Preparing to lead all-female units of the Kurdish militia, or peshmerga, women officers study military strategy at a base near Suleimaniya. During the Kurds' long struggle against Saddam Hussein, women at first worked behind the front lines building camps, tending the wounded, and spying on the enemy. But beginning in 1996 they officially took up arms as members of the Peshmerga Force for Women. "Kurdistan is totally different from the rest of Iraq," says Parwen Babaker, herself a minister of industry in the region. "Women ministers, judges, and soldiers are exercising an equivalent role as men."

The chief of a police station on the city's northern end greeted me with the chevrons of a peshmerga major buttoned onto his shoulders. But halfway through our interview, to prepare for the arrival of a delegation visiting from Baghdad, he replaced them with the insignia of a captain in the Iraqi National Army. Most of his men were peshmerga veterans like himself, and he said he had flatly refused a command from the central government to begin replacing them with Arabs.

A similar order directed at the Oil Protection Force was also dismissed by its commander. All 3,000 of the men who patrolled the 384-square-mile (995-square-kilometer) Kirkuk oil field in 2005 were Kurds. But according to a National Oil Company (NOC) source, there were only 160 Kurds among its 10,000 workers, the majority of whom owed their jobs to Saddam's Baathist Party.

The effect was near paralysis. The enormous field was littered with abandoned pipes, rusted pumps, and broken machinery. NOC officials declined to supply any production figures, but the level of activity was visibly low. No significant investments have been made in equipment or technology since before the gulf war, as international energy firms waited to see who would win the struggle for Kirkuk.

"What you're looking at is an oil museum," a staff engineer said. "Everything in it is obsolete." Then he grew somber. "I'd estimate that at least half of our employees have links to terrorists. The rest of us are afraid, every minute of every day."

According to Iraq's oil ministry, there were 642 terrorist attacks on oil fields in 2004, at a cost of ten billion dollars. In the first six months of 2005, terrorists struck at U.S. and Iraqi military targets outside the protected zone more than 12,000 times.

How could the Kurds imagine reunification with Arab Iraq, I asked myself. How could the world expect it of them?

The roads in Kurdistan say all you need to know about the Kurds' view of the future. On a new multilane highway west of Suleimaniya, where Parwen Nadir is employed as an engineer, laborers trucked in from the refugee camps of Kirkuk wield picks and shovels around the clock. They grunt in the fierce sun by day, and by night they toil under the glare of klieg lights, readying the terrain for bulldozers and asphalt rollers. Hundreds of miles of roads are being pushed through the mountains. All of them link cities in Kurdistan to each other or to its foreign borders. The roads south, toward Arab Iraq, are in a state of advanced disrepair. They will not be needed when Iraqi Kurdistan is free.

The aims of the Builders and Warriors converge on those roads; they are united, despite their other differences, in their position on rejoining Iraq. "Deep down, nobody in Kurdistan supports it, from babies in their cradles to the oldest men in our villages," Mam Rostam insisted.

"The Arabs have punished us too much, for too long," agreed Omar Rahan, 64, a shepherd in a hamlet of 80 families in the northern mountains. "They attacked this village in 1977, then again in 1986 and 1991. They destroyed every house, every tree. Every time we came back and rebuilt. You won't find anyone here who wants to be part of Iraq again."

In an informal referendum held in Kurdish-dominated regions during the January 2005 Iraqi elections, 98.7 percent of Kurds voted for full independence rather than reconciliation with Arab Iraq. "Among young people, the figure is probably 100 percent," asserted Rebwar Hasan, 25, a reporter at Hawlati (The Citizen), Kurdistan's largest circulation newspaper.

On sheer practical terms, said Mohsen Omar, a celebrated Kurdish writer, "it's very difficult for Kurds to conceive of life in a reunified Iraq, especially the younger generation." After a decade and a half of Kurdish education in the protected zone, he noted, "almost no one under 30 even speaks Arabic."

Nowhere in the KDP sector of Kurdistan was an Iraqi flag flying or any semblance of Iraq's supposed central authority evident when Ed and I wandered its length and breadth. "I was raised thinking of this as our beautiful mountainous north, but now I see that the Kurds have made it their north, and that we're not welcome," said Inaam Hassan al-Yasiry, 26, an Arab women's rights advocate from central Iraq who was attending a conference in Erbil. "Personally, I still consider the Kurds Iraqis, but they make it clear they don't see themselves that way."

The picture was only slightly less dramatic in the region's eastern sector, thanks to the elevation of PUK leader Jalal Talabani to Iraq's interim presidency last April. In public Talabani has argued for a federal state, with significant local autonomy for Kurds under a national government in Baghdad. But few people in his Suleimaniya fiefdom doubted that his private goal, his fundamental purpose, was to oversee Kurdistan's inexorable drive to full independence.

For his part, KDP chief Masoud Barzani was blunt in his assessment of Kurdistan's destiny: "Self-determination is the natural right of our people," he said after the 2005 referendum. "When the right time comes, it will become a reality."

It would be one thing if the Kurds of Iraq lived in a vacuum, where the prospects for full self-determination rested only on their own tenacity. But they must also contend with their neighbors—Iran, Turkey, Syria—each of which has its own sizable Kurdish community, each of which is deeply hostile to the establishment of an independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq, fearing it would threaten control over their own restless Kurdish people.

"We need our neighbors. We need their trade, their economic cooperation, and coordination on security matters," said Shafiq Qazzaz, a close adviser to Masoud Barzani. "But they all see any aspiration of Kurdish nationalism as anathema."

One result has been a transparently double-tracked political strategy. "Yes, we make a commitment to Iraq, to the process of establishing a federal state," Qazzaz continued. "But at the same time we must also seek another way, in case a truly federal Iraq proves unfeasible."

None of the Kurds' present allies, including the U.S., is likely to back Kurdish independence against the combined will of Tehran, Ankara, and Damascus.

When Barzani's "right time" arrives, the Kurds will face it alone. Neither the Builders nor the Warriors harbor any illusions about that.

"The Americans liberated us from Saddam, but they did it for their own interests," Majid Nadir told me. "History says they'll abandon us, as the outside world always does, when it's in their interest."