Iraq: Defeat And Flight

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Civil wars inevitably result in mass migration, but the forced exoduses out of Iraq's north and south seemed almost as much the product of deliberate policy. In Kurdistan babies have reportedly been suffering from marasmus and kwashiorkor, diseases usually brought on by the severe malnutrition endemic to countries like Sudan and Ethiopia. The infants' limbs were stringy, their faces shrunken to their skulls, their eyes filled with pus. "There are many of them like this in this region," said Dr. Sabry Hassan of the Zakhu General Hospital, "but we have nothing to keep them alive with." Since the Kuwait invasion last August, Saddam has channeled his country's meager supplies to his power base in central Iraq, thereby imposing a kind of selective starvation on his Shi'ite and Kurdish enemies.

Before fleeing to the hills, Barzani complained of his people's predicament. "We have two blockades," he said, "one from Baghdad, which purposely starved Kurdistan of food and medicine, and the U.N. blockade, which strangled Iraq. Now the U.N. is talking about emergency food relief for Iraq, but does it really believe Saddam will feed the Kurds? No, he will let them starve. And those he does not starve he will order his troops to kill."

As refugees, not only were the Kurds more numerous than the Shi'ites but their prospects were more dire. The mountains presented a formidable rampart of bare stone, their soaring cliffs and giant crevices providing few navigable passes to borders across which few would be welcome. As they trekked up into the barren ranges, the Kurds saw constant reminders of their brutalized past: rusting pipes, a few foundation stones, the ruins of a gristmill, the skeletal remnants of Kurdish villages demolished by Baghdad during earlier repression.

In some places the escape track became a mess of mud; many abandoned their cars and trucks to wade through the bog. Sentries, set up every 3,300 ft., watched the skies for approaching enemy helicopters, which they called "damnation birds." Not all destinations were reachable. Syria, for example, was arrived at by crossing the Tigris on a boat and a prayer, through some 30,000 mines planted in the riverbank on the Iraqi side. The peshmerga boats that ferried refugees were at the mercy of incoming Iraqi shells, and the few bridges had already been blown up. By last week, Baghdad had completely shut down the escape route into Syria.

So the Kurds headed north and east toward Turkey and Iran. It was impossible to estimate the number bottled up at those borders. Tehran claimed that 1 million to 2 million Kurds were seeking sanctuary in Iran and that 200,000 had entered its territory. Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati announced that his country would continue to keep its frontiers open to the refugees. Iran's generosity toward the Kurds is hardly based on altruism: it is designed partly to mollify Iran's own restless Kurdish minority, which makes up 9% to 12% of the population, and partly to improve the country's deplorable human-rights image.

Despite pressure from Washington and London, Turkey's borders were closed. "We are trying to help the refugees on both sides of the border," President Turgut Ozal said. "There are already 100,000 of them inside Turkey and another 150,000 in Iraq. The number is much higher than we can handle."