Iraqis abandon pledge to resist - and Kirkuk falls

The soldiers awoke in the shadow of Kirkuk, and knew it would be their last day in the army of Saddam Hussein.

It was 8 a.m. when Kurd fighters came toward the post held by Iraqi soldiers. Amir Sahib Aziz, a corps officer who had signed a pledge to defend this area to the death, told his men there was no reason to resist another day.

"The pesh merga came and they called out to us and said, 'We are your brothers and your countrymen. If you give up, we will not hurt you,' " said an exhausted Mr. Aziz as dozens of Iraqi soldiers, sunbaked and scraggly, crowded around to see how their immediate higher-ups would explain their surrender.

The spontaneous collapse of Kirkuk offered a telling window on the degree to which Iraqis were unwilling to fight for a regime that bred much fear and little loyalty.

Thousands streamed into Kirkuk during the day, some riding a toppled statue of Hussein. They whacked it with crowbars, sang victory songs, and held US flags.

Much of the world worried that when Saddam Hussein fell from power, Kurds would seize the oil-rich city Kirkuk.

Instead, Thursday, it was a jubilant mix of people - Kurds and Arabs, Turkmen and Assyrians, Christians and Muslims - who took over the city and celebrated the downfall of the regime. They also cheered an unexpectedly rapid success that virtually spared this city of 2 million and averted fears of a bloody northern front where the Kurds and Turkey, which is deeply suspicious of Kurdish ambitions here, might clash.

Kurdish fighters scrambled to fill the vacuum left by the fleeing Iraqi military leadership and Baath Party officials. Government buildings were looted, with people carrying off chairs, light fixtures, and odds and ends of a regime that, people said, took far more from them.

"Frankly, they stole so much from us that this is a kind of revenge we deserve to take for ourselves," says Hussein Ahmed Khan Derwish, standing on a corner as a teenagers wheeled away an air conditioner.

The Kurdish pesh merga fighters came in trucks equipped with megaphones and mounted machine guns. Instead of bullets, they fired off instructions. The Iraqi soldiers put down their weapons and walked out with their hands up. By midmorning, several hundred of them were being leisurely escorted up to the strategic Iraqi bridge town that leads to Kirkuk, waiting for open-top trucks to cart them away.

"We were just sitting there and wishing the pesh merga would come," says Aziz. "There was no point in resisting. We knew that if we'd fight them, we'd probably be killed."

The Hussein regime, it is clear, was not one that many Iraqis have been willing to die for. But that is exactly what many soldiers, it appears, had to promised to do in the weeks before the war again. The surrendering soldiers here say that on Mar. 18, they were all forced to sign pledges that said: "I will not run away. I am ready to die here," recalls Aziz.

"We all signed, and then we all left our posts together," says Mohammed Ali Ibrahim, a young Iraqi soldier from Baghdad. "We had no choice, - they made us sign in order to scare us."

Thursday, fear seemed to be melting away along with the last remnants of Iraqi defenses. By midday, Kirkuk fell to Kurdish forces, sparking wild celebrations.

Among the carloads of average Kurds streaming into Kirkuk was a middle-aged couple who had left their home here 10 days ago, expecting heavy fighting and fearing for the safety of their seven children.

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