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Mahmod said. "Kurdistan can be held up as a good example. If this were done, people in the rest of Iraq and the Middle East would be able see that the U.S. is not just here for its purposes, but to help them."

Iraqi Kurdistan s leading poet, Sherko Bekas, is skeptical of Arab aspirations to democracy. "From where will that democracy emer-ge?" he said. "Do you think it can be built from Ramadi or Fallouja? Do you think the Sunni man will embrace democracy when he does not even allow his women to go outside without a veil?"

Although overwhelmingly Sunni Mus lim, Kurds are much less strict in their interpretation of their faith than Arab Iraqis. Many women do not veil themselves; the sale and consumption of alco-hol is widely tolerated; Israel is not considered an enemy as it is in much of Arab Iraq. Kurds fear being forced into a straitjacket if reli-gious forces gain the upper hand in Baghdad. Women now fight in the peshmerga as officers and ordinary soldiers. On a recent mor-ning, about 50 fęmale recruits were being shown how to march and handle Kalashnikov rifles. Others were on duty at checkpoints at the generał staff headquarters.

Bekas led a petition drive this spring that gathered 1.8 million signatures favoring a referendum to determine whether Kurdistan should be part of Iraq or become independent. Many people signed with their blood, he said. He recalled Husseins genoddal Anfal campaign of 1988 against the Kurds, including a Chemical attack that killed 5,000 of them. After having suffered so much at the hands of Iraq's Arabs, he said, Kurds would be better off going their own way.

"Eighty-three years ago, Kurds were wronged annexed to this Iraq against their will after the first World War," he said. After decades of oppression, he said, "there is nothing inside us that makes us feel connected to Iraq."

Their attitude toward the Americans is one way Kurds differ from many Arab Iraqis, said Omar Fatah, the acting prime minister of the Kurdish regional administration in Sulaymaniya. "When the coalition forces came, we welcomed them because they came to free lraq and free the Iraqi people," he said, "and we still keep them in our hearts as libera tors, not occupiers."

Nevertheless, there is growing concem in some quarters that the United States is willing to abandon the Kurds in order to mollify the morę restive Arabs. "Some people say, Lets start killing Americans then they will respect us,'" Hassan said.

Kurdish pride is on display in the rapid development of the land. Work on a commercial intemational airport started outside Sulaymaniya in January and is scheduled to be finished in a year.

It will be handy for landlocked Kurdistan if it ever seeks indepen-dence. For the time being, however, political leaders say that is not possible because of pressure from Iraq's neighbors particularly Turkey which have Kurdish minorities, abhor the idea of an independent Kurdish State and have threatened to crush it if it emerges.

But on the streets here, it is obvious that the official position is cha-fing against the will of many, if not most, ordinary Kurds.

Fatah, speaking in his living room, said Kurdish leaders were aware of the frustration and doubts among their followers.

'We would like to be part of a democratic, federal and united Iraq," he said. "But our people have presented two conditions that are absolute: fuli democracy and fuli federalism."

Kurds could always reassess, he suggested.

"From the beginning, we have expressed our desire to make Iraq a country of two equal peoples, and we hope that Allawi s govem-ment will succeed on this basis."

Kurdish Refugees Len Homeless on Return

The Aiistralian

By NICOLAS ROTHWELLJuly 26,2004

The running track at Kirkuk's Olympic Stadium is pitted and bul-let-holed and the concrete grand stand seats are crumbling a way. Yet here in Iraq's oil-rich, violence-tom central dty, a quiet crowd of men, women and children sits and waits.

The only homes are rough tents and lean-to corrugated iron sheds, or makeshift mud-brick sleeping rooms the people have built beneath the stadium stands, where the dust storms blow and the sun beats down in a 45-degree blaze each day.

These are the Kurdish refugees of Kir kuk: about 7000 fa mili es are camped here, in the stadium itself or in the bleak camps nearby, without sewerage or basie facilities. They are among the last vic-tims of Saddam Hussein; it is their bizarre fate to be homeless on return to the dty where they were bom, and once lived.

Jaffar Mohammed Rashid, like many others, was dispossessed by the former dictator in 1988, after a Fierce Kurdish uprising was put down. Scores of thousands of Kurds were driven out, and either killed or scattered round the rest of Iraq. Their homes were given to Arab migrants from elsewhere in the country. The demographic balance of Kirkuk, always intricate, was abruptly changed. Historically, the dty, which has 880,000 people, was two-thirds Kurdish, with large Arab and Turkmen minorities.

Now it is 43 per cent Kurdish and 20 per cent Turkmen, with the rema ind er Arab, according to local authorities. The Kurdish refugees like Rashid and his family were drifting for the past 15 years.

He lived in Kurdish northwest Iran, and in the Iraqi Kurdish dties of Arbil and Suleimaniyah.

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