The last year was a good one for Iraqi Kurds. It ended in carnage, writes Graham Usher in Arbil They were greeting well-wishers at the start of the Muslim Eid Al-Adha feast in Arbil, a town in the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq. Sami Abdul-Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdish Democratic Party government that runs the northern slice of the zone, stood on a dais in his party offices. Shawakan Abbas, senior leader of the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (which runs the southern zone), stood on a dais in his. At 10.15am on 1 February two men entered the offices, dressed in Kurdish clothes: winter coat, baggy trousers, perhaps a sash. They walked past the elevated stage of the leaders, shaking the hand of each dignitary in turn. As they moved to the right of Rahman and Abbas they detonated. The synchronicity was almost to the second, even though the offices are miles apart. The victims were similarly preconceived. Sixty were killed in the PUK office, another 50 or so in the KDP, including many senior and middle rank leaders. Two hundred were wounded, with dozens ferried to makeshift clinics in people's homes for want of doctors and beds in Arbil's three hospitals. Some Kurds likened the political loss to the human one visited on their people at Halabja in 1988, when Saddam Hussein's airforce crushed the Kurdish resistance by killing 5,000 civilians with poison gas. "The blow to our movement is enormous," said Goran Aziz Hariri, a medical student, who was at the KDP reception. "I went in to rescue the bodies. I saw most of my leaders dead in their chairs: Neirman Hamad, the police commander, Mahmoud Helo from the Finance Ministry, Dr Zadash, son of Mahdi Hoshnow, the second man in the Arbil governorate. These are men who lived in the mountains and fought the Ba'athist regime. When they returned in 1991 they helped us rebuild our villages, organise our first elections and establish our parliament. They led us to where we are today." Outwardly KDP and PUK spokesmen are at pains to say such attacks will only unite their divided leaderships and strengthen their cause "within a united and democratic Iraq". "Events like this don't scare us," said Mustafa Khader, a peshmerga guard at the KDP office. "We've had massacres before." He is standing beside the spot where the bomber exploded: a slick of black ash floating on blood. Above there is a fan, the blades peeled back by the heat. "We will continue to fight until we reach our goals." Which are what? "A federal Iraq," he answers, with gritted teeth and a little coaching from senior KDP official. But inwardly every Kurdish leader knows that this will steel their people's desire not for a new reintegration within the rest of Iraq but for the older demand of separation and independence from it. For nearly 13 years Arbil and other towns in the Kurdish autonomous zone felt free (save for the occasional bloodletting between the KDP and PUK) -- shielded from Saddam's wrath by the American-British no-fly zone. In this attack's aftermath, nearly one year after Saddam's fall, Arbil no longer felt free. It felt scared. There were police checkpoints every score metres, with the peshmerga militiamen leafing through identity papers, clanking their machine guns. A long tailback of vehicles waited to enter the town, the police checking every car. Few people were on the streets. Outside Arbil's Emergency Hospital for War Victims the gates suddenly lock shut. "You'd better get out of here," says a doctor. "A passing car has just opened fire on the hospital." As for those who perpetrated the killings, the Kurds gave their usual roll call of enemies. A previously unknown group "Ansar Al-Sunni" claimed responsibility for the attacks. This, says a PUK official, is "is a cover for Ansar Al-Islam which is a cover for Al-Qa'eda". His men have arrested a Yemeni national from a hotel in Kirkuk wherefrom, he says, at least one of the bombers set out. "We will get the information from him, if the Americans let us." But other Kurds suspect older adversaries, like Ba'athists at home or surrogates acting at the behest of Turkey or Iran abroad. There are rumours that a day before the attacks a Sunni imam from Hawaja near Tikrit sermonised that to "kill a Kurd is the same as killing an American". What unites "all our enemies" is opposition to a separate national identity for the Kurds in Iraq, says Hariri. "The attacks were a message to us to forget our dreams: that we will get neither federation nor independence," said Hariri. But those dreams are not going to die. On the contrary, the blood and ashes in Arbil will serve only to rekindle them: "The attacks on our leaderships not only strengthen our desire for independence. For most Kurds they are making it a necessity."
