I met Fatma’s groom-to-be, his mother, and several women relatives one day as they were leaving the house and I was coming in. The women were dressed traditionally, with head coverings, but the young man wore a neatly pressed button-down shirt and pants. He was slim and pale, and seemed quiet and gentle.
After they had gone, Fatma grabbed my arm excitedly. “What do you think? He’s nice, don’t you think? He’s a teacher in a college, and very intelligent.” She blushed.
I agreed that he seemed nice, and asked how long it would be before they could marry.
“Oh, that will take a very long time,” she said. “Maybe more than one year. We have much paperwork to do before he can come to the United States. We will have to meet often.” She blushed again, more deeply. “That will be very embarrassing for me—Kurdish women do not meet with their husbands before they marry. We are very shy.”
IN THE AMADIYA district, not far from Dohuk, rot the stumps of three castles that once belonged to Saddam Hussein. A mountainous region of great beauty, Amadiya has been a resort destination ever since the 1930s, when King Faisal built a Mediterranean-style palace in the village of Sarsing, and hotels sprouted up nearby.
One day, Majed, the family, Yousif, Fatma, and I set out in three cars to picnic and tour the sites of Saddam’s former castles. Though it was no longer Newroz, thousands of other families were out picnicking—barbecuing, playing badminton, exploring the mountains, and dancing in motley lines that ranged in length from three people to forty or fifty. The longer lines were often wedding parties, with bands. Watching the many revelers, it was hard to imagine that only eleven years before, such activity had been strictly forbidden.
As we drove, Yousif told me about the castles. Before building them, Saddam had evicted all the local inhabitants, he said. But since the Iraqi president still needed local labor, he brought in workers blindfolded so that they wouldn’t learn the approaches or layouts. The roads outside the palaces were completely off-limits, and any unauthorized person who trespassed was shot.
“One of our uncles was a famous wall builder who was called in to work on one of Saddam’s airports,” Yousif said. “Saddam came to the airport one day and said, ‘This section must be finished by tomorrow.’ It was a huge section, and the workers couldn’t finish it by themselves. So they called in my uncle and hundreds of others, and they worked all night. Even the security men helped. They knew that if the section wasn’t finished, they would all be killed.”
Like most other Kurds I met, Yousif talked about Saddam Hussein in an intimate manner, as if he were an evil uncle or other close relative. It was always “Saddam,” not “Saddam Hussein,” and it was always Saddam, not the Baath forces, who was personally responsible for each and every cruel act. With Saddam at a safe distance, the Kurds could also joke about him and, at times, speak of his grim exploits as if they were tales out of Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” Many Kurds were fascinated with Saddam, as was I. It was as if we were looking into a dark mirror, at the underbellies of ourselves, of what we might be capable of in the wrong time or place.
Our cavalcade reached the site of the first former castle, near Enishky village, but there wasn’t much to see. After the uprising, Kurds had destroyed the edifice, pulverizing some parts, carrying others away for reuse, to leave nothing but a high brick wall behind. The site was now used by the KDP militia.
More interesting was an airstrip nearby, on which stood about a dozen Turkish tanks, neatly aligned in a row, their gun barrels glistening from a recent rain.
“What are they doing here?” I asked, shocked at the sight, but Majed and Yousif shrugged away my question, preferring not to talk politics. I would learn the answer later.
We drove on, to the second and third castle sites, which neighbored each other—one easily accessible near Ashawa village, the other out of reach atop Gara Mountain, a craggy black peak still patchy with snow. A road connected the two, but it was impassable at this time of year. Saddam had usually arrived at Gara by helicopter.
The Ashawa castle was also destroyed, but it had been built beside a series of lovely, landscaped waterfalls, and these remained. To one side, the waterfalls were shallow and wide, engineered to fall over a stepped-down series of rosy marble blocks. To the other, they were wild and natural, plashing against black boulders fringed with moss. Bridges arched here and there, and a small pool collected near the top, where a small zoo had once stood.
Parking our cars, we walked down to the wild side of the falls, along with dozens of other visiting families. Near the bottom was a stone patio with an oven built into a blackened rock wall. This had once been one of Saddam’s favorite spots, Yousif said—he’d liked to come here for dinner and sit by the falls while his servants cooked. I could easily imagine the scene and even feel Saddam’s mustachioed ghost, hovering nearby as it tried to take a seat at its invisible table. But the ghost kept getting shoved aside by groups of laughing Kurds taking pictures of one another. There was no room for him here.
CHAPTER FOUR
After al-Anfal
AL-ANFAL REFERS TO THE BAATH REGIME’S FINAL, GENOCIDAL attack on the Kurds, begun on a large scale in February 1988.1 Blasphemously, and cynically, taken from the eighth sura, or chapter, of the Quran, “al-anfal” literally means “the spoils” of war. The sura tells the story of 319 newly converted Muslims who defeat three times their number in the A.D. 624 battle of Badr, and justifies the victors’ pillage of the infidels’ property.
During the Anfal campaign, about twelve hundred Kurdish villages were systematically destroyed by the Iraqi military through bombing and burning, mass evacuation, and execution. In the campaign’s course, tens of thousands of Kurds—perhaps as many as one hundred eighty thousand— were murdered or disappeared. Ruined villages were bulldozed, wells capped with concrete, fields poisoned, and tens of thousands of civilians placed in refugee centers that were, in effect, concentration camps.
Though unique in its scope and aims, the Anfal was the culmination of decades of attacks against the Kurds by the Iraqi government. Many Iraqi Kurds have seen their villages destroyed numerous times; to rebuild one’s house four or five times in a lifetime has been the norm, not the exception, in Kurdistan. From the British attacks in the 1920s to the Kurdish revolt of the early 1960s to the aftermath of the Algiers Accord, the Kurdish villagers have suffered the consequences of their leaders’ actions. During the entire reign of the Baath Party, an estimated four thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed and perhaps three hundred thousand people perished.
However, the Anfal was an entirely different operation than the ones that had come before it, and one that went far beyond retaliations against a citizenry for supporting a war on the Iraqi government. According to a 1992 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report: “Anfal was a ‘final solution,’ implemented by the Iraqi government, the Baath party and the Iraqi army. It was intended to make the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan and their rural way of life disappear forever.”
When the major operations of the Anfal began in February 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was running scared of the increasing collaboration between the Iraqi peshmerga and Iran. In the previous few months, Iranian troops had captured strategic sites along the Iran-Iraq border and penetrated deep into Iraqi Kurdistan. But instead of retaliating with focused assaults against the Iranians and peshmerga, Hussein methodically began destroying Kurdistan. On February 23, he launched a colossal air and ground attack, using conventional and chemical weapons, against a peshmerga-held region to the east of Suleimaniyah. Seven other equally massive Anfal operations followed, each targeting a different area. The Dohuk region, farthest from Iran, was the last to be attacked, in the eighth and final Anfal of August 25 to September 6, 1988.
Most of the Anfal operations proceeded in more or less the same manner. After gaining control of a region, the Iraqi forces executed the captured peshmerga, herded the civilians into forts, and bulldozed the emptied villages. Virtually all survi
ving men and teenage boys, along with women and children at some sites, were handcuffed, loaded into convoys of trucks, and driven hundreds of miles to the southern Iraqi desert. There, often at dusk, they were forced out, their handcuffs removed (to be used again), and ordered to stand on the brink of shallow ditches where they were shot and bulldozed into mass graves.
The remaining civilians—tens of thousands of women, children, and old men—were dumped out into “camps” without shelter, food, water, health care, or sanitation. Usually, the only structures were guard towers and security buildings. Many of the camps were located in the barren plains surrounding Erbil, and the refugees survived only through the generosity of the city’s citizens, who organized an enormous relief effort, bringing food, water, blankets, and tents to the camps.
Although technically not part of the Anfal, which targeted rural communities and left most large cities intact, the best-known and single most horrific of the 1988 operations occurred at Halabja, a city of fifty thousand near the Iran border. On March 15, the peshmerga helped Iranian forces enter Halabja—against the wishes of many of its citizens. The next day, Baath forces attacked the city with napalm and chemical bombs. About five thousand people died instantly, perhaps another seven thousand died over the next three days, and many thousands of others fled over the mountains into Iran.
The mastermind behind the carnage was Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, nicknamed “Chemical Ali” by the Kurds—and captured about five months after the Iraq war of 2003. As the Baath Party Northern Bureau secretary-general, Chemical Ali had absolute powers over the region and the go-ahead to employ any means necessary to eradicate the “saboteurs.” In one 1988 meeting regarding the Kurds, Chemical Ali boasted: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community, and those who listen to them!”
Indeed, the international community did not listen. It was not politically expedient to do so; the United States and much of the West supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. Even sympathetic listeners took little action, dismissing the Kurdish claims as wildly exaggerated, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Only after the Gulf War, when the Kurds drew attention to their suffering through their uprising, and human rights organizations carefully documented the rampant atrocities, did the Kurdish story begin to be heard.
In his destruction of about 4,000 out of a total 4,655 Kurdish villages, Saddam not only destroyed the Kurds’ communities, but the very fabric of their society. The Kurds had lived in largely self-sufficient villages for centuries; theirs was traditionally a rural existence centered on agriculture, animal husbandry, and family. By eradicating the villages, the Baathists destroyed the Kurds’ economic base and weakened their societal ties, casting them into a chaotic modern world where many have been forced to rely on foreign humanitarian aid. Independence has been replaced by dependence.
Although al-Anfal refers specifically to the 1988 campaign, many Kurds now use the word generically, to refer to any massacre or large-scale attack. “To anfal” has also become a verb.
NIZARKEH IS AN ugly stone citadel on the outskirts of Dohuk. Though often referred to as a castle by Kurds speaking English, the word prison or fortress would be more appropriate. Like dozens of other buildings throughout northern Iraq, Nizarkeh was built by the Baath Party in the early 1980s to house the Iraqi army. But as the decade unfolded, the Baathists converted the buildings into refugee camps for displaced families.
During those years, Nizarkeh’s perimeter was peppered with mines and patrolled by helicopters. Trespassers were shot on sight. And after the 1991 uprising, many Kurds were found still locked up in cells, their bodies emaciated, bruised, and broken. Some men had lost their minds; others couldn’t remember their names. Women were discovered naked and covered with sores.
One cold rainy day in April, I accompany a delegation of five women from the KDP’s Women’s Union into Nizarkeh, now occupied by homeless families. Along with other women’s groups throughout Kurdistan, the union is working to improve women’s lives through literacy and education programs, legal counseling, social services, political lobbying, and small economic projects, such as sewing cooperatives.
We pass through Nizarkeh’s towering entrance gate and into its vast courtyard, encircled by a two-story building ringed with doors. A rusting water tank and battered pickup trucks stand to one side. Clusters of men, their depression apparent even from afar, huddle together near the trucks. Women crouch on concrete walkways, washing clothes.
Our van parks, and we climb out. Picking our way over the mud, we pass through an open doorway and into a dark hall piled high with metal drums, cardboard boxes, and bulky plastic bags. To one side is a makeshift shower, built of tin oil containers hammered flat, and a bare-chested man getting a shave. Upon seeing us, he lets out an embarrassed yelp and reaches for his shirt.
Down a shadowy circular hallway, our many footsteps echo. We enter a room—a former cell—where a woman named Bayan and two of her six children are waiting. Dressed in a green-print dishdasha and black head scarf, Bayan is in her thirties, with a drawn, careworn face.
The room is clean and well kept, with thin cushions lining three walls, and a refrigerator and cabinets lining a fourth. A television stands in one corner, near photos of family members and Mulla Mustafa.
We take seats on the floor as Bayan serves tea. Then she begins her story.
“My husband and I were married when we were in our teens,” she says, “and twenty days after our wedding, he went to the mountains to become a peshmerga. Sometimes I didn’t see him for two months, one time I didn’t see him for two years. I raised my children by myself, but I didn’t mind. People from villages are stronger than people from cities.
“One day in August 1988, the airplanes came to our village, and the next day, the soldiers also came. We ran away to the mountains and hid for fourteen days. But we became hungry, and so we surrendered. We were very frightened, we had no hope, we thought we would be executed.
“The soldiers took us to Beharkeh collective town near Erbil. It was hot, just like a desert, with no water. They gave us nothing. We only survived because the people from Erbil came secretly at night and helped us. Some of the guards also helped us. But we weren’t allowed to leave Beharkeh unless we got permission—say, maybe if my son was sick—and then only for three hours a day. For two years, we lived just like prisoners.
“During the uprising, we went to Turkey, and when we came back, we had no place to live. Our village in the Sarsing area was destroyed. So we came here, the castle is free. There are about 140 families living here now. . . .”
A heavyset woman from the Women’s Union leans forward. In her fifties and dressed in elegant black, with gold jewelry and a black head scarf striped with gold, she appears to have little in common with the residents of Nizarkeh. Appearances are deceiving; one person’s story is everyone’s story in Kurdistan.
“I am also from a village of Sarsing,” she says, “and what happened to Bayan also happened to me. My husband was a peshmerga, and in 1985, I went to live with him and my three children in the mountains. There were many women living in the mountains, cooking and helping the peshmerga. But one day, the soldiers came and found us. They attacked us, and I still have two bullets in my leg from that time.
“After the attack, my children and I went back to our village. But then the chemical bombing came. I was pregnant, and when my child was born, he was not right in his head—he is fourteen now, but still like a two-year-old. On August 27, 1988, the airplanes began circling again, and we ran to the mountains. There was no place to hide. We thought we would be killed. The soldiers came and took us to Beharkeh at night and dumped us in the desert. When we woke up in the morning, we had nothing.”
ZERKAH IS A reconstructed village typical of the many hundreds that dot the Kurdish countryside. Completely destroyed during the Anfal, it was rebuilt by the U.N.
agency Habitat and the Kurdistan Reconstruction Organization (KRO). About 150 houses are neatly lined up along a few parallel streets. Painted bright white with blue trim, the houses seem doll-like, while the whole village feels a bit like a cruise ship washed up onto a foreign land.
Anfal widows Maryam (left) and friends
Walking up a short walkway to one of the houses, our delegation is warmly received by Maryam, a small woman with a kind, round face made for smiling. Enveloped in a long black dress and head scarf, Maryam is about thirty-five and has five children. Beaming, she ushers us into her spic-and-span home, its main room furnished with carpets, cushions, a tall wall cabinet, and a large television. A born storyteller, Maryam serves tea and starts to talk, while two other women also enveloped in black slip in, to sit silently on either side of their friend like shrouded bookends, their expressions mirroring her expression, her sadness their own.
“It was winter when we left our house,” Maryam says. “Saddam’s forces had been marching in our area, and we knew something was about to happen. So we went to Gara Mountain, where we stayed for four months, living in caves. But in August the Anfal began, and we were captured.
“They took us to Aqra castle. We stayed there three days, and then they took us by truck to prison in Mosul. For sixteen days we had hardly any food. Some people fainted, some died. The guards came with music and said we had to dance for Saddam. But we were too weak because of hunger, and they beat us—children, women, men. They beat my husband very hard—I don’t like to remember—and then one day they put us on buses again, men and women on different buses, and I never saw him again.”
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 8