Karahanjir, Iraq — The abandoned commander's office was stripped bare, just one page from the newspaper left on the dusty floor. It was from the March 25 edition of Al-Qadisiyah, the organ of the Iraqi Defence Ministry.
The Enemy Will Face Great Obstacles In Our Holy Iraq, blared the headline, in five-centimetre-tall red type, above a picture of a beaming President Saddam Hussein.
The paper was left behind when the commander and his men — part of Infantry Chemical Unit No. 8 — hastily retreated from this military base late Thursday. While the U.S.-led coalition may be running into plenty of opposition in southern Iraq, Kurdish forces encountered no resistance when they took this territory yesterday. The jubilant peshmerga pushed to within three kilometres of the city of Kirkuk, where the retreating Iraqi forces had dug in.
The retreating Iraqis left chilling reminders of their intentions in the north: Inside the Chemical Unit, whose windows were bricked in and covered with barbed wire, was a "Store for Stable Materials." All the documents and materials were taken with the fleeing soldiers — including any evidence that they might have chemical weapons — but the unit certainly appeared to have been functional until Friday. Its office included a helpful list of "33 countries that have fought Iraq" painted on the wall.
Related Articles
Yet there was also a lingering sense in the camp of a bogeyman unmasked. The base was forlorn, decrepit, built around an old Kurdish village whose inhabitants were driven out decades ago. The walls were covered with slogans exhorting the soldiers to glory, and reminders that they should show "good behaviour and make sacrifices for others."
There were cartoon-like murals of saluting soldiers with the Iraqi flag furled around them; the offices were painted in a white-and-peacock-blue colour scheme reminiscent of a kindergarten. The chairs were plastic; the kitchens were primitive; the record books were covered in pink, flowered wrapping paper to keep them tidy — this was not the home of an elite fighting force.
The peshmerga had orders only to occupy the ridge above the Kurdish town of Chamchamal, but they were too excited to stop there. Three hundred mines had been unearthed early in the day, allowing the peshmerga to surge forward.
"We feel we are reborn today," said Friad Shawqi, who drove a truckload of ragtag soldiers armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers all the way to edge of Kirkuk.
"We had no orders, we just went," added Mohammed Assad, a young soldier whose family lives in the city.
The villages along the road to Kirkuk were empty — the apparent result of Iraqi soldiers taking civilians with them to the region's main city.
Most of the Kurdish fighters are Kirkuk natives displaced by Mr. Hussein's policy of "Arabization," veterans of the 1991 Kurdish campaign that took the city and held it for two weeks until Mr. Hussein struck back by air. For most of the men, it was their first glimpse of home in more than a decade.
"It feels wonderful; I haven't seen the city in 13 years," said Ghazi Khalid. "But it's frustrating to be able to go only within two or three kilometres, not to go in."
From a hill 11 kilometres outside the city, Kirkuk could be seen spread across the valley below, light glinting off windows and steel water tanks. A pall of smoke hung over the city from the coalition aerial bombardment that went on intermittently all day. It was impossible to see the oil fields (the largest in Iraq) because they were obscured by the smoke from the bombing.
But the peshmerga said the Iraqi army was digging in there, too. The Baghdad loyalists fired artillery at the positions they had abandoned earlier in the day, and three shells landed in Chamchamal, but no casualties were reported.
"If many peshmerga get closer to Kirkuk and the people know they are there on the outskirts, then there will be an uprising," predicted Jowad Sharif, who was pulling his Doshka recoilless rifle back from the front at sunset. The Kurds say they have an active underground of more than 5,000 men in the city.
The men in Mr. Shawqi's truck were all carrying new gas masks, which they took from Karahanjir when they arrived at the camp, the first in a wave of looting there yesterday.
"They're not stolen, they're really ours," Mr. Sharif reasoned. "The Iraqis bought them with money they stole from us" by imposing sanctions on the north.
Kurdish officials confirmed yesterday that the peshmerga will play a key role in the coming fights for Kirkuk and Mosul.
Within three days, "you will see deployment of troops, using Kurdish troops to attack the major cities," said Mohammed Ihsan, the human-rights minister for the Kurdistan Democratic Party; he has been acting as a liaison with U.S. forces.
For Mr. Assad, the young soldier, it seemed only reasonable.
"We want to go to Kirkuk to rescue my family," he said. "We're just waiting for George Bush's orders."
