Since the Gulf War, the modern army of Saddam has been kept out of the Kurdish territory by the threat of aerial action from American and British warplanes based at the Turkish NATO base at Incerlik. The army waits for the opportunity. It is a poised cobra watching for a prey’s moment of weakness.
Some Kurds say that the life, always waiting for the cobra’s strike, is not worth living, that it would be better to sidle up to the reptile and lie under its protection. Other Kurds say that the comforting words from Washington and London are hollow, spoken from toothless mouths. And a few Kurds say that the present time offers the last best hope of a military thrust to recapture their old capital city of Kirkuk.
By the frail light of a small torch, a child was buried beside the road going south to Kirkuk, her legs taken off by a V69 Italian-made anti-personnel mine laid by Iraqi army sappers.
The girl’s legs had been severed at the knees when her running footfall triggered the tripwire. She had been gambolling ahead of her father towards a meadow of yellowed grass where the family’s four goats grazed. He had known there were mines close to the small collection of homes that made a village, but it was the first day of April, it was eleven days after the sparse celebration of the Kurdish New Year, Newruz, and the winter fodder for the goats was exhausted. They must find their own food if they were to fill their udders and give the family the milk of life. Had there been a hospital close by, had there been a four-wheel-drive vehicle in the village to take the child to it, then a life might have been saved. As it was, the child had died of trauma and blood loss.
Her father and brothers paused by the pit they had dug beside the road under the shelter of battered, stormtossed, leafless mulberry trees. The father slid down into the hole on his backside, and the eldest of the brothers took the small wrapped bundle from the mother and passed it to him. The tears ran on the father’s cheeks, dribbled with the rain on his face, and all the time the mother cried the dirge that was familiar to all women, all mothers, in northern Iraq.
‘Saddam! Saddam! Why do you sow mines in our fields?
‘Why do you hang our sons, why do you bulldoze our villages?
‘Why do you bury us alive?… We beg you, America!
‘We beg you, United Nations! We beg you, God!
‘Help us and save us…
‘For our lives are destroyed, and we have become beggars.’
The small convoy of vehicles passed her as she sat swaying her shoulders and crying her song. Her hands were folded tightly against the emptiness of her chest, where she had held her dead, desecrated child. The vehicles were travelling slowly along the rutted track on dulled sidelights. The torch that lit the burial of her child, with a weakened, failing battery, threw a wide cone of grey light into the first dun-painted, mudscarred truck that passed her. She did not recognize the man who drove, or the men squashed into two rows of seats behind him, but she recognized the young woman sitting beside the driver. The mother had never before seen the young woman, but she recognized her from the rumour slipping through the villages. It had been brought, as surely as the leaves of autumn eddied from the orchards, by nomads. She saw the young woman’s face, the combat fatigues on her upper body, the rifle against her shoulder, and the chest harness to which the grenades were hooked. All the mothers in her village had heard the whispered rumour of the young woman who had come from the north, many days’ walk away, where the mountains were highest.
She shouted at the limit of her voice: ‘Punish them. Punish them for what they have done to me.’
More vehicles passed.
Her child’s father and brothers were pushing the clods of wet soil and the stones back into the pit. Then the father stood and held up the torch so that the brothers might better see stones to heap on top of the shallow grave to protect it against wild dogs and foxes.
There should have been a man of God there, but they lived too far from any mosque to receive that comfort. There should have been neighbours and friends and cousins, but they were too close to the positions of the Iraqi murderers and the front line of their bunkers for any but the close family to venture into the darkness. The boys gasped under the weight of the stones.
The light of their father’s torch caught the last vehicle in the convoy. It had a closed cab and an open back in which were huddled men in fighting clothes who clutched weapons to their bodies. The men saw the mother, they saw the father and the brothers, they saw the stones that marked the grave, and all but one raised their fists, clenched, in a gesture of sympathy.
One man, squatting in the back of the last vehicle, was different. He gazed at the mother but his hands remained firmly on the straps of a many-coloured container, green and black, white and deadened yellow, and his rucksack. The beam of the torch caught the smeared lines on his face. He was different because he was not of their people. The mother saw the strange garment that the man wore, bulky, covered with the little strips of hessian net in the colours of the hills and earth, foliage and stones among which she lived. She thought he came from far away.
‘Kill them,’ she shouted into the night. ‘Kill them as vengeance for taking my child.’
And the line of lights drifted into the distance. She knew nothing of history and nothing of politics, but she knew everything of suffering, and she knew what the rumour had told her of the young woman who had come from the distant north.
When his bed was cold, long after his woman had left it, the shepherd crawled from under the blankets.
He heard the sound of the generator throbbing, and he smelt the rich coffee that she had already placed in the pot for heating. The fire was lit but its warmth had not yet spread through the room. With the coffee was the scent of bread baking. She worked hard to look after him, but he deserved a good woman because he had brought her the electricity generator and fuel for the fire, ground coffee and sugar and food and money to spend in the bazaar in Kirkuk away beyond the checkpoints and road blocks. He gave her the money to buy carpets for the floors, and bedclothes and drapes for the walls, which were dry under a roof of new corrugated iron.
He waved to her and she scurried from the stove to the window and pulled back the drape. He saw the slow-moving clouds against the light gold sky of the dawn. He knew the colour of gold, the best gold, because sometimes he could buy it at the bazaar in Kirkuk. It had been a bad night, but the storm buffeting his home had moved on. The shepherd usually slept well. He was a contented man. He had a fine house, a fine flock of sheep, he had a generator for electricity, he had food, he had an old biscuit tin filled with dinar notes issued by the Central Bank that he kept against the wall under his bed, and a smaller box beside it held four chains of eighteen-carat gold… and he had their equipment.
By taking their equipment, the shepherd had sold himself.
He pulled on his loose-fitting trousers, knotted the string at the waist, then drew over his head that week’s shirt and a thick woollen sweater, gently unravelling where the thorns had plucked at it, then a heavy coat. He sat on the bed and slid into his still-wet shoes. He wound a turban loosely around his head. From a hook beside the door he took the Kalashnikov and the binoculars that had come with the equipment. She gave him his first coffee of the day in a chipped cup. He grunted, drank it, belched, and returned the cup to her. He lifted an old television set from the floor – wires snaked from it across the room and climbed the walls before disappearing into the ceiling – pressed down the button and waited for the picture to form. It showed, in black and white, a steep-sided valley, and at the bottom of it were the gouged lines of a vehicle track. It was the same each day, and each night, deserted. But he checked it many times each day. The shepherd was conscientious because he valued the things given him when he had sold himself.