DIANA, Iraq — The northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk is like a grenade primed to explode in Saddam Hussein's clenched fist.
His army has blocked most escape routes in an effort to stop civilians from fleeing. His security forces are going door to door rounding up young Kurdish men in a campaign to prevent an uprising, according to residents who escaped.
Interviewed in villages and shelters many miles apart in the Kurdish-ruled autonomous region of northern Iraq, Kurds who escaped Kirkuk by bribing soldiers or hiring smugglers give consistent accounts of what has been happening in the oil-rich city of 400,000.
Iraqi officials, they say, are visiting every home in Kurdish districts of Kirkuk to check the names of anyone inside against those on government-issued ration cards for U.N. food aid. Anyone whose name is not listed on the cards is loaded into a police van and hauled off for interrogation -- or worse, the refugees said.
Nazanin Mohammed Ali now lives here in the village of Diana in a school classroom with 13 other people, most of them her children. She said she paid smugglers in Kirkuk to sneak herself and 10 of her children past Iraqi army lines Wednesday, the day Iraq closed off the city.
They charged her $4, only slightly less than an Iraqi government worker's monthly salary, for each child. She had to leave her husband and two sons, ages 17 and 23, behind. She said soldiers won't let Kurdish males of fighting age leave the city, which has been targeted by coalition airstrikes for several days.
"We had to leave the men at the checkpoint," Ali said, sitting on the edge of a school desk bench that she shared with four of her children. "Police and soldiers are searching the lanes, and coming to our houses.
"They search every house, and then go to the roofs, where they stay. It's just like a base for them. They force people to bring them food and water."
The only furniture in the Alis' new home is six desks, where the family stacks small, knotted cloth bundles holding the only belongings they were able to carry to this mountain refuge, about 90 miles west of Irbil.
They line their shoes up on the windowsill and walk barefoot on icy cold floors so that they won't track thick mud in from the streets and soil the floor where they sleep.
Several refugees, and the officials who register them here, say Iraqi authorities gave little warning before declaring the roads from Kirkuk closed at noon Wednesday. By then, the security forces' search operations were well underway, Ali said.
