Martin Woollacott (Guardian Utd): More nihilist than nationalist

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Friday February 6

Iraq insurgents more nihilist than nationalist
Sunni rebels must understand they would lose a fight with the Shia
By Martin Woollacott

The city of Irbil in the spring of 1991 had little electricity or drinking water, not much petrol, and a scrappy supply of food. People scavenged for water from the cooling tanks of office air-conditioning units, and the only things you could buy to eat in the city centre for a time were hard-boiled eggs, flat bread and mint, which soon ran out. But the city's Kurdish population was in a mood of extraordinary jubilation, expecting Saddam Hussein to be swept away at any moment.
However, in late March that year Saddam swept back north after he had warned the Kurds that rebellion in the past had "brought only death and destruction to our Kurdish people. If they persist in their game, their fate, God willing, will inevitably be the same as the fate of those who came before them."
Saddam never came all the way north, because of action by the Gulf war allies. The Kurds kept a precarious autonomy, but suffered nevertheless from Baghdad's campaign of bombings, assassinations, and divide and rule incursions. They worried, always, that the Ba'athist regime might one day fully reassert itself.
That anxiety could finally be put aside after a second liberation in 2003. Yet today the Kurds face another dangerous threat to their national project. The terrible bombings in Irbil have slashed into the ranks of Iraqi Kurdistan's relatively small cadre of leaders and experts. They have also reinforced the strong feeling among Kurds that they should control their own security affairs, and their own borders with the rest of Iraq, even if the first claims of responsibility for the massacre suggests that Kurdish Islamists may have been the bomb carriers.

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