Boston.com / News / Rebuilding Iraq

PERDEH CHECKPOINT, IRAQ

Laughter echoes in horror of war

By David Filipov, Globe Staff, 3/31/2003

ictories are what you make of them. For Kurdish guerrillas who have had precious little to celebrate for 12 years, the bloodless capture of this crossroads on the road to the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk was a victory worth celebrating. And what better way to celebrate the Iraqi Army's sudden retreat 12 miles from the front lines toward Kirkuk than by blowing up the assorted land mines they left behind, especially in front of the rolling cameras of the international media?

And so it was that the Kurdish peshmerga fighters collected more than 340 mines and placed them in a large ditch near their newly captured checkpoint. As a dozen foreign journalists in flak jackets filmed, recorded, and took notes, the Kurds lit a fuse.

The group suddenly realized it was too close to all that ordnance, the ditch was far too shallow, and the whole mess was going to blow before anyone had time to do anything about it. Panicked Kurd fighters ran across the street and motioned to everyone to get down, but a few reporters rushed over to a large mound of dirt on the opposite side of the road -- the side that had not yet been de-mined.

"Oh, great, now we're taking cover behind this mined pile of dirt," said a National Public Radio reporter. One of the Kurds laughed at the site of all these cowering correspondents. It was not a nice laugh.

The fuse burned for several long minutes. The Globe reporter realized he was lying on a nest of large, voracious ants, which had begun chewing on his legs. He shot up instinctively -- only to be knocked back off his feet by the blast.

Thankfully, no one was hurt. A big yellow smoke ring rose up from the detonated mines, bringing cheers from the fighters. Four peshmergas danced a brief victory jig. The celebrations had to be cut short, though, because the Iraqis half a mile away began shelling the road.

This was when Sami Abdul Qadir, a driver who had been watching these events incredulously from a safe distance, did the first sensible thing since the whole mine-detonation episode had begun. He fashioned a sign out of two sticks and stuck it on the road toward the direction the Iraqis were shelling and wrote a message for the journalists in English that was imperfect, but appropriate, given the situation: "STOP HERE NOT GO."