Iraqi village mourns Powell’s big mistake

The people of Khurmal live daily with the whirlwind battles between Ansar fighters and forces of the ethnic Kurdish government in this region. Now, as winter rains blow across the valley, Khurmal, a village accustomed to misfortune, is jittery. The residents are worried that cruise missiles and smart bombs will whistle toward them as part of a U S invasion of Iraq. ‘‘The name of Khurmal was wrong,’’ said Abdullah Mohammed Hassan, a labourer who lives with his family in a cinder-block house with no plumbing. ‘‘We don’t have enough electrical power to make such chemical weapons. It’s unfair this village could be bombed. There are no chemicals here.’’

The US State Department has said it knows the alleged poison factory is in Sargat but that Powell used Khurmal as a geographic indicator because it is the largest village in the area. The compound, according to the Bush administration, was designed to manufacture deadly agents such as cyanide and ricin for terrorist attacks.

Ali Bapir, the local leader of Komaly Islami, the Muslim group that controls Khurmal, said he sent a letter to Powell declaring that ‘‘you’re a big man. In your speech to the Security Council, you held up a slide saying Khurmal was the site of a chemical factory. This is a lie. Do not act on false information.’’

Khurmal’s fate has often been tied to the whim of others. This swath of northern Iraq has long been the scene of a struggle between radical Islam and secularism. Khurmal is a kind of border town of opposing ideologies. Many here do not embrace religious extremism, but because of their proximity to Ansar, whose guerrillas meander through the bazaar, their needs are not met by U N programmes and by the regional government, led by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. ‘‘You can feel the economic state here is very weak,’’ said Hassan, noting that Khurmal has unclean drinking water, pocked roads and no electricity. ‘‘Even 1 per cent of project services aren’t getting here because of the fighting.’’

The village remembers 1988, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launched chemical weapons and killed 5,000 people in neighboring Halabja. It remembers the Kurdish uprising of 1991. And it recalls the civil war of 1996 and the fighting that broke out when Ansar took up arms in 2001. The villagers believe that another round of bloodshed is coming.

Powell’s satellite photograph convinced its farmers and blacksmiths that no place is invisible in a world watched from high overhead. Such understanding leads to a sense of vulnerability. And generations of vulnerability have left mullahs such as Bapir walking to prayers surrounded by bodyguards with Kalashnikovs. ‘‘We are helpless,’’ Bapir said in anticipation of a possible American attack. ‘‘If a rocket comes in this village, we can’t protect ourselves.’’

When asked why Ansar fighters — considered terrorists by the US — are allowed to move freely through his territory, Bapir said he does not have the power to tell Ansar families to leave. He added that he condemns Ansar’s tactics but that ‘‘maybe America itself is the first terrorist.’’ (La Times-Washington Post)