUK when they withdrew on July 29. 

Full-fledged fighting resumed on Aug. 17, the 50th anniversary of the
founding of the KDP by the revered nationalist leader Mullah Mustafa
Barzani, father of the current KDP leader. 

The Iraqi recapture of Irbil, in alliance with the KDP, now seems likely to
solidify the territorial carve-up between the two Kurdish factions. It would
leave the KDP in control of Irbil and most of the land to the west,
including the soon-to-be reopened oil pipeline to Turkey, and the PUK in
charge of everything to the east. 

Large numbers of Irbil residents were reported to be fleeing this weekend's
fighting in the direction of Koisanjak, a PUK-controlled area almost due
east. Whether the new exodus assumes the proportion of the mass flight in
1991, when 2 million Kurds fled to Iran and the Turkish border, remains
unclear. What is sure is that many Kurds are genuinely fed up with both the
KDP and PUK. 

Last winter, for example, a Kurd told a visiting American friend, "I dream
that Saddam Hussein comes back, gets rid of both Barzani and Talabani, and
then goes back to Baghdad." 

Neutral Kurds and Iraqi opposition sources took note of Aziz's statement
that Iraq's military operations were "on a limited scale," but said that
even if Iraq eventually withdrew, Baghdad
could come and go pretty much at will. 

If past performance is any yardstick, the PUK can be expected to fight hard
to retake Irbil. Iran has every reason to back the PUK in hopes of
embarrassing the United States and Iraq, which it fought in the 1980-1988
Iran-Iraq war. 

Any U.S. policy involving the Kurds must take into account the reaction of
Turkey, a key American ally that borders Iraq's Kurdish areas and is
reconsidering its relations with Washington. 

Last month a new Turkish government, led by Necmettin Erbakan, modern
Turkey's first Islamic conservative prime minister, defied U.S. efforts to
isolate Iran by signing a $23 billion deal to buy Iranian natural gas.
Mideast experts believe Iran is eager to expand its influence both in Turkey
and in Kurdish Iraq. 

"If the United States doesn't do something right away" to get Saddam to back
off, Porter said, "Iran is likely to enter the picture. . . We should make a
strong show of force, saying to both Iraq and Iran, . . . 'Stop it, or
we'll slap you hard.'" 

----

Kurd Talks in London Break Up

Saturday, August 31, 1996; 6:49 p.m. EDT 

LONDON (AP) -- U.S.-brokered talks in London between two rival Kurdish
factions in northern Iraq broke up Saturday after Saddam Hussein launched an
offensive with the backing of one of the factions. 

"It's a little difficult to go ahead when Saddam Hussein is beating up on
the Kurds," said State Department spokesman Glyn Davies in Washington. He
confirmed that arbitrator Robert F. Deutsch, the State Department's expert
on Iraqi Kurds, was on his way home from London. 

Saddam Hussein launched his biggest military offensive in five years,
sending tanks, troops and helicopters into northern Iraq on Saturday to
capture a key city inside the Kurdish "safe haven" protected by U.S.-led
forces. The move came despite strong U.S. warnings. 

The Iraqi forces, allied with the Kurdistan Democratic Party, had by
Saturday night taken most or all of Irbil, the main Kurdish city in the
north, according to various reports. But the rival Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan said it was resisting the onslaught and still held at least part
of the city. 

The two Kurdish groups control a safe haven in northern Iraq carved out for
them by the United States and its allies following the Gulf War in 1991. 

The dispute between the two factions centers on control of customs revenues
from the road between Turkey and northern Iraq. Patriotic Union officials
say the Kurdistan Democratic Party leaders have used custom revenues to
increase their own power rather than fund the region's government. 

Britain and Turkey had sent observers to the talks, which were to have
lasted through the weekend. 



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