A trip to the U.S. State Department curbed Zebari's exuberance. The highest-ranking "friend of the Kurds" inside the administration was Richard Schifter, the assistant secretary of state for humanitarian affairs. He had met Mulla Mustafa Barzani in Washington and stayed in contact with Najmaldin Karim. Dr. Karim would feed Schifter intelligence tips from Kurdish agents inside the Iraqi army, and it made the American look well informed inside the State Department. In gratitude and out of genuine sympathy, Schifter agreed to receive the Kurdistan Front delegation at the State Department on February 28. It turned out to be the day of the cease-fire with Saddam. "I felt so good," said Zebari, "We were going to the State Department! My goodness, I felt so happy."
He and Sami Abd-al-Rahman gave their names at the main lobby and the receptionist called Schifter's office. No answer. The secretary tried again. Thirty minutes passed, and then forty-five. The receptionist finally informed Zebari that he had no appointment, but that someone would come down to see him. Two well-dressed junior staffers from Schifter's office appeared and offered to have coffee with the Kurds. Not inside the building though.
"I said, 'Sami, really, this is bad. This is humiliating, degrading,'" said Zebari. "He said, no, let's at least go and tell them what we want." At a coffee shop around the corner, he smoked a cigarette while Abd-al-Rahman talked with the two staffers. Zebari made a point of grabbing the check.
After the cease-fire only one person in the Bush administration expressed any interest in meeting with Iraq's opposition: the young undersecretary for policy planning at the Defense Department, an Afghan American named Zalmay Khalilzad. The Kurdistan Front representatives had been making the rounds of the policy think tanks in Washington and New York, and Columbia University professor Bernard Lewis had seen what he described as some "smart Iraqis" speak at the Council on Foreign Relations. He contacted "Zal" Khalilzad and suggested a meeting. The "smart Iraqis" were Ahmed Chalabi, Hoshyar Zebari, and Barham Salih (arguably the three men most responsible, albeit with different motivations, for persuading the United States to intervene and invade Iraq in 2003). Zalmay Khalilzad—who would play a key role in the second Bush administration's planning to invade Iraq and eventually take the lead as U.S. ambassador to Baghdad—in 1991 put through a request to meet with the Iraqi opposition. It was shot down.
"I asked my Middle East-region colleague and he said I couldn't meet with them because our policy was not to meet with the Iraqi opposition. I was startled. Here we had been at war with the regime and we couldn't see the opponents of the regime," he remembered.6 Months passed before Khalilzad was finally able to meet Zebari and Salih, but once he did, the men formed a friendship that would serve them for the next fifteen years as they became major players in the Iraq game.
Turkish sensitivities had made the Kurds radioactive in Washington. President Turgut Özal sacrificed more than most of the Gulf War coalition members when he came on board with the United States, against Turkish public sentiment. As the Turks feared, their country lost a huge amount of trade with oil-rich Iraq when the war began (twelve years would pass before it formally opened again). For decades the Turks had resisted the notion that their country had any ethnic minorities, but the 1990s also marked an uptick in violence with the Kurdish separatist PKK. Ankara bristled at any mention of Kurds or Iraqi resistance, and they had a legitimate fear that over the long-term, pan-Kurdish nationalism had designs on southeastern Turkey as part of the reunification of "Greater Kurdistan." But Özal spoke more openly about the Kurds than any other president in Turkish history. He even implied that he had some Kurdish ancestry. With Iraq looking unstable, the American ambassador to Turkey, Morton Abramowitz, thought it was time to start making contact with the Kurds.
"Washington said, 'No way, too offensive to the Turks,'" Abramowitz recalled. "At the same time, unbeknownst to us, Özal was having secret meetings with the Kurdish leaders. So we were being much holier than the pope."7
All the diplomatic double-talk set alarm bells ringing back in Kurdistan. Its people wanted to believe the United States would support them, but the Kurds had been left holding the bag before. Kurdistan Front leaders prepared what they called the "plan of probabilities." They war-gamed an American victory that removed Saddam, as well as a victory that left him in power. They considered a Kurdish rebellion with American support and an insurrection without American assistance, with or without the pro-government Kurdish jahsh. Rebel radio began broadcasting calls for national unity, encouraging the Iraqi army not to fight and declaring an amnesty for any jahsh who came over to the Kurdish side. They divided the Kurdish region into administrative districts, with pesh merga commanders assigned to each. Before the leadership could agree on a direct course of action, however, Kurdish civilians made their own decision.
The Shi'ites were already taking the cities in the south, shooting up pictures of Saddam and toppling his statues along the Shatt al-Arab River. The Kurds followed suit, led by the desperate residents of Saddam's relocation camps and thousands of Kurdish deserters from the Iraqi army. On March 5, in the foothill city of Ranya, a mob attacked the Ba'ath Party headquarters and killed three dozen staff. A similar pattern spread across the north, focusing on the three branches of Saddam's security services and the Ba'ath Party offices. On March 7 the traditionally insubordinate city of Sulimaniya reached a tipping point after days of demonstrations. A mob that included women and children sacked the "red" building that housed the secret police. It massacred Saddam's security agents and discovered a torture chamber as well as a room full of discarded women's and girls' clothing—the rape room. Hundreds of agents died as they tried to fight what was now a popular uprising backed by urban cells of pesh merga.8
On March 11 the Kurdish leadership finally caught up with its people, and the city of Erbil fell in just three hours, with greater coordination than before. Long experience had taught Masoud Barzani that it paid to keep a back channel of communication with the leaders of the Iraqi divisions occupying Kurdistan. As the uprising surged, the conscript Iraqi army simply faded away, many of them taking shelter in Kurdish homes.9 Kurds in Qushtapa—the camp where Saddam had put thousands of Barzani widows and children after killing their men—rose up and occupied the nearby headquarters of the Iraqi Fifth Corps, seizing weapons. The hard-core Republican Guards were far to the south guarding Baghdad and putting down the Shi'ite rebellion. With a few exceptions, the jahsh—perhaps a hundred thousand of them—came over to what they thought was the winning side, redeeming their tribes among the Kurds. The balance tipped, and cities fell in a quick chain reaction—Chamchamal and Tuz Khurmatu, Kifri and Kalar along the southern fringe of the Kurdish provinces, Dohuk and Zakho near the Turkish and Syrian borders.
The Kurdish leadership tried to control the mission of the intifada and the message it sent to the outside world. Pesh merga forces had orders not to stay in the cities, instead withdrawing to the safety of the mountains after they had tipped the scales. The Kurds wanted to preserve their fighting strength but deny Turkey any excuse to claim that northern Iraq had separated. Their carefully chosen slogan was "Democracy for Iraq, Autonomy for Kurdistan"—quite a contrast to the Shi'ite rebels in the south who were crying for Iranian-style theocracy.
That didn't prevent the Kurds from going after the big prize: Kirkuk. Only a three-hour-drive from Baghdad, Kirkuk has enough oil to build a Middle Eastern emirate. With Jalal Talabani still hesitating in Damascus, his lieutenants Kosrat Rasul and Nawshirwan Mustafa made it to the city by March 20—the eve of the Kurdish New Year, Newroz. Another member of the front, Hussein Sinjari, recalled sharing a celebratory bottle of whiskey with the the pesh merga leaders on the first night of Kurdish rule in the oil-rich city A flamboyant, jacket-and-tie-wearing intellectual, Sinjari remembered looting the city alongside the Kurdish soldiers: "What do you expect? We are Kurds. Are we Swiss? We looted all of the government buildings. When we left, the Iraqi government looted all the Kurdish homes."
Kirkuk was as far as the
rebellion went—in fact it was already too far. America's mission was accomplished as soon as the Iraqi army quit Kuwait City and went fleeing back across their own border. The Bush administration had its heart set on a quick and clear victory in Kuwait, and the president several times spoke of using this war to erase the quagmire of Vietnam from America's psyche. Even the cease-fire was announced with an almost compulsive neatness: when Bush addressed the nation on the evening of February 27, he said hostilities wouldn't end until midnight, making the ground war exactly one hundred hours long.10 Supporting the Kurdish and Shi'ite insurrections appeared much less tidy and Washington wanted no part of it. Amazed to find himself still alive and still in power, Saddam soon realized he had a green light to take care of business. The Republican Guard dispatched the rebellions in the south and then turned their attention to Kirkuk.
The Bush administration put the word out, with the Gulf War coalition as well, that the uprisings in Iraq were not to be encouraged. As the intifada faltered, Hoshyar Zebari found himself making a secret trip to Riyadh, courtesy of Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi spy master, who wanted to make sure the rebels' goals fit Saudi interests. Zebari found himself locked in a room with Ayad Allawi, a dissident Ba'athist exile, and Ibrahim al-Ja'fari, the leader of the Shi'ite party al-Da'wa Islamiya (Islamic Call). Turki told them to come up with a political program for regime change in Iraq that the Saudis could get behind, and in exchange he would push it in Washington. But two days later the mood changed—Turki suddenly had no time to meet with the opposition. Languishing in his hotel room, Zebari chain-smoked as he watched the news that the Iraqi army had begun turning back the rebellion.
"I'm leaving tomorrow," Zebari told Turki's deputy. "I don't need your airplane ticket; I can buy one for myself. My people are being massacred and I'm sitting here doing nothing. That is the message. Tell your boss." Prince Turki responded as Zebari packed his bags. There were complications, he explained, expressing his regrets and asking that kind regards be sent to brother Masoud Barzani. Zebari found out later that the complications had arrived in the form of President Bush's national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger's former deputy, on his own secret trip to Riyadh. He let the Saudis know that no one was to support an insurrection in Iraq.
The Kurds held Kirkuk for three chaotic days until they realized they had been set up for a fall. The Iraqi army that General Colin Powell had bragged he would "cut off and kill" remained intact. There was no coalition air support, no American secret agent coming to help them force Saddam to "step aside." If thoughts of a military coup had tempted the Iraqi army immediately after Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait, the uprisings scared them straight.11 Iraq's internal schisms were laid bare: Shi'ites in the south carried placards of Ayatollah Khomeini, terrifying Washington almost as much as it scared the Iraqi elite. Saddam's Sunni Arab generals were petrified that the country was coming apart and their reign of privilege with it. They closed ranks behind Saddam, the only leader they thought could keep the country intact.
The Iraqi regime got an unwitting boost from an unexpected quarter—General Norman Schwarzkopf. On March 3, when the American general had dictated his terms of surrender to Iraqi defense minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed, the Iraqi general had only one request: Iraq wanted to use its helicopters. Ahmed claimed they were for reconstruction of Iraq's bombed-out infrastructure, though he asked a second question: Would it be alright if the helicopters were armed? Schwarzkopf realized too late what he was authorizing.
"In the following weeks, we discovered what the son of a bitch had really had in mind: using helicopter gunships to suppress rebellions in Basrah and other cities. By that time it was up to the White House to decide how much the United States wanted to intervene in the internal politics of Iraq," he wrote in his memoirs.12
The Iraqi opposition, still drunk with dreams of regime change, had convened in Beirut in mid-March. Shi'ite and Kurdish leaders met and coordinated for the first time, but mostly they watched in wonder at the rebellions breaking out spontaneously as they sat in Beirut trying to plan one. Telling the rest of the representatives that he would see them in Baghdad, Jalal Talabani moved east across Syria and headed for the Iraqi Kurdish city of Zakho to make his triumphant return.13 Syrian red tape caused some delays, and by the time he crossed the border, the uprising looked shaky. Zebari, still concentrating on winning the propaganda war, sent Talabani an urgent message about what to smuggle across the border: "Don't bring weapons—bring journalists!"
Talabani arrived in Zakho with an entourage of loyal pesh merga and combat paparrazi, ferried across a Tigris River swollen from late-winter snow. On March 27, with crowds cheering him, he announced that he and other members of the opposition would soon select a provisional government. Then the other boot dropped. After the adoring crowds in Zakho, Talabani moved to the city of Dohuk, arriving just in time to watch the entire city pack its bags and flee. The Iraqis were coming with tanks and cannons and helicopters. Two days later Talabani was appealing to the world for military help and food aid. As the population fled, his rebels scrambled back into their mountains along the Iranian border.
Columns of tanks descended on the city of Kirkuk, crushing rebels and civilians alike. Small Iraqi helicopters drew out the pesh merga's few antiaircraft rounds. Once they had flushed out the rebels, the Iraqis swooped in to incinerate them with rocket fire from larger Russian-made Hind gunships, terrifying not only for their firepower but also because Saddam had used them to spray gas in the past.14 The dominoes fell back in the other direction: on March 31, Iraqi troops retook Erbil; on April 2, they were in Sulimaniya and heading for northern cities like Dohuk. Only three years after Anfal and the gassing of Halabja, the Kurds expected no mercy for man, woman, or child. The entire Kurdish population of Iraq seemed to reach the same conclusion: better anywhere but here. A million crossed into Iran, which opened its borders, and half a million started to bottleneck on the frontier with Turkey.
Tank shells, helicopter machine guns, and phosphorus bombs killed tens of thousands of Kurds and Turcomans in and around Kirkuk, and that was just the direct violence. The winter lingered into April that year, and cold began to prey on the weakest as they walked, many barefoot, through the snowy mountain passes along the borders. Families became separated in the thick hordes of civilians; many of the old and sick were simply abandoned.
"The whole of Kurdistan was flowing up the road," said BBC reporter Jim Muir, who crossed into Iraq with Talabani. "They used any kind of vehicle you can imagine—things like bulldozers with a scoop full of children. People [were] fleeing from hospitals—with IV drip feeds hanging off and people in beds rolling along—because someone said they'd smelled poison gas."15
This time no black cars came to spirit away the leadership and their families. Sami Abd-al-Rahman's father died in the exodus, one among thousands of people too weak to continue the journey. Talabani made his headquarters in the shell of a schoolhouse in the village of Mawat, in the mountains above Qalaat Chowlan. At one point he and his wife, Hero, found themselves deserted in their retreat by all but a handful of guards. They stood their ground and looked ready to fight to the death—the kind of battlefield leadership that makes or breaks guerrilla action. Enough pesh merga were shamed or inspired into going back to stand with their leader, and they fought the Iraqis to a standstill.16 Masoud Barzani, fifteen years younger than Talabani, moved around a bit more. His KDP force, less depleted from the 1980s, harassed Saddam's advancing army and covered the civilians' retreat. With only 150 troops, Barzani's pesh merga stopped a tank column advancing on the Kore mountain pass above Salahudin. Remembering his father's death in exile, Barzani pleaded with Kurds to stay inside Iraq and not become landless like the Palestinians and Armenians.
While Iran opened its borders, Turkey, by contrast, had no interest in letting half a million politically excitable Kurds into the already volatile southeast (a hot zone because of fighting with the PKK). The Turks let a tiny number cross the bord
er each day and beat the others back with rifle butts. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds began to make ragged shelters in the mountains—at night their meager campfires lit up the hillsides. These were not the fabled Kurds of the rugged mountains but city dwellers from Dohuk, with no idea how to survive in the elements.
WASHINGTON'S FIRST ALARM was sounded at the embassy in Ankara on Easter Sunday, March 31.
"I remember clearly one night sitting at home and Ambassador Abramowitz called me," said Marc Grossman, then the deputy ambassador. "He had heard from Peter Galbraith, who had just swum across some river and said that hundreds of thousands of Kurds were fleeing the north and pushing up the mountains."
Jalal Talabani had invited Galbraith to northern Iraq to enjoy the great victory over Saddam Hussein. Instead, for the second time in five years, the Senate staffer was witness to the mass murder of Kurdish civilians. Lie hadn't actually swum the Tigris River across to Syria, but the boatman who ferried Galbraith did get shot on his next crossing.17 His call to Abramowitz set the U.S. embassy in motion toward the southeast border, a region the Turkish government had under a state of emergency because of the PKK insurrection. Abramowitz called Turkish president Özal, who was already pondering what he saw as the horns of the problem: how to feed half a million freezing Kurds, and how to keep them from taking over southeastern Turkey. A previous posting to Cambodia made Abramowitz an expert on refugees. He and Grossman took an unusually proactive stance for diplomats. They called up their entire staff and started doling out embassy car keys, fax machines, and packets of five thousand dollars in cash. Each car had Turkish and American staff with instructions to drive as far to the south and east as they could and start sending back reports from the ground.18
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