Kurds fear their hard-won freedom will be the price of Turkish aid to US

A machine-gun chatters as Kurdish special forces, dodging between rocks, creep up the side of a steep hill topped by an enemy bunker.

The 25-man attacking unit falls back and regroups. There are several loud explosions and they charge up the hill from a different direction. Minutes later, four enemy soldiers emerge with their hands raised and are taken prisoner as a yellow Kurdish flag is raised over the captured bunker.

"This is not an operation against the Turks," General Aziz Hawas, commander of the Kurdish special forces, says jovially as he watches the training exercise from a nearby hill at Atrush, high in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. Other Kurdish officers watching the exercise laugh dutifully at their commander's little joke, but they all know that within weeks they may be fighting a Turkish invasion.

While the rest of the world waits to see when the US and Britain will declare war on Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the Kurds fear they are about to become the victims of a second Turkish war against them. Ankara has made it clear that its aim is to limit Kurdish influence in a post-Saddam Iraq.

"Whoever fights us will regret it, especially Turkey," said General Hawas as he reviewed some 400 Kurdish soldiers in green-and-brown camouflage uniforms being trained as special forces.

Back in Dohuk, Faisal Amin Rostinki, head of security at the military HQ, spoke more forcefully of a Turkish invasion. "It is a fascist army and has a great hatred against the Kurds," he said.

As armies muster in and around Iraq for the coming war, the Kurds are one of the smallest military players. But, with the experience of decades of savage warfare against President Saddam behind them, they want to show they will not see their interests sacrificed to Turkey or anybody else.

General Hawas, who became a peshmerga (guerrilla) in 1986, explained that Kurds were trying to create a modern professional army that also drew on their experience as guerrilla fighters. He said: "We have three kinds of officers: Kurdish officers from the Iraqi army who defected to us, peshmerga commanders, and officers newly trained by us."

He pointed to a burly officer standing near by holding a swagger stick and added: "He used to be a general in the Iraqi army and took part in the invasion of Kuwait."

Building a Kurdish army is not easy. After watching the storming of the hill at Atrush by his men, General Hawas said that in reality the enemy bunker should have been under fire the whole time, but "we can't afford to waste ammunition". Equipment is short and the Kurds have no tanks and little heavy artillery. On the other hand, they have an intimate knowledge of the mountains and ravines, which offer many opportunities for ambush, along Iraq's 218-mile border with Turkey.

Overall, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, to which General Hawas belongs, has 62,000 soldiers, of which some 50,000 are combat troops. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which controls eastern Kurdistan, has another 40,000 men. There are also irregular Kurdish forces with military experience. Few people have seen as much fighting as the Iraqi Kurds over the last half century. "All Kurdish life is a war," said General Hawas.

Bravado aside, the Kurds as a whole are determined to resist a Turkish invasion. There is a groundswell of rage that just as their arch-enemy, President Saddam, is about to be overthrown, the measure of freedom they won after 1991 is about to be snatched away by a deal under which the United States allows Turkey to invade Kurdistan in return for American use of Turkish bases.

If the Turks do attack, their tanks will roll across the bridge at Ibrahim Khalil, just north of the Kurdish city of Zakho. Turkey has closed the frontier, and there is a a forlorn, apprehensive air in the frontier town, which was bustling with traffic a fortnight ago. But there is a determination that the Kurds should resist Turkey in whatever way they can.

General Hawas and his men could not stop a Turkish attack using armour, artillery and air power. But they would make sure that a Turkish assault was not a walkover and that any Turkish occupation of Kurdistan would be very costly.

It would also be extremely embarrassing for the US if all its rhetoric about rescuing the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein should end with the Kurds, the one group of Iraqis free from his rule, being subjugated by their arch-enemies.

Patrick Cockburn is co-author, with Andrew Cockburn, of 'Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession'.