Kurds welcome a thousand paratroops to mark the opening of new battlefront

A thousand US paratroops were dropped early yesterday morning on to an airstrip at the bottom of a green valley sandwiched between Kurdish- controlled mountains. The landing marked the opening of a northern front against Saddam Hussein.

The troops of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the first of a contingent of 6,000 men previously based in Italy, quickly began digging foxholes in the rain-soaked wheat fields around Harir airstrip, about 30 miles north-east of the Kurdish capital, Arbil. Other paratroops had landed unseen elsewhere in Kurdish areas.

Iraqi Kurdish fighters also crossed into Iraqi government-controlled territory yesterday. How many had been on the move was not clear.

"We have taken the hilltops, and our fighters are 4km inside Iraqi territory," Mam Rostam, a senior peshmerga commander, said.

It marks a critical moment for the war in Iraq. Until last month, Washington had planned to attack Baghdad from north and south in a wide pincer movement. Some 250,000 Americans and British would attack northwards from Kuwait and another 62,000 would move south from Turkey, the latter's heavy tanks smashing through to the northern Iraqi cities of Mosul and Kirkuk.

This plan fell apart, to the visible astonishment and dismay of US officials then visiting Kurdistan, when the Turkish parliament narrowly refused to allow American forces to be based in Turkey. The US then hoped it could do without a northern front, but the failure to capture any Iraqi cities in the south has made a northern front essential.

"This tightens the noose against Saddam's forces battling coalition forces to the south," Brigadier General James Parker, commander of US forces in the north, said. "And it may also serve as a warning to Turkish forces."

The US paratroops appeared uncertain yesterday if they had landed in friendly territory. Within a few hours of landing they had built a small earthen fort, on top of which a soldier manned a light machine-gun pointing along the road that runs past the airstrip.

The earthwork is unlikely to serve much military purpose. Harir is located in the mountainous heart of Iraqi Kurdistan, from which President Saddam's forces withdrew in 1991, never to return. The airfield itself, a grey, concrete strip and the longest inside Kurdistan, was built by the Iraqi army 20 years ago to supply its troops in one of its many campaigns against Kurdish guerrillas.

On top of a hill, beside a straggling village overlooking the airstrip, three American paratroops were standing in the mud, incongruous in sandy uniforms. Their outfits had been designed to blend in with the desert and the soldiers looked surprised to find themselves in a rain-swept landscape more reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands.

The Kurds were determined to make their guests welcome and impress them with the assiduous nature of their security measures. Last week, half a dozen peshmerga and a roll of rusty barbed wire had protected the entrance to Harir, but yesterday Kurdish soldiers were aggressively – albeit ineffectually – trying to push back journalists, photographers and television cameras accompanied by dozens of excited children from Harir village.

The parachute drop had been delayed for one night because of thunderstorms sweeping through northern Iraq. Hoshyar Zebari, a senior official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls Harir, said: "I spent a whole night in the rain waiting for the planes but they never came because of the weather."

But last night they did come and Mr Zebari was overjoyed. It was, he said, the opening of a northern front. But he added that the war in the north would be very different from that in southern Iraq with heavy tanks and artillery playing scant role. He did not think that 6,000 American troops would be enough to launch an offensive against the 100,000 soldiers in the north but, with the help of 70,000 peshmerga from the KDP and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, they could pose a significant threat to President Saddam's government by threatening the cities of Mosul, Kirkuk and Tikrit. The Iraqi army itself has little armour north of of Tikrit.

American officials say that the initial mission of the 173rd Airborne is to provide a threat to President Saddam's rule. It will be a week before the rest of the troops arrive, as well as such heavy equipment that they need. The road to Harir, like many roads in Kurdistan, winds through the mountains and, while the surface is good, the road itself is narrow.

The Kurds already have many squads of peshmerga operating behind Iraqi lines and hint that they have infiltrated the Iraqi army and won over important tribes. They are trying to create the conditions for mass defections, which have clearly not happened in southern Iraq. Politically, they want to establish themselves as essential military and political partners of America and thus stake their claim to power in any post- Saddam political settlement.