ARBIL, Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — A lot has hap­pened today. It seems the assault on Bagh­dad has begun, with a num­ber of impor­tant and sym­bolic build­ings now under con­trol of the Amer­i­cans, includ­ing a num­ber of Saddam’s pres­i­den­tial palaces. Per­haps most dra­mat­i­cally for the Kurds, though, the British say they have killed Ali Has­san al-Majid (“Chem­i­cal Ali”) in the attack on Basra. Al-Majid was the man in charge of the Hal­abja mas­sacre in 1988 that left 5,000 Kurds dead.
In the Inter­net cafe where I was typ­ing this, sev­eral young Kurds were hard-pressed to pull them­selves away from Al Jazeera, which was broad­cast­ing the Fox News cov­er­age from inside one of the cap­tured palaces. They gaped and then tut-tutted at the gold plat­ings in the bath­rooms on the screen.
“In four days, Sad­dam will be gone,” said Faisal Adil, 24, a final-year law stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Sula­haddin near Arbil. As for al-Majid, “We are very happy now,” he con­tin­ued. “He was a crim­i­nal. He was a killer, a Kur­dish killer.”