By Terry Friel
Reuters, 18 April 2006
SARGALO, Iraq - Sher Mohammed smiles as he gestures to the rocky hill a few hundred metres away from the window of the mansion he calls "Freedom Castle" in the soaring mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Not so long ago, he lived in a cramped and dirty cave on the other side of the hill, fighting Saddam Hussein's army and its chemical weapons.
"I am so lucky," says the 55-year-old former peshmerga guerrilla leader. "In my dreams, I never thought the day would come when we could live in our own land.
"(The contrast) is between the earth and the sky. The difference is too much to explain."
Sher Mohammed took his family to the safety of London for a decade, where he earned good money owning and running a Mongolian restaurant, and has returned to Iraq a rich and powerful man.
An aspiring politician and wine maker, he runs a contracting company in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, 330 km (205 miles) north of Baghdad, and is the unofficial mayor or godfather for about 10 villages -- 15,000 people -- not far from the Iranian border.
Kurdistan's peshmergas -- "those who are ready to die" in Kurdish -- have fought rule from Baghdad in the dusty plains to the south for six decades and are now playing a major role in the autonomous province which leads Iraq in growth and security.
They head army units, run the police and the administration and even guard the borders with Turkey and Iran.
GUERRILLA ARMY
Kurdish regional President Masoud Barzani led the guerrilla army his father founded and in which many of his ministers fought, including Kurdistan Deputy Prime Minister Omar Fatah.
Life for the peshmergas was harsh.
Fatah's wife, Kafia Sulaiman, who heads the Kurdistan Women's Union, was also a guerrilla and remembers the times fighting in the mountains as Saddam's army closed in after the end of the eight-year-war against Iran allowed it to shift its focus to the Kurds.
"We were like an island," she says, drawing on a cigarette in a plush restaurant in the hills above Sulaimaniya. "We were surrounded. Our links with the main headquarters were cut off."
Many peshmergas were badly wounded by the chemical weapons the army used in the 1980s, a lethal cocktail of mustard gas and nerve agents. Iraq's was the first army in the world to use chemical weapons on its own people.
"They were blinded," she says. "They couldn't see anything. We had to take their hands and lead them."
Saddam and his cousin Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, who earned the nickname "Chemical Ali" for using chemical weapons against the Kurds, face trial soon on genocide for a seven-month pogrom in 1988 that killed about 100,000 people, mainly civilians.
Sher Mohammed remembers the mustard gas, which he says smelled like garlic and turned the grass yellow. He fled to Iran after he was blinded by a chemical attack. It was months before he could see again at all. He has still not regained the sight of his right eye.
BREAD AND WATER
Food was always a problem in the hills and the caves. Often, whole families survived on nothing more than bread and water.
"It was a very difficult time," he says. "Almost all the time, people would just have bread with water, or bread with yoghurt. Even the rich people could only afford to have meat very rarely."
Some Kurds are not happy about the peshmergas' stranglehold on power, believing partisan fighters do not always make good administrators.
Critics say a major problem is that the peshmergas are bound mostly to one of the two main Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party or the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
"It is very bad. They are monopolising power," says former peshmerga doctor Mahmoud Othman, now a leading Kurdish politician and member of the national parliament.
"This is not what we need. We need technocrats, we need skilled people, we should have independents. They don't leave anything for anyone else.
"There are a lot of people who can come back from outside."
Major Mohammed Najib, a former guerrilla and now the police chief of Kurdistan's Qaradagh district near Sulaimaniya, believes it is the peshmergas alone who have paved the way for the autonomy and economic growth the region enjoys now.
"I am sitting behind this desk, with this rank, in this uniform, because of my comrades' blood," he says proudly.
"It was worth it."
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Citation: Terry Friel. "Ex-rebels now ministers as Iraqi Kurds enjoy power," Reuters, 18 April 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/FRI641686.htm
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