Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  * It's hard not to note the near synonymy of the words "crusade" and "jihad." In their home contexts, both words mean a personal moral struggle or a military campaign. Both "crusaders" and "mujahideen" have at different times in history found religious justification to perpetrate mass murder.

  * A British paper appreciated Ridley Scott's 2005 film Kingdom, of Heaven for its accurate, even overly generous, portrayal of the Muslim caliph. The reviewer gushed that Saladin was "played by that wonderful Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud—and thank God the Arabs in the film are played by Arabs."

  * From a personal perspective, the mellow attitude about religion has always made Kurdistan an easier place for Western visitors, with little fear of making a mortally offensive breach of etiquette. On my first day in the Kurdish city of Sulimaniya, whiskey was served with lunch, and it was not only for my (delighted) consumption.

  * Genocide is a small word to describe so much suffering, and this brief treatment given to the Kurds' involvement in the attempt to eliminate the Armenians is in no way meant to minimize it.

  * Kurds love to tell the story of how the Turks protested to Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser when he began broadcasting some nationalist radio programs in Kurdish. Flirting with the Kurdish nationalists, Nasser responded that since there were no Kurds in Turkey, this shouldn't offend them.

  * This may have been the first carpet bombing of civilians, predating the German Luftwaffe's 1937 bombardment of Guernica in the Spanish civil war. The full context of Churchill's memo is a bit more forgivable: "/ do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected." Winston S. Churchill, War Office departmental minute, May 12, 1919 (Churchill papers: 16/16).

  * These Kurdish soldiers fighting for Baghdad became known as jahsh, which means "baby donkeys" in Kurdish but is close to the Arabic word for "army," jaysh.

  † Pesh merga is often translated as "those who face death," but the word "pesh" means "forward," so the title implies not just facing death but fearlessly running at it with a dagger in your teeth. Having been a pesh merga is a crucial part of Kurdish manhood. I'm not sure I've ever met a male Kurd over thirty who didn't claim to have been a pesh merga at some point, from urbane intellectuals to peasant farmers.

  * Even Talabani's wife calls him "Mam." After he had become president of Iraq in 2005,1 asked if he would rather be called "President Talabani." Keeping with Mulla Mustafa's famous disdain for fancy titles, he said, "No, call me by my name, Mam Jalal." Then he told me the story of his uncle.

  * The Ba'ath Party was founded in 1947 by a Syrian Christian named Michel Aflaq. Saddam Hussein's version grew so perverted that it is probably better termed Saddamism than Ba'athism.

  † Critics claim it was also Sheikh Ahmad Barzani who encouraged Mulla Mustafa's faith in America.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Betrayal and Holocaust

  THE AVERAGE AMERICAN TEENAGER MAY not have any idea who Henry Kissinger is, but a Kurdish high school student ruefully spat out his name during a schoolyard poll in the chilly February of 2003. The war drums were beating in Washington, and the gaggle of teenagers couldn't wait for the American soldiers to come and take away Saddam Hussein, whom they could safely mock from inside the Kurdish area. At first they stuck to the approved language, which they had learned by heart.

  "Our dream really is to make one Kurdistan," said a student named Mustafa, whose deadly serious stare was somewhat mitigated by his peach-fuzz mustache. He continued with the standard disclaimer: "But at this time for us it's better to be a part of Iraq."

  It took only a little troublemaking to get them going. Were they Iraqis or Kurds? No one waited their turn to shout that they were Kurds first, and Iraqis—well, maybe not even second. A sixteen-year-old girl from Halabja said she had never met her older brother, who died when the Iraqi army gassed the city in 1988. Then another young man spoke up in broken English.

  "In fact there's something. I am sorry to say that we never forget Great Britain had canceled Kurds from their country," he said as if he were addressing the United Nations. "And I want to say that I am Kurd and not Iraqi."

  Bringing up the 1920s is always fair play in the Middle East, even if you were born in 1989. But this was a new century. Did they trust America? The answer boiled down to one name: Kissinger.

  "BARZANI WAS DRIVEN by the single-mindedness without which few independence struggles would ever be undertaken . . . Heroes, we were learning, are more pleasant to read about than to deal with; the very qualities that inspire their courage also meld their inflexibility," Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in one volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal.

  It's not entirely clear what Kissinger wanted General Barzani to be flexible about in 1972, when his appeals for aid began arriving in Washington. The Kurdish rebel respected the covert action code of "plausible deniability," sending his requests through third parties like King Hussein of Jordan or the Israelis so the Americans could disclaim any involvement.

  Since the assassination attempts, which he could only assume were official Baghdad policy, Barzani had opened the door to Iran again. Saddam Hussein, even as vice president, had started the saber rattling that would characterize his regime for the next thirty years, taking up the cause of Iran's small Arab minority in the Khuzestan province along the Shatt al-Arab River, the short confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates that links Iraq to the Persian Gulf. For his part, the shah was hardly innocent of provocations. Seeing that Iraq was fairly weak and had few allies, Iran reopened a dispute with Baghdad over the exact location of the Shatt al-Arab border. To create some bargaining chips, the shah encouraged the Kurds to be troublesome—never a difficult task.1

  As a master of cold war politics, the shah expressed his worry to Nixon that the Kurds could go either way if they weren't supported—from being a handy thorn in Iraq's paw to being a Soviet ally. When the Soviet premier visited Baghdad in the spring of 1972, it was natural that Nixon visit the shah in Tehran. At the time, Iran was America's anchor in the Middle East, and U.S. policy was described as "give the Shah whatever he wants."* On this visit the shah got his choice of American jet fighters—F-14S or F-15S—and a promise of support for the Iraqi Kurds, who were regularly attacking Saddam's positions along the fringes of Iraqi Kurdistan, doing wonders at keeping Baghdad preoccupied.2

  The guns and ammunition neatly came secondhand from the two largest recipients of American military aid in the world, Iran and Israel (bulwarks against Soviet allies Iraq and Egypt). Eventually the Kurds would get millions' worth of Soviet hardware captured from Egypt by the Israelis in 1973 and funneled through Iran.3 Despite contributions from Britain as well, the covert program was still tiny next to the blood and treasure being spilled in Vietnam. Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger's deputy at the time, remembers American support for the Kurds as strictly an appendage of U.S.-Iran policy.

  "The Kurds were derivative. The shah was a good ally. And he was having this problem with Iraq. We were emotionally supporting the Kurds, but it wasn't a big deal," said Scowcroft.4 Yet while American support of Barzani's struggle may not have seemed much back in Foggy Bottom, to Kurdistan it felt like a covenant with God. The Voice of America broadcasts began describing Barzani's men as freedom fighters.

  "Even kids younger than me knew the names Nixon and Kissinger, and we loved them," writes Hiner Saleem in his memoir of childhood in Kurdistan. "Radio Moscow called
us vulgar rebels acting against Saddam Hussein, that champion of Socialism. But my father wasn't worried; America and Henry Kissinger were on our side."5

  For a year or two the Kurds felt strong. The dissidents within the KDP reunited under Barzani and continued to distract a huge portion of the Iraqi army, to the delight of the shah and Israel's Golda Meir. But Barzani made it clear that he saw the American involvement as a guarantee that Iran wouldn't pull the rug out.6 The general told a delegation of visiting journalists that he wanted Kurdistan to become the fifty-first state, and even mentioned that American companies could do a great job exploiting the oil in Kirkuk, so long as Washington's long arm would keep them safe. "We are ready to act according to U.S. policy if the U.S. will protect us from the wolves," Barzani said.7

  Barzani had a fair amount of experience playing and being played in the cold war's great game, so he should have seen the low blow coming. What he did not anticipate was the way Kissinger and the shah kept reeling him in when they knew the Kurds were done for. The tide began to turn in Baghdad's favor in 1974, and the shah made overtures to Saddam. He offered to cut off aid for the Kurds if Saddam would accept the definition of the southern border as the deepest point of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Saddam tried his own way first, offering Barzani a truce and another autonomy agreement on March 11, 1974, exactly four years since their previous deal. Not knowing it was his last chance, Barzani stonewalled the Iraqi leader and sent Washington an absolute pipe-dream request for a massive increase in covert aid. "If you give us arms to match those (Iraqi) arms we will fight. Otherwise we will make peace. We don't want to be massacred," Barzani wrote.8

  Kissinger knew that the shah was negotiating with Iraq by February 1975.9 Still, he gave Barzani no hints, writing him a gushing letter on February 20, restating his admiration for Barzani and his cause and inviting the Kurd to send an emissary to Washington. Meanwhile, the shah met with Saddam Hussein at an OPEC summit in Algiers, and they struck a deal that included "strict border security"—a euphemism for handing the Kurds to Saddam on a platter.10 Somehow Kissinger maintains that on March 6 "the Shah stunned us with the announcement that he had reached a deal with Saddam."11

  The shah waited five days to let Barzani know that he was in free fall, so the betrayal could land on the same bitter date that the shah had been holding his grudge over: March 11, five years after Barzani's autonomy agreement with Baghdad. The Iranian portal for aid closed within hours, and suddenly the Kurds had no acess to the outside and only bolt-action rifles to face Saddam's Soviet tanks.12 News of the catastrophe spread by radio across Kurdistan. As Hiner Saleem recalls, "A long letter by General Barzani addressed to Kissinger, begging him to keep his promise, was read over our radio, but Kissinger abandoned us to our fate."13

  Barzani's twenty-five-year-old physician, Najmaldin Karim, had been a member of the KDP since he was fourteen, and worshipped Barzani. He recalls watching his idol wrestle with the decision between the humiliation of defeat or extermination if he kept fighting. "I think Barzani would have stayed and continued the resistance if he had been fifteen years younger," said Karim.

  Despair washed over Kurdistan like a dust storm. Initially, Karim said, the pesh merga vowed to fight on, sending their families into exile. By March 18, Barzani saw the writing on the wall and called on his followers to survive any way they could, focusing on getting as many of his loyal cadres as possible out of Iraq. About one hundred thousand crossed into Iran, where the shah at least accepted his recent allies as refugees. Others surrendered to Saddam's army. Some fighters committed suicide, and legendary commanders were seen weeping as they abandoned the struggle.14

  Even decades later, Barzani's son Masoud would refuse to meet with Kissinger when offered the chance. Despite the defeat, Masoud could never criticize his father, whose face still looks down from the walls of every KDP office. "The doubts we had with the Iranians were clear," Masoud said. "He himself admitted we should have stayed more dubious. But he didn't think the Americans would cheat us."

  At the time, others in Barzani's family did speak harshly about him, focusing on the general's failure to take Saddam Hussein's final autonomy offer. Some even suggested that Barzani's own authoritarian nature had prevented him from making a compromise that would have saved him and his people. Barzani could say only that he would have acted differently without the American imprimatur.15 This was cold comfort, especially to the pesh merga families that couldn't escape with Barzani's to Iran.

  Barzani was seventy-five years old, and he knew that his last chance of leading his people to independence had ended. He may also have had a warrior's premonition that his death was near. That summer Barzani called Dr. Karim to him in Tehran because of a lump he could feel under his collarbone. Karim immediately suspected it was lung cancer and asked Barzani to have an X-ray. But the general had one last trick up his sleeve. He insisted that no one diagnose him until he left Iran for the United States, believing that if he started treatment in Tehran he would be doomed to die there.

  Kissinger and the shah had opposed Barzani coming to the States out of fear that he would go public about their double cross,16 but there was already a bit of a fan base for the Kurdish rebel in Washington, especially among followers of Democratic senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (who inspired neocons like Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Douglas J. Feith, who would end up in the Bush administration in 2000) and with newspapermen like William Safire and Jim Hoagland. The KDP representative in the U.S. capitol used the threat of going public to get Barzani a visa and permission to leave Iran. Dr. Karim as well as Barzani's sons, Masoud and Idris, flew with him to New York, where a CIA contingent met them at the gate and escorted Barzani to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Barzani would thereafter spend the rest of his days in a quiet Washington, D.C., suburb.17 Before the cancer killed him in 1979, Barzani had the consolation of seeing Kissinger (and his close associate President Gerald Ford) voted out of office, and the shah overthrown.

  To be fair, Kissinger's explanation for what he calls "the tragedy of the Kurds" holds some water. At the moment in history when he would have been asking Congress for a massive increase in covert aid for the Kurds, President Nixon had just been forced to resign and the enormity of defeat in Vietnam was dawning on America. Congress opposed the initial aid to the Kurds and then turned around and castigated Kissinger for cutting off the program. Without the shah to help, there was no easy way to get aid to the landlocked Kurds. Still, a report compiled by Senator Otis Pike, leaked to the media in 1976, found that both the United States and Iran had acted with calculated disregard for the fate of the Kurds, hoping to benefit from a perpetual cycle of violence in which the Kurds never got their autonomy and Saddam never quite wiped them out.

  Brent Scowcroft remembered it with refreshing simplicity: "In 1975, quite suddenly the shah made a deal with Iraq. And so he had no further interest in fomenting trouble up there in Kurdistan. As a matter of fact he had a disinterest, because there are a lot of Kurds up there in Iran. So then he wanted us to stop supporting them, and then we had no practical way to support them. We ended our support. It was just small potatoes. It wasn't really an issue at the time that I recall."

  In Iraqi Kurdistan a wave of ethnic cleansing, torture, and executions began. It would ebb and flow for fifteen years.

  IN THE 1970s Saddam Hussein had not yet made his reputation as one of the twentieth century's crudest men. Arabists in the West thought Saddam seemed like a promising young socialist, a modernizer who might help Iraq's people benefit from their oil, fertile land, and great water resources. The Kurdish rebels and intelligentsia who fled to Europe after Barzani's defeat found little sympathy. The left didn't want to hear Saddam criticized; the right didn't want to upset a country with such huge oil reserves. Seeing the attention lavished upon the Palestinian Liberation Organization, some of the younger Kurds flirted with the idea of using hijacking, hostage taking, and bombs to get attention for their cause. The leadership, from General Barzani o
n down, rejected such methods, though they lamented that the Kurds were unknown because they killed only their own enemies. The exiles suffered the indignity of having to explain not their demands, but more basic questions ("what is a Kurd?"), while Saddam Hussein's Iraq flourished.18 The Iraqi dinar was worth more than two dollars, and the Iraqi Central Bank had plans to be economically on par with southern Europe by the mid-eighties.19

  With the Islamic revolution of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, Saddam suddenly looked even better to America. Granted, he was taking guns from Russia, but he wasn't an Islamic fundamentalist, and he didn't inaugurate his regime by taking fifty-two Americans hostage for a year. Saddam kept his purges within the family. In July 1979, the same year that Tehran fell, Saddam formally seized power, after years of ruling from behind the scenes. Setting the tone, Saddam held a meeting of the Ba'ath Party leaders, calling out sixty-eight names of supposed traitors, who were hauled sobbing from the auditorium. He executed twenty-two of them. In an early sign of his penchant for documenting his own atrocities, Saddam had the meeting videotaped.20

  The Kurds, however, became aware of whom they were dealing with from the moment of Barzani's departure in 1975. Their war with Baghdad had already killed thousands, but with defeat the violence only increased. The government in Baghdad cleared a buffer along Iraqi Kurdistan's external borders sometimes eighteen miles (thirty kilometers) deep. It became a free-fire zone, and Iraqi soldiers were ordered to summarily execute any man, woman, or child found inside it. By 1978 more than one thousand villages had been razed, including Barzani's battered hometown. Thousands of his kinsmen were transported to the flat desert of southern Iraq, and their journey was only beginning.21

  Saddam Hussein now revealed his true genius—the art of pitting Iraqis against one another. He cleaved the province of Kirkuk, then Iraq's main oil producer, into two new provinces: Ta'mim and Salahudin.* By splicing the Kurdish areas onto other provinces, Saddam ensured the ethnic balance of Kirkuk would tip against the Kurds. Kurds left in the city were no longer allowed to own property and many went through a humiliating process of declaring themselves Arabs in order to get jobs or buy houses. Small Kurdish villages now found themselves tacked onto Sunni Arab provinces with capitals like Baquba and Tikrit. Massive deportations of Kurds would soon follow, and the regime imported poor Shi'ite Arabs from the south to replace them. Even years after Saddam's ouster, his ethnic and religious gerrymandering left Kirkuk like a Gordian knot tied with razor wire.