'This is the day of our liberation!'

Television images of U.S. troops pounding through Baghdad fill Kurds with elation

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq — It's really over. When their television screens filled with pictures of American tanks parked in Saddam Hussein's palace courtyard yesterday, the Kurds of northern Iraq began to believe that 35 years of suffering under the Baathist regime may be ending.

"This is the day of our liberation!" exulted Barzan Hassan, director of a Kurdish museum built in Iraq's former prison in Sulaymaniyah. He was so elated that he couldn't stay at his desk but dashed from his television to the sidewalk to report the news to passersby. He flicked his remote control between channels, bellowing with delight at pictures of the tanks in Baghdad. "There is no discussion: It's over!"

In downtown Sulaymaniyah, streets in the normally bustling bazaar were empty yesterday; everyone stayed in to watch television.

"Today, for the first day, I believe it: Saddam is finished," said Ahmed Jabbat, a soldier in the Kurdish peshmerga.

He was watching Fox News in the Sports Tea House in the heart of the bazaar, where the usual ferocious games of dominoes were abandoned as customers craned their necks to watch the TV perched above the door. When the screen showed tanks barrelling through streets of Baghdad they recognized, the men shook their heads in delighted amazement. When Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf came on, proclaiming Baghdad safe and the American invaders slaughtered, the crowd jeered and cursed at him.

And when the camera panned the gold bathroom fixtures in a presidential palace, they hissed.

"Look how they lived!" exclaimed Bahman Hamid Abdullah, who owns a photo shop. "This man spent millions on his palaces, but not on his people. He told the world Iraqi children were dying of hunger while he spent millions!"

The café's owner, Omar Darwish, said it was standing room only all morning, as men packed in to see the television. The biggest news, he said, was the report of the death of Ali Hasan al-Majid, the man the rest of the world knows as Chemical Ali. (The Kurds call him Ali Chemical, in both Kurdish and English.)

Mr. al-Majid oversaw the killing of thousands of Kurds with mustard gas and nerve agents in 1988. He ordered the brutal suppression of the Shia uprising in Basra in 1991. As Mr. Hussein's cousin and one of his most trusted deputies, Mr. al-Majid was responsible for the Iraqi forces in the south.

British soldiers said yesterday that they found his body in his Basra home, which was bombed over the weekend. Although officials cautioned that the death was unconfirmed, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed, "We believe the reign of terror of Chemical Ali has come to an end."

But even if true, the reports brought little satisfaction to Sulaymaniyah.

"The people of Kurdistan didn't want Ali Hasan al-Majid to be killed; they wanted him to be taken alive and taken to court. ... We are sad that he is dead," grocer Ghafor Rahim said.

"He was supposed to die from psychological torture," added Dilshad Ali, a primary-school teacher. "Or every day, we could come and carve off a piece of his flesh."

"I didn't want Ali Hasan al-Majid to be killed directly like this; I wanted him to surrender, so that those he tortured could decide his fate," echoed Mr. Ahmed, the museum director and a survivor of the 1988 chemical attack. "This was too quick a death."

The men stressed that they wish to see Mr. Hussein taken alive and tried. Mr. Jabbat said the leaders of the regime must be made to account for the victims of the anfal, the campaign of persecution against the Kurds in the 1980s. He noted that many of the names or burial places for the estimated 100,000 victims remain unknown today.

For some Kurds, however, there was a bittersweet quality in watching foreign soldiers plow into Baghdad.

"I'm proud of the American and British troops, but Kurds were supposed to be a part of it — it was our enemy," said Sakar Mohammed Salah, who had the TV on in his barber shop.