The Race, and the Riots
News: Kirkuk was falling, and every Kurdish figther with a Kalishnikov wanted a piece of the action.
April 11, 2003
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It was a full speed advance in anything that could get to the front: pickups, 4x4s, ancient buses, dump trucks. A taxi overtook us, packed full of Kurdish fighters and racing over the rugged road leading to Kirkuk at 90 miles an hour. If they couldn't die in battle, it seemed the peshmergas were determined to take their chances with a road wreck.
Every once in a while, someone would appear headed the other way on the two-lane road -- a taxi fleeing Kirkuk or a looter rushing his stolen truck home - but most of the time the traffic was so uniformly in-bound that it took both lanes.
I had been spending my days in Iraqi Kurdistan, perhaps the one part of the world where nearly everybody say they support the war. Kirkuk had fallen, the northern front had finally opened, and it seemed that every Kurd with a Kalishnikov wanted his part. Our destination was flagged by a funnel of dark smoke billowing from a burning oil trench, and as we approached, we could see what had been rattling our windows at night. Prison-like military fortifications with punched-in roofs and yards of twisted and carbonized vehicles attested to the bombing campaign. One row of concrete buildings was so damaged you could no longer tell its original purpose; garages, shops, an office block?
The last few miles were the ugliest. In some spots, the shoulder was filled with oil. We passed a stalled taxi -- a dead man lay next to it -- then an unexploded mortar shell in the middle of the road. A cluster of hills outside the city were sliced through by trenches, as if someone had passed a knife through everything over a certain height. Our translator was originally from Kirkuk, but hadn't seen the city for 13 years. He kept pointing out oil installations like they were scenes of natural wonder. When we crested a final rise and could see the low lying city full of trees, our driver turned about for a round of high-fives.
Inside, every street seemed to have its looters and their loot; office chairs, cabinets, ceiling fans. A boy, maybe 8-years old, pushed a television stand he could barely see over. Outside a government office, two men struggled with a photocopier. You had the feeling that if you were suddenly to die, somebody would take your belt and boots before you hit the ground. But most people were celebrating. In the center, a crowd toppled the statue of Saddam, then worked at taking off his head. Some beat at a crack with metal bars, while others wrapped a garden hose around the statue's neck and tugged. Women lined the streets of the city, and peshmergas made frantic victory laps, firing joyfully into the air.
By mid afternoon, at least a dozen shooting victims had been brought to the Saddam Hussein Hospital -- already renamed Baba Gorgor after a nearby oil field. We spoke to the doctor there. He was an Arab, not a Kurd, and we asked him why he thought the United States was fighting this war. He hesitated and then said he wasn't sure, but thought it was mostly for reasons of oil and empire. "Thousands of civilians were killed," he said. "It's not easy to see your country so heavily bombed for a reason that is not 100 percent clear."
