THE last newspaper to roll off the presses at al-Iraq printworks in Baghdad carried a picture of Saddam Hussein clutching a rifle and urging citizens to take up arms against the American tanks rolling into the city.

The newspaper that goes on sale today bears a very different image: the smiling face of Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and Saddam’s arch-enemy, crowing over the number of former regime leaders being rounded up by the Americans.

Two weeks ago, this plant produced four of Iraq’s official state newspapers, from the sycophantic al-Jamhouria, documenting every minor official presidential visit and rendezvous, to Babylon, the state sports journal.

Now the printworks, the only working press left in the capital, has fallen into the hands of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two Kurdish guerrilla groups that fought for decades to free their people from Saddam’s rule. They commandeered the presses after finding them empty on their arrival in the city. The old proprietors had long since fled.

Last night the new proprietors were cranking up the presses to run off the first editions of their new journal, al-Ittihad, ushering in a new wave of press freedom.

“Now the people of Baghdad can enjoy the same freedoms people take for granted elsewhere,” said Sarbast Bamarni, who edited an Arabic newspaper in London until two months ago, when he was asked to return to help with the Kurdish war effort. He agrees that inevitably the paper will follow the editorial line of its Kurdish paymasters, but nonetheless sees it as a trail blazer for press freedoms, opening the way for others to publish their own papers.

Inside the printworks, huge rolls of newsprint, imported from Russia, jostled with old lithograph prints from the last days of the old regime.

“Information Minister: with the determination of the leadership and resolution of the people, we will defeat the aggressor”, read al-Iraq’s last front-page headline from April 9, recalling Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf’s valiant attempt to deny the American invasion even as the rumbling tanks almost drowned his words.

Mr Barmani chuckled as he looked over the old negatives. “Yes, we won’t have to answer to the likes of al-Sahhaf any more. Now the truth will be ours for the telling.”

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