Kurds waiting for their war

From a dusty foxhole in the emerald winter-wheat fields of the Bakir Valley, Kurdish opposition commander Chicho Harti saw three men walk toward his frontline outpost. Iraqi defectors? They were coming down from an Iraqi army encampment atop a low mountain ridge about a mile away. “Without doubt, these are Iraqi defectors,” Harti exclaimed excitedly, dispatching three of his fighters to escort the men back to his outpost. “This is a very good day for us. For you, too,” he told a pair of visiting journalists. “You can get some good interviews with them.” But three lonely deserters didn’t seem very much. If the war had gone the way opposition forces expected, entire cities in the part of northern Iraq controlled by Baghdad should have surrendered by now. Thousands of underpaid, underfed, unhappy government soldiers should have left their positions, with their hands behind their heads. Harti and his 100 Kurdish fighters had expected the northern front line in the U.S. war against Iraq to have shifted from the Bakir Valley and down past the strategic cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. Full Story