But while the first wave of families to arrive back to this hotspot of sectarian violence have been able to return to their homes, those who followed endure squalor and suffering, forced to squat in abandoned army barracks.

"One day Saddam's men came and said 'You are Kurds. You have one week to get out'," says Jiane Fakeh, 45, on the doorstep of a house overlooking the desert outskirts of Kirkuk, an ethnically volatile and much fought over oil hub.

"When the soldiers came back seven days later, they took all our belongings."

This plump and smiling woman came back to the land of her ancestors in 2003, but in place of their farmhouse, which was torn down by an Arab from the main northern city of Mosul, now stands a huge villa.

The walls are decorated with ornate plaster horses and a carved lookout turret. Towering above the entrance sits an enormous portrait of Saddam, dressed in bedouin clothing, still discernable despite a top layer of paint.

"The old owner was a mukhabarat (spy) for Saddam, but above all, a massive oil smuggler," laughs Fuad Fakeh, 27.

"He thought putting a huge portrait of Saddam outside his house would protect him from the police. The first thing the people did when they started coming back here 20 days after the Americans entered Baghdad, was to paint over the portrait."

Hidden away for 16 years in the neighbouring town of Arbil, now the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, the Fakeh family used to regularly pass by their old home.

"We saw the house being built but we were not allowed to stop or speak to the people there. The whole village was full of Arabs. Saddam's people. Giving them Kurdish land was their reward," says Adnan Fakeh, 27.

"We were lucky because this particular Arab was a crook. He was frightened of the new authorities and he had the money to move away," he adds. "This was not the case for all my friends."

Four years ago they began the arduous process of replanting vegetables and corn, buying new cattle and rebuilding chicken coops.

"Thank you, America," says Ibrahim Fakeh, 22. "Without you, we would never have been able to return home. The Kurds will never forget that."

In the slum district of Nasser, where buildings such as the former headquarters of Saddam's feared secret service have empty rooms and broken windows covered with plastic sheets, smiles are more rare.

The Kurds were poverty-stricken before being driven out and are poverty-stricken still, after 15 years of food shortages and being pushed from one Kurdish region to another, even as far as Iran.

At 33-years-old, Shler Nasser, her face hidden by a white veil, looks at least 20 years older. "We returned to Kirkuk after the fall of Saddam," she says as she cleans an old cooker in the courtyard. "We were from here. We said to ourselves that maybe if we go back we will be given a house... But we were wrong. Life here is terrible."

Her carpenter husband looks for work during the day but unlike other Kurdish regions where construction is booming, in Kirkuk, where political and criminal violence reign, building work is scarce.

"I earn between 150 to 200 dollars in a good month... Hardly enough to eat. If I had known what it was going to be like, I would have stayed at Shamshamal... But now, I don't have enough money to return."

There are thousands of Kurds like Nasser, squatting in stadiums, barracks and abandoned buildings in Kirkuk.

His cousin Goran Omar, 22, is one of them. Six months ago a car bomb exploded around 100 metres (yards) from him, knocking him from his bicycle.

"There are kidnappings, but they do not go after the poor like us. Shootings but above all the bombings; The bombings are the worst... But if you are too frightened, you cannot survive here. So you can't afford to be afraid."