The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Although there had been nothing like the apocalyptic communal bloodshed that some predicted, Kirkuk suffered a steady rise in insurgent attacks and suicide bombings, and a campaign of assassination against the city’s leaders. Most of the murdered officials were Kurds, though a few Arab politicians and a tribal sheikh who had occupied disputed lands around the village of Amshaw fell victim as well. Arrests were seldom made in these cases. Kurds in Kirkuk cast suspicion on Turkish intelligence agents and their allies in the hard-line Iraqi Turkoman Front. The Turkish government repeatedly asserted that a Kurdish power grab in Kirkuk would be regarded as a prelude to an independent state and therefore a threat to Turkey itself, with its own minority population of rebellious Kurds. The Turkish foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, compared Kirkuk to Bosnia and issued a veiled warning: “Everyone is aware that this is the issue that could end up being the greatest headache for Iraq.”

  Hasib Rozbayani was the Kurdish deputy governor for resettlement and compensation, the official responsible for the returning refugees. Rozbayani was a leading spokesman for the emerging policy of reverse ethnic cleansing. He had spent years teaching social studies and statistics in exile in Sweden, and, with a head of unruly curly hair, spectacles, and a habit of mumbling questions to himself as he talked, he had a mild professorial air. When we spoke in his living room, he was barefoot in sweatpants and an untucked shirt, and he kept absently picking up the automatic pistol that lay on the sofa beside him, then startling himself and setting it down again. Propped against his stereo system was a Kalashnikov.

  Rozbayani left no doubt about the future of the imported Arabs. Their departure from Kirkuk was necessary for a variety of reasons, he said, including psychosocial ones: The Arabs suffered from guilty consciences, since most of them were criminals and former Baathists, which would make them uneasy about staying; they knew they didn’t belong in the city and had no friends among the other groups; their continued presence would be a provocation to Kurds, inciting social conflict. Moreover, unemployment was already too high in Kirkuk.

  Those Arabs who hadn’t left Kirkuk before the census and referendum would not be allowed to vote there, Rozbayani said. He did not expect many Arabs to be living in Kirkuk by then. “They have to leave,” he said. Imported Arabs had to leave even if no one contested their house or land, because their fault was a collective one. After the census and the referendum on the status of Kirkuk, he told me, Arabs could return to the region—for a visit.

  I told Rozbayani about a couple I’d met: The husband came from central Iraq in the 1960s; the wife was an “original Arab” whose family had lived in Kirkuk for generations. Their children grew up with playmates from a mixed Kurdish-Turkoman family next door. What should happen to this couple?

  “They have to return,” he said.

  “The wife is a native of Kirkuk.”

  “She can follow him.”

  My questions struck Rozbayani as misplaced humanitarianism, and he threw them back at me. “Of course, I accept brothership and friendship,” he assured me. “But we know openly that the Arabs have taken lands, occupied lands, they have gone to every house to investigate people, execute people, take their sons, their girls—and you will say, ‘Welcome, Iraq is for all people’? It’s funny, I say.”

  * * *

  MUCH OF Rozbayani’s and other Kurds’ unhappiness was directed at the American-led coalition. They had expected something more than studied evenhandedness from the United States. A peshmerga living in an abandoned house in Amshaw asked me, “Why, when the Kurds are your friends, do you now treat us just the way you treat other Iraqis, including the Republican Guard?”

  The first CPA representative in Kirkuk, and the most influential advocate for the city with Paul Bremer, was a slim, brown-eyed, thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman named Emma Sky. She spoke some Arabic and once worked with Palestinians in the West Bank; though she opposed the invasion of Iraq, Sky answered a request from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for volunteers to join the occupation authority. Being English- and Arabic-speaking put her in the minority at the CPA, and she was also out of step with its ideological assumptions.

  “Bringing democracy—to many Americans it’s like the new religion,” she told me in Baghdad. “People come here as missionaries. I’ve never had that as a mission. I don’t have the sense of democracy as this good that we should be promoting around the world.” Rather than ignoring or breaking down the undemocratic tribal structure of Iraqi society, she said, the occupiers should see it as a natural outgrowth of a harsh environment and find ways to allow more people to participate within it. She found American nationalism, with its sunny certainties and its zeal, a strange and troubling force. I reminded her that it was not entirely different from British nationalism, which had once conquered half the world (including Iraq) in the name of the white man’s burden. “Maybe we had it in the UK forty or fifty years ago,” Sky said. “Iraqis are always saying, ‘Oh, the Brits, you know how to do this far better than the Americans,’ as if it’s something genetic that’s been passed down to you. My generation have never grown up with ruling other countries.” Yet she was well aware of following in the footsteps of her colonial forebears, and, as a result, of bringing a feel for Iraqis and their history that most Americans might not have. Perhaps because she knew the name of the British general who had “liberated” Baghdad from the Turks in 1917, Sky was better able to think skeptically about the current project than her American colleagues who did not. In Baghdad she visited Gertrude Bell’s tomb; she was a little haunted by Bell and her suicide.

  Upon arriving in Kirkuk, Sky saw that the most urgent task was to reassure alienated Arabs and Turkomans that the triumphalist attitude of their Kurdish neighbors did not mean there was no future for them here. As she traveled around the province, her prestige among Arabs soared. Ismail Hadidi, the deputy governor and an original Arab, gave Sky his highest praise: “We deal with her as if she’s a man, not a woman.” Sky believed passionately that Kirkuk could be a model for an ethnically diverse Iraq. “People have to move away from this zero-sum thinking,” she said. “Kirkuk is where it all meets. It all comes together there. Yes, you can have a country of separate regions, where people don’t have to deal with other groups. But can you have a country where people are happy with each other, where people are at ease with each other? I think Kirkuk is going to tell you what kind of country Iraq is going to be.” She was instrumental in securing millions of dollars from Iraqi oil revenue to fund the new Kirkuk Foundation, which would give grants to local civic groups that were trying to avoid the logic of ethnic politics. Compared with the problems in Israel and Palestine, Sky said, Kirkuk’s should be relatively easy to solve. “Kirkuk you can win. Kirkuk doesn’t have irreconcilable differences—yet.”

  Over time, with no apparent solution to the legacy of ethnic cleansing, many Kurds began to regard Emma Sky and the CPA as biased toward Arabs. When she met the Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani in Suleimaniya, he snapped, “They call you Emma Bell.” His gibe captured the full irony of Sky’s situation. She was trying to bring Europe’s postcolonial values—diversity, tolerance, a sense that people could solve their problems if they would sit down together and talk—to a place where zero-sum politics had been the rule ever since her ancestress Gertrude Bell had drawn the map and set up the modern state in such a way that Sunni Arabs became the holders of power and Kurds saw their dream of nationhood dissolved.

  Nor did it help Sky’s cause that the CPA’s mechanism for untangling and redressing grievances in Kirkuk—the Iraq Property Claims Commission, which Sky helped set up—didn’t begin to hear claims until April 2004 and still hadn’t issued its first decision by early 2005. Azad Shekhany, a Kurd who once directed the commission, concluded that the whole thing was an elaborate stall to keep the peace, and he put the blame on the CPA. “I understand they don’t want to send the Arabs back to their original places, but they don’t want the Kurds to be unhappy as well,” Shekhany said. “So t
hey just delay everything by bureaucracy.”

  The commission was receiving far fewer claims than anticipated—exactly 1,658 as of the July morning in 2004 when I visited its well-equipped and nearly empty offices. Two Kurdish women in billowing black robes—Jamila Safar and her mother, Khadija Namikh—were seated at a desk making a claim. In March 1991, during the uprising in Kirkuk and the north that followed the Gulf War, Safar told me, her father died. On the day of his burial, March 13, she and her mother returned from the cemetery to find their house surrounded by soldiers, Baath Party members, and men with masked faces who worked for Chemical Ali. “Are you Kurds or Arabs?” the men demanded. Everyone in the neighborhood was out on the street—Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomans, grouped by ethnicity. Tanks blocked the streets and helicopters circled overhead as the Kurdish men, including Safar’s older brother, were bound and taken away in buses. The women and children were loaded onto other buses and driven into the mountains, where they were dumped and told to walk north. As Safar and her mother walked, they were bombed by aircraft overhead, and several neighbors died in front of them. They stayed at the Iranian border for three months. When they ventured back to Kirkuk, their house—along with two thousand others in the neighborhood—had been destroyed.

  “Thank God, all I found was dust,” Safar said. “Thank God for our safety.”

  A staff lawyer was filling out a lengthy form for them. “Was the house brick or clay?”

  “Brick,” Safar’s mother said. “Finish, please. I’m sick, I can’t wait.”

  “Do you want to take the land or do you want compensation?” the lawyer asked.

  “We want the land,” Safar said.

  The lawyer wrote that they wanted the land and money to build a new house. “Why didn’t you go to the commission for people with damaged houses in 1991?”

  “I did,” the mother said. “I gave them an application, but they didn’t give us anything.”

  An Arab man in his late thirties came over and said hello to the two women with a shy reserve. His name was Ayob Shaker and he had once been their neighbor. On the day of the deportation, he had helped other Kurds in the area load furniture on the buses. He was also a soldier in the Republican Guard, and when he came back to Kirkuk from Baghdad after the fall of the regime, he found a group of peshmerga, including another former neighbor, occupying his house. Though the property claims statute had been amended to allow Arabs displaced after the war to make claims as well, Shaker said that his children had been threatened by the peshmerga, and he was afraid to file for compensation.

  “Believe me, nobody knows for sure, but mostly it’s the Kurds who are running the city,” he said. “For me as an Arab, if I want a job I have to get a paper from a Kurdish party saying I’m not a criminal.” Chance had brought him to this office on the same day as the two women he used to greet every morning on his way to work. He felt that the very injustice he had once seen done to them was now befalling him. “The same thing,” he said. “The government did it to them. The peshmerga did it to us.”

  The women agreed, and there was a moment of good feeling between the old neighbors.

  “Only God and America can solve the problem,” the Arab said.

  What about the new Iraqi government? I asked.

  “I don’t know,” the mother said. “Is there a government right now or not? I know nothing. I know there is day and there is night. I don’t even remember my own name.”

  The staff lawyer finished filling out the form. The daughter smiled and said, “I think that’s it—there will be justice and our case will be finished.”

  I asked the Arab if there will be justice in Kirkuk. He hesitated. “I don’t think so. It’s very difficult.”

  The daughter said, “Why are you making things hard?”

  “Because those who are now in the city don’t understand each other,” he said. “I am a son of Kirkuk”—an original Arab—“and for thirty-five years nobody could hurt us. Now I’m feeling upset, because of my house.”

  I asked the women if Kurds would ever do to Arabs what Arabs had done to Kurds.

  “No, they won’t do that,” the daughter said. “Believe me, I swear to God they won’t do that.”

  “They’ve done more than the Arabs,” Shaker said.

  The daughter stiffened and coldly eyed her former neighbor. “Where is that?”

  “I know one person who made half a tribe run away from their houses in the city.”

  The warm feeling was gone. The daughter pointed out that Shaker had already forgotten what happened to the Kurds in Kirkuk. Abruptly, she excused herself and helped her mother out of the Iraq Property Claims Commission.

  * * *

  BECAUSE KIRKUK wasn’t yet the scene of large-scale combat, the city remained a hidden flaw in the broken Iraqi landscape. But what was a local dispute between neighbors would inevitably become one of the greatest obstacles to making Iraq democratic and keeping it whole. In the summer of 2003, I had a conversation with Barham Salih, who was then the prime minister of the regional government in Suleimaniya. A strong supporter of the American invasion and of Kurdish participation in a democratic and federal Iraq, he was also mindful of his constituents’ ingrained suspicion of Baghdad and longing for independence. For twelve years, Suleimaniya was one of the two capitals of Iraqi Kurdistan, a de facto independent state under the protection of the allied no-fly zone. A generation of Kurds grew up speaking no Arabic and feeling no connection to Iraq, and the idea of rejoining a country that not long ago visited genocide and ethnic cleansing on Kurds was a hard sell.

  “While I have accepted the fate history has landed my people with, I want to assure my kids and the new generations to come that the new Iraq will be fundamentally different,” Salih said. “If the Arabs of Iraq do not have the courage to come to terms with the terrible past that we have had and make right those terrible injustices that befell my people, I would have extreme difficulty convincing the doubters in Suleimaniya’s bazaar that Iraq is our future.”

  I went to see Salih again in June 2004, on his first day as deputy prime minister of the newly sovereign Iraqi interim government. After a year of occupation and insurgency, his mood was darker, and his interpretation of the interim constitution on Kirkuk was uncompromising. “The indigenous people of Kirkuk, the original communities of Kirkuk, should be the ones who decide the fate of Kirkuk—not those who were brought by Saddam or any outside power,” he said. The imported Arabs were victims, too, “tools for a vile policy, for Saddam wanted to create the environment for a permanent civil war between Kurds and Arabs.” But, Salih added, “Kirkuk is not Bosnia, and in fact the Kurdish leadership has demonstrated the utmost restraint in the way that it has handled Kirkuk. In Bosnia you’d have seen civil war.”

  I asked Rowsch Shaways, one of two vice presidents of the interim government, what would happen if the imported Arabs refused to leave Kirkuk. Would they be loaded into trucks and driven south to Basra and Kut?

  “Well, there should be a continuous campaign to persuade them,” he said.

  Wouldn’t the attempt to force Arabs out of Kirkuk lead to reprisals against Kurds in Arab regions of Iraq? “No, it’s a different situation,” he said. “Kurds who are living in the south, they were coming here very normally, not through a campaign of changing ethnicity.” After the reversal of ethnic cleansing, Shaways said, “everybody can live where he wants. But before that you have to reverse the unjust policy which was done to strengthen the Baath Party and to change the composition of some regions.” The Americans had waited too long to resolve the problem of Kirkuk, he said, adding, “This is my opinion: Kirkuk is a part of Kurdistan.”

  Of the top Kurdish officials, I imagined that the person who would find the question of Kirkuk most vexing was Bakhtiar Amin. He grew up in Imam Qasim, the old Kurdish neighborhood near the citadel. He and his family were expelled from Kirkuk during Arabization; his relatives were jailed and tortured. Amin, in his mid-forties, lived in exile for years
, working as a human-rights activist in Europe and founding the International Alliance for Justice. He then became the first human-rights minister of a sovereign Iraqi government. But when we sat down in his spacious Baghdad office to talk about justice in Kirkuk, Amin made it clear that he was answering as a Kurd.

  After recounting the history of Kurdish oppression in great detail, the minister warned me that the situation in Kirkuk was becoming explosive. The Americans, with their hands full in the rest of Iraq, “want to keep the calm there—the calm of a cemetery.” Amin added, “It’s important not to be naïve with your foes and Machiavellian with your friends. Patience has its limits for victims as well.” The only solution, he insisted, was to return the demography of Kirkuk to what it was before Arabization, helping Arabs to resettle in the south.

  I asked how he would answer an Arab youth who said, “Mr. Human Rights Minister, Kirkuk is my home. I don’t have another. Why do I have to leave?” Amin replied that he would introduce the young Arab to a young Kurd who had lost his house and grown up in a tent, whose brother or sister had died of starvation or cold. He would tell the young Arab, “Your father, your mom, they are from a different area and they came here and they took these people’s house, and this is what they did to those children. And I will help you to have a decent life where your parents came from.”

  * * *

  KURDISH POLITICIANS and the constituents they represented wanted a guarantee that the future in Iraq would not repeat the past. After the fall of the regime, the Kurds negotiated hard with the Americans and their fellow Iraqis on two tracks: They sought as much power as possible in Baghdad and a strengthened autonomous region in the north. They understood that the interim and permanent constitutions would be the key to their desires, and they put their considerable skills to work on these documents, often outmatching the young, inexperienced Americans and divided Iraqis with whom they dealt. They were increasingly alienated from their American allies, who always seemed readier to soothe the recalcitrant Arabs than the dependable Kurds. Several Kurdish politicians told me that a repetition of 1975, when the United States withdrew its support and abandoned them to the Baathist regime, now seemed entirely possible. This kind of talk had the feel of an extreme reaction born of extreme experience, a kind of historical neurosis in which Iraq’s Kurds and Arabs were both trapped.