It is harvest time in Kurdistan. Although acres of corn sheaves droop their heads awaiting the scythe, the farmers of northern Iraq sit idle in the summer heat, write Jack Fairweather and Alawa Mahmud
American forces in the region have decreed that the harvesting cannot start until the threat of pitched battles between Kurdish and Arab farmers over the bringing in of the crops has subsided.
Military planners are desperate to avoid any scenes of confrontation between the two groups for fear that any conflict might lead to calls by ethnic Kurds for the setting up of an independent Kurdistan in the oil-rich north.
But in the villages around Kirkuk where Arab and Kurd farmers work shoulder to shoulder there was little sign of racial hatred yesterday, only general boredom at the hours spent playing table football - a regional sport - and a growing sense of frustration as the time for harvesting passes.
Although thousands of Kurds were kicked out of the region following a brutal policy of Arabisation adopted by Saddam Hussein, they have returned to their homes after the war to offer their help at harvesting the crops planted by their Arab neighbours only to be told "to wait for permission from the Americans".
"It's very frustrating," said Ahmed Rahman, a Kurdish man who has returned to his village of Alawa Mahmud after spending 16 years relocated in southern Iraq where he worked in a cement factory. "I have spent every day of the past 16 years dreaming about working on the land again.
"Now I have been told to sit on my hands and wait," he said, demonstrating that there is a diktat from on high. Whether it comes from Saddam Hussein or the Americans, it is still capable of striking inertia into the hearts of the locals.
Rahman stood in a ripe cornfield with his Arab neighbour, Ali Sahut, arm in arm, checking the crop. "Ali was living in my house when I returned," Rahman said. "But we shook hands and agreed to take in the harvest together, and now Ali has moved into a smaller property nearby."
Sahut said: "I have known Ahmed since I was a child. We are brothers. But now we must wait for the Americans. I think they are very scared of any trouble."
In Kirkuk, however, there appeared to be other reasons for American paranoia and the delay in the harvest.
At the town bank troops were distributing the first pay packets to Kirkuk's oil workers, a reminder that, vital though the harvest is for people like Rahman and Sahut, the Americans' top priority lies in getting the region's oil pumping again.
Fifty-dollar pay packets were being handed out, the first money many workers have seen since the start of the war. "This is all the Americans have been talking about \ since they came to Kirkuk," said one technician.
"And now that we have started pumping again they feel it is time to reward us. Although we are happy to have the Americans in Kirkuk many of us are beginning to feel that it is now time they went."
The Pentagon has announced a "significant expansion" of efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, naming a new team of Americans, British and Australians to take up the search.
The Defence Department appointed Maj Gen Keith Dayton to head the Iraq Survey Group, which will try to find the chemical and biological weapons that the United States cited as justification for the Iraq war that toppled President Saddam Hussein. No such weapons have been found.
- (Reuters)