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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
After suffering years of Saddam's ethnic cleansing and a night of U.S. bombing, the residents of Mahad greet Americans with chants and stories and shouts of joy.
Apr 9, 2003 | As the afternoon light filtered through the haze and dust, Zedu, an old Kurdish man born in the village of Kandala, resettled by Saddam Hussein's regime in the bleak town of Mahad, leaned on his shepherd's crook and wept. He was crying tears of relief and joy and he was not alone.
Zedu and thousands of other people in Mahad waited 28 years for Sunday, April 6, the day their town was abandoned by the Iraqi regime under pressure from U.S. forces. Leaving a relieved but still nervous population behind, the Iraqi military had fled a night of intense bombing by U.S. aircraft, retreating to the safety of a ridge above the town. People in Mahad were terrified that the Iraqis would shell them in an act of retribution. After a few anxious hours, the village elders made contact with the local authorities from Kurdistan and invited them to come into the town and take control. It was a day of song and stories and joy, when the bombing and death that made it all possible seemed blessedly far away.
Mahad, desperately poor, is a place of open sewers and crumbling cinderblock buildings, more reminiscent of rural Afghanistan than Iraq. It was created almost 30 years ago, when Saddam Hussein's vengeful administration deprived the residents of nine villages of their farms -- Kurdish ethnic cleansing -- and forced them into a refugee camp, which eventually became the makeshift town of Mahad. Arabs brought in by the government took over the expropriated Kurdish farms, in some cases renting the land back to their original owners.
I witnessed Mahad's liberation by happy accident, after trying to cover a battle some distance to the north and getting lost. Early Sunday afternoon, we found ourselves at a Kurdish Democracy Party checkpoint at a bridge over a muddy stream. Across the stream, a kilometer to the west, we could see the outlines of a large settlement at the base of the hills, the town that turned out to be Mahad. The local Kurdish security officer pointed in its direction and said, "Saddam," summing up the security situation over the bridge.
We looked through binoculars at the regime-controlled town. On the hill was a building with a tall star-shaped spire made of yellow stone. The building with the tall spire did not have minarets, there was no crescent at the apex. It was not a mosque and I was curious about it, because it didn't look like any temple I had seen before. In the town there was no shooting. No bad signs, just a quietness across the field. Azad, the local KDP officer in charge, was polite but preoccupied, and in the middle of our conversation he got a phone call. A moment after he stepped away to take the call, a white four-by-four -- the type used by U.S. special forces -- pulled up and a crowd of at least 50 men materialized and surrounded the driver. They were mobbing him, all of them trying to give some piece of crucial information at the same time.
The driver was an American, and that lent an electrical charge to the situation that wasn't there before. Information came in bursts, the translation kicked in and out. My translator, Baravan, was having trouble keeping up because he was so excited. But he worked his way into the center of the crowd and started translating for the American soldier. This was a massive coup, because Baravan stepped back and related the entire conversation to me. "The men are telling the soldier, who they call 'Mr. Robert,' to please tell the planes not to bomb the town across the river," Baravan said. I wanted to know why the men wanted to convey that piece of information at that moment. After all, we thought the town was controlled by Iraq, and didn't the Iraqi army have weapons near the town?
In fact, they didn't. Azad, the Kurdish security officer at the checkpoint, told Mr. Robert, that he'd just received information that the Iraqis left Mahad, "and the people there are asking us to come to the city." Mr. Robert asked them to wait, saying, "Don't go into Mahad until I come back with the other soldiers. Give me two hours." Then he drove off in his four-by-four.
The peshmerga didn't wait. They ran around looking for vehicles and they took whatever they could find, battered Volkswagen rabbits, dented pickup trucks, as they pulled together a convoy to drive to Mahad. They couldn't wait for Mr. Robert, they just headed off across the bridge to a dirt road across the field. We ran to the car and followed them. We were about to witness Mahad change hands.
