Human Rights

By Scott MacLeod

Sefika Ali, 20, a pretty Kurdish woman in a soiled yellow dress, was cooking breakfast for her husband and three children when she heard the sound of aircraft. The Iraqi warplanes started dropping bombs on Butia, the village in northern Iraq where she lived. "I felt something wrong in my eyes, and I started to vomit," she says. "We knew what it must be, so we all drank a lot of milk and then we ran."

The attacks on Butia and other Kurdish villages began three weeks ago, and have prompted fresh denunciations of the government of President Saddam Hussein for using chemical weapons in violation of international law. The assaults are part of a drive that has virtually crushed a long-simmering rebellion of the Kurds and punished Kurdish guerrillas -- known as pesh mergas, or "those who face death" -- for collaborating with the enemy during Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. When Iran agreed to a truce on Aug. 20, the Iraqis began to move against the Kurds.

By last week, as some 60,000 Iraqi troops backed by aircraft, tanks and artillery continued the operation, at least 60,000 Kurds had fled across the border into Turkey. In the safety of one of four refugee camps there, Sefika and her family were relatively fortunate. According to some reports, the Iraqis killed at least 2,200 civilians and 250 pesh mergas. Though not all the dead were victims of chemical warfare, the attacks revived ghastly memories of Iraq's poison-gas blitz last March in the village of Halabja, where an estimated 4,000 Kurds died.

The two main rebel leaders, Masoud Barzani of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan and Jellal Talibani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, accused Iraq of committing genocide against the Kurds, a non-Arab Muslim people who make up about 20% of Iraq's 17 million population. After U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed that Iraq was using chemical weapons once again, Secretary of State George Shultz last week delivered a searing protest in a 50-minute meeting at the State Department with Saadoun Hammadi, Iraq's Foreign Affairs Minister. And the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would impose economic sanctions against Baghdad.

The offensive in northern Iraq resulted in one of the biggest setbacks for the Kurds since they started agitating for autonomy decades ago. The European powers that signed the 1920 Treaty of Sevres never honored a provision granting independence to the Kurds. Instead, the region they inhabited in what was formerly the Ottoman Empire was divided among five countries that are now home to 20 million Kurds: Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria and the Soviet Union. Reflecting confidence that it now has the latest uprising under control, Iraq last week proclaimed an amnesty for Kurdish rebels.

Few Kurds are expected to take up Iraq's offer while fear and resentment over the recent attacks are running so high. At a camp near the Turkish village of Ortakoy last week, 7,000 exhausted refugees were fighting malaria, diarrhea and intestinal diseases from their journey. There was scant physical evidence of either chemical or gas bombings, but refugees said those victims had not lived to carry their tales across the border. In a primitive medical clinic, Caglayan Cucen, a Turkish doctor, said he would never forget treating a little Kurdish girl for an injured foot. "She was crying and crying," he said. "Then I realized that there was another sound just outside: hundreds of the Kurds, hundreds of them, had begun to cry with her."

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Ortakoy and Ricardo Chavira/Washington