Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  I explored the university, looking for young Iraqi Kurds to talk to. As I asked around for the office of the university president, I encountered a student who seemed eager to speak with me. His name was Omar. Despite the blistering heat, he wore long pants and a long shirt buttoned all the way to the top. He conducted himself in a very professional manner. This is something I would notice about Kurdish youth: They have very adult mannerisms and they take themselves very seriously. Many will put on a shirt and tie just to go to the market or run an errand.

  We made small talk about the heat, but soon turned serious. He asked me how I found Iraqi Kurdistan and where I was from. I asked him to describe the atmosphere in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region immediately after September 11. He explained that while people in the Sunni and Shi’a parts of Iraq believed September 11 was the punishment from God, the Iraqi Kurds felt the experience and the grief was shared because they, too, had experienced suffering at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Initially I was confused, because Omar was making a distinction between the Iraqi Kurdistan Region and the Republic of Iraq. I would learn that most Iraqi Kurds do not see themselves as part of a larger Iraq; being part of Iraq has always been a temporary acquiescence for them, an unfortunate detour from a road that will ultimately lead to an independent Kurdish state.

  Eager to get the Kurdish reaction to the sequence of events that followed 9/11, I asked about popular perceptions after the United States went into Afghanistan. Omar paused for a minute and then, after letting out a sigh, explained that at first they felt safer in Iraq, but not long after the liberation from the Taliban began, many Al-Qaeda fighters fled Afghanistan and set up camp in Tawela and Biyara where they collaborated with members of the extremist Sunni group Ansar al-Islam.

  After chatting with a couple dozen students and getting a sense of what I would need to see while in northern Iraq, I had the chance to sit with the president of the university, Dr. Sadiq. Dr. Sadiq’s office had fancy rugs and couches and an elegant desk. He had neatly combed gray hair and wore a dark gray suit and bright orange tie. There was an air of confidence about him; I could tell that he was proud of the university and what he had contributed to its success.

  Dr. Sadiq had a tremendous amount of confidence in the students of Selaheddîn University. He described them as innately political, channeling their considerable activism and spirit into student unions, demonstrations, civil society organizations, and other ambitious endeavors. With an air of pride, he predicted that it is the students who will bring about the reforms in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. His premonition didn’t surprise me, as these students today are learning about democracy and shaping their modern identity around what this means to them. As a result, young people are active in getting involved. In Arbil alone there are at least 183 nongovernmental organizations, some of which are a couple of guys sitting in a garage, but many of which are legitimate organizations. These youth are very ambitious. They have a vision, they love their country—Kurdistan—and they have a developed sense of citizenship. As a result, they believe that in order to be good citizens, they must embrace the idea of democracy. For young Kurds, embracing democracy is synonymous with making a contribution. In this supposedly prosperous part of Iraq—where unemployment is as high as 60 percent—youth have the free time to channel this ambition toward volunteering and civic entrepreneurship.

  I had been invited to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region as a guest of the Kurdistan Regional Government. I initially had concerns that such hospitality was a ploy for me to be a mouthpiece for the Kurds, but this was not the case. I talked to whomever I wanted and if I needed help, the government was there to provide it for me. They didn’t interfere at all; in fact, they seemed eager to hear my findings on the youth. The foreign minister said to me on a number of occasions that the youth are of vital importance and that the government wanted to fully understand their needs and their thinking. So before setting out to meet the young people building Kurdistan’s dynamic civil society, I took advantage of the access I had been granted and paid a visit to the minister of human rights. I wasn’t quite certain what was in the portfolio of this ministry, so Hachem, an aide to the minister, offered to show me.

  Hachem was in his mid-twenties and his desk was decorated with the Kurdish flag, as well as the flag of the Ministry of Human Rights. He sat in front of a large, modern computer monitor. He told me to come over to his side of the desk so he could show me some of the ministry’s work. As I huddled with him around his brand-new Dell computer monitor, he reached into a box and pulled out more than twenty DVDs. He popped in the first one and told me that it was called Crimes Under Saddam and was designed to show the brutality of punishment under the former Iraqi dictator.

  As we went through image after horrific image, I thought I was going to be sick. The images and videos Hachem showed me were eerily reminiscent of what I had seen at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I watched three young people with their hands tied behind their backs get thrown off the top of a three-story building; the torturers then picked the bodies up and did it all over again. I watched repeated beatings, firing squads, and whippings. I watched a man get his hands surgically removed for dealing in American currency. I watched tongue amputations take place as punishment for speaking out against Saddam. I watched the Fedayin al-Saddam sit a man next to another man who had already been blown up and place an explosive device in his pocket; the man’s last words were, “Is this how I am going to die?” I watched executioners make four or five tries to decapitate a man, finally using a smaller hand knife and violent sawing gestures to complete the task; I saw the killers then hold the severed head up in the air.

  Hachem wanted me to see what Iraqi Kurds had lived under before the Kurdish uprising in 1991, and what the rest of the Iraqis had experienced up until Saddam was overthrown. After we’d made it through the first batch, Hachem pulled out about twelve more DVDs, and we watched all or part of each of them.

  When one sees the torture, brutality, and barbarism to which they were once subject, and one compares that horror to the peace and hopefulness of present-day Kurdistan, it is not difficult to understand why they look so kindly upon those they view as responsible for deposing Saddam’s murderous regime.

  Of all the images shown to me by Hachem, the footage of Halabjah had the greatest impact on me. On March 16, 1988, just one day after a combination of Iranian and Kurdish forces seized the eastern Iraqi city of Halabjah, Saddam Hussein and his trusted general “Chemical Ali” gassed the city, killing approximately five thousand people. Many of these were women and children. I watched video footage of people running from the chemical gas and of children frozen by the poison. I heard tapes of screams and saw skin melt off people’s faces. I watched children with their hands in the air and mothers holding on to their daughters. It was all so horrible.

  The March 1988 gassing of Halabjah was part of a larger campaign by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds of Iraq. The Kurdish youth in Iraq today were born into the most brutal phase of Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign, a period in which Saddam didn’t discriminate between innocent civilians and soldiers, or between men, women, or children. Beginning in 1978, but taking on its most organized and brutal form in 1987 and 1988, Saddam’s Anfal Campaign still torments the youth of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, whose earliest memories are of running from Saddam’s troops. At the order of Saddam Hussein, more than five thousand Kurdish villages were emptied and more than two hundred thousand people were arrested, many of whom either disappeared or were killed. Among the most brutal of these campaigns was the extermination of eight thousand Barzani tribesmen. Many of the mass graves that were uncovered during Operation Iraqi Freedom provided evidence of Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign.

  The latter phase of Anfal offers the mostly deeply embedded images and horrific memories for young Kurds. In February 1988, the final year of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein launched the first of what would be eight major Anfal
operations. As the Iranian forces, aligned with Kurdish forces, gained positions on the periphery of Baghdad, Saddam sought not only to quash the encroachment, but also to punish the Kurdish people, who he believed were both insubordinate to his regime and inherently inferior to the Arabs who ruled Iraq.

  While the Halabjah massacre is the most notorious of the Anfal campaigns, Hussein also orchestrated extermination campaigns in Garmiyan, Koi Sanjaq, Lesser Zab, Bahdinan, and Bazi Gorge. In most of these cases chemical gasses were employed by the Iraqi army and women and children were not spared. After six months and eight campaigns of Anfal operations, it is believed that as many as two hundred thousand Kurds, including many women and children, were brutally slaughtered. Just three days after arriving in Iraq, I had the opportunity to visit Halabjah. The journey was nearly five hours from Arbil. I drove across Iraq, visiting Sulaimaniya and other towns and cities on the way. Given the notoriety of Halabjah, I expected a big city. Instead, it is a quiet, melancholy village, a living ghost town. It reminded me of the Rwandan town of Murambi, which I’d visited in December 2002. The bodies of some of the sixty thousand people massacred in Murambi during the 1994 genocide were littered around the classrooms they died in. I felt the same pervasive, profound sadness in Halabjah.

  As I drove into the city limits, there was a billboard that read “Welcome to Halabjah.” Depicted on the billboard were images of dead babies and gassed Kurds. All of Halabjah was a reminder of what had happened on that fatal day in 1988. There were monuments comprised of mortar shells; there was a cemetery with five thousand tombs commemorating the victims. In the center of the city was a large monument to the gassing of the Kurds; posted next to it was a giant blue sign that read “It’s not allowed for Ba’aths to enter.” Although the Kurds have had virtual autonomy since the 1991 uprising, there always remained a fear that Saddam Hussein could come back in; the Ba’ath presence still lingered at the periphery of Kurdish life. The youth in the Iraqi Kurdistan region believe that with Saddam out of the picture, they are now one step closer to their dream of Kurdish independence. Whether or not this is true is yet to be seen, but young Kurds give the United States credit for taking Saddam out of the picture.

  The trauma, pain, and stories of brutality of the Anfal campaigns are still deeply embedded in the minds of Iraqi Kurds. For older generations, Anfal was the darkest of a prolonged period of misery, brutality, and fear under Saddam. For the younger generations, it represents what they have been trying to get away from since their childhood. In fact, each time I met a young Kurd in Iraq, the first two things he or she would tell me about were the Anfal Campaign and how Kurdistan was different from the rest of Iraq. These two issues form much of the Iraqi Kurdish youth identity. And when they spoke of Anfal, I noticed a lot of similarities with the youth of Iran. Both had experienced brutal violence and trauma at the earliest stages of their lives and both want change, but not at the expense of violence and instability. I suspect this aversion to danger and chaos is one of the main reasons why the Kurds have so warmly embraced the American presence in Iraq. While battalions of soldiers landed in Iraqi Kurdistan, the fighting has taken place in the Sunni and Shi’a regions of Iraq. In fact, the Kurds take tremendous pride in the fact that Americans parachuted into the north because it was a safe entry point for them into Iraq. The few military campaigns that did take place in the north, most notably the eradication of Ansar al-Islam from the northeast, were welcomed because they actually made the region more stable.

  Ansar al-Islam, the Supporters of Islam, is a Sunni terrorist group with a strict Sunni Islamist interpretation of Islam. It was established in December 2001 as the union between two extremist Kurdish groups: the Islamic Movement in Kurdistan and the Soldiers of Islam. Led by Mullah Krekar, Ansar al-Islam based itself in the northeastern part of Iraq and fortified villages along the border with Iran. Within weeks of coming to power in the region, the group began cleansing the northeast of all cultural relics, shrines, and artifacts and all residents were forced to convert to Islam, with harsh punishments for those who refused. The group’s methods were brutal; they engaged in torture, mutilation, and decapitation.

  The membership of Ansar al-Islam included numerous fighters who had fought against the Soviets during the 1980s in Afghanistan. With alleged links to Al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam has received funding from Osama bin Laden and also created a safe haven for notorious terrorist leaders infiltrating into Iraq, most notably the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The group also allegedly had ties to Saddam, and for American war planners, Ansar al-Islam was the link between the Iraqi dictator and Al-Qaeda.

  In 2003, following the American intervention in Iraq, the American government helped Kurdish forces root out Ansar al-Islam. Though the operation was successful, most of the Ansar al-Islam fighters escaped into Iran and eventually found their way back into Iraq, where they have since joined the Sunni insurgency. While the insurgency has taken place largely outside of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, the few attacks that have managed to penetrate the heavily guarded territories of northern Iraq were believed to have been carried out by remnants of Ansar al-Islam. When I visited the former Ansar al-Islam towns of Tawela and Biyari, I expected to encounter fundamentalist populations. I had been to Afghanistan the previous February and found that even after the Taliban had left, their influence remained: The people were reserved, and many women still wore the blue burkha. But neither Tawela nor Biyara was like this.

  Tawela was the more northeastern city of the two, tucked into the base and hills of a natural border between Iraq and Iran. The surrounding hills were cluttered with shacks along the cliff, and every single house, regardless of its size or location on the cliffs, had a satellite dish. The central market was situated around a mosque adorned with a turquoise dome and four tall, thin minarets. After Zarqawi came to Iraq, this mosque was his first place of worship.

  Despite its link to the infamous leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Tawela wasn’t a fanatically religious city. I saw a group of boys listening to Western music on a boom box. There were girls walking around only marginally covered. Everybody whom I met in this former extremist outpost was peaceful and hospitable.

  For the Iraqi Kurds, Ansar al-Islam was the last nuisance in a string of violence that had plagued their region. They have now developed a community that is relatively safe, democratic, and egalitarian. Politically speaking, there are few, if any, places like this in the Middle East.

  Even so, social and recreational progress is moving at a far slower pace. Iraqi Kurdistan doesn’t have the same wild and crazy parties found in Iran and Lebanon; it doesn’t even have the submissive but quietly insubordinate Sunni youth population found in Syria. Having been to Halabjah, having heard the stories of the civil war, and having visited Biyara and Tawela, I understood some of the reason for this docility. The Iraqi Kurdish youth have had a horrifically violent and turbulent upbringing. Iran had the Iran-Iraq War, Lebanon had the civil war, and Syria had Hama, but Iraq was somehow different. Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian grip on society, which for the Kurds lasted until 1991, was of a different breed. They grew up socialized into his cult of personality and brutality. As a result, the first decade of their lives was emotionless, uniform, and void of free thinking. In the words of one Kurdish student from Arbil, “Before the uprising, the Kurdish people generally were exposed to the Ba’athists; they could penetrate the brain of everybody. After the uprisings, the phenomenon of the Ba’athists vanished. This has completely changed the way of thinking for the Kurdish people. Our new ideology embraces, rather than hides, the concept of Kurdistan.”

  As satellite television, mobile phones, and the Internet are taking over, Kurdish youth are beginning to question long-standing cultural norms, particularly when it comes to the treatment of women. This is a new process: It was only in 2002 that honor laws were outlawed in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. Honor law is a common understanding in the Middle East that if a female does something to dishonor her family—adultery and premari
tal sex are common crimes—any male in the family has the right to kill her without legal consequences.

  As I’d seen and heard at the university, young Kurds are becoming active in creating a civil society. They are eager to start civic and civil organizations, some with greater backing than others. I encountered some youth organizations with offices, nice furniture, and computers; others were little more than a couple of guys sitting in a dark shack. The level of civic activism in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region is inspiring. We all could learn a thing or two from their dedication.

  The most impressive group was the Kurdistan Student Union. I expected the students to be wearing shorts and shirts. But when I walked into the Kurdistan Student Union, I was embarrassed. I was wearing track pants, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks and everybody else was dressed as if they were going to the office. Many of the boys wore jackets and ties, and all wore collared shirts and dress pants; the girls wore long dresses or skirts with nice blouses.

  The Kurdistan Student Union was established in 1953. The union is headquartered in Arbil but has eighteen branches in the region. There are even branches in Mosul and Baghdad. There are no socioeconomic requirements to join; the group boasts an official membership of 158,000, but youth from around the Iraqi Kurdistan Region often involve themselves in Kurdistan Union activities. The mission of the Kurdistan Student Union is to serve as a youth lobby to the Kurdistan Regional government. On a more basic level, the student union is designed to bring young people together so that the generation may speak with a strong, united voice. The union runs or sponsors athletic clubs, newspapers, magazines, discussion groups, political groups, Internet sites, and even television programs. It is arguably the most progressive and influential youth lobby in the entire Middle East.