Where Ashraf Sadak’s house had once stood there was yesterday merely a large crater.
The 2 000lb American bomb had landed directly on it, reducing the three rooms where he and his family used to live to a heap of rubble. The mosque next door fared little better. The missile had gouged large chunks out of its blue dome, perforated a wall, and brought down the chandelier.
”There is nothing left. It’s all been destroyed,” Sadak lamented yesterday, standing above a row of shops that had also been flattened. ”If America bought me a new house I would feel a bit better about this.”
The American missile was not aimed at Sadak but at his neighbours, a group of bearded guerrillas from the radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam.
Until this weekend the guerrillas had controlled a small area in the mountains of north-eastern Iraq, next to the Iranian border. Last Friday, however, the main Kurdish faction in the area, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), launched a ground offensive to get rid of them, aided by US special forces and American warplanes.
After an hour’s resistance, the Ansar fighters abandoned their stronghold in the village of Biyara, and fled into the mountains. On Saturday a handful of guerrillas were still up there, sending down desultory bursts of machine gun fire from well above the snowline. Yesterday jubilant PUK leaders announced that all six Ansar villages had now been liberated from a group linked by the Bush administration to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.
”Many Ansar have been killed by our peshmerga. Only a few are still fighting,” Omar Saeed Ali, a PUK official, declared triumphantly.
The US yesterday hailed the attacks as a success. Central Command chief General Tommy Franks told a news conference at US war headquarters in Qatar: ”Coalition forces have attacked and destroyed in the last 48 hours a massive terrorist facility in northern Iraq.”
But for the ordinary villagers of Biyara liberation was something of a mixed blessing. Sadak (45) said he had watched from a neighbouring valley as a US aircraft flew over his village at 11am last Friday and blew up his house. He was pleased that Ansar had gone, but pointed out that he now had nowhere to live.
”I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have even any furniture,” he said.
The 500 Ansar fighters — including many Arab-Afghans — had lived in Biyara for two years. They rarely mixed with locals but insisted that women covered their faces with a veil at all times.
”It was like being in a prison,” Astari Ali Mohammad (53) said as she picked over the ruins of her house. ”I had to wear a chador even when sweeping my front porch. And they wouldn’t let me sleep on my roof in the summer. They told me it was immoral. This is a great day. I don’t care that my house has been destroyed,” she added defiantly. ”We have got rid of Ansar al-Islam. My daughters can now come and visit me here freely.”
Yesterday dozens of PUK peshmerga fighters explored Ansar’s abandoned security headquarters, just down the road from where several cruise missiles had ploughed into the village mosque. The group had left a few tantalising clues — a Koran, several Iranian sports newspapers, and a SIM card from a satellite phone. Minutes before leaving, the guerrillas had performed a final act of cruelty, executing two PUK hostages seized earlier this year. ”In the end it wasn’t much of a battle. They only fought us for an hour,” Kurdish commander Mam Raffor said. ”Some may have escaped into Iran.”
By yesterday Raffor and his fighters had retrieved four Ansar bodies from pastures and orchards around the village. Several had blown themselves up. Kurdish officials claimed the death toll was much higher, and that 120 Ansar militants had died in the fighting. Two PUK peshmerga were also killed when they stepped on a mine, Raffor added.
US aircraft began their lethal attacks on Ansar’s military positions just over a week ago. A defector yesterday said the bombing had prompted the group’s collapse. Nizar Ahmed Mohammed (21) said the Kurdish Ansar fighters who had families wanted to run away and live, but the Arab volunteers who were single agreed they would all die.
”I was told by my boss to go and blow myself up in a suicide attack. I told him: ‘Why don’t you blow yourself up.’ He got very angry. My boss told me that if I blew myself up I would be sent to paradise and be given 77 nymphs.” Three days before the American-led offensive Mohammed claimed he escaped.
The Kurdish peshmerga who took part in the offensive will also bolster the US’s relatively feeble northern front. Sadak, meanwhile, said he would now try to find somewhere else to live.
Given the choice between having a house, or having the Ansar guerrillas back, what would he prefer? ”I prefer being liberated,” he admitted.
Michael Howard in Qushtapa, Iraqi Kurdistan, adds: Coalition operations along the northern front were stepped up at the weekend as US warplanes intensified their aerial barrage of Iraqi forward lines and Kurdish forces moved in to secure areas abandoned during a tactical Iraqi withdrawal.
But with only a limited number of US troops and weapons in the region, there are still no orders for a ground offensive against the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. Yesterday US jets continued to pound Iraqi positions overlooking the Kurdish-controlled town of Kalak, while targets outside Mosul were again bombarded by coalition aircraft. – Guardian Unlimited Â