Iraqi Kurds Worry About U.S. Action

WASHINGTON (AP) - Kurds in northern Iraq have created a quasi-democratic, somewhat prosperous life under the protection of U.S. jets patrolling a no-fly zone and keeping Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s tanks away.

But faced with the question of whether that democracy could flower elsewhere in Iraq if the United States launched an invasion to topple Saddam, many Kurds are leery.

They worry that any U.S. military action in Iraq could just lead to a backlash against them by Saddam, who gassed Kurdish villages in the 1980s.

Even if Saddam were toppled, they could just end up with another dictator in Baghdad or — even worse — invasions by Iran or Turkey, said several who attended a meeting this weekend in Washington on prospects for democracy in Iraq.

Before they support any U.S. efforts to overthrow Saddam, the Kurds want guarantees that the United States would not stop until Saddam was overthrown, and that they would have a role in any future central Iraqi government, said Mahmood Osman, a Kurdish politician who lives in London.

"They cannot destroy all their gains, and give more sacrifices," he said at the conference, sponsored by the human rights group Freedom House and the Iraq Institute for Democracy, an organization based in Irbil in the Kurdish north of Iraq.