Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  The Kurds spent several years tangled in their own internal divisions after the defeat of General Barzani in 1975. Jalal Talabani, from exile in Damascus, wasted no time in announcing the formation of a new party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Talabani framed his party as a modern leftist movement, particularly stressing that it would not be a family-run business.22 General Barzani's sons, Masoud and Idris, took over the KDP and immediately condemned the PUK as a usurper of the Kurdish revolution. As the PUK announced a renewed guerrilla campaign against Baghdad, it would be fighting the KDP as well.23

  Barzani's longtime lieutenant, Mahmoud Othman, also formed his own party, the Kurdistan Socialist Party, which tried to act as a mediator between the KDP and PUK. Talabani sent a letter to the ailing Kurdish hero in Washington, appealing for unity. But the letter was carried by Ibrahim Ahmad, the original urban Kurdish intellectual (and by then, Talabani's father-in-law). Ahmad was perhaps the only Kurdish leader Barzani liked even less than he liked Talabani. Even from his sickbed, General Barzani rejected this and other attempts to bring the movements together, fueling the critics in Kurdistan who claimed that Barzani held his own success above that of his people.24

  The rivalry still might have been manageable, but a few incidents left bad blood that would linger for years. Two well-loved commanders, Ali Askari and Khaled Said, who had joined Talabani, were making peace overtures to their old comrades in the KDP, Masoud and Idris Barzani, arguing that the personal hatred between the Talabani and Barzani families should be put aside in favor of fighting Baghdad. Possibly by mistake, the KDP ambushed them on their way to Turkey in 1978 and both men were captured. In an unusually cold-blooded decision for the intra-Kurdish conflict, KDP commander Sami Abd-al-Rahman had them executed. 25 The wound wouldn't properly heal for some twenty-five years, and it helped outside powers to divide and neutralize the Kurds.

  The Kurds' bickering neutralized them as a threat to Baghdad, but it was only one of the reasons Saddam Hussein thought the moment was ripe to attack Iran in September 1980. He had an armory full of shiny new Soviet tanks and the biggest ground force in the region. Iran was internationally isolated, poorly armed, and dealing with postrevolution chaos. Saddam hoped to win a quick war, take his concessions, and prove Iraq's regional dominance. Thus he embarked on what would become a long career of hideous miscalculations. In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini saw the war as a convenient outside threat to galvanize the revolution and wipe out his internal rivals. The eight-year war brought horrific death to as many as one million people, and didn't win an inch of dirt for either side.26

  Two years into the war, the Iraqi opposition was an alphabet soup of angry acronyms and no great threat to anyone. Nineteen groups from across the Iraqi spectrum met in Tripoli and signed an accord against Saddam during February 1983; the agreement didn't last the return journey.27 The Kurds had stopped shooting one another, but they were still drawing battle lines. The KDP was taking Iranian money and in return helping the Iranians suppress their own Kurdish rebels, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI). Reaching out to his enemy's enemy, Talabani's PUK was friendly with the KDPI, and completing the circle, the KDPI had facilitated a cease-fire between the PUK and Baghdad.28

  While Saddam strung Talabani along in negotiations, KDP scouts helped Iran seize the Iraqi border town of Haj Omran in July 1983. It was the most direct assistance to his enemy so far, and Saddam could not let it go unpunished. He took revenge on the thousands of civilians from Barzan who were still under his control. The villagers captured in 1975 had been transported first to the south and later to a camp in Qushtapa, between Mosul and the Kurdish city of Erbil. Shortly after the Haj Omran operation, Iraqi soldiers raided the camp and rounded up eight thousand males, young and old. Saddam paraded the doomed souls through Baghdad, and then they were gone. Not even their remains could be found until twenty years later.

  Saddam Hussein took full credit for their deaths on national television, explaining to his people, "They betrayed the country . . . and we meted out a stern punishment to them and they went to hell."29 With this mass murder, Saddam turned a corner and began slouching toward his final solution for Kurdistan. A few other circumstances conspired to box in the Kurds. Turkey's Kurdish rebels, the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), were ramping up their guerrilla war against Ankara, making the Turks ever more paranoid about the notion of Kurdish autonomy anywhere. The PUK never found out if its negotiations with Baghdad had been in good faith; when the deal looked ready, Turkish leaders quashed it, threatening to shut down their end of Iraq's main oil pipeline if Saddam made peace with Talabani.30 As their options were disappearing, and the war with Iran dragged on, the Kurds got a hideous preview of what lay in store.

  Ayatollah Khomeini was using his country's larger population as a force equalizer—boys as young at twelve were being brainwashed in school and handed plastic "keys to paradise" to remind them of their heavenly reward if they died on the Iraqi front. The Islamic republic invented the "human wave" attack, where these young untrained recruits became human shields and minesweepers, and the gruesome tactic began to grind down Iraq's superior army.

  Saddam was not to be outdone. He began firing mustard gas shells at the Iranian troops and experimenting with other methods of delivering chemical weapons. At the same time, to his delight, the Iranian successes on the battlefield inflamed sectarian tension in the Gulf. Iran's Shi'ite government scared the Sunni Arab regimes, and so concerned their allies in Europe and America. Until then the U.S. policy in the Iran-Iraq war had been a neutral "pox on both their houses,"31 but fear that Iran might actually win convinced the United States to back Baghdad. The Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld as its special envoy to Iraq; his mission was to revive diplomatic relations that had been shut down since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Rumsfeld, a veteran Republican operative, met twice with Saddam Hussein and Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in December 1983 and March 1984. Economic support started flowing toward Iraq.* The detailed notes of Rumsfeld's meetings with the Iraqi dictator show no mention of chemical weapons, even though his second meeting with Saddam occurred after the U.S. State Department had issued a bland condemnation of Iraq's use of mustard gas.32 Back in 1984 that protocol sent Saddam a clear message: no one was going to make a fuss as long as he could stop the mullahs from Iran. The Kurds heard the message too.

  Talabani's break with Baghdad was cemented in 1985, when pro-government jahsh attacked the village of Kalkan in the middle of the night, killing Talabani's half brother Sheikh Hama Salih and two of Salih's daughters as they slept. With their habitual bad timing, all the Kurdish parties finally managed to unify and come in on Iran's side in 1986, just as Iran started losing.* By the next year, Tehran was clearly exhausted from a war that had come to involve the entire international community by the proxy of Saddam Hussein. But Iranian troops still had freedom of movement throughout the Kurdish region, where the Iraqi government had no control outside the major city centers. Saddam's guns slowly swiveled from the Iranians to Kurdish fighters in league with Iran, to the entire troublesome Kurdish people. The Iraqi regime had already leveled another two hundred villages in an attempt to limit the Kurdish fighters' ability to move freely. Looking for a more permanent solution, Baghdad inaugurated a new campaign called Anfal. The word means "spoils" and comes from a verse in the Koran regarding the legality of plunder in war. Saddam would redefine the word forever, and raze the Kurdish hopes of statehood down to the roots.

  "FROM NOW ON the term cal-Anfal' must forever and for every Arab carry the new meaning that the Iraqi Ba'ath gave to it: the officially sanctioned mass-murder in 1988 of at least 100,000 non-combatant Kurds," wrote Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya in his expose of Saddam, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World.

  On the ground the calamity crept up on the Kurds softly. In March 1987 Dr. Fayek Mahmoud Golpi, a pesh merga medic, had set up a battlefield aid station in the abandoned village of Peeka, in the jagged mountains south of th
e city of Sulimaniya. Golpi had been up for days treating bullet and shrapnel wounds—pesh merga have no combat medics; men are expected to grit their teeth and walk to the rear when they get hit. He was catching a rare bit of sleep when a well-known commander woke him, bearing a soldier with strange symptoms. The wounded man, short of breath, explained that an artillery shell had landed near him but didn't make a loud explosion, instead letting off a sickly sweet smell.

  "I wasn't surprised. First I told him to take off his clothes, and we burned them. Then I took him to bathe," Golpi said. He had been dreading this moment. A few years earlier he had met a deserter from the southern front of the Iran-Iraq war who had described the horror of chemical warfare. The man had shared some of the Iraqi army training on how to deal with mustard wounds. Golpi therefore knew that the gas was still in the soldier's clothes and still burning him. He treated the man for infection and burns on his eyes and skin. Golpi was soon to become an expert in the makeshift treatment of chemical wounds.

  "With mustard there's no antidote. You treat the symptoms, and they increase with time. Still today there are many Kurds affected by mustard gas, and in the cold and dusty weather they spit blood," Golpi said. Nerve gas, he explained, by comparison was more likely to kill instantly, but if the victim survived, he was usually all right.

  As Golpi and the pesh merga retreated north into higher mountain cover, he saw more and more Kurds wounded or killed by mustard gas, especially civilians who had no idea what the strange smell of rotten apples or onions signified. Some children were intrigued by the silent bombs and went close to investigate—these made the most horrifying cases. Golpi recalls watching a young shepherd's son die over twenty-four hours, his entire body burned black after he picked up a piece of a mustard gas shell.

  So began the Anfal campaign, the world's first chemical assault against noncombatants. The gas attacks, however, were only one prong of the offensive that would eventually put Saddam Hussein in the dock for genocide. Saddam was never known to be a religious man until it served his purpose, but the part of the Koranic verse that probably appealed to him was the exaggerated language regarding what can be done to infidels. "Strike them on their necks, and smite over their fingers and toes . . . This is [the torment], so taste it; and surely, for the disbelievers is the torment of the fire" (Surat al-Anfal 8:12-14).

  Saddam initiated the Anfal campaign in early 1987 and named its chief executioner: his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, soon to earn the nickname "Ali Chemical." Majid had risen from the position of bodyguard and police sergeant to become one of Iraq's crudest men amid stiff competition. Majid's brutality served as one of Saddam's most feared threats—unleashing his cousin on an enemy or perceived traitor was the ultimate punishment. Majid set up his office in the city of Kirkuk in March 1987, and the slaughter began.*

  Majid's powers inside the Kurdish region were near absolute; he controlled all of the Ba'ath Party's main security mechanisms. To protect his boss, Majid made the decisions himself and shielded Saddam from much direct involvement, a fact that would complicate the genocide charges against the Iraqi dictator years later. First Majid declared new sections of Kurdistan as prohibited zones, including about a thousand villages. Any man, woman, child, or farm animal inside the zone was to be exterminated. He prohibited farming and forbade all foodstuffs from entering the areas. Majid ordered his troops to use artillery, helicopters, and airplanes, telling them to maximize casualties any way they could.

  Some roads became killing zones as well—every car was emptied and its passengers executed. In the summer of 1987, some five hundred villages were destroyed by bulldozer, their inhabitants taken away to government camps.33 Again the Ba'athist obsession with record keeping makes it easy to trace the path of the destruction. Majid's voice can even be heard on taped phone conversations, disregarding any negotiation with the Kurdish leaders.

  "Jalal Talabani asked me to open a special channel of communication with him," Majid says on one tape. "That evening I went to Sulimaniya and hit them with the special ammunition. That was my answer. We continued the deportations."

  Talabani's troops had just begun a major offensive driving south through the valley below Lake Dukan. As Dr. Golpi implied, they were aware that chemicals might be used against them, but that didn't help much. Some commanders had gas masks and atropine (a nerve-gas antidote) acquired from Iran, but at the beginning the Kurds had only a few desperate countermeasures. "You're supposed to move up to higher ground so the chemicals will sink below you, and start fires to burn up the chemicals," one pesh merga leader recalled. But then he added with a disturbing laugh, "You have to remember to do this while you're being gassed."34

  Saddam's troops carried out the Anfal campaign in eight distinct stages over the course of two years, each phase centered on the destruction of a Kurdish stronghold, primarily those of Jalal Talabani's PUK, which was the most powerful at the time. Attacks on the PUK's bases were punctuated by the annihilation of almost any form of life around them, leaving the guerrillas nowhere to shelter or resupply. It was the antiguerrilla tactic of "draining the water from the fish" taken to an extreme the world had never seen. Civilians fled across the snowy mountains to Iran and Turkey, many of them dying of exposure on the way. These countries hardly welcomed them, but the Kurds were so desperate that a mere rifle pointed at them by a border guard was easily preferable. Many other civilians fled south while the Iraqi army and its jahsh allies used something of a sweeping motion across Kurdistan's fertile valleys, herding the population toward internment camps.

  Witnesses at Saddam's genocide trial in 2006 described the camps; many still didn't dare show their faces and spoke from behind a curtain. One woman told how her entire family was imprisoned, including her grandmother, who died quickly under the harsh conditions. She described how a pregnant prisoner gave birth in a toilet while the guards watched and did nothing. The witness recalled how an infamous warden named Ja'afar al-Hillawi used to grab female prisoners by their breasts.

  "He grabbed a beautiful young woman from Koi Sanjaq," the witness recalled. "He caught her and told her, 'You are mine.' She spat in his face. He tore her clothes and raped her in front of her parents. Then he shot her. She remained alive for several minutes and then died."

  Those thought to be active members of the pesh merga were more deliberately tortured to death, beaten with electric cables, burned by cooking stoves placed under bare wire bedframes, left under a slow drip of ice water on their foreheads. One prisoner described watching three suspected guerrillas hanging by their hands from a post in a courtyard. The jailers then tied tanks of cooking gas to their scrotums. On a signal the heavy tanks were dropped, ripping off the men's testicles. They died within half an hour.35

  Though the Ba'athists never constructed killing factories like the Nazis, they did implement a systematic approach to execution. Only a handful of people who saw it lived to tell the tale. A young boy named Taimour Abdullah Ahmad, twelve years old at the time, was thought for years to be the only survivor of Anfal's execution squads.* He was picked up by jahsh along with his father, mother, and three younger sisters on April 13, 1988, from the village of Kulajo. The soldiers told them they were going to be safe.

  "Unfortunately, they lied to us," Taimour recalled. "They took us straight to jail, the military base close to the Iranian border, which is called Foratu. We stayed there for about ten days and a lot of kids, a lot of children died because there wasn't any water, there wasn't any food."

  The Iraqis moved Taimour and his family to a second prison in the city of Kirkuk. Taimour watched as his father, along with all the other grown men, was stripped, manacled, and taken away in a freight truck, never to be seen again. A month later the trucks returned and loaded up the women and children. The journey took all day, and some children suffocated along the way. In the back of the trucks, some previous passengers had scrawled final, furtive messages in Kurdish about a journey to the Saudi or Kuwaiti border. Near dusk, they reached an empty
desert where bulldozers were already digging trenches for them. Taimour had managed to slip his blindfold slightly and could see as the exhausted Kurds were pushed into pits. The soldiers then began emptying their rifles, shooting into the trenches from each end. Few put up any resistance as the bullets hit them. His mother and sisters were killed. A round hit Taimour in the shoulder, and then he scampered up the side of the pit toward one of the executioners.

  "Please don't shoot us. I mean, we haven't done anything. We didn't do anything," he said. It's doubtful that the Arab soldier spoke any Kurdish, but for a moment Taimour thought he saw tears in the soldier's eyes. Then the Iraqi at the other end of the pit saw them, and Taimour was pushed back down. He was hit in the lower back by another bullet and lay down among the dead. When the bulldozers started to bury the Kurds in the pit, some of them still alive, Taimour made his break. He tried to convince a young girl to run with him, but she was petrified with fear. Taimour ran to the nearest empty trench and made himself a hole in the earth, where, having lost blood, he passed out for a while.

  Taimour awoke when the bulldozers began to fill his trench with bodies. He scrambled out of the pit and away into the night. Taimour remembers feeling his breath coming though the hole in his shoulder. After walking a few hours he came upon a bedouin family who gave him shelter. The bedouins hid him until relatives in Kurdistan could be safely informed that he was alive. Taimour was smuggled back to the north in 1990 and hidden until the Kurds took control of the area. Only then did his story start trickling to the outside.36