One wrong word, one fearful village
Mullah Marwan Ismail Hussein, his beard grey and long and his eyes green and tired, sat in a courtyard outside Ibn Taymiyya mosque and shared a sentiment now common in Khurmal.
You would think, he said, that "a great politician like Colin Powell should have looked at a map".
The mullah might have spoken for much of this village on Iraq's mountainous border with Iran. This is a place filled with worry because of one careless word.
In an address to the UN Security Council on February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell displayed a satellite photograph of what he described as a poison factory and terrorist camp that has received support from the Iraqi Government and al-Qaeda's terrorist network.
The photograph, offered as a reason to consider risking war to topple Saddam Hussein, carried a caption that bore this village's name, Khurmal.
The camp in question, however, is in Sarget, a 35-minute drive away and on the other side of a military front, in territory occupied by Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic group that the United States says is an affiliate of al-Qaeda.
Since the slide was shown, US officials have said they know exactly where the Ansar camp really is. They note the distance between Sarget and Khurmal is only about six kilometres and Khurmal, by far the larger village, was a convenient marker for a public not familiar with the geography of northern Iraq, an area independent of Saddam but largely isolated from the world.
From Washington, a few kilometres was close enough, and to hear US officials tell it, there seems virtually no chance the Pentagon regards Khurmal as a potential target.
But to villagers in Khurmal, the labelling was frightening, and their fear is an indicator of the United States' low credibility when it comes to distinguishing military and civilian targets.
Khurmal, population about 7500, was once a part of a savage front in the Iran-Iraq war. Its environs are polluted with trenches and hidden mines. The village was razed by Saddam in the late 1980s.
Recently rebuilt, it is little more than a cinderblock shantytown, an impoverished municipality on a front between the Kurdish fighters and Ansar. It is controlled by a comparatively moderate Muslim party, Komala Islami Kurdistan, which has resisted Ansar's jihad politics but distrusts the US.
Many villagers clustered into homes with televisions to watch Mr Powell's UN presentation, and said they were astonished to see their village named as the nexus between Osama bin Laden and Saddam.
Long a luckless place, Khurmal now fully expects to be struck by American bombs. "We have seen this kind of mistake in Afghanistan, when the Americans bombarded the wrong villages," Komala leader Sheik Ali Bapir said. "The people of Khurmal are very helpless and very poor. Please do not make any mistake."
Villagers say they support a war to unseat Saddam but are discomfited by the US.
"We are not with Saddam," said Ibrahim Ali Karim, a labourer and father of four children. "But we don't want America to destroy our lives."
Mullah Hussein said he had no faith in the Bush Administration's stated reasons for wanting to change the Iraqi regime. If the US genuinely opposed chemical weapons, he said, it could have attacked Iraq in 1988, when Iraq was using nerve and mustard gas against Kurds in this valley.
Sheik Bapir suggested that if the US attacked, its weapons should be more precise than the words on Mr Powell's slide.
This is a place where the population could break either way, he said.
"If we are hit by fire that is meant to burn Ansar, the United States would turn us from a popular party to a party that is against them," he said. "It is better to have friends than to have enemies."
- New York Times