Letter From Northern Iraq: Waiting At The Front

Last week, on a freezing night in a blacked-out bunker outside Halabja, a city in the mountains of northeastern Iraq, the officers of a Kurdish guerrilla unit drank tea and laid out in vivid detail what they would do to President Bush if he fell into their hands. "I would kiss him one thousand times," the company commander, Sheikh Fattah, said. "I would carry him on my shoulders and shout songs to him," another officer, Farouk Khaled, added. "I would sacrifice one thousand sheep and two thousand chickens for him," a third officer, Mam Siamand, said.

These salutes to Bush-very much unlike the sort of thing that is said about the President elsewhere in Iraq and in the rest of the world-went on for some time. The guerrillas fall under the command of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or P.U.K., the enthusiastically pro-American party that controls most of the eastern sector of Kurdish Iraq, or Kurdistan. They are known as peshmerga, or "those who face death," and they were happy yet anxious; the night before, American cruise missiles had struck the positions of the two Islamist groups who control the territory a half mile to the east. It was midnight, and I was told by peshmerga leaders that a second round of missile attacks would begin in about three and a half hours.
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