TIME: A Family's Last
Stand for Saddam
Monday, April 21, 2003
By MICHAEL WARE / KIRKUK
Knowing that U.S.-led Kurdish soldiers had entered
Kirkuk, Abdul Karim Hamdaniy and his son Ahmed donned
plain khaki military uniforms, strapped on
ammunition-filled webbing and, with Kalashnikov
rifles in hand, headed out of their homes.
The faithful father-and-son team were going to die
for a dying regime. "They were real members of the
party, so they fought to the end," said Talat Haias,
a city resident, many hours later as he stood over
Ahmed's body, sprawled as though crucified in a
blood-pooled halo on a suburban street. The two had
taken up positions near the Baath Party center in
Kirkuk's Huria district last Thursday and had fired
at people passing by. Eventually separated, the duo
hung on for about four hours before teams of Kurdish
peshmerga (those who face death) shot them. "We're
happy they've killed them because they've done many
bad and cruel things," said Haias.
The multipronged assault on Kirkuk began before
daylight. U.S. special forces led battalions of
peshmerga, who for the most part met no Iraqi
resistance. To the east, however, it was a different
story, as Iraqi soldiers tried to mount a last stand.
They were positioned at the city's edge, having
retreated there from bases farther afield amid
intense bombing that began in March. This meant
Kirkuk's first line of defense was now also its last.
When the assault kicked off, close to 300 peshmerga
from one of the Kurds' top units raced to the Iraqi
line. The fighters and the U.S. special forces
leading them found themselves in a bigger battle than
they had anticipated. With two tanks firing as they
withdrew, the Iraqis yielded their outer ring of
bunkers but stood fast on the city's outskirts. Iraqi
soldier Riaz Jihad Zahir explains why he and his
comrades stayed. "The officers had told us Baghdad
had fallen, but they said the execution squads would
kill us if we left," he says.
Five hours into the attack, the advance halted in its
tracks. Around 10 a.m., the commanding team of
special forces abandoned the eastern front, leaving
Kurdish soldiers to hold the line. "We're going back
to the 6th element. Let's go. Let's go," shouted the
team leader, waving his men into their white Land
Rovers. The order wasn't well received by all the
special forces. "I'm telling you we're leaving," the
leader breathlessly insisted as Iraqi artillery
roared in. An argument erupted, with an angry U.S.
soldier screaming "Is this how we lead by example?"
The team leader called on his subordinate to "get
with the program."
Forty-five minutes later, the Kurds began firing
rockets into the Iraqi zone. Shortly afterward, a
B-52 trailing four white vapors laid a carpet of
perhaps a dozen bombs on the Iraqi trenches. Black
clouds boiled up as the peshmerga whooped from their
hilltop trenches that hours before had been occupied
by the Iraqis being bombed. "This attack is a sacred
thing," said Ismael Mohammed. He was fighting to
return to the home in Kirkuk he had been driven out
of seven years before. Kurdish commander Mam Rostam,
a nom de guerre meaning Uncle Rostam, reveled in the
momentum of the push on Kirkuk. "My soul is
returning," he told his staff in the bunker.
When a second B-52 strike at last silenced their
artillery, the Iraqis knew the end had come. "The
officers took their uniforms off and dressed as
civilians," says Iraqi soldier Zahir. "Both the
Baathists and the Fedayeen changed their clothes and
ran off. That's when I left."
Unknown to Zahir, the mood of the city behind his
sandbagged bunker had already changed. Kirkuk
inhabitants say that beginning at 10 a.m., they were
seeing Iraqi soldiers, paramilitaries and Baath Party
members change into civvies and leave town. "Many of
them gave their weapons to civilians, and they all
seemed to be headed south to Baghdad or Tikrit," says
Firhad Saddiq Saeed. But not all the Iraqis who
wanted to leave were able to do so. Ali Hussain says
he stood mesmerized as two Iraqi soldiers trying to
surrender were executed by their own. "They just shot
them there in the street," he says.
Surprised by advancing Kurdish columns, one group
fleeing the Arafa district tried to blast its way
out. A colonel among them "tried to protect himself,
and they killed him as his men escaped," says Ramazan
Miran Jwainer. Hours later, the colonel's body
remained on the sidewalk, his red boots still
polished, his uniform still crisply creased. Two
small pockets of Fedayeen diehards fought it out from
a school and another building in the Wahda district.
Kurdish soldiers encircled them, killing a few and
capturing others. "We expect more bad things from
them because they're finished and want to kill as
many of us as they can," says Ghafur Salah Samin,
local administrator of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan Party.
As TIME entered the city with peshmerga fighters,
scores of Saddam's defeated soldiers were walking the
same road. None were harassed. A Kurdish radio
station advised people to disarm any Iraqi soldiers
they came across but to allow them to go on their
way. There was at least one case of Kurdish
vengeance, against a man who had killed four
peshmerga fighters. Holed up in the Huria district
Baath Party center, he battled with Kurdish troops
for hours; he surrendered in the afternoon. Burhan
Mohammed witnessed what followed: "They asked him
many questions, and he said he was Syrian." The
peshmerga beat the man unconscious with rifle butts.
"As he lay there, the peshmerga shot him," says
Mohammed, "then they doused his body in petrol and
burned him." Like his neighbors, Mohammed felt no
pity. "They treated us like animals, so we must treat
them in the same way," he says, staring down at the
blackened corpse.
The vast majority of Kurds weren't out looking for
blood in Kirkuk. Instead they filled the streets at
midday, cheering and waving and beeping car horns.
Offices of the regime's apparatus, like Baath Party
compounds and police facilities, were looted and, in
some cases, torched. Meanwhile, people danced in the
streets, giving bouquets of flowers to U.S. special
forces whose vehicles were trapped in the throng. In
the center of town, a statue of Saddam Hussein was
torn down. That evening happy fire from countless
Kalashnikovs peppered the city's sound track. Hastily
crafted THANK YOU, U.S.A. signs went up everywhere.
"We are grateful to George Bush and Tony Blair," says
Yaquob Yousef. "We hate not just the governments but
all the peoples of Germany and France."