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SULAYMANIYAH, IRAQ

Kurds in northern city report a crackdown

By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff, 3/25/2003

he United States says it is confident that Saddam Hussein's control on his country is slipping, but residents of the northern city of Kirkuk say the regime has tightened its grip there. As more US combat troops arrive in the region, a translator and a driver working for the Globe have been calling family and friends in the city who are loyal to Kurdish opposition groups. Speaking in code to protect their relatives, they've tried to glean what life is like in the city, where no Western reporters are present.

This is how the residents, whose identities are withheld for security reasons, described the scene in the city. Their impressions were confirmed by senior Kurdish officials who also have been contacting sources there.

On the streets of Kirkuk, a city of roughly one million and the hub of Iraq's oil industry, black smoke is blanketing the town from the burning trenches filled with crude. The regime set the trenches ablaze to hinder the visibility of allied fighter pilots and to hamper any attempt to land US airborne troops. "The smoke is so thick in the air that everything is covered in ash," one relative said.

Others said members of the Mukhabarat, the regime's feared and loathed security force, prowl the streets with pistols and a bullhorn to warn residents of the Kurdish quarter that "anyone who leaves their home will be shot on sight."

Hussein's Ba'ath Party has relocated its regional headquarters into the heart of a neighborhood of Kurds known as Domez. The party has also armed the Hussein-loyalist Ubayid tribe and ordered them to put down any rebellion.

Young Kurdish men suspected of loyalty to opposition groups who could stage a revolt from within have been rounded up and arrested. The families say that it is believed that as many as 1,200 men have been apprehended and loaded onto buses and taken to unknown locations. Sixty-one suspected leaders of a plot for an uprising were executed en masse by the regime in Kirkuk within the last week, senior Kurdish officials say.

The nightly airstrikes by the United States are also uniquely horrifying for the population. But this is met with a mix of emotions: fear, but also hope that the United States will soon topple the regime.

Another relative described how his 5-year-old daughter appears to be suffering from shock from the bombing, saying, "She just stares ahead and she won't speak. She has been shaking at night. She doesn't cry. She just shakes."