Whose Bodies?

Iraq may not have major-league baseball or daylight-saving time, but it has come to recognize an equally reliable sign of spring. Each year, as the snows melt in the lofty mountain passes along the border of northern Iraq, the sporadic, five-year-old guerrilla rebellion of Iraq's stubborn 1,500,000 Kurdish tribesmen flares up again--fueled by fresh weapons and ammunition lugged in by donkey caravan over the mountains from fellow Kurds in Iran.

This year was supposed to be different. The death last April of President Abdul Salam Aref removed the Kurds' most implacable foe. When his brother, Abdel Rahman Aref, took over, he called off plans for a new government offensive, declared that the Kurds were "our blood brothers." Aref freed five rebel leaders from house arrest and conceded two long-standing demands: a measure of local rule for Kurds, and Kurdish-language instruction in their schools. But Aref had a demand of his own. He wanted Rebel Chieftain Mullah Mustafa Barzani to disband his 15,000-man army, called pesh mergas (meaning "those willing to die for the cause"). Skeptically, Barzani refused.

By last week things were back to normal. Shortly after Kurdish terrorists tried to blow up the Iraq Petroleum Co. pipeline from Kirkuk to Syria (damaging it slightly), Iraq government MIG-17s and MIG-19s blasted Kurdish supply routes at the base of Zozok Mountain, near the border, plastering hillside, countryside and villages in the neighborhood with machine-gun bullets, rockets and napalm. Kurdish sharpshooters sat out the attacks in caves, surprised army patrols on isolated roads, swooped down one night on the tents of an Iraqi army battalion stationed near the town of Ruwandiz.

The results were bloodcurdling. "The battalion was completely annihilated," announced a rebel communique. "The aggressors failed in all their attacks. Along the Ruwandiz front, there are more than 1,000 bodies left by the Iraqi army. General Barzani has begged the International Red Cross to propose a one-day truce to remove these decomposing bodies, for the health of the civilian population is endangered." Radio Baghdad told it another way. "The Kurdish rebels," it said, "are collapsing. Sixty rebels were killed in the Barzan area, 75 in Khorman, 80 in Korah and 20 in Koti. The insurgents were so exhausted that they asked for a truce on the pretext of removing dead bodies." But discounting the conflicting claims, it still seemed to have been a major military victory for the Kurds.

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