The peshmergas' will to hold the northern front had been sapped, writes Lynne O'Donnell, in Irbil
News of the death of "Chemical Ali", a hated figure responsible for gassing to death tens of thousands of people, was yesterday the only bright spot in the Kurdish day.
In the immediate wake of a tragic friendly-fire bombing that caused the deaths of at least 18 fighters of the Kurdish peshmerga militia, the reality that there would be no instant and painless liberation from Saddam hung over the residents of Irbil, the capital of Kurdish Iraq.
"We had begun to think that this would be easy, that with such a powerful friend behind us our freedom would come quickly," said Neruddin Mohammed, a peshmerga fighter.
"But when so many of our peshmerga were killed, and we remembered that so much of our brave peshmergas' blood has been spilled in the past, we were shaken by the reality of war," he said.
The war in northern Iraq has bogged down, with a long northern front being pushed back and forth over a few barren kilometres between the Iraqi loyalists and the peshmerga, who are now fighting under the direct command of the US Special Forces.
The regime's grip on the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk remains secure, virtually unthreatened by the American military forces that have accumulated in the north but which lack the armour and personnel to punch past the Iraqi army's lines of defence. Mosul experienced heavy shelling yesterday.
As progress against Saddam Hussein has charged ahead with the push from the south, the peshmergas' will to hold the northern front appeared to be sapped following a number of deaths of fighters and civilians in intense Iraqi artillery barrages late last week.
The pall of despondency became heavier on Sunday, when an American jet bomber mistakenly fired what was probably an anti-tank missile on a convoy of jeeps carrying senior peshmerga commanders and international journalists.
Eighteen Kurds and, possibly, four Americans were killed.
Yesterday, at frontline villages like Bardarash and Kalak, where American-led spotting and mortaring operations had been intensifying over the past week, all was quiet.
The Iraqi shelling of Kurdish positions and villages was back to levels that have come to be accepted as normal, as was the American bombing of the Iraqi defensive posts now back where they were on ridges along the far bank of the Great Zab river.
But as reports filtered through a population obsessed with satellite television of the allied advance on Baghdad, the cloud began to lift, replaced with the hope that these days under the jackboot of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship might finally be nearing an end.
It was the news that the body of the man most hated among the many enemies of the Kurds had been found in his Basra palace after a weekend air strike that struck the deepest chord in Irbil.
Ali Hassan al-Majid, the cousin of Saddam Hussein who ordered the poison gassing of Kurdish villages in 1988, to teach the residents a lesson for rebelling against the regime, was better known as Chemical Ali.
More than 5,000 people are believed to have died in Halabja, a Kurdish village near the Iranian border, and up to 10,000 injured. Long-term health problems, birth defects and sterility are daily reminders for the Kurds of Chemical Ali's ruthless and vengeful act against them.
"One-half of Chemical Ali's body should be given to the Kurds, and the other half to the Shia," said Tara Mansour (27), referring to the Shia Muslims of the south who were also gassed in Saddam's post-uprising pogroms. "It is our right," she said.
Some cars laden with women, children and household goods are beginning to trickle back into the city, an indication of increasing confidence among ordinary people who had fled their homes for fear of bombing and chemical weapons attack that the war may be soon be over.
"People are now not so frightened, especially after the coalition forces occupied Baghdad and Saddam can no longer use his chemical weapons against us," said the peshmerga, Neruddin.
"Before the coalition entered Baghdad, maybe the threat was there.
"But now, even if the rumours that he moved his chemical weapons to Syria are true, he cannot get them back because the Americans have blocked the way."