Kirkuk

By 9 am on April 10, the day Kirkuk fell, columns of Iraqi troops who were supposed to be defending the city fled to the Baghdad Garage, the main transportation terminal, and stripped off their uniforms and boots. Barefoot, they fled south to the capital. By noon, the looting in Kirkuk had begun. In the multiethnic Arab, Turkmen and Kurdish city, it was primarily the Kurds who smashed the windows of the state-owned supermarket and hurled bolts of pink fabric, carpets, cooking oil, desk chairs and rice over the fence. The more ambitious went to the airport, hijacked Iraqi tanks and careered around the liberated town.

"I used to drive a tank in the Iraqi Army," Nawzan Barzilini, 32, shouted down from his new acquisition. "I came this morning to fight for Kirkuk, but the soldiers ran away." Barzilini is one of the thousands of Kurdish fighters, peshmerga, who unexpectedly poured into Kirkuk that morning long before the Americans arrived. Many, like Barzilini, were not following orders. He said he simply picked up a Kalashnikov and followed his comrades as they rushed in. He argued that liberating the city was his duty as a Kurd and that he was entitled to the spoils of the Baathist regime.

In the early hours, the stunned locals didn't realize the Iraqis were gone until truck after gun-mounted truck of peshmerga in yellow and green bandannas rattled into the city, accompanied by a handful of journalists. I watched the faces of dazed Kirkukis change from shock to jubilation to frenzy as they surrounded our cars, clamoring onto the hood. One man, Jabar, thrust his head in a car window and said in English long out of use, "I love the USA." Children held up bunches of yellow flowers and Kurdish flags as the adults covered their mouths with their hands and ululated.

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