“I decided then that even if they killed me, I would not confess about how I helped the peshmerga,” Jemal said in crisp, British-inflected English as he escorted us into the compound. “If I confessed, I would have to give them names and then I would be lost.” His voice caught. “I prefer my own death to this, to bringing friends of mine into this kind of hell.”
Entering one of the deserted buildings, Jemal led us into the former interrogation room. All the room’s furnishings and lighting were gone, but three rusting and surprisingly small meat hooks still hung from the ceiling. “Sometimes they tortured three men at once.” Jemal nodded at the hooks. “To torture one man was not enough for them. . . . They had a technique, to take us right to the moment of death, but not to cross over. They regarded it as an art.”
He led us deeper into the dark, cold, miserable building, showing us the communal cell in which he had been imprisoned with ninety other men, and the solitary confinement cells, each measuring about four by six feet. The communal cell had only one tiny window high up near the ceiling, the solitary confinement cells no windows at all. We passed by a midsized room in which women and their young children had been imprisoned, and by the site of a shed, since torn down—by the irate mob? I wondered—in which women had reputedly been raped and thereafter killed.
“I was luckier than most.” Jemal paused in one of the dark hallways. “Because at least my family knew where I was. A student recognized me when the guards took me to the hospital one night. . . . The Iraqis never told the families when they arrested someone. And no one was allowed to approach the security building to ask about a person who’d disappeared. Sometimes people tried to bribe the soldiers for information. Sometimes they sold everything they had for that little bit of information.”
As we toured the complex, Jemal’s eyes were leaden and at times filled with tears, but as soon as we left, they started dancing again, and his irrepressible smile returned.
AT THE UNIVERSITY of Suleimaniyah, I met with professors who told me more about life under the Baath regime. Saddam Hussein was especially harsh on the city because of its rebellious history and many peshmerga supporters, they said. In Suleimaniyah, more than Dohuk and Erbil, the Baathists frequently cut off public services, imposed curfews, arrested civilians, and killed “saboteurs” in cold blood on the street, often burying them where they fell and making their families pay for the bullets. “It became a familiar sight to see a group of officers standing in a circle with a shovel,” English professor Kawan Arif told me. “The families had no right to claim the bodies. They had to come back for them secretly at night.”
Kawan’s stories reminded me of another I’d heard, from a thirty-something Suleimaniyan named Zerrin Ibrahim. When Zerrin was in intermediate school, she had a teacher who tried to “brainwash” the children with constant tales about the greatness of Saddam Hussein, she said. The peshmerga warned him many times to tone down his message, but when he persisted, they murdered him. The Baathists responded by gathering the children in a circle in the playground, arbitrarily choosing eight or ten boys, putting bags over their heads, and killing them on the spot. “I was sick for a week,” Zerrin said.
In contrast to the older generation, most of the students at the University of Suleimaniyah, who had been children when the Baath forces withdrew from Kurdistan, spoke to me not about atrocities, but about their desperation to leave Iraq. Kurdistan offered no jobs, no physical security, and few social freedoms, they said. “I want to go to a nightclub—there are no night-clubs here,” one male student elaborated. “And I want to go to the beach and ride a bicycle, wearing shorts and listening to a headset. But you can’t do that here. People will say you are not normal, you are rude and crazy, they will call you bad names.”
How difficult it must be to live bombarded with images of the pleasure-seeking West while being confined to a boxed-in, traditional country like Kurdistan. It was no surprise that many young people were emigrating illegally, and often under dangerous conditions; the students told me of one friend who drowned in the Aegean Sea and of another who lost both legs to frostbite crossing snow-covered mountains. But how terrifying the whole process must be for their parents, left behind with no news of their children for months. And how different these young Kurds’ concerns were from those of many older Kurds. All it takes to forget is one generation.
THE WOULD-BE BICYCLE rider’s worry about being thought “rude and crazy” echoed other sentiments I’d heard. Kurds of various ages and both sexes had told me that they avoided drawing undue attention to themselves because others might make fun. It had something to do with sherim, which translates into “shame” but is more akin to stage fright, I learned months later. A group-created concept that children learn at an early age, sherim is a powerful form of social control that helps to hold the communal society intact. Sherim contrasted sharply with the image of the Kurds that I’d had for years—that of a courageous and rebellious people willing to risk all they had for freedom and independence. But, in fact, both sets of attributes applied, and now that I thought about it, there was really no reason why they should be mutually exclusive. Perhaps only in the Western mind are the words “rebel” and “loner” regarded as synonymous.
SHALAW ALI ASKARI was a tall, lithe man with a deep tan dressed in a cream-colored shal u shapik, black button-down shirt, and dark cummerbund, no turban. His father, Ali Askari, had been among the first to restart the Kurdish revolution in 1976, post–Algiers Accord, and Shalaw himself was a member of the PUK high command, overseeing the peshmerga in the Suleimaniyah region. He was also one of the few Iraqi Kurds I met who did not favor a U.S. attack on Saddam. “I think the status quo is best for the Kurds,” he said. “In this situation, we are getting stronger and Saddam is getting weaker, because of sanctions. But if Saddam goes, things might get worse. A weak Saddam is better than many other alternatives.”
One morning Shalaw took me to a narrow valley beneath the grim, awe-some Pira Magrun mountain range, a wall of seemingly impenetrable rock, with many peaks leaning far in one direction as if being blown by a fierce wind. Here, his father and a group of peshmerga had lived in a large cave— Shalaw pointed it out—from which they conducted clandestine operations between 1976 and 1978, when they and eight hundred other men headed north to the Turkish border to pick up an arms delivery. Tensions between the KDP and PUK were then at a high, and the PUK leader Talabani gave Ali Askari written instructions to wipe out any KDP bases he encountered along the way. Askari apparently intended to ignore the order, as he had a working relationship with the KDP, but a copy of Talabani’s instructions fell into KDP hands, and the PUK force was ambushed by seventy-five hundred KDP troops. After suffering heavy losses, Askari surrendered, to be shown no mercy. He and his commanders were summarily executed, on the order of Sami Abdul Rahman, who at the time of my visit was deputy prime minister of the KDP-controlled zone.
It is upon hundreds of such incidents, carried out with equal intensity by both sides, that the bitter animosity between the KDP and PUK is built. “You don’t forget such things,” Shalaw said wearily, as I studied the cave, wondering how I would react if my father were killed under similar circumstances. It is easy for outsiders to condemn the Kurds for their inter-tribal and political violence, but quite another to be a victim of that violence, and still another to rise above its murderous cycle.
Behind the valley in which Ali Askari had once lived, on the other side of the Pira Magrun range, spiraled the hauntingly beautiful Jafati Valley, an isolated hideaway of terraced fields and goat paths winding around jade slopes, villages nestled in the ravines below. With mountains protecting it on all sides, the Jafati Valley had served as a natural fortress for the PUK in the 1980s, and so had suffered the first major Anfal attack, waged between February 23 and March 19, 1988. The PUK region suffered seven of the eight major Anfal attacks; it bordered Iran, and its peshmerga had been preeminent in aiding the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War.
Shalaw�
�s family had deep roots in the Jafati Valley region, and, from Pira Magrun, we traveled on to the village of Shadala, where his ancestor, Shaikh Abdul Kerim, had founded the Haqqa religion around 1930. A small splinter sect of the Naqshbandi order, now all but died out, the Haqqa had attempted to create a semi-utopian community based on social equality, communal ownership, and greater freedom for women, some of whom became religious leaders. “But the Haqqa do not believe in free sexual relations, as some of our enemies have claimed,” Shalaw’s cousin, Abdul Kerim Hadji, informed me soon after we arrived at the sect’s humble headquarters.
A sect of the poor and oppressed, the religious movement had grown rapidly, spreading to about three hundred villages in just a few years. Anyone could join, including the wealthy, and several powerful aghas had done so, but only after burning their fine clothes and “putting ropes around their necks and running like donkeys” to prove their new humility, Abdul Kerim said.
The Haqqa’s growing power, nonconformity, and refusal to pay taxes led the British to arrest Shaikh Abdul Kerim and imprison him in Kirkuk in 1934. In response, thousands of Haqqa believers put on burlap sacks, emblematic of their vow of poverty, took up walking sticks, and marched on the city, forcing his release. “It was like Gandhi,” Abdul Hadji said. “Our demonstration was completely peaceful, but we frightened the British and they let the Shaikh go.”
If only such an approach could work today, I thought, while also remembering the quasi-utopian community reputedly established by Shaikh Ahmad of Barzan and the once-widespread popularity of the non-worldly Naqshbandi and Qadiri Sufi orders. Was there something in the Kurds’ character that had attracted them to such idealism, or had they turned to it more as a means of escape from a difficult world?
SHALAW AND I traveled on to Goktapa, largely built by his grandfather, an influential man with four wives. Perched on a high bluff, the village boasted a splendid setting overlooking the cobalt blue Lesser Zab River, hills neatly terraced with orchards, and a valley patchworked with light and dark fields. But to one side of Goktapa stood the empty ruins of Shalaw’s grandfather’s former mansion, while to the other rose a steep hill topped by a mass grave and a white sculpture of screaming human and animal forms entitled Shouting.
Saddam’s attack on Goktapa had come at about five-thirty P.M. on May 3, 1988, during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. The women were outside baking bread for the evening’s meal, the children playing in the river, and the men, socializing or working in the orchards. Four or five planes appeared, but the villagers paid little attention—the region was always being bombed. The first plane dropped pieces of paper, to see which way the wind was blowing. Then the bombs fell, softer than usual and releasing a strange odor of garlic and apples—the smell of chemicals. One bomb fell in the river, instantly killing all the fish for miles upstream and down, and others hit the orchards and fields. The panicking villagers fled in all directions, some collapsing as they ran, others expiring days later, and the rest were herded off into camps and prisons. About 150 people died in the attack, including forty-nine of Shalaw’s cousins.
ONE EVENING, I MET with Safwat Rashid Sidqi, a lawyer affiliated with the Kurdish Human Rights Organization. Founded by a group of Kurdish intellectuals in 1991, the organization was almost unique in Kurdistan; it was independent of all political parties, with what little funding it had provided by its members. The group’s aim was to monitor human rights abuses committed against Kurdistan by its surrounding states, and to look into abuses within Kurdistan itself, first by contacting the accused party, in the hopes of redress, and then, if that was not successful, through legal investigation.
In a dark, upstairs office, Safwat filled me in on the human rights record of the semiautonomous state. On the positive side, the 1992 elections had for the most part been democratic and fair, and since then, both the KDP and PUK had succeeded in establishing police and court systems that worked relatively well. His organization had unrestricted access to officials, and a moderately good relationship with both Barzani and Talabani, who sometimes responded to their concerns, sometimes not.
During the internal war, from 1994 to 1997, both parties had committed every atrocity in the human rights book—“killing POWs, confiscating property, firing each other’s employees, even mutilation, you name it,” Safwat said. “The only thing we didn’t hear a single incident of was rape.” However, over the last five years, with the growing peace between the parties, the situation had much improved.
Nonetheless, both the KDP and PUK were still missing peshmerga from the internal fighting, who were perhaps being held secretly as POWs. Under Iraqi law, the governments could legally arrest suspected spies through a “special investigation judge,” and hold them in isolated prisons. Each party also had its own internal intelligence apparatus and talked more about human rights abuses than they took action against them.
In addition, tribal law still reigned in the more remote villages, with even murders often settled within the tribes. “The parties encourage this,” Safwat said. “They each have Social Bureaus that try to solve things outside the courts. . . . Why? Because it allows them to gain strength with the tribal leaders and be in control.”
Safwat’s words reminded me of Agha, Shaikh and State by Martin van Bruinessen, a classic work in Kurdish studies, based largely on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s. One of van Bruinessen’s central arguments was that the Kurdish tribe was sustained by the state, with the state aiding and using the power of the aghas to control huge segments of Kurdish society. The Ottomans and Saddam Hussein had been experts in this arena, and now it appeared that the PUK and KDP were following suit.
Safwat went no further in discussing human rights abuses, but one week later, I met with other professionals who expressed a more negative outlook. Speaking off the record, out of fear of repercussions—“rightly or wrongly,” they said—the professionals described a land in which “whoever is not with the party [the KDP or PUK], is against it.” Employees who protested party decisions too strongly were fired; nonparty members had virtually no chance of reaching senior civil service positions or landing government business contracts, and even the United Nations consulted with the parties before hiring employees, they said. Great distrust between the KDP and PUK continued, the possibility of fresh violence between them was still very real, and neither party wanted to hold another election, as they were afraid of losing power. Underneath, too, both sides were opposed to independent human rights groups, and many Kurds thought twice before joining the Kurdistan Human Rights Organization. Concluded one of the professionals, “On the surface, we are free and democratic, but in the details, we are not.”
Many of these inbred political problems could be solved if Kurdistan had a serious free press, I thought. But it did not. Although a free press was in principle encouraged by the semiautonomous state, all publications that existed were directly or indirectly supported or controlled by the parties; there were few sources of independent financing in Kurdistan.
Several Kurdish journalists told me that, over the last two years, they had been speaking out with increasing openness about various social problems, including the formerly taboo subject of honor killings. However, when it came to criticizing politicians or the parties, they still proceeded with caution. “There are some red lines that we cannot cross,” said Asos Hardi, editor-in-chief of Hawlati, the region’s most independent paper at the time of my visit. “Usually, we can find a way to talk about everything, but we don’t do so directly,” and the paper seldom named names.
Many Kurds I met, including some party officials, openly acknowledged the daunting power of the KDP and PUK—a good sign, I thought. Yet many also partially excused that power, saying that the vulnerable position of Kurdistan, coupled with its lack of a civil rights tradition, made the problem a thorny one to solve. The parties had to watch their backs at every minute, they said—threats from the Baath regime, the Islamists, and the surrounding states were constant and very rea
l, and the parties could not afford to be infiltrated with spies or otherwise lose power or control. In addition, the Kurdish people themselves, so new to democracy, were still inept at using their new institutions for the common good. Building a civil society took time.
The arguments made sense. Perhaps it was still too early to expect fullfledged human rights, watchdog organizations, and a free press to operate in Kurdistan. Abuses of power had ravaged the country for centuries; to end them was no simple matter. On the other hand, if a system of accountability was not established now, then when? “I think when Kurdistan and Iraq are free of Saddam Hussein, we will solve all these problems,” said the Hawlati editor. I fervently hoped he was right. Against all odds, and to the Kurds’ great credit, democracy had taken root in Kurdistan, but its shoots were still tender and green.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Judgment Day
AS IF THE CITY OF HALABJA HAD NOT SUFFERED ENOUGH in 1988, losing over five thousand souls in a single day of chemical bombing, it was now under threat of attack by an Islamist terror group, Ansar al-Islam, or Supporters of Islam. Thought to number about five hundred or six hundred, Ansar al-Islam had seized control of about a dozen villages in the valley between Halabja and Iran, and controlled the main highway east of the military road. Ansar al-Islam had killed at least forty-two PUK peshmerga in one incident the previous September, massacring over half in cold blood after they’d surrendered, and attacked the PUK’s Halabja headquarters several times that same fall. Ansar al-Islam was hostile to Westerners, and the PUK always provided foreign journalists visiting Halabja with a heavily armed escort, while most foreign aid workers had ceased to visit the city altogether, saying that the risk was not worth it.
Journeying with me to Halabja one early June day were the two American journalists I had traveled with to the Qara Dagh, Kevin McKiernan and Ginny Durrin. They were in Kurdistan to film a documentary on weapons of mass destruction that Ginny was producing for Ted Turner Documentaries. Kevin, who was working as her cameraman, was a journalist and documentary filmmaker in his own right, best known for his award-winning film Good Kurds, Bad Kurds; he had been covering the Kurds since 1991. Accompanying us was our translator, Dildar Majeed Kittani, a strong, outspoken woman of about forty who had lived in the mountains with her peshmerga husband in the 1980s.
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