IRAQ: Like many women in northern Iraq, Nahida Mohammad has recently bought several bottles of chlorine and stored them carefully under her kitchen sink. "It is good for cleaning the furniture and clothes after a chemical attack," she explained cheerfully. "Our neighbours have done the same thing."
Upstairs, Mrs Mohammad's husband, Azim, has also been busy. First he sealed all the outside windows of a medium-sized upstairs bedroom with plastic sheeting and masking tape. Then he hung a thick blanket across the entrance. Finally, he brought in supplies of water, dried food and walnuts.
"The biscuits and dates are for my grandchildren," he added. "We'll be able to survive up here for two days."
Across the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, many other families have been doing the same thing. It is not that they are alarmist, they say, merely that they are wearily familiar with Saddam Hussein. He has, after all, used chemical weapons in the past against the Kurds, they remind you.
Mr and Mrs Mohammad's townhouse, with orange trees and a climbing vine in the front garden, is in Sulaymaniyah, one of Kurdistan's principal cities. The frontline with Iraq is a 30-minute drive away. The Kurdish parties that control this self-rule region do not expect an Iraqi ground offensive in the event of an American-led war. They fear something much worse.
Rumours have spread that Saddam plans to fire six missiles into Kurdistan, each fitted with a chemical warhead. It would be a final act of vindictive flamboyance from a man whose burning hatred of Iraq's Kurdish minority is well known.
The Iraqi leader may have assured the world that he no longer has weapons of mass destruction, but the Kurds, it seems, do not believe him.
"Saddam is lying. He can't be trusted," Mr Mohammad, a 62-year-old schools inspector, said.
"The Iraqi people know Saddam Hussein. The Kurds in particular know Saddam Hussein. The international community doesn't know him."
Every night, actors on Kurdish TV give useful tips on how to survive a chemical attack. The authorities in Sulaymaniyah have asked the UN and senior US officials for urgent supplies of gas masks, antidotes and protective suits. Nothing has happened yet.
"You don't have many doubters here about the capacity of this regime to commit evil," said Mr Barham Sali, the region's prime minister, yesterday. "We have to expect the worst."
In the embarrassing absence of any help from the west, the Kurds have been busy improvising. A local factory has already churned out 3,000 "gas masks" - which are little more than simple mouth coverings of the kind used by surgeons.
These have been distributed to civil servants and other government officials.
In the bazaar, meanwhile, sellers of plastic sheeting and second-hand military gas masks are doing a roaring trade.
Cloth masks have a single advantage: they only cost two Iraqi dinars, or about 40 cent.
"You fill the mask with crushed charcoal and salt. This stops the chemicals getting through," said Mr Atta Muhamad Ahmad, the director of the Civilisation Development Organisation, a Kurdish charity making gas masks.
"My son hates it. He keeps pulling it off," one of his colleagues chipped in. "I have to promise him a chocolate egg before he'll put it on."
The local hospital has a few dusty boxes of atropine, the antidote to nerve gas. And it has sent medical staff for training to Tehran, where doctors are all too familiar with the horrendous lingering results of chemical exposure, having treated Iranian soldiers gassed by Iraq during the 1980-88 war.
But there is little that Kurdish officials can do to prevent mass casualties in the event of another chemical strike.
Thousands of people could die, they admit.
Sitting downstairs in his cosy front living room, Mr Mohammad said: "Some of my relatives perished during the attack on Halabja" - the Kurdish village where 5,000 people died in 1988.
The regime in Baghdad, he believed, had hidden supplies of three types of chemical weapons.
They include liquid, ("like a burning rain"), gas ("it kills you in 45 minutes") and nerve agent ("you vomit, and it makes you go blind").
If a chemical missile landed on Sulaymaniyah, would Mr Mohammad and his wife be able to get upstairs in time? "I would grab the grandchildren in my arms first," Mrs Mohammad said. "I don't really care about myself."
She had the same grim opinion of Saddam Hussein as her husband. "My nephews were living in the Karadak area during the Anfal campaign" - when the Iraqi army razed thousands of Kurdish villages in 1988. "They were taken away and disappeared. None of them ever came back."