About halfway through all this scrambling, Snuffy said, "We've gotta call Galvin and tell him what we're doing."
"Yes, sir," I said.
Then Snuffy looked hard at me. "Talk to me," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Go ahead, talk to me."
So I tossed him a few words.
"I think you're sober," he laughed. "You call Galvin."
I called General Galvin and told him what was going on.
The next day, Saturday, the sixth of April, after a rapid coordination effort with the Turkish government, Jim Jamerson moved his USAFE forces into bases in Turkey. On Sunday, U.S. Air Force transport planes, with air cover from our fighters, airdropped thirty-seven tons of supplies into the snow-covered mountain tent camps.
No one really believed that it could be done in thirty-six hours. But we got fired up, beat the thirty-six, and put the first airdrops on the ground, thanks to Jim Jamerson and his USAFE team.
By Monday, we were able to start looking at the longer-term needs of the mission. At first, it looked like the original mission would require about ten days' worth of airdrops; but we realized very rapidly that the problem was going to be much bigger than that.
We initially concluded that given the force we had, we could extend the immediate mission to provide thirty days of support, while we worked to get a better handle on the situation and came up with a longer-term solution. Parachute riggers from all the services were ordered to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to set up a massive operation to package relief supplies for airdrops. The two CH-53 Navy helos that had carried Baker were ordered to remain to support the movement of the supplies.
Meanwhile, Dick Potter was sent to Turkey with his staff to form a Special Operations component. Potter had commanded the joint Special Operations task force under Proven Force. Now his mission was to get up in the mountains, make an assessment, and then get his SF (Special Forces) troops into the refugee camps, where they could do a great deal of good.
Once this emergency operation was under way, we began planning a more robust response.
What do we do? What do we need? We had no experience with refugees and humanitarian problems. They were all totally new to us. How do we craft a humanitarian operation? Already NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) were starting to head into the area. How do we deal with them? Obviously, somebody senior would have to go down to Turkey to handle that end. Who'd go? We knew we had to send more people down to Jim Jamerson. We also knew this wasn't strictly an air operation. It would grow. But Jamerson's organization was solely designed for air operations. It wasn't going to be able to handle everything else we'd need down there. We'd need a full-blown joint operations center capable of dealing with ground troops, a humanitarian effort, the logistics, the UN, the NGOs, the Turks, and God only knows what else. We knew how to put together a Joint Operations Center, but we'd never done anything like the one this was shaping into.
We were doing all this planning fast and furious, trying to improvise with this unusual mission, when somebody came in and announced, "Sir, there are two Army captains out here. They say they need to see you."
We were too wrapped up in the battle to make sense of the humanitarian task to listen to a couple of Army captains. "I can't deal with them right now," I said. "Maybe later."
Finally, a few hours later, I took a break and went out to where they were waiting. They looked bright, eager, and enthusiastic. A good sign.
"Sir, we're Captain Hess and Captain Elmo," they said, introducing themselves. "We're the EUCOM staff's Civil Affairs guys."
"Okay," I said. "What have you got?"
"Sir, we know what to do in this humanitarian relief situation."
"Oh, great," I said to myself. I didn't think anybody in the world could help with this thing. It was all just totally new. But I didn't want to send them away, either, just in case. And I did like their enthusiasm. "Well, I don't have time for any long discussions," I said.
"Sir, we really ought to brief you," they said. "You need to hear what we have."
"Okay," I said, feeling I'd taken enough of a break and needed to get back into the Op Center, "but give me a minute."
Later, I found a few extra minutes and was able to give the captains a listen. But after they started throwing at me what they could provide, I suddenly realized that they did have something--most of the answers to the questions we'd been breaking our heads over. They had practical solutions for all the operations we were trying to design out of our brains from scratch. They knew what was required in terms of food, shelter, housing; they knew how to set up health-care facilities; they knew how to set up combined civil-military operations centers; they knew how to deal with NGOs and the UN; they knew how to process refugees; and they knew how to organize and staff all this.
"You've got to brief Admiral Smith," I told them.
But when I went to Snuffy, he pushed me off: "I just don't have time for these guys . . . later. I'll deal with them later."
"No, sir," I said. "You've got to hear them now. These guys have got the answer."
"Okay, bring them in," he said, with visible skepticism. But his hesitation didn't last long. "Where the hell have you guys been all day?" he told them when they'd finished.
We took them on then and there, and by the end of the day (Monday) we had a plan. Later, we brought them with us into Turkey, and they were indispensable in getting the operation going and moving it forward.
WITH THE help of Captains Hess and Elmo, we designed a joint task force to fill out Jim Jamerson's operation. Its initial priority was to stabilize the refugees in the mountain camps. Late Monday afternoon, the decision was made to send me to Turkey to function as Jamerson's deputy. Since I'd been in on the planning, I'd be better able than anybody else to get the JTF off the ground and then to make an assessment of how all of it was working.
"You're just going down there for a week to ten days," Snuffy told me. "That's all. You'll stand up these things, make an assessment, see what's needed, and come back."
I left for Turkey the next day.
Seven months later, I came back.
The operation was named "Provide Comfort."
MY FIRST order of business as Jim Jamerson's deputy was to set up a Joint Operations Center at Incirlik that turned his predominantly Air Force command into a joint task force.
I brought with me a few key people from the J-3 staff who physically set up the Joint Operations Center. They took care of all the necessary nuts and bolts--the communications, the internal systems, the planning; and they began to make the assessment of what else we needed.
My next order of business was to connect with Dick Potter, who was just getting out in the field, and see what was going on out there.
My first visit to the camps via one of Potter's MH-53 helos was a shock. In fact, to call the forty-three locations where the refugees had massed "camps" was a real stretch. We had over 500,000 refugees strewn over freezing, desolate hilltops, all with desperate looks on their faces. Most had come with little to help them survive in the snow. Many were city or town dwellers with no experience living in the wild. Nobody had enough clothes to keep warm; everybody was shivering and shaking, not only from the cold but from hunger. Everybody was desperate for food. Children were dying. Mothers were scraping out little graves.
When our two CH-53s made their first lifts of food into the camps, they were swarmed by panicked mothers who desperately threw their babies onto the choppers. (The Kurds were incredibly fertile. We learned later that seventy percent of Kurdish women of childbearing age were pregnant. Infant mortality was high.)
The brutal slaughter along the way by Saddam's troops had only added to their trauma.
The Turkish military had been doing all they could to provide order and security (I have to hand it to them), and they were also providing food, medicine, and shelter, but far from enough to begin to cover what the refugees needed for survival. More important, the Turks were insistent that
the Iraqi Kurds remain close to the border (even when that resulted in many deaths from exposure), forcibly preventing them from coming down the mountains into Turkey. In their eyes, the refugees were an Iraqi problem and not a Turkish problem . . . and they did not want to add the Iraqi Kurds to the problems they already had with their own Kurdish population.44
It did not take Dick Potter long to realize the magnitude of the potential humanitarian disaster we faced. He had originally gone in with a single battalion from the 10th Special Forces Group (commanded by Colonel Bill Tangney45); but early that first week he requested that the entire 10th Group (two additional battalions) be sent into the camps to stabilize these sites. His request was immediately granted; and the rest of the group had begun to ar- rive by the end of the week. This act saved tens of thousands of lives. Though more than 10,000 people perished in the flight from Iraq and later in the camps, this number would have been far larger had the relief effort not have been accomplished so swiftly. The efforts of the 10th Special Forces Group was the most significant contribution to that effort.46
Another pressing order of business was to learn as much as I could about these people: I had never heard of the Kurds before this operation. Fortunately, a U.S. Army intelligence officer, Nelgun Nesbit, who had grown up in Turkey before immigrating to the U.S., was available to fill in our ignorance; she was with us giving expert advice from very early in the mission. Her language capability and knowledge of the Kurds proved invaluable. Nell provided much of the information that we based our planning on. (She later went on to become a colonel in the Army.)
Nell was assertive, self-confident, and knew her own mind. She did not blindly follow the party line, which tended to upset the traditionalists; but I liked her. She got things done.
The point she repeatedly emphasized: We didn't understand how the Kurds' social system worked. As a consequence, we were trying to connect with them in ways that didn't match their culture . . . picking the wrong people to deal with (a fact that I had already started to realize).
In the camps, we initially tried to connect with people we'd have normally linked up with--the ones who spoke English, the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the Western-educated. Many of these types came forward and curried our favor, but nothing was coming out of it. So then we looked for the political leadership--the mayors, the provincial executives. Still nothing was happening.
Nell Nesbit made it plain that we had to forget all of that Western thinking and reach out to the tribal chiefs (the Kurds are a tribal society) and figure out how the tribes were structured.
She brought in a Kurdish schoolteacher who answered my questions about social structure and decision making by mapping out the Kurdish tribal and political structures: how Kurds do things, who makes the decisions in the society. These were important issues for us as we tried to determine who were the actual leaders in the camps.
There were two major political factions among the Kurds. One was the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), under the leadership of Masoud Barzani (the son of a legendary resistance fighter), and the other was the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) under Jalal Talabani, who had broken away from Barzani's group to form his own faction. Each faction had a tribal, political, and geographical base (the KDP--the stronger of the two--had power in the west, while the PUK had power in the east).47 Each had its own militia; and each had been contending with the other--sometimes violently--for years. They did, however, cooperate during Operation Provide Comfort.
The Kurdish fighters (the militias of each faction) were called "Peshmerga," which meant "those who face death." They were tough, battle-hardened guerrilla fighters who'd proved more than a match for Saddam's soldiers, man for man, but had been no match for the artillery barrages, air attacks, and gas attacks they'd been subjected to during their many years of resisting Saddam.
We also found others in the camps, including Turcomans, Assyrian Christians, Chaldeans, and Arab Iraqis . . . all fleeing Saddam's brutal regime. Some were defectors from his own government and personal staff.
DURING THE first week, we were really scrambling. Potter and his Green Berets on the ground were taking an assessment of what had to be done in the camps. We were working to connect with the Turks. NGOs were trying to get in with medical supplies; and the UN had also started to move in some teams. We had to set up procedures for working with both of them. All the while, we were setting up the civil-military operations center. But by the end of the week, we had managed to put all this together and were functioning adequately.
As we were working to stabilize the people in the hills, General Galvin and others were soliciting NATO and international support. Soon we were getting offers of medical, transportation, and combat units.
From April to June, we delivered seventeen thousand tons of supplies to the camps, while Dick Potter's guys took control of the chaos. They organized the camps and ended the "survival of the fittest" atmosphere.
As time went on, we began to realize that the airdrops were not the most efficient way to deliver supplies to the camps. The airdrops quickly provided emergency supplies to the most remote areas; but they were highly inefficient, and very expensive. Bundles ended up all over the hillsides; and then we couldn't control the distribution once they were on the ground.
We knew we had to shift increasingly to helo delivery and eventually ground transportation. But that was easier to talk about than to do. The road networks up in the mountains were ghastly. There'd already been serious accidents that had cost us some people. So before we could switch from air to ground, we had to improve the mountain roads and consolidate the refugees in more accessible locations.
Toward the end of April, Ambassador Abramowitz advised us to contract for Turkish food, tents, and transportation. This was wise advice. The change reduced costs by four-fifths--a huge saving. Turkish food was more in line with the refugees' normal diet (they didn't like the relatively expensive MREs we'd been giving them). Instead of the military tents we'd been forced to use in the camps (also expensive, and we never had nearly enough of them), we were able to contract with Turk tentmakers who took tarpaulins and other ready-to-hand materials and turned them cheaply into usable shelters. Several thousand Turkish truckers, who'd been put out of work because of the sanctions against Iraq (most drove oil tanker trucks), took the big oil tanks off their frames, turned them into open-bed rigs, and went back to doing what they did best--navigate the tricky and dangerous mountain roads. They moved the food and supplies into the mountains. All of this gave a big boost to the Turkish economy--badly hurt by the cutoff of trade with Iraq--which encouraged Turkish support for all of our programs.
The embassy sent us an excellent liaison team headed by Marc Grossman, the Deputy Chief of Mission. Their excellent advice and close coordination were invaluable.
AS WINTER turned to spring and the snows melted, our problems did not ease. Though we had supplied the refugees with food and shelter, the summer temperatures of up to 120 degrees in these locations would bring diseases and water shortages. The weak and traumatized refugee population--crammed into small areas, drinking, bathing, urinating, and defecating into an already contaminated water supply--was very susceptible to disease. And, sure enough, we began to see cholera, dysentery, and other communicable diseases.48
Some of the Kurds from the towns didn't have a clue about basic sanitary procedures, such as: You don't crap upstream and then draw your drinking water downstream. The Special Forces troops saved thousands of lives simply by educating people about adhering to proper sanitary conditions.
The end of the snow cover also meant the end of most of our water supplies. It was clear that we would soon have no water in the hills--a truly dangerous situation. There was only one solution to both the disease and the water problems: We had to move the refugees down from the mountains. We couldn't keep them up there. Since it was clear that they weren't going to be allowed to move farther north into Turkey, there was only one direction we could safely take
them--south.
The initial plan we worked out with General McCarthy was to make an incursion into a valley in northern Iraq and set up huge refugee camps there.
By that time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had set up a liaison office with our JTF. Because they are used to dealing with refugees, they proved to be enormously helpful. Right away, they tossed cold water on the idea of creating refugee camps. "Don't build them," they warned. "They become miserable, and you'll be running them for years. These people have to go home.
"If you have to make camps, make them austere. They should only serve as transient facilities."
Since Washington was not ready to make the political decision to take over northern Iraq, we began to establish a few camps as an interim measure as we worked on plans for a more permanent solution.
After centuries of oppression, the Kurds had learned how to be tough survivors and to keep stoic through their suffering. But, fearing Saddam, they refused to leave the apparent safety of the Turkish border and go down to the new camps. We took videos and showed the Kurdish leaders how they'd have greatly improved quality of life and security in our new camps. They still balked.
But after much persuasion, we convinced them to send a delegation down to check out what we were building.
They didn't like what they saw: We were building the camps like military camps, with everything lined up in lines, grids, and squares. "We can't live like that," they said. Their communities had a very different kind of structure from our "straight line" military alignment. "We build our communities around clusters of cul-de-sacs. We like to have several families facing inward."
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