A Place Apart in Iraq

The Shiite Muslim carpenter and five friends had left the bloodshed of central Iraq to head north toward Kurdistan. The language changed and glances turned suspicious. It was another country, but it wasn't. After police interrogated him and decided he wasn't a terrorist, a contractor handed him a tool belt and a sack of nails.

Like thousands of Arabs from troubled southern and central Iraq, Abbas, who left Baqubah several months ago, has found a more prosperous life in the democratic, free-market Kurdish region. Protected from Saddam Hussein's armies for 12 years by a "no-fly" zone patrolled by U.S. and British planes, the ethnic Kurds in effect raised a nation within a nation. Their clattering cities represent what many want for the rest of Iraq.

"There's a big difference between the south and here," Abbas said, stepping over metal rods and a pile of rocks on an apartment building construction site. "The Kurds are rich and educated. We're tired of poverty in the south. I look around at all this construction and see many, many Arabs just like me."

Authorities say 2,000 to 6,000 Sunni and Shiite Muslim Arabs have migrated to the Sulaymaniya region since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq two years ago. They are laborers, doctors, waiters, professors. There is even a civil aviation engineer hired from Baghdad because the Kurds lacked the experts to build an airport. Reliable statistics are scarce, but estimates suggest that the number of Arab migrants is steadily rising and may total more than 20,000 across northern Iraq, which is home to 3.5 million to 4 million Kurds.

Recent Kurdish history is a lesson in reversal of fortune. Regimes based in Baghdad brutalized the north for generations. Sunni Arabs, who were dominant under Hussein, were taught that Kurds, who are not Arabs, were beneath them; the Kurds' political voice was muted, and hundreds of thousands of them were killed.

Then the no-fly zone, established after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, transformed the region. Kurdish mountain guerrillas traded their baggy pants and bandoliers for the suits of politicians and businessmen, negotiating multimillion-dollar deals in oil, technology and retailing with Iran, Turkey and Dubai.