ERBIL, Iraq — Hamdid Hashim is a merchant of dreams in a time of looming war, and the most powerful dream he sells is of safety.
With a sheepish smile, the bearded Kurdish vendor pulled a strange cloth hood from among the army surplus supplies he hawks at a noisy bazaar in this bustling little city in northern Iraq. It was a handmade gas mask designed to protect against a chemical attack by President Saddam Hussein's forces.
Stitched together from scraps of plastic bags, old nylon and a handful of charcoal stuffed into a crude filter, it looked more like a child's Halloween mask than a lifesaving device. And Hashim openly admitted that it probably would doom its wearer.
"This is just my prototype," he said with a sigh, as if skeptical of his own invention. "I know it isn't good enough. But what else can we do? People are desperate. There are no real gas masks available."
Hashim's pathetic gas mask is as good a symbol as any of the woeful state of disaster relief preparedness in Iraq's northern Kurdish enclave, a rugged autonomous zone of about 4 million people that could face lethal Iraqi biochemical attacks and huge refugee flows in the event of a U.S.-led war to topple Hussein.
According to local Kurdish authorities and the handful of foreign relief organizations based here, emergency planning for war-related catastrophes in northern Iraq is largely non-existent--paralyzed by Kurdish fears of provoking Hussein and by political wrangling in distant capitals.
On the international level, the United Nations and many individual countries have shied away from laying the groundwork for humanitarian relief in northern Iraq because, unlike neighboring states where some disaster planning is going ahead, the breakaway Kurdish region has no official political status.
That murky statelessness has had the effect of severing cooperation between the UN and private aid groups working in northern Iraq. Because most aid organizations are operating in the autonomous region without Baghdad's consent, their presence is technically illegal. Hence, the UN has barred them from participating in crucial disaster relief planning meetings.
Meanwhile, Europe's hostility to Washington's war plans has closed the aid spigot to a trickle in northern Iraq. Traditionally generous European governments have withheld humanitarian assistance to the Kurdish enclave because they don't want to be seen to be paving the way, even via disaster relief, for a conflict they oppose.
The result is an inert atmosphere on one of the most volatile fronts of any future U.S. war against Iraq.
Despairing and preparing
Millions of Kurds are resignedly stocking food, medicines and fuel in their houses even as they go about their ordinary lives. No functioning gas masks or other protective gear can be had in a region where thousands of civilians have died in Iraqi gas attacks in recent wars. And only weeks away from another possible conflict, not a single tent, much less a refugee camp, has been erected in northern Iraq, the scene of a catastrophic exodus in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
"What we are seeing here now is criminal neglect due to stupid politics," said Dr. Giorgio Francia, a doctor with the Swedish relief group Qandil in Erbil, the capital of one of the two Kurdish factions that control northern Iraq. "What we will see during the war will be like the pictures from World War II--complete chaos."
What form that chaos takes depends largely on how Hussein lashes back if his regime collapses, humanitarian experts say. None of the scenarios, though, bode well for Iraq's Kurdish minority.
U.S. backed away
Most analysts agree that there would be no repeat of the gulf war fiasco, in which a failed Kurdish uprising against Baghdad, encouraged by Washington, resulted in the depopulation of vast swaths of northern Iraq. In 1991, 1.5 million Kurdish refugees stampeded to Turkey, Iran and Syria.
"This time around that probably won't happen because U.S. forces invading northern Iraq will keep Saddam's soldiers at bay," said John Fawcett, an American disaster relief expert who recently toured northern Iraq.
But if the Kurds stay put, that doesn't mean a torrent of hungry, scared and homeless people won't be staggering over the narrow highways and goat trails of northern Iraq.
The Kurdish regional government's Ministry of Humanitarian Cooperation and Aid estimates that some 500,000 Iraqis could flood into the Kurdish area to escape fighting to the south. The picture grows even more ominous if fighting breaks out between Iraq's Kurdish factions and neighboring Turkey.
The U.S. is pressing Turkey hard to allow it to launch an invasion of northern Iraq from Turkish soil in exchange for permitting thousands of Turkish soldiers to move into Iraq's Kurdish zone, a deal designed to allay Turkey's fears that an independent Kurdish state would materialize after the fall of Hussein, thus inflaming the nationalist passions of Turkish Kurds.