An Iraqi Kurd who welcomed the US war in his country sees arrogance and force crushing chances for freedom. His view: American occupation policy is dangerously misjudged.

Iraqi Kurds have struggled for self-determination for eighty years. Iraq can have no peace – and the United States may lose an ally in the Middle East – if their rights are again denied, argues a Kurd who originally supported the US-led of Iraq invasion in 2003.

In April 2003, Ayub Nuri embraced the change in Iraq with cautious hope. In July, he took the measure of a complex transition. Now, he reports on a time of bitterness and disillusion with the American occupiers.

The arrest of Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of the old Iraqi regime’s most feared and hated figures, is an opportunity for his Kurdish victims to find belated justice.

A few months ago in northern Iraq, Ayub Nuri was barely surviving. Now he is engaged as a fixer/translator for the BBC in Baghdad, and has bought a state-of-the-art laptop plus satellite phone. Through the internet he can communicate with the whole world. In this vivid kaleidoscope of current public opinion in Iraq, he foresees difficult times. But intelligent guys seem to be thriving already.

After decades of dictatorship and war, and amidst continuing social suspicion and insecurity, Iraq has an overriding need: disarmament.

In his third report from northern Iraq, the journalist and guide Ayub Nuri reflects on the complex tribal, religious and ethnic relations that war and liberation have brought to the surface. The intoxicating new freedoms are testing Iraqis’ patience and trust in their new rulers; the US needs urgently to prepare the ground for a democracy in which all the country’s peoples will be secure.

The war against the Iraqi regime is still claiming victims on the northern front, foreign journalists among them. But the sinister activities of radical Islamist forces in Kurdistan equally concern an informed analyst of his homeland.

The northern frontline of the Iraq war does not separate only Kurds and regime forces. Independent Kurdish groups, pressed by Turkish incursions in the rear, are also engaged in bitter fighting with the extremist guerrillas of Ansar al-Islam. A Kurdish observer sends a vivid diary of a many-sided conflict.