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 In Autonomous North, Preparing for the Worst |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
In Autonomous North, Preparing for the Worst
Worried About Chemical or Biological Strike by Baghdad, Kurds Buy Masks and Plan Escape
Shopkeeper Hamin Muheddin prominently displays diapers, which have been selling quickly since Kurdish authorities said they could be used as makeshift gas masks. (Photos Karl Vick -- The Washington Post)
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 25, 2003; Page A16
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq, Feb. 24 -- Iraqi Kurds have begun improvising civil defense strategies and making plans to escape cities because of growing fears that President Saddam Hussein's military could attack this Kurdish-controlled region with chemical or biological weapons if the United States invades Iraq.
Gas masks have grown scarce. In the military surplus stalls of Sulaymaniyah's downtown bazaar, prices of the few, mostly used models still available have jumped tenfold in a month to $30. Buyers have made a run on disposable diapers, merchants report, because local civil defense officials publicized instructions for fashioning improvised gas masks by sprinkling crushed charcoal and salt between the absorbent layers. Plastic sheeting and rolls of wide tape also flew out of hardware shops following a public advisory to construct a sealed room in which to ride out a gas attack.
But residents questioned the value of homemade countermeasures against weapons many Kurds know firsthand. Hussein's forces gassed scores of Kurdish villages in the late 1980s, killing thousands of people.
"It's just for people's comfort, using these materials," said Ako Ali, who was peddling thick rolls of plastic from a hardware store in Sulaymaniyah's central bazaar last week. "It's something people do because their neighbors are doing the same thing."
His brother Mustapha agreed. "It is a city of fate," he said.
Senior Kurdish officials, struggling to promote public safety without promoting panic, said local history and recent intelligence underscore the gravity of the threat. Barham Salih, prime minister of the half of northern Iraq that is administered by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said his government has received credible reports that chemical weapons specialists have arrived on the Iraqi military's front lines facing the Kurdish zone.
The specialists, wearing uniforms of the Republican Guard but no patch identifying a specific unit, joined units manning freshly placed missile batteries, said Faraidoon Abdul Qadir, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan interior minister. Qadir said the missiles could reach the cities of Arbil and Sulaymaniyah, where more than half of the region's 3.5 million Kurds reside.
The officials expressed confidence in the quality of the intelligence, which they said came from multiple sources who have been reliable in the past. But they acknowledged that the chemical weapons specialists may have been moved to the front lines in the knowledge that their presence would be noted by Kurdish informants whose reports would unnerve an already edgy Kurdish population.
Salih said a tribal official quoted a senior Iraqi security official as saying that "hundreds of thousands will die. This will not be a picnic." Another source quoted a senior official declaring, "The Kurds will be eliminated."
Regardless of the veracity of the reports, Kurdish leaders say they have intensified already urgent efforts to prepare the autonomous area for a possible attack. Salih said all but a core of essential ministries will close in coming days in anticipation of a U.S.-led invasion early next month. "I'm worried about anthrax more than anything else," Salih said.
Qadir said the Kurdish administration is operating on the assumption that the Iraqi government would hope to sow panic in the Kurdish zone to impede the progress of U.S. forces moving south from Turkey. In 1991, a government crackdown on a Kurdish uprising in the last days of the Persian Gulf War prompted more than a million Kurds to flee northward on the main road toward Turkey, exactly the route U.S. armor and troops are expected to arrive by.
To avert such a move, the Kurdish civil defense department has urged the approximately 1 million residents of Sulaymaniyah to consider moving their families to outlying villages. That option did not exist in 1991. Three years earlier, Hussein's government had razed most Kurdish villages in a counterinsurgency sweep that included repeated chemical attacks, and the population feared such attacks might come again.
"We want to hide here from Saddam Hussein," said Khadeji Ahmed, who recently traveled from the oil center of Kirkuk in government-held Iraq to Gobtappa, the Kurdish village where 10 of her siblings died in a 1988 chemical attack. "People now say people in villages will live, not the people in towns. This time."
In Sulaymaniyah, meanwhile, officials are putting in place an emergency plan that would allow security forces, health care and the top layer of government to function after an attack. After increasingly vocal protests of "empty" U.S. promises of material support, the United States has promised anew to provide protective suits, gas masks and other emergency equipment for members of essential services, according to an informed source.
Most residents, however, will have to improvise. In Sulaymaniyah's central market, people without small children suddenly have been buying diapers, said Hamin Muheddin, who rearranged his stall to highlight the "affordable gas masks" -- just $1.50 for a packet of 15.
"It should be a large or regular," said Muheddin, demonstrating how to layer in the crushed charcoal and salt as the radio advised. "I actually experimented at home but had difficulty breathing, so I put it aside."
Tahir Tofik considered a roll of the wide tape stacked for sale on the sidewalk, a recent addition to kiosks that formerly sold only batteries. Rolls of plastic sheeting stood for sale next door, at 75 cents a yard.
"What can I do?" Tofik said. "My family can't sleep. We have nightmares at night. We are worried, especially for the little ones."
The advice from authorities is specific: Choose one room, as high in the house as possible, because gas settles. Seal the windows, and lay in water, food and bedding for several days.
In a sprawling home in one of the city's best neighborhoods, Sheelan Susey's mother followed the instruction to the letter, even sewing homemade gas masks for Deia, 9, Lala, 3, and their baby cousin Mustafa. Like many poorer residents who cannot afford to travel to a village, the family plans to stay put, but for a different reason.
"We're afraid we'll lose our home to looters," said Susey. They have more to lose than most, she said. But the possession Susey values most is the satellite television system that delivers the stream of information they lacked in 1991, when Kurds could see only state-controlled TV.
"In '91 we didn't know anything about the war," Susey said. "Now we have the dish and see everything. Now we see the buildup in Kuwait. And we are afraid."
?2003 The Washington Post Company
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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