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Kurds allied with Baghdad seize key rival town
September 9, 1996
Web posted at: 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT)BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Kurdish troops allied with Saddam Hussein seized control of the northern Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya from rival Kurds on Monday.
Monday's offensive by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) gives Saddam Hussein his broadest sphere of influence in northern Iraq since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The KDP soldiers encountered only weak resistance from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), as they moved eastward toward the Iranian border, sources said. Iraqi forces were in the area but not reported to be involved.
"The PUK had withdrawn and the KDP walked in," said Stafford Clarry, the head of a United Nations guard unit in Sulaimaniya, Iraqi Kurdistan's second-largest city.
About 50,000 of its normal population of 400,000 had fled in the past 24 hours, but the city was quiet after the takeover, he said.
Sulaimaniya was the PUK's last stronghold after it lost Irbil, the area's de facto's capital, on August 31 in a KDP offensive backed by the Iraqi army. Iraqi troops have since pulled back from Irbil but remain in the area.
Also Monday, KDP soldiers took the strategic town of Dokan, the site of a major dam that controls the water and power supplies to the region.
The KDP issued a statement claiming to control the whole of northern Iraq after several weeks of clashes with the PUK.
The United States has said it does not intend to get involved in the dispute between the Kurdish factions, but did offer to mediate between them.
Refugees flee ahead of troops
President Clinton said the United States is helping "those who have worked with us" to flee Iraq amid the new fighting, which reportedly wrecked a CIA effort to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"We're doing everything we think we can to help anyone who needs to be out of Iraq," Clinton told reporters.
He declined to elaborate, but was responding to a question about a Washington Post report Monday that some 200 Iraqi Arabs with links to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency were holed up in a northern Iraq town after fleeing Irbil ahead of Iraqi troops.
A statement by the Iranian Mission to the United Nations said thousands of refugees had already crossed the border from Iraq into Iran, and "tens of thousands are on the move." Iran appealed for international relief to avert a "humanitarian catastrophe."
The Iranian government's top refugee official, Ahmad Hosseini, said a half million Kurds had been made homeless because of the fighting.
"Thousands of Iraqi Kurds are headed towards our borders," said Mahmoud Mohammadi, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman. "Following our humanitarian principles, we accepted Kurdish refugees after the 1991 Iraqi massacre and will do so again."
White House mulls new 'no-fly zone' expansion
The Clinton administration, during the course of the Iraqi crisis, considered and still holds an option to extend the southern "no-fly zone" in Iraq another degree of latitude north, to the 34th parallel.
That would leave a corridor only 140 miles wide available to Iraqi aircraft, and would close the skies above Baghdad to flights by Saddam Hussein's air force.
But such an expansion is not likely in the next few days, according to a CNN source.
The allies responsible for enforcing the northern and southern "no-fly zones" in Iraq extended the southern zone last week, from the 32nd to the 33rd parallel. This was done in conjunction with U.S. cruise missile attacks on Iraqi military installations. The zones are off-limits to Iraqi military planes.
Iraqi activity noted at bombed military sites
Activity has been detected at some of the missile defenses targeted last week by U.S. missiles.
U.S. intelligence analysts are divided on whether Iraq is attempting to rebuild the air defenses or merely cannibalize the sites for equipment that can be moved elsewhere, sources tell CNN.
Washington has also monitored the movement of some mobile surface-to-air missle launchers within the new "no-fly zone" area, sources said.
That raises concern that Iraq may attempt to create what is known as a "SAM trap," a procedure which would attempt to shoot down a U.S. plane by targeting it from several different locations at once.
Another method is to use optical targeting systems rather than radar, and turn on the radar only at the last minute. This is done because radar emissions from the ground are what normally tips off U.S. pilots that a shootdown is being attempted. This technique was used successfully last year to shoot down Air Force Captain Scott O'Grady over Bosnia.
"We have no evidence that Iraq has actually created a SAM trap" said one U.S. intelligence official, "but we are on the alert for this kind of activity, based on the movement of mobile missiles."
The United States has warned Iraq that any threat against U.S. planes could be met with military force.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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