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SULAYMANIYA, Iraq (AFP) If Iraq's Kurds initially welcomes US vows to topple Saddam Hussein they are now seeing US military action as a potential double-edged sword.

After years of being gassed, bombed, executed or fleeing in terror from Saddam, the Kurds are wondering whether Washington was intending to leave them to face thousands of Turkish troops who could pour into northern Iraq at the start of hostilities.

Officially, Turkey insists it only wants to forestall a refugee crisis as well as the creation of an independent Kurdish state which could set an example to its own restive Kurd community.

But Sami Abdul Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, sees Turkey seeking to grab back a part of the old Ottoman Empire, from which modern Turkey and Iraq were carved out after World War I.

"This is 19th century expansionism and colonialism," he said, "To allow Turkish forces into Iraqi Kurdistan despite the total objection of our people is a betrayal."

Iraq is home to up to five million of the 25 million-35 million Kurds, who are of Indo-European origin, grace their roots back to the Medes of ancient Persia, and are scattered over the mountainous regions straddling Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.Their social organisation, tribal in origin, has diversified and almost half the Kurdish population now live in urban areas, including several cities of half a million people or more.

As a large and distinct group with their own language and culture they are neither Arabs, Turks or Persians and are therefore seen as a political threat by all four of the countries that they inhabit.

They enjoyed periods of self-rule under Kurdish dynasties in semi-autonomous principalities, some of which survived until the mid-19th century when they were overthrown by the Ottoman empire and Persia.

The Kurdish claim for an ethnic homeland, which dates back to 1695, has been the source of their problems in a history that has been a long tale of harassment, discrimination an occasionally slaughter.

The largest number live in Turkey, where 13 to 19 million have settled, followed by Iran with six to eight million, Iraq with four to five million and Syria with between one and 1.5 million Kurdish residents. Large Kurd communities also exist in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Lebanon and some European countries such as Germany. The majority are Sunni muslim, though some older native religions survive.

The traditional refuge of the Kurds has always been the mountains, with their steep pastures and fertile valleys, but even these were of no avail when Iraqi warplanes attacked them with poison gas at Halabja, in April 1988, killing the population of an entire village.

Following the Turkish defeat in World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Kurdish demands for an independent homeland were recognised under the Treaty of Sevres (1920), but promises received from London and Paris were never implemented. The Sevres treaty was re-negotiated at Lausanne in 1923 and the Kurdish demands were buried.

Turkey and Iraq have been equally ruthless in frustrating Kurdish demands. Ankara banned until 2002 the use of Kurdish language, and even the words Kurd and Kurdish were banished from public discourse, officials preferring to speak of a "mountain language."

Baghdad under Saddam Hussein carried out a genocidal campaign, systematically wiping out towns and villages using guns, planes and bulldozers.

In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) led by Abdullah Ocalan was formed in 1978 and in 1984 launched a campaign for a separate state, plunging southeast Turkey into a civil war, in which more than 31,000 people died before the conflict ended in 1999.

In Iraq, the free area of the "no-fly zone" established by the Allies above the 36th parallel following the 1991 Gulf War briefly became a de factor miniature Kurdistan. However the bitter rivalry between the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the two main political parties, erupted into civil war, in which the KDP allied itself with Iraqi troops to counter Iran's support of the PUK. The Kurdish language, unlike Turkish and Arabic but like Persian and Armenian, is part of the Indo-European group, with four major dialect groups.

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