MUHAMMAD is a waiter in a chicken restaurant. He works 12-hour shifts in a cramped room beside the heat of the grill in Sulaimaniyah in northern Iraq.

It is hot and smelly, and there are few moments to sit and rest. The odour of street waste and exhaust fumes from the rutted pavements outside drifts in to add to the mix, along with the chatter of pedestrians and sound of car horns.

But Muhammad has a recipe to get through each day. He runs a list of men’s names through his head, and dreams about what he will do to them when the city of Kirkuk falls back into Kurdish hands.

“I know the name of every one of them,” he says, “from the Baathist members who beat me in jail in Kirkuk, most of them Da Hazar Arabs (Arabs who have displaced Kurds from their own homes) who live in the city, to the Iraqi officers who tortured me at the military jail in the Arafa quarter. I know them and I want to find them personally. Revenge is my right.”

Muhammad, 26, half- Kurdish, half-Lebanese, was 19 when he was arrested in Kirkuk for dodging the Iraqi draft. His nine months’ imprisonment and torture culminated in the expulsion of his parents from the “Saddam” sector of the city. His mother, Pakhshan Wali, 42, was put in a cell for two days before the entire family were loaded on a Zil lorry and forcibly evicted to Kurdish-held territory in the north.

“My mother was insulted and abused by Officer Walid in the Baath jail in the Muthana Quarter,” Muhammad adds. “He was a torturer and a Baathist, and he’s on the list, too.”

The family, once well-to-do, lost everything — home, land and possessions. Like so many of the Kurds expelled from Kirkuk, they live now in dank, squalid lodgings just outside Sulaimaniyah and have long hoped for the chance to return and reclaim what they lost. As war with America looms, their eyes have returned to Kirkuk and they have more than just repossession on their minds.

Pakhshan is as ardent as her son for vengeance. “I am very eager for the day of revenge,” she says, eyes sparkling.

“My son is going straight back to the ‘Saddam’ and ‘Muthana’ sectors as soon as Kirkuk is taken to get the men on our list. We have waited seven years for this moment.”

Revenge has been part of Kurdish culture for as long as their history of repression at the hands of the Iraqi Government. Most recently, in 1991, between 400 and 700 Baath Party members, Iraqi intelligence officers and secret agents were killed by guns, knives and saws in Sulaimaniyah alone when Kurds seized the Central Security Headquarters in an uprising.

The failure in 1999 of 38,000 Nato troops to halt the vengeful killing of Serbs by Albanians in Kosovo, a province little bigger than Wales, suggests that the postwar cycle of retribution in Iraq will occur on a huge scale. In the north, where the Kurds lost as many as 182,000 people to Saddam’s al-Anfal campaigns of the late 1980s, the spectre of revenge appears to be concentrated upon the potential fall of Kirkuk, the oil-rich city whose Kurdish majority has been thinned by Saddam’s ‘Arabisation’ policy of forced eviction.

With so many Kurdish fathers dead, it is often the mothers who now encourage their sons to exact retribution.

“I want any kind of revenge,” said Asmar Osman, 35, a widowed refugee living in the Kadr Karam quarter of Chamchamal. “The regime killed my husband. He was arrested and disappeared in the Anfal campaign in 1988. I have two sons and my revenge is theirs.” Beside her was her son Asaw, 16. Born the year before his father’s disappearance (and certain death) and now a peshmerga fighter, he was hard-faced and articulate.

“Of course I don’t remember anything of the Anfal purges,” he said. “But I have very bad feelings towards the regime who killed my father and destroyed our homes. It is not just a matter of tradition. There is a feeling of hate in my heart and it grows more and more and asks for vengeance.”

Kadr Karam is something of a cradle for such sentiments. A “collective” quarter, designed for Kurdish families purged from their homes elsewhere, half of the 3,000 families living in the shanty-town buildings, barely 25 miles from Kirkuk, are “Anfalised”, most with a widow at their head.

There are few men on the muddy streets here older than 30, as those aged more than 16 were “disappeared” by the regime during the Anfal period.

The women are very specific about who they “want” in Kirkuk and its rural environs. Arab civilians who took over the land from which the Kurds were expelled should go peacefully, the Kurds say. “They are also a victim of Saddam,” I was told. Arabs indigenous to Kirkuk before the Anfal and Arabisation period seem likely to be allowed to remain. Captured Iraqi soldiers will probably live, as most were allowed to do in the 1991 uprising.

“But Republican Guard, Baath members, mukhabarat (secret police) and the Amn (security services) — we will kill them,” said Mardan Abdullah, 31, who was expelled from Kirkuk in 1991.

He pointed out a place in the fields at the edge of Kadr Karam. “There are ten soldiers of Mujahidin Khalq, Iranians loyal to Saddam, who are buried there after we executed them in 1991,” he said. “There will probably be a lot more soon.”

He scoffed at the idea that a US force could stop Kurds returning to Kirkuk in the event of a war. “America can man all the checkpoints it wants and control all the roads to Kirkuk. There are thousands of tracks around them to the city. No one can stop me from getting back there.”

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