The most powerful man in Kurdistan at the time was a wild-eyed sheikh named Mahmoud Barzinji, who is seen in a few photographs at the front of other tribal leaders with a curved dagger, a turban, and a walrus mustache. The British tried putting the fox in charge of the henhouse by appointing him as their governor for the Kurdish north in December 1918, but he was no Saladin.14 Sheikh Mahmoud began stacking the local administration with his family members, and within months he declared himself the king of Kurdistan, seizing the British treasury in Sulimaniya and raising his own flag. He intercepted British couriers and cut telegraph lines. A British political officer caught wind of the rebellion and managed to flee south with the news.15 The British description of Mahmoud was entirely pejorative—he was said to be an animal, a thief, a cruel and unpredictable tyrant. But Arnold Wilson, upon meeting the sheikh in Sulimaniya, described a man who quoted President Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points verbatim and wore a Kurdish copy of the Treaty of Sevres, with pages from the Koran, like a talisman wrapped around his arm.16
As the British marched north to put down the rebellion, they met surprisingly stiff resistance. Sheikh Mahmoud first turned the British back at Tasluja Pass—one of the same mountain walls that would keep the Iraqi army at bay later in the century. His early victory made Mahmoud overconfident, and the British 18th Division scaled the cliffs of Bazyan and surrounded him. He was sentenced to death, but then spared, since he had not executed his captured British officers. They exiled him to India instead.17
The British occupation of Iraq can begin to sound uncomfortably familiar to an American one in the twenty-first century, with Kurdistan substituted as the troublesome Anbar province of Ramadi and Fallujah. The British tried once again to co-opt the locals and brought Sheikh Mahmoud back in 1922. Within months he had declared himself king again.18 This time the British put him down with Sikh troops transported to the area by plane. This was a military innovation at the time,19 and not the only one the British discovered between their world wars.
"I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [to] spread a lively terror," was the judgment of Winston Churchill at the time. Gas was used to quell Arab rebellions in the south, and aerial bombardment employed against the Kurds in the north.* When the British had imposed King Faisal as the ruler of Iraq in 1921, the Kurdish city of Sulimaniya boycotted the referendum on his rule, and the city of Kirkuk was the only significant no-vote across the country.20 Sheikh Mahmoud was only one of many Kurdish troublemakers, and his people demonstrated that they weren't quite ready to get behind a unified nationalist struggle. After a brief exile in Persia, Sheikh Mahmoud submitted to the British government in Iraq and slipped quietly back into his homeland in 1927. His uprisings were over, but the greatest of all the Kurdish rebels was just learning his trade.
NO GUERRILLA COMMANDER of the twentieth century—not Ernesto "Che" Guevara, not Afghanistan's Ahmed Shah Masoud, not Sudan's Dr. John Garang—fought more wars over more years than Mulla Mustafa Barzani. He may also hold the dubious record for the number of countries he took aid from over the decades: the Soviets, the government in Baghdad, the shah of Iran, the Israelis, the Jordanians, the British, and finally the Americans. Born in 1903, Barzani had a career that spanned seven decades. He founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in August 1946, which now flies its flag (and never the Iraqi one) all over the Kurdish region of Iraq. Barzani did not aim to be the king of Kurdistan—in fact he seemed originally motivated by a natural desire to protect his tribe and his own small mountain region. But Barzani would grow to be come the Kurds' first modern revolutionary, playing the cold war game pragmatically in the hope of gaining at least a measure of recognition for the invisible millions of Kurds. As important, he planted the seeds of the Kurds' national army, which would only triumph years after his death.
Barzani was stout and short, and even in old photographs it's easy to see the intense, piercing eyes that persuaded thousands of men to follow him into the mountains, usually against devastating odds. He was famous for his physical strength even into his seventies, and like Fidel Castro and Ahmed Shah Masoud, he easily seduced Western journalists into romantic press coverage. When he died in exile in 1979, even the Israeli Mossad held a fawning memorial service.21
Though it sounds like the stuff of Greek myth, Barzani could actually claim he was weaned in prison. Before he was three years old, his entire family was jailed in Mosul by the Ottomans. His grandfather, his father, and one older brother were hanged for different rebellions.22 Mulla Mustafa got his own first taste of combat in his teens, leading several hundred men in Sheikh Mahmoud's first rebellion in 1919.23 The name Barzani later became a curse in the mouth of Saddam Hussein, who rounded up and executed eight thousand Barzani tribesmen in the 1980s.
The first Barzani rebellion in the early 1930s was led not by Mulla Mustafa, but his older brother Sheikh Ahmad of Barzan. While "Mulla" was a family name and had no religious significance, Sheikh Ahmad was a cleric, though it's not entirely clear he was preaching Islam. Rumors spread that he was encouraging his parishioners to drink wine, eat pork, and have a good free-loving time. Ahmad also reportedly instructed them to pray not southwest to Mecca, but north to the village of Barzan. This did not go down with King Faisal, Iraq's British-sponsored Arab monarch in Baghdad.24 The Iraqi government, with Royal Air Force backing, set out to punish the entire Barzan region, and in 1932 exiled the two Barzani brothers to various other cities.25 In 1943 Mulla Mustafa Barzani escaped from exile and found his home destroyed and his people starving on the moutainside. His appeals for aid to Baghdad were refused, and Mulla Mustafa Barzani went back to war.26
This time Mulla Mustafa fought for more than just his starving tribesmen. Barzani demanded that Baghdad create an autonomous Kurdish region in the north, encompassing the same areas the Iraq Kurds control today. He asked for Kurdish to be made an official language and for a share of the cabinet in Baghdad. As World War II raged, both the Allied and Soviet propaganda pushed freedom and self-determination, and Barzani—audacious or naive—thought he somehow had British support against Baghdad. His rebellion failed, not least because one of his biggest Kurdish allies, the Zebari tribe, defected to the Arab side in 1945.27 Pro-government Kurds would tip the balance one way or another in many battles to come.*
Barzani again found himself on the run, and he took three thousand followers into Iran, where the Soviet Union had promised to sponsor a homeland for Kurds. The 1946 Mahabad Republic, based in the Iranian province of the same name, remains at this writing the only declared Kurdish state in history.28 The attempt at building a Kurdish homeland was led by Iranian Kurd Qazi Muhamad, who had founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI). He and Barzani didn't get along perfectly, but Qazi Muhamad had no choice but to accept Mulla Mustafa as an equal; Barzani was already a legend among the Kurds on both sides of the border, and his pesh merga troops were the best Kurdish fighters of the day.† What undid the Mahabad Republic first is not clear—the internal divisions or the fact that the Soviets withdrew their support in the spring of 1946, under pressure as the other former Allied powers lined up behind the shah of Iran, Mohamad Reza Pahlavi, who had taken the throne from his father in 1941.29
The shah was thus free to crack down on the Kurds with his newly created secret police (later the infamous SAVAK). By the next year the Mahabad Republic was a smoking ruin and hundreds of KDPI were hanging from gallows, including Qazi Muhamad. Iraqi Kurdish leaders were sent back to Baghdad, where many of them also swung, charged with treason for creating a Kurdish state even across the border in Iran.30 Barzani narrowly escaped back to Iraqi Kurdistan, where he gathered several hundred followers for a freezing exodus through the mountains, on foot, to Soviet Azerbaijan.31 They fought their way through the mountains, clashing often with the Turkish and Iranian armies, and finally reached the Soviet Union after fifty-two days. What would become an eleven-year exile in the USSR earned Barzani the nickname "the Red Mullah."
&n
bsp; Barzani's flight to the Soviet Union made sense, and not only because he had nowhere else to go. The Russians had taken an interest in Central Asian minorities, including the Kurds, from the early days of the century. By the 1930s Russian scholars had developed a Cyrillic alphabet for the Kurdish language and held "kurdology" conferences, perhaps seeing the Kurds as a card to play in the region's great game.32 During the Mahabad period, the Soviets sent encouragement in the form of Kurdish-language radio broadcasts. Kurds hoped the USSR would be the great power that would finally hear their cries. But Barzani's Soviet exile seemed to disabuse him of any socialist leanings he had. He and his men did take advantage of the opportunity for some of their first formal education, mostly as craftsmen, and Barzani himself learned Russian at the language academy in Moscow, though he dismissed rumors that the Soviets gave him military training.33
When Abd-al-Karim Qassim staged a military coup in Baghdad in 1958, he gave Barzani the green light to return. The KDP had been in contact with the Iraqi free officers (modeled after Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egyptian free officers), and they thought Qassim might offer their first chance at being equal citizens in Iraq.34 Barzani's return to Kurdistan was somewhere between a homecoming and a second coming. His status had assumed godlike proportions, and the Kurds hung on his every word, ready to fight or make peace at "General" Barzani's command.
As Iraq's prime minister, Qassim was interested in using the Kurds to balance the power of Arab nationalists, and it wasn't long before he was practicing the age-old method of co-opting a tribal leader—by giving Barzani a stipend and a government car.35 Kurds were favored for a time under Qassim, and Barzani's men served the government, even helping Baghdad put down a rebellion in 1959, which included some dirty work against Qassim's Ba'athist and nationalist rivals in the city of Mosul, something the Ba'athists would not soon forget.36
Barzani's time with the Baghdad government didn't bring out the best in him, as with many mountain fighters who get citified. Critics said that Barzani wasn't pushing Kurdish issues hard enough and that he still let tribal divisions get in the way of his people's aspirations.37 Qassim's affections soon drifted, and he began to also patronize Barzani's jahsh rivals, the Surchi and Karki tribes. In 1961 the divided loyalties became too much for the general, and he raised his men in rebellion again.
At the time, the American press had no sympathy for the "Red Mullah," whom they considered a Russian tool (and mistakenly thought to be a religious radical). A rather partial account of the rebellion ran in Time magazine's May 4, 1962, issue:
The revolt could not be dismissed as merely another example of Kurdish cussedness. The rebels have moved steadily south out of the Zagros Mountains to within 70 miles of Baghdad, now have a quasi hold on sizable parts of Iraq . . . Buffeted within and without, Qassim's regime is in danger of collapse . . . Leading the rebellious Kurds is veteran pro-Communist Mustafa Barzani, a onetime mullah—religious teacher—and military boss of a Red-supported puppet republic of Kurdistan just after the war . . . Barzani began last summer by leading his hotheads in raids on isolated Iraqi police outposts.
Indeed, Qassim was overthrown in 1963 by the same Ba'athists and Nasserites the Kurds had helped him suppress in Mosul. At the same time the seeds of Kurdistan's most important schism sprouted. Despite what America thought, Barzani was no more red than he was yellow. But the Kurds were not immune to the socialist revolutionary current around the globe. The real reds in the KDP started a push to modernize the KDP from its tribal roots, led by a young Barzani protégé who would become his greatest rival, Mam Jalal Talabani.
Talabani was born in 1933 near the town of Koi Sanjaq, and his family had a natural sphere of influence in the southern part of Iraqi Kurdistan, the area around Sulimaniya and Kirkuk. While "Mam"—"uncle" in Kurdish—is a common honorific, Talabani bore the title even when he joined the Kurdish resistance at age thirteen. Before his son was born, Talabani's father had had a dream in which his late uncle Jalal gave him an apple, and so he named the boy "Uncle Jalal."*
Talabani studied law in Baghdad, and while he was as much a worshipper of General Barzani as many others, he also followed the more intellectual leanings of the KDP's secretary general, Ibrahim Ahmad. Along with Ahmad, Talabani represented the Kurdish intelligentsia who had been discussing and writing about Kurdish rights in cafés in the capital.38 Talabani cut a dashing figure in those days, with broad shoulders, and a hearty grin under a bushy mustache. He was a clear favorite of Barzani's and translated for the general, but on a trip to Baghdad representing the KDP in February 1964, Talabani went far beyond what Barzani saw as his mandate. Seizing a chance to broaden the Kurds' support, Talabani extended his trip to Algeria and Egypt, where he had a high-profile meeting with Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. Barzani disagreed with the purpose of Talabani's trip and also took umbrage at the youngster's unauthorized actions.39
Before the end of that year, Talabani and Ahmad challenged Barzani publicly and even held a rival KDP conference. Barzani never forgave the affront, considering most of the KDP politicians as slick, vain city dwellers who let men like him do the real fighting. Over the next ten years their split would undermine all progress, and the Kurds' enemies found it easy to pit the factions against each other.40
Luckily for the Kurds, divisions and distractions hobbled Baghdad as well, which on several occasions pulled the Iraq army back from the brink of what looked like certain defeat for the Kurdish resistance. Outside powers had begun to take a more active interest as well, and by the late 1960s Israel and Iran were plying Barzani with weapons and cash. The Kurds had found their new calling: to tie down several divisions of the Iraqi army with constant harassment at the behest of foreign powers. Iraq sent no significant troops to fight Israel in the 1967 Six Days War, mostly because Barzani stepped up his attacks on government positions in a coordinated effort. Aid flowed to him through Iran, but with an ugly price: Barzani pledged to shut his border to Iran's Kurds, allowing the shah to mop them up.41
The Ba'athist coup in 1968 began thirty-five years of brutal continuity in Baghdad. Talabani and Ahmad initially welcomed the Ba'athists as the first regime to extend a hand of friendship to the Kurds—the same wishful thinking Barzani had felt toward Qassim ten years earlier.* This time Talabani had the stipend from Baghdad, an office, and his own Kurdish newspaper.42 On March II, 1970, the reunited KDP signed an autonomy agreement with Saddam Hussein, who was already controlling the Ba'athist government from the vice president's office. The deal gave the Kurds everything they wanted—Kurdish as an official language, guaranteed places in government, land redistribution, and the return of Kurds displaced by war.43 The Kurds would soon learn that treaties with Saddam Hussein weren't worth the paper they were printed on, and worse, their deal with Baghdad angered the shah of Iran, who would bide his time before taking his revenge.
BARZANI LATER SAID that he suspected the Ba'athist regime wasn't sincere, but felt he could not refuse to sign on to such generous terms. His suspicions soon took human form—in the infamous incident of the exploding imams.
Though Barzani had emerged as the clear leader of the clan and the Kurds, despite the fact that he wasn't a real "mullah," he always respected his more spiritually inclined older brother, Sheikh Ahmad Barzani. Mulla Mustafa always deferred ceremonially to Sheikh Ahmad,†" and an up-and-coming Saddam Hussein exploited the weakness in September 1971.
Baghdad was officially at peace with Kurdistan at the time, and the group of Shi' ite and Sunni clerics didn't suspect foul play when Saddam's functionaries asked them to travel to Kurdistan and sound out Barzani's views toward his Arab countrymen. So interested was the regime in Barzani's every word that they asked the imams to allow themselves to be wired for sound. In fact the Ba'athists rigged them up like roman candles before their scheduled meeting at the Kurdish leader's headquarters. Luckily, Iraqi hospitality mandated that copious amounts of tea be served during the meeting. While the tea boy leaned in front of Barzani and his lieuten
ant Mahmoud Othman, one of the clerics thought it would be a good moment to hit what he thought was the Record button on the secret "tape deck" hidden inside his robes.
"When Barzani started talking, the man sitting across from us—he exploded!" recalled Mahmoud Othman.
Othman, a medical doctor, gave Barzani a once-over and saw no major injuries—the tea boy had saved their lives at the cost of his own. Four of the clerics were dead, and in the confusion, Barzani's pesh merga rushed in and shot the rest of the visitors, thinking they were complicit. When Othman and Barzani stepped outside, they discovered the real assassins—the clerics' government drivers, who threw a hand grenade at them.44 It fell short, killing one pesh merga and wounding a dozen—still Barzani escaped harm. Othman tried to get the Kurdish soldiers to take the attackers alive.
"We told the pesh merga to capture them, but they were so furious when they saw Barzani with blood on his face, they just—everybody was killed," Othman remembered.
Naturally, Barzani no longer felt bound by the treaty with Saddam—all the more after two other assassination attempts against him and his family, including a gift box of fairy-tale poisoned apples. The general reengaged in discussions with Saddam's mortal enemies, the shah of Iran and Israel, which helped draw the cold war battle lines when Saddam finally decided to negotiate with the Soviets after several years of flirtation. In April 1972, Iraq signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union and started collecting Russian tanks and planes. The treaty gave Barzani more leverage with Iran, but he knew the neighborhood too well to trust it. He felt there was only one country on earth that would give its word and keep it.
"We do not trust the Shah," Barzani told the Washington Post in 1973. "I trust America. America is too great a power to betray a small people like the Kurds."45
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