SULEIMANIYAH, Iraq -- The Kurds have a national flag of their own. The tricolor of red, green and white, with a sun at its center, is the emblem of a people who, numbering 40 million, are the Middle East's fourth-largest ethnic group.

Their mountainous heartlands describe a great arc through some of the richest and most strategic regions of the four states -- Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria -- among which they are divided. In 1920, the Treaty of Sevres recognized their right to statehood. But the rise of Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk and the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne put paid to their dreams. Since then, they have been rising in revolt after bloody, uncoordinated, unavailing revolt. In 1946, the flag flew in the small and short-lived Mahabad Republic before it was suppressed by the shah of Iran. But nowhere has it officially flown since -- not even here, in "liberated" Iraqi Kurdistan.

It is now 10 years since the Iraqi Kurds, or a large segment of them, acquired a sort of self-mastery. It was the fruit of a long struggle and great suffering whose climax came with the chemical weapons onslaught that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein unleashed on them in the 1980s. But, in the end, and typical of the Kurdish experience, it was great upheavals beyond their control that finally brought their self-ruling enclave into being: Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the great Kurdish and Shiite uprisings, the panic flight of an entire people, and the creation of the Western-protected "safe haven."