Gains by Kurd militia leave road to Mosul open

The Kurdish militia has taken a strategic mountain overlooking Mosul as their soldiers, acting with US Special Forces, prepared to attack at different points along the northern front.

The attack on Maqloub mountain, 10 miles from Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, came early yesterday and was met by little return fire. "It shows how demoralised the Iraqi army is that there was so little resistance," said Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurdish leader. "Now the road to Mosul is open."

During the day Kurds in Arbil, the largest Kurdish city, began to appreciate that Saddam Hussein is indeed falling. Some chanted "George Bush! George Bush!" Others held up a poster of Sylvester Stallone and cars raced through the streets blowing their horns.

On the front south of Arbil, close to the village of Diganah, many Kurds were trying to return to land from which they had been forced to leave in 1987 during President Saddam's ethnic cleansing of Kurds from the region.

Kurdish militiamen, known as peshmerga, were holding back Kurdish civilians from returning to Diganah. "The Iraqis pulled back this morning after being bombed," said Nazat Hulla, a peshmerga commander. "They left five tanks and other vehicles behind and the US Special Forces and some peshmerga went down there an hour ago to blow them up."

Columns of black and grey smoke rose from Diganah and there was a fiery twinkle in the distance as ammunition exploded. It is a measure of the disparity in military strength between the US and Iraq that the Kurds did not want to keep the elderly Soviet-made tanks. Commander Hulla said: "Most of them had broken down and we could not get them working."

Whatever the doubts of Iraqis in other parts of the country over an American occupation of their country Kurds celebrated the imminent fall of President Saddam with undiluted joy. In 1988 he had killed 100,000 of them.

The pace of the Kurdish advance is being limited by the US, fearful that it might provoke a Turkish invasion. The fate of the demoralised 80,000-strong Iraqi army in northern Iraq is still unclear after the capture of Baghdad by the US. Collapse of Iraqi resistance in the capital might lead to its disintegration.