Iraq: Defeat And Flight

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Against Kirkuk, a city of nearly a million, Saddam had unleashed an indiscriminate barrage from tanks, helicopter gunships, heavy artillery, Katyusha rockets and ground-to-ground missiles. The Kurds reported raids by Sukhoi bombers as well -- despite the coalition ban on Iraq's use of fixed- wing aircraft. Kamal Kirkuki, a member of the Kurdish resistance, claimed that more than 100,000 women and children had been captured around the city. "If the Iraqis act true to form," he said, "they will all be butchered." One horror story was being passed from mouth to mouth: of Kurdish infants strapped to the flanks of attacking Iraqi tanks. Whether such tales are true or exaggerated, the Kurds have good reason to fear reprisals from a government that has systematically set out to destroy their culture and homeland.

Nor were the Kurds Saddam's only new victims. While civilians throughout Iraq struggled to replace shattered power plants and water lines -- not to mention scrounging for food -- the regime also threw its energy into smashing the Shi'ites in the south who want Saddam's secular Baathist regime replaced by Islamic rule. In the five weeks since the liberation of Kuwait, Baghdad has retaken every major rebel-held city and town, sometimes with terrifying vindictiveness.

Saddam took aim first at the south, where he gathered the remnants of his defeated army and the armor that escaped the allies into a loyal force that rapidly overwhelmed the weak and ill-equipped Shi'ite insurgents. He dispatched two Republican Guard divisions that had been stationed around Baghdad to ensure the efficiency of the Iraqi troops that had failed so miserably against the allied coalition. This time it was the Shi'ite rebels who were doomed to failure. They lacked a joint command-and-communications system and were dependent largely on weapons and ammunition abandoned by Iraqi soldiers as they fled the allies. The holy sites of Karbala and Najaf, so meticulously avoided by coalition bombing raids, were reportedly ravaged. In some cases targeted with napalm and phosphorus, thousands of civilians streamed toward the southern sector of the country occupied by U.S. troops. Ordered not to intervene, American soldiers could offer little more than food, water and medical assistance.

In the north, things were different, and for almost a month the Kurds lived a dream. An uprising that began on March 4 in the town of Rania spread like a sandstorm to engulf all Iraqi Kurdistan. The peshmerga (those who face death), as the rebel fighters are called, did not need to capture towns, as local Iraqi Kurdish militiamen spontaneously joined the rebellion. Fighter Kamal Kirkuki repeated joyfully to all who would listen, "We Kurds are finally free." Jails were thrown open; prisoners set at liberty. Kurds spoke openly of their travails without fear of retribution from Baghdad's once omnipresent spies. Even the discovery of the horrors of Saddam's torture camps -- corpses studded with maggots, canisters of rotting human flesh stored at local outposts of the dreaded Estikhbarat (military intelligence), prisoners who had not seen the light of day for so many years that they thought they were still living in the 1970s -- seemed a catharsis before the new era of freedom.