Kurdish guns turn south

The red flame crossed the northern Iraqi sky just as Abbas Sharif was about to perform his evening prayers.

A second later something thundered into a hillside a half-mile away. The shock wave blew open the green metal door of Mr. Abbas's mud-walled house. Dust sifted down from the sod roof.

In Hargena, a neighboring mountain village, windowpanes rattled loose from their caulk. "The women and children screamed," says cooking-gas vendor Atta Qadir. The explosions - the second slightly less deafening than the first - were the loudest things he has ever heard.

When the Kurdish villagers investigated the next morning, they found one crater 25 feet in diameter and another a third that size. Missile parts - bent exhaust nozzles, twisted pieces of metal the size of plow blades, charred swatches of rubberized wire mesh - lay strewn across a chickpea field below the impact site.

The missile came to earth last Wednesday, but its arrival has yet to be reported in the Kurdish media, perhaps because the Kurdish authorities want to minimize public anxiety. Unlike Kuwait, the northern Iraqi countryside has no air-raid warning system nor any major air-defense systems.

The origin of the missile could not be determined from a review of two dozen parts found at the site. The villagers are certain that it was Iraqi, citing the direction of its flight and recent statements by Iraqi officials referring to missile attacks against cities and airstrips in the Kurdish-controlled north.

There is no doubt that the missile attack is another sign that the Kurds are increasingly at war.

US forces have helped the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which administers the eastern portion of northern Iraq, beat back an extremist Islamist organization that has fought a civil war from an enclave next to the Iranian border.

Ending this miniwar will allow the PUK to focus attention on the main event in the rest of Iraq.

Kurdish leaders in the western half of northern Iraq are promising that their fighters will go to war alongside US troops in areas controlled by President Saddam Hussein. For some Kurds, the opportunity to battle his regime is long overdue.

For others, the strife presents new dangers, as the missile strike suggests. And for still other Kurds, the crumbling of the regime is bringing to the surface painful memories of the sufferings Mr. Hussein has caused them.

"We can say that the battle against so-called Ansar al-Islam is finished militarily," says PUK leader Jalal Talabani, referring to the Islamist group that has attacked and harassed his troops since it was formed 18 months ago. Predecessor groups have fought the mainstream Kurdish parties for years.

Yesterday Mr. Talabani and other PUK leaders led a heavily armed convoy of white SUVs through areas once controlled by Ansar. In Biyara, a former Ansar stronghold, Khoraman Qadir and her husband, Feiroz Salah, salvaged packages of cheese puffs, tubes of toothpaste, and other items from the ruins of their grocery store.

A few days ago, during intensive US air attacks against the Ansar enclave, a bomb or a missile destroyed part of a mosque and a row of shops that included the couple's store. Mr. Salah isn't too put out. "As long as they keep us away from these groups," he says, referring to the Americans and the Islamists, respectively, "I won't be angry."

Ms. Qadir says she is happy to see the end of Ansar. "I had to wear gloves and a veil" whenever she left her house, she says. "That wasn't a life."

She says that if she had appeared in public in what she wore yesterday, a baggy ankle-length dress and a headscarf, Ansar officials would have fined her $75 - an onerous sum in northern Iraq.

The battle against Ansar and a related, more moderate Islamist group was notable for the close support the US provided the Kurdish militiamen. During a ground assault that began early Friday morning, US Special Forces called in airstrikes from forward positions.

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