The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Prior said that, compared with Abu Ghraib, the mutilations of the contractors in Falluja was representative. “It would be nice to let the American people know that the problems here aren’t just because Americans have cultural flaws. It’s because these people have cultural flaws, too.” He added, “We can change a culture. We have to lean on it, and lean on it, and lean on it. And Americans want it to be done in three months. If people are getting killed, fuck it. And that’s a cultural flaw.”

  Wetherington sat brooding. “I hate the motherfuckers. Muslims are worthless. I don’t mind Iraqis—they’re okay—just Muslims.”

  “What the sergeant means,” Prior said in his deadpan way, “is that there are many challenges in understanding each other.”

  The soldiers of Charlie Company were still proud of what they had done. A sergeant named James Jett told me that, compared with other units that used rougher tactics, the restraint and respect shown by the company were the best way to win over Iraqis who were still sitting on the fence. That, even more than catching bad guys, was the thing that mattered most in winning the war—not turning friends or neutrals into enemies. Prior was pleased that during the year of the occupation only one of his soldiers had died and two had had to shoot Iraqis. Later, when we were alone, I reminded him of the speech on evidence and due process that I’d heard him give almost a year ago at the gas station in Zafaraniya. I suggested that he wouldn’t give it now, at the end of his long tour.

  Prior shook his head. “In my heart I believe everybody’s American. George, I’m a complete idealist. All that stuff I told you in August—none of that has changed. My frustration with the Iraqi people, that has increased. But my attitude toward wanting to fix this place hasn’t changed. I can’t give up on them just because I’m frustrated. I would still give that speech today.” What he wouldn’t do, Prior said, was tell Iraqis what he had told me tonight, because he didn’t want to destroy their confidence. “Everything I told you in August was from my heart. Now I’m just more frustrated because they’re not a Mom and apple pie people in my mind. But I still love my country, I still believe in public service, I still want to give back to my nation. And part of me giving back to my nation is me giving to other nations.”

  * * *

  AT THE END OF JUNE I was back in Baghdad for the handover of sovereignty. To foil any attacks, it occurred unannounced two days ahead of schedule, on June 28, in a hasty private ceremony in the Green Zone, after which Paul Bremer and his top aides were spirited to the airport and flown out of Iraq. The sudden end of the CPA was in keeping with its short life.

  The interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, which was to have been chosen by Lakhdar Brahimi’s UN team, in fact was the result of a deal brokered between Washington and the Governing Council, with Ayatollah Sistani’s blessing. The public seemed prepared to give it a chance. On a single Thursday a few days before the handover, at least a hundred people died across Iraq. Explosions and assassinations were now part of everyday life, and any change would be change for the better.

  I visited several government offices and found Iraqis grimly determined to take on the new responsibility that most of them felt should have been theirs from the start. Every official, every secretary, every policeman, was risking his or her life just by leaving home in the morning. In his chambers at the Central Criminal Court, I asked Raed Juhi, the young judge who had issued the arrest warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr and was now leading the investigation of Saddam Hussein, what kept him coming to work every day. He had already survived three attempts on his life.

  “If I stay at home, and you stay at home, and the other guy stays at home, who will build Iraq?” Juhi said, and he leaned forward and fixed me with a look. “This is a battle, mister. And we’re all soldiers in this battle. So there are only two choices—either to win the battle or to die. There’s no third choice.”

  10

  CIVIL WAR?

  IRAQ WAS CREATED by European diplomats in Paris after the First World War out of three Ottoman provinces: Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. According to the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between Britain and France, Mosul, believed to have valuable oil fields, was to come under French control after the war, but Clemenceau graciously handed it over to Lloyd George. The first civil commissioner of the British Mandate, Sir Arnold Wilson (in a sense, Paul Bremer’s predecessor in Baghdad), thought from the start that Iraq was too fractured to become a viable independent state. The Kurds in the northern mountains, part of the old province of Mosul, had expected to achieve an independent Kurdistan after the war; they suddenly found themselves ruled from Baghdad in the name of an overwhelmingly Arab entity. The Kurds “will never accept an Arab ruler,” Wilson wrote to London. And there was another problem. The majority Shia would not accept Sunni rule, but at the same time, because the officer corps and the administrative class under the Ottoman Empire were Sunni, “no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination.” Wilson’s legendary assistant, Gertrude Bell, who had been traveling and writing in the region for years, was warned by an American missionary, “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south. They have never been an independent unity. You’ve got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done gradually. They have no conception of nationhood yet.”

  In Iraq, as elsewhere, the British brazened through the absurdities of their own making. They soon had their hands full with another, more immediate problem than the ultimate viability of Iraq, for one thing that seemed to unite Kurds, Shia, and Sunnis was their rebelliousness against British rule. In June 1920, a revolt began among the Shiite tribes near the holy cities and spread to the Sunnis of Falluja, while in the north the Kurds had been causing trouble for months. British troop levels were grossly insufficient to keep the vast territory under control, and in London there were serious misgivings about the wisdom of an occupation. A headline in The Times proclaimed, “Bad to Worse in Mesopotomia.” It took additional troops from the Indian colonial army, British air bombardments, and the deaths of six thousand Iraqis and almost five hundred British soldiers to put down the revolt.

  According to the historian David Fromkin’s excellent account of the era, A Peace to End All Peace, Wilson found the uprising almost incomprehensible: “What we are up against is anarchy plus fanaticism. There is little or no Nationalism.” The government in London saw the hand of various conspirators from outside Iraq: Turks, Pan-Islamists, Germans, oil companies, Bolsheviks, and Jews. But Gertrude Bell understood the force of Arab nationalism in Iraq, and she proposed to Winston Churchill, the colonial secretary, that Iraq be ruled not directly but as a protectorate, with the core of the old Ottoman Sunni elite built up into the administration of a modern state. In November 1920, she wrote to her father that the new Sunni-dominated council in Baghdad “has against it almost the whole body of Shiahs, first because it’s looked upon as of British parentage, but also because it contains considerably less Shiahs than Sunnis. The Shiahs, as I’ve often observed, are one of the greatest problems.” For their part, the Sunnis “are afraid of being swamped by the Shiahs,” she wrote two months later. “The present government, which is predominantly Sunni, isn’t doing anything to conciliate the Shiahs.”

  Bell died and was buried in Baghdad in 1926, probably a suicide, without resolving the problem that she had helped to create. The majority Shia and the Kurds fell under the rule of the minority Sunnis, first during the Mandate and then after independence in 1932. Shiite and a handful of Kurdish politicians served in the numerous Iraqi governments of the monarchy period, including several Shia as prime minister, and in republican Iraq after the 1958 coup that overthrew the king. Iraq’s powerful Communist Party was largely Shiite, and in its early years the Baath Party had Shia in key positions. But during the decades of Baath Party rule, the Sunni came to dominate, and u
nder Saddam the ruling class telescoped down to a clique of cousins and tribal relations from around Tikrit. When Islam became a political force among the Shia of Iraq in the late 1970s, Saddam repressed it brutally, and Shiite consciousness spread across the country’s south. The Kurds had never completely stopped fighting since the creation of the state. So there was reason to worry that the American occupation would inherit three pieces that had never fit together and were bound to chafe until they combusted if they weren’t separated.

  The insurgency that followed the American invasion reminded some amateur historians of the 1920 revolt against the British. But there was this key difference: In 1920, it was Shiite tribal sheikhs who had first rebelled; after the invasion, very few Shia, other than the Sadr militia, took up arms against the Americans. The reason was obvious: This time, the heirs of Arnold Wilson and Gertrude Bell, the neoconservatives in Washington and the CPA officials in Baghdad, were determined to put power in Shiite hands. This had to do with more than simple majority rule; the Sunni Arabs of Iraq were regarded as one key source of the malaise of the Arab world, with its violent anti-Western ideologies. The main insurgency that began shortly after the fall of Baghdad and continues to this day was always Sunni in character.

  During the first year of the war after the war, many Iraqis refused to speak in terms of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd. People told me that the term “Sunni Triangle” was an insult—that the region was an American invention. As soon as I mentioned one of the unmentionable ethnic categories, I would be told (usually by a gray-haired gentleman in a suit jacket) that these were ideas imported by Westerners and Arab extremists, no one used to ask about Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd, all Iraqis suffered equally under Saddam, and the gentleman in the suit jacket himself had numerous cousins and neighbors in mixed marriages. There could never be a civil war in Iraq, because Iraqis didn’t think that way. I always found myself thinking: If only it were true.

  Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down became a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims. The surge of Shiite religiosity was also a political display, deeply disquieting even to Sunnis (as well as secular Shia) who had no desire to dominate. As Shiite officials, security forces, clerics, and pilgrims increasingly became the target of attacks, the sectarian character of the insurgency and of Iraqi politics in general overwhelmed the best intentions of those who insisted that they were all Iraqis. The CPA’s failure to disarm the militias, as Bremer more than once vowed to do, left almost every city in Iraq under the real control of an ethnic group rather than the government. It sometimes felt as if a civil war had already started, which only the Sunnis were fighting. The great Shiite patience in not retaliating (apart from a campaign of assassination of former Baathists) had less to do with Iraqi nationalism than with the knowledge that majority power would soon be theirs. Communal violence and occasional terror bombings also erupted along the fault lines in the north where Arabs and Kurds came together. Kurdish separatism was such an obvious force that the only question seemed to be whether the Kurds would stay in the new Iraq or not.

  Some American observers, such as Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Peter Galbraith, an ex-diplomat who was an adviser to the Kurds, looked at the mess and decided that only a separation of Iraq into three autonomous regions could prevent civil war. This was in direct opposition to the official American policy that Iraq’s “territorial integrity” must be preserved. To Gelb, partition was the solution to America’s problems in Iraq: Cut off the Sunni center, abandon it, concentrate troops in the south and north, and support democracies among the Shia and the Kurds. The Sunnis, with no oil in their desert, could then decide whether they wanted to cooperate or fade away.

  This scenario struck me as too remote from the texture of life in Iraq. The country was cobbled together almost a century ago; there are very few Iraqis alive who have any memory of the time before Iraq. The decades of living together wove innumerable personal ties and created a national consciousness that was badly damaged by Saddam, especially among the young, but was nonetheless real. There was nothing organically inevitable about Iraq’s falling apart. If it fell apart, it would do so because of the folly of its leaders. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy in Iraq, who had seen terrible civil wars firsthand in Lebanon and his native Algeria, warned Iraqis, “Civil wars do not happen because a person makes a decision ‘Today I’m going to start a civil war.’ Civil wars happen because people are reckless, because people are selfish, because groups think more of themselves than they do of the benefit of their country.”

  As the violent year 2004 wore on, Iraqis talked more and more openly about the danger of civil war. Some people thought it was already happening; others said it could happen with a single spark. And almost everyone agreed that, if a civil war began, the place where it was most likely to begin was the ethnically mixed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

  It was my favorite Iraqi city. Kirkuk was just as searing in summertime, as neglected and trash strewn and traffic choked, as any other place in Iraq. But from my first visit I found it charming, sometimes even magical, with the nostalgia of the past and the fearful complexity of the present layered like sediment in every narrow street; and at the heart of the city lay a mystery.

  It was on my third and last trip to Kirkuk that I met Luna Dawood.

  * * *

  LUNA WAS TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD when Saddam Hussein paid a surprise visit to her house, but she reacted like a teenager. It was an October afternoon in 1983. Two presidential helicopters landed on an open field; tanks cordoned off the tidy middle-class streets of the Arrapha neighborhood, home to employees of the oil company; and the president, flanked by an enormous security entourage, showed up at the Dawoods’ back kitchen door. The Baathists’ long-standing war against Iraqi Kurds was intensifying, and it appeared that Saddam wanted to secure the loyalty of those who worked in Kirkuk’s valuable oil industry. Two decades later, Luna still recalled Saddam’s visit a bit giddily: He was handsome in his olive-drab military uniform, and he paused to admire the house and ask friendly questions. His cologne was so overpowering that, for days afterward, Luna couldn’t wash the odor off the hand that had shaken the president’s, and the living room sofa smelled so strongly that it had to be given away.

  Saddam refused coffee and chocolates, but a painting of a woman drawing water from a tree-shaded river caught his eye—Luna’s brother, who was serving on the front in the Iran-Iraq War, had painted it—and the president claimed it as a gift. The Dawoods were Assyrian Christians, not Arabs, and when Saddam addressed Luna’s mother in Arabic she replied in the English that she’d learned from the British managers of the Iraqi Petroleum Company before it was nationalized by the Baathists, in 1972. “That time is gone,” Saddam scolded her. “You must learn Arabic.”

  A presidential trailer was parked in the Dawoods’ garden, and neighbors lined up to go inside for a private audience with the president. Those were flush days in Iraq, and Saddam’s personal secretary, Barzan al-Tikriti, presented each petitioner with three thousand dinars from a bag full of money. To her everlasting regret, Luna was too timorous to enter Saddam’s trailer. Her younger sister Fula did so, and she emerged with both the cash and a job at the oil company. One of Luna’s cousins entreated Saddam to release his brother, who was doing five years in prison for comparing the face of a top Baathist official to that of a monkey. Saddam replied that he couldn’t interfere with the judicial system. Then he came out of the trailer to tell the assembled residents that Iraq was at war with Iran to protect the purity of Iraqi women from Ayatollah Khomeini’s rampaging troops. The helicopters took off, and everyone assumed that Saddam had left Kirkuk.

  But the trailer remained in the Dawoods’ garden; their phone was cut off, their kitchen full of security men. Without explanation, the family was told to spend the night on the second floor. At two in the morning, unable to sleep, Luna went to the window and looked down at the garden. As if in a dream, she saw Saddam s
tep out of the trailer wearing a white dishdasha. The next day, he was gone.

  The president visited Kirkuk again in 1990. This time, his helicopter landed in the square in front of the municipal building. By then, Luna was working there as an accountant in the finance department. Saddam announced a campaign to beautify Kirkuk: The walled citadel—the oldest part of the city, situated on a plateau across the dry Khasa River bed from the modern city—was going to be cleaned up, beginning with the removal of the eight or nine hundred mostly Kurdish and Turkoman families living in its ancient houses. The next day, fifty million dinars arrived at Luna’s office from Baghdad. She had forty-five days to dig through title deeds, some dating back to 1820, and pay compensation to displaced homeowners.

  The process of emptying out the Kirkuk citadel had nothing to do with urban renewal. It was the climax of a forty-year campaign known to Iraqis as Arabization. Beginning in 1963, and continuing up to the eve of the American invasion, the Baathist regime in Baghdad deported tens of thousands of Kurds—some Kurdish sources put the number at three hundred thousand—from the city and the surrounding province, forced other ethnic minorities from their houses, and imported similar numbers of Arabs to Kirkuk from the south. Luna’s job required her to distribute lump sums of money to families forfeiting their homes, sift through crumbling property records, and handle the traffic of deportees at the municipal building. She was a bureaucratic expediter of ethnic cleansing.

  A slim, energetic forty-five-year-old when I met her in the summer of 2004, Luna was unmarried, and, unlike most Iraqi women, she wore Western clothes and carried herself with self-confidence. She had wide, startled eyes and the kind of strong nose seen on statuary from Nineveh, and when she talked about Kirkuk’s history under Saddam, her anxious smile flashed a row of crooked teeth. “It was a tragedy I don’t want to remember,” she told me when we met in her office. She then proceeded to remember everything. “They were poor people,” she said. “Each one who came to take the money, in his eyes you saw the tractor coming to take his house.” Crowds awaiting deportation filled the hallway outside her office; women fainted. Because Assyrian Christians comprised the smallest and therefore least threatening of Kirkuk’s many ethnic groups, some of the deportees in Luna’s office trusted her enough to curse Saddam. If the secret police instructed her to delay paying someone they intended to arrest, Luna would quietly urge the reluctant man to leave Kirkuk without his money.