The arrival of outsiders who are actually interested in their views on the impending conflict is cause enough for an impromptu town meeting in this village between Batman and Siirt. The six customers at low tables outside the main teahouse quickly become more than 30.

''If you give me this Saddam, I will roast him,'' says a middle-aged man whose deeply-creased and darkly-sunburnt scowl suggest both that he was once a shepherd and that he is not kidding now. ''But I am sorry for the women and children.''

He, and all but two of the other villagers who gravitate to the tea shop to talk about the war, are unemployed, and expecting the worst.

''Send us gas masks,'' says a grizzled old man, in tones that make it difficult to tell whether he is demanding or pleading. ''Saddam's missiles cannot reach Ankara and Istanbul -- they will fall on the Kurds and the poor.''

''The only thing I have seen in all my years is torture and oppression,'' said a 27-year-old Kurd, who like all the villagers declined to give his name lest he run afoul of the internal security services.

''I have never seen a future, and now I wait for this war that will make things worse,'' further depressing the local economy and possibly reigniting the Turkish-Kurdish civil war, he said. ''We just sit here all day, playing cards, drinking tea, living off money our relatives send from the West -- if you can call that living.''

A freshly shaven, well-dressed older man said that after the brutal, 15-year civil conflict between the Kurds and Turks that ended in 1999, people here are still tired of war. ''They have been in war for so long, when they hear the word now their bodies shake.''

''We don't want this war,'' injected a man whose family makes the sumptuous angora blankets that are the Siirt area's best-known product in the rest of Turkey. ''All the world doesn't want this war.''

This story ran on page A21 of the Boston Globe on 3/16/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.