“Where are you, Dara?”
Matt cradles his cell phone to his ear. The wind has picked up, and his voice mixes with the roadside traffic and is nearly swept away.
“I’m right by the flagpole,” Matt adds. “Which one? The huge fucking Kurdish one!” He laughs. “All right, see you in a second.”
Whole schools of identical headlights rush past. I hope Dara finds us, because there is no way we’ll find him. But before my anxieties can coalesce into actual concern, a black Audi Q6 parks next to us, kicking up a trail of dust that billows into my mouth. The SUV’s door swings open and the cab’s light spills into the street. A muscled Kurd with black, gelatinous hair and a white UFC “Tap Out” T-shirt barrels toward us. “Professor! You’re so skinny!” he bellows at Matt, who is equally enormous, and the two embrace in a contortion that is half hug, half wrestling move. After a quick round of introductions, Dara tosses our bags into the back of the Audi. “Let’s get going,” he says. “Three hours to Dream City.” I can only imagine he’s referring to Erbil.
We pull out of Silopi, passing by a few Ford and Chevrolet dealerships, as well as two amusement parks replete with neon-lit Ferris wheels. While this procession of burgeoning Americana flits by my window, Matt and Dara cycle through a Rolodex of shared acquaintances, catching up on the last six years. “You didn’t hear? He’s in Germany.” Or, “She’s at the Ministry of Interior and doesn’t return my calls.” Dara is eager to query Matt about the faculty at the American University, making interjections like “We all thought he was a prick.” Or, “Not once? Well, I thought you were sleeping with her.” There is something universal in the conversation, the same as any student relishing an encounter with an old teacher, the two meeting as equals for the first time. Dara’s phone interrupts them, its ringer set to the theme from The Godfather. In the quiet, I can hear annoyed staccato bursts of Kurdish through the receiver. Dara replies, equally annoyed. There is a brief argument and then he hangs up. “I didn’t expect you guys to take so long,” he says. “My mother’s worried. She didn’t want me to drive all the way out here. The last few months have been pretty bad.”
The lights of Silopi disappear from the rearview as we snake our way into the Qandil Mountains, and I can feel the dark presence of the sheer ridges just off the road as Dara tells us about the fighting around Erbil and how in the summer many families evacuated. “Things are better now,” he says, “but who knows. The Daesh are right outside of the city.”
Our conversation ebbs to silence. The dark mountains untangle, spilling into a flat plain, its horizon pricked by flashes from the northern oil fields. The Kurds, unable to reach a deal with the government in Baghdad, which heavily taxes its export barrels, now burn off their excess oil. Silhouetted by these fires, Erbil’s jutting skyline comes into view, an entire city picketed by unfinished skyscrapers, the construction halted due to this oil dispute, the fight against the Islamic State, and the never-ending animus that seems to seep up from the ground in this part of the world. As we make our final approach to Dream City, Dara snatches his iPod from the glove box and plugs it into the Audi’s ample sound system. “You like the Red-Headed Stranger?” he asks us.
“The who?” says Matt.
Before Dara can explain, Willie Nelson is well into the opening verses:
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don’t let ’em pick guitars and drive them old trucks
Make ’em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
They’ll never stay home and they’re always alone
Even with someone they love
And as the peshmerga’s first checkpoints come into view outside of Erbil, Dara and I are both singing while Matt, the Waspy New Englander, only hums along.
After Dara drops us at our hotel on Sixty Meter Road, a main boulevard in Erbil named after its width, we unload our bags from the back of his Audi. He then asks what neither Matt nor I have yet put words to: “So you guys want to go up to the front lines, right?” Sheepishly, we both nod.
* * *
After fighting in two wars with no front line, I want to see one, and I know Matt feels the same. The next morning Dara drives us to the Ministry of Peshmerga, where, after some coordination with a brigadier general, an audience is arranged for us with Staff Colonel Salim Surche, whose unit, the Erbil Battalion, is garrisoned in Makmour, a suburb southwest of town. We take our Audi to his headquarters, a youth sports center; it’s a modern, three-story complex of steel and glass, its front drizzled with small-caliber bullet holes, as if someone had attacked it with a hole puncher. The Erbil Battalion reclaimed Makmour after the Islamic State seized the town for three days in September, nearly two months ago. Billeted in the complex, the peshmerga sleep between shifts on the line, burrowed beneath fleece blankets. Excited to see Americans, a few of them eagerly take us to a room upstairs, its windows shattered, dried blood crusting the tiled floor. They had killed two Islamic State fighters here weeks ago and never bothered to clean up the mess.
Over cigarettes and cups of spiced ginger tea in his office, Colonel Surche explains how the Islamic State captured Makmour, driving into town with eight armored Humvees. When I mention that this doesn’t seem like a particularly large force to take an entire town, Colonel Surche’s gaze retains its warmth even as his forehead knots, a thick single eyebrow splitting his face like a fraction line, one that divides the stern soldier from the hospitable man. “Perhaps if we had better weapons,” he says, “this would be true, but what do we have? Only light machine guns. Our bullets bounce off their vehicles.” He goes on to explain how the Islamic State has proved especially effective in regions with a Sunni Arab majority. “In these places,” Colonel Surche says, “the population rises up with the militants, fighting alongside them.” He then tells us to go see for ourselves, offering a HiLux pickup truck and six of his troopers as an escort.
We wind down a dirt road, arriving at the Erbil Battalion’s forward-most positions with the Islamic State. I crouch behind a sandbagged berm and stare south, across nearly two kilometers of desert, at a cement factory, its cinder blocks pockmarked by gunfire. Sergeant Farhad Karzan, who is leading the eight other peshmerga fighters manning this position, hands me his binoculars. “If you watch long enough, you’ll see them moving on the roof,” he tells me. “But my binoculars don’t work so well.”
I lean against the parapet, my knees in the dirt. Next to me, Dara fingers through some tins of ammunition while Matt chats idly with a few of the junior soldiers. I lower my gaze into the binoculars. The right lens barely holds focus, and the left is cracked. Unable to see any movement along the front, I wait.
After a couple of minutes, one of the soldiers wanders over, apparently to get a better look at me, their visitor. He carries an M16A2, a rifle that the US military hasn’t used widely for more than a decade. I rest the binoculars on the parapet, asking if I can see his rifle. He hands it to me, and I open the breech, sticking my pinky inside the firing chamber. It is immaculate, cleaner than I ever kept my rifle during my Marine days. Seeing that I know how to lock back the bolt on an M16A2 and inspect its mechanisms, Sergeant Karzan gives me a suspicious look, and I explain that I fought here a decade earlier. His entire face lights up. Reaching into his pants pocket, he removes a weathered ID card from the long-defunct Iraqi National Guard, dated back to 2004.
“Do you know my friend, Captain Luke?” he asks me. “We were in Mosul together.” On the American-issued ID, a much younger version of Sergeant Karzan stares back at me, his head shaved, his face without its salt-and-pepper stubble.
I shake my head, no.
How could Sergeant Karzan think that I would know one American captain out of the thousands that had served in our eight-year war? But staring across the front, standing among the eight men at his position, the war seems a local, very personal affai
r. He then takes me over to a single PKM, a light machine gun of Soviet design. It rests on the parapet’s corner, oriented toward the cement factory held by the Islamic State. “Aside from a few rifles, this is all we have to hold them back.” Two cans of belted ammunition rest next to the gun, their links rusted. “Over there,” says Sergeant Karzan, pointing to a smudge of upturned earth on the horizon, “is our other position. They have a machine gun too.”
Rusted ammunition, eight peshmerga fighters, a tired old sergeant: this is the front line. An American carrier battle group flies sorties from the Persian Gulf. Drones orbit, unseen. But less than two kilometers from the Islamic State, it all evaporates—to nothing. Whether these peshmerga will stop the Islamic State’s advance farther into Iraq depends on that machine gun. And I remember the William Carlos Williams poem that I, and so many other children, memorized in grammar school:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Sergeant Karzan offers me tea, but the escort that Colonel Surche has provided seems ready to depart. So we pile into their HiLux and say our goodbyes. Tearing down the road toward the Erbil Battalion’s headquarters, I keep thinking about the gun pointed at the cement factory, and about that poem. This latest war in Iraq may well be decided by the smallest of things: a few men, a few guns, luck. Before visiting Sergeant Karzan’s position, I had asked Colonel Surche what his orders were. He told me he had none, but that if the Ministry of Peshmerga ordered him to attack, he would, and they’d try to push the Islamic State back once more, until Kurdish forces reclaimed all the land they had lost over the summer and the fall.
When I get back to my hotel in Erbil that night, I look at a photograph I took of Sergeant Karzan’s machine gun, and the expanse of desert stretching between his position and the Islamic State. I transcribe a few notes and then go to bed, the unrelenting traffic of Sixty Meter Road shuttling past my window, the drivers seemingly oblivious to the front line only thirty minutes away.
The next morning, Dara meets us for breakfast in the lobby. Before we can make a lap around the buffet, he grabs both Matt and me, showing us a news story in Kurdish on his phone. Just hours before, at first light, the Erbil Battalion attacked, advancing from their positions and taking the cement factory. Slowly, I graze over the buffet—fresh fruit, croissant, omelet—and sitting down with my coffee, I wonder how Sergeant Karzan and his eight men, and that one machine gun, have fared.
* * *
I’ve never visited the citadel of Erbil, and Matt insists it’d be a crime if I didn’t see it. With the afternoon light quickly fading, we wander through souk Eskan. Beneath a catacomb of sandstone archways, Arab and Kurdish vendors hawk tailored suits, spices, and the latest iPhone from rickety shop fronts as we make our way to the ramparts. When I spot a baseball cap emblazoned with the Star of David, Matt explains that many Kurds have a strong affinity for Israel. Solidarity among minority groups antagonized by Arabs, he surmises. Outside the souk, mixing with the off-duty peshmerga who laze in sidewalk cafés, we spot several European aid workers and tourists smoking narghile and sipping chai. Then we pass a guard, half-asleep in his chair, and climb a large stone ramp to the citadel’s portcullis.
Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site just as the Islamic State swept into Mosul in June, the citadel of Erbil crowns a hillock in the city center. It is the world’s oldest continually inhabited settlement, dating to the fifth millennium BC. Brick walls encircle the fortress, and for many Kurds it is a symbol of their resilience in the face of centuries of oppression. Residing within the walls is a city in miniature, a concentric circle of streets around the modest minaret of the Mulla Effendi mosque. Until 2007, when the Kurdistan Regional Government began restoring the citadel, 840 families lived within its confines. When evictions began so the renovations could take place, one family was allowed to remain, thus insuring that seven thousand years of settlement would continue uninterrupted.
Climbing the ramparts, Matt and I take in the sweeping vistas, the horizon replete with car dealerships, chain hotels, and the empty floor plans of uncompleted skyscrapers. Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Erbil has been a boomtown, a beachhead of stability and progress, a promise of what a unified and peaceful Iraq could look like. With an uncompleted vision of the region’s future laid before us, Matt and I begin to speculate. I tell him that being in Erbil makes me imagine what it must have been like to be in Barcelona in 1936. The Spanish Civil War, like the current conflict in Iraq and Syria, proved a prelude to a larger ideological crisis, between communism and fascism and democracy, one that defined Europe through the Second World War and through much of the twentieth century. Today the ideological tension in the Middle East is among the Islamists, as represented by groups like the Islamic State; the autocratic regimes, as represented by rulers like Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt; and the democratic activists, as represented by the now largely defunct movements that rose up during the Arab Spring.
Matt patiently listens to my theory, then asks how the Kurds fit into this construct. “I guess they don’t. They’re just our friends,” I say, knowing that “friend of the United States” is a complex role to hold during an existential crisis in the Middle East. Slowly, we wander through the citadel’s inner keep, passing beneath an enormous Kurdish flag. I remember the rusted cans of ammunition on the front near Makmour, the decade-old rifles the peshmerga used to hold the line against the Islamic State, and I wonder if we Americans are living up to our end of the bargain as friends.
Walking down the citadel’s ramp toward the bustling souk Eskan, we again pass the sleepy guard in his chair. His attitude mirrors everyone else’s: it seems impossible that the Islamic State, despite occupying positions only thirty minutes away from the city limits, could make any real incursion into the Kurdish stronghold of Erbil. Even if the United States provided less than adequate support for the peshmerga, it seems that they will hold the line regardless.
Having traveled extensively in the Middle East, I find it disorienting to be surrounded by Kurdish amity for the United States, instead of the animus I’ve grown accustomed to in other countries. I am again reminded of the Kurds saying “We have no friends but the mountains.” After nearly a decade of investment, facilitated by the US occupation of Iraq, it seems like the Kurds can add “and the Americans” to this. In the war against the Islamic State, the Kurds have become an important ally, providing essential combat troops when a war-weary America will not send its own. But proxy war is a dangerous game, often turning friends into enemies: Afghanistan’s mujahideen, Nicaragua’s Contras.
A week after our walk through the citadel, I have returned to Istanbul and Matt has returned to Gaziantep. He sends me an email with a single article attached. The Islamic State has detonated a bomb, just by the citadel’s portcullis, the first Erbil has seen in years, killing four and injuring twenty-two. The bomber was a local, his name Abdulrahman al-Kurdi.
PARADOX
CAMP LEJEUNE, FALLUJAH
More than a year after the fall of Mosul, the Iraqi Army remains scuttled. American advisers return by the thousands to familiar camps like al-Taqaddum, an air base straddling the dark waters of Lake Habbaniyah. They disembark from helicopters, from transport planes, from Humvees, into a war that anticipates their return. Their old billets wait for them, huts of plywood construction. Office chairs lay toppled on the ground, strewn next to abandoned desks. Gloved hands right them, smacking four years of dust from seat cushions and armrests. This dust also coats desktops, where stacks of wilted magazines—People, Us Weekly, Rolling Stone—rest undisturbed, their covers dating from 2011. Everything is plywood: the desks, the walls, the floors. To build with cement or solid board would have suggested permanence in a war that began at its alleged end: Mission Accompl
ished. President Obama now heralds a different return: “If the Iraqis are not willing to fight for the security of their country, then we cannot do it for them.” Conjuring an Iraqi will to fight—for Iraq—remains a decade-long waiting game. I recall another waiting game in these deserts, the one we played for the rain.
All through the summer of 2004, while our rifle platoon waged counterinsurgency in Haditha, Hit, and other Anbari backwaters that have since fallen to the Islamic State, it never rained, not once. Within the platoon we had a betting pool; ten bucks got you in: try your luck and pick the first day of rain. When the dust finally turned to mud on November 8, all forty-six of us were staged just outside of Fallujah, hunkered down in slit trenches, waiting for the assault to begin.
I don’t remember anybody collecting on the pool.
All it takes is the sight of someone sprinting along a wet crosswalk and I’m back in Fallujah and back to that one street in particular: Highway 10. Veterans of the battle each have their story of crossing Highway 10’s expansive four lanes covered by machine gun fire, with Islamists dug into the buildings on the far side, defending this, their main line of resistance. The story of Gunnery Sergeant Ryan Shane, a Marine from my infantry battalion, has always remained close. On the second day of the battle, his rifle platoon perched on a rooftop covering another platoon that rushed the crossing’s gauntlet. Within minutes, a slug ripped through the leg of Sergeant Lonny Wells, a twenty-nine-year-old career Marine and father of four children, felling him in the open. He lay facedown, blood pooling around his waist, moving just a little. Leaving his rifle behind so it wouldn’t slow him, Ryan went after Lonny.
A Marine combat cameraman captured the scene in four photographs. In the first, Ryan stands in the wet street, bent over Lonny. His 220-pound frame tugs the drag strap on Lonny’s body armor. In the second, another Marine runs to Ryan’s side, trying to help. Clumsily, the second Marine bends over Lonny while Ryan keeps pulling. The next frame is taken just as a bullet tears into Ryan’s lower back, scrambling his stomach. He’s on his heels, falling. The other Marine watches in a half sprint, heading for cover. The final frame is Ryan and Lonny, both lying facedown on the street in the rain.
Places and Names Page 11