Video footage of the Iraqi counterattack shot by Peter Galbraith aired on ABC's Nightline on April 1. Galbraith, despite his Senate position, became one of the loudest voices calling for a humanitarian intervention. Picking his target well, Hoshyar Zebari orchestrated a small, Britishly polite demonstration outside the house of recently unseated prime minister Margaret Thatcher, complete with a little girl in Kurdish garb to hand Mrs. Thatcher a bouquet of flowers and a petition. On April 3, Thatcher obliged, giving her successor, John Major, an earful.
"The Kurds don't need talk, they need practical action. It should not be beyond the wit of man to get planes there with tents, food and warm blankets. It is not a question of standing on legal niceties. We should go now," she said.19 But Major stuck to the coalition party line: the dying Kurds were an internal Iraqi affair. When asked by a reporter if the coalition hadn't egged them on, Major famously responded, "I don't recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection. There is a civil war going on . . . We hope very much that the military in Iraq will remove Saddam Hussein."
The White House and the Pentagon clung to the idea that it had been a good quick war and it was over. President Bush betrayed what would later reveal itself to be an unfortunate family habit of answering questions about wars from the golf course. After that he went fishing in Florida. The media sunk their hooks in. William Safire lamented in the New York Times that Bush had blown all the credibility gained by pushing Saddam out of Kuwait.
"He threw away our newfound pride . . . as a superpower that stands for the right and will not let defenseless allies be pushed around. It seems we defend the rich and sell out the poor . . . If a whole people can be decimated while the President of the U.S. goes fishing, no nation will put faith in American security guarantees," Safire wrote on April 4.
But at week's end Secretary of State James Baker had a road-near Damascus conversion. Ambassador Abramowitz convinced the secretary of state that his visit to Ankara should include a flight out to see the magnitude of the crisis on the border. Baker, along with his director of policy planning, Dennis Ross, choppered in to the mountainside camp at Qukurca. As Baker stepped down from the helicopter, thousands of desperate men, women, and children swarmed around him begging for food. He stayed for about twelve minutes. The international media's initial reaction was to deride Baker for showing up in his Texas cowboy boots for a photo op and leaving so quickly. Morton Abramowitz would later call it the most effective twelve minutes spent in the history of refugee work.
Until the moment he landed, Baker had been arguing with Ross that the United States needed to keep Iraq from splitting apart above all other concerns. Ross felt that America had a moral obligation to help the people who had been encouraged to rebel. Ross coordinated with his counterpart in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, and they even came up with joint talking points to convince their bosses, Cheney and Baker, to do something. But the trip to the border did it all. Indeed, Baker later described the scene of the exodus in biblical terms. On the plane back from Incirlik air base Baker called President Bush and told him the U.S. policy needed to change. The American generals, who had been celebrating the end of their nice neat war, got a call from Washington telling them to prepare to airlift food within thirty-six hours.
"That was the beginning of the de facto state of what I call the law of unintended consequences," said Abramowitz. Nobody involved suspected this was anything but a humanitarian mission. Years later Abramowitz realized they had accidentally created Kurdistan.*
THE KURDISTAN FRONT had scraped together as many Kurds who spoke European languages as they could find to help the press broadcast their struggle to the outside world. But as the revolt collapsed, there was hardly anyone to interpret for. Most of the journalists who came in with Talabani had followed the Kurdish exodus up to the Turkish border, both to cover the humanitarian crisis and to get out from under Saddam's rockets.20 The BBC's Jim Muir stayed behind and was led about the mountains mostly on foot by Hussein Sinjari, who combined a perfect knowledge of the rebel trails with an entertainingly snobbish critique of his backward Kurdish countrymen. The Kurds treated the reporter as a VIP, but that still meant scrounging rice and beans and maybe a few dates to eat.
Muir inadvertently became the British envoy to the Kurds through his live broadcasts. While traveling with Barzani, Muir would shout his reports across the Kurdistan Front's radio to Damascus, where they would be recorded and relayed to the BBC office. Talabani possessed a satellite phone—perhaps the only one in all of Iraq at the time—and Muir borrowed it for two-way chats with the news anchor in London. On one of his calls he heard the anchor discussing a proposal by John Major to establish a safe haven in the north of Iraq. The British prime minister, after his tongue-lashing from Thatcher, had joined with the French in pushing for intervention.21 Soon after, Muir did a battlefield interview with Masoud Barzani, who loved the safe haven idea. John Major, in turn, heard Barzani's endorsement on the BBC.
Along the Iraqi border in Turkey, the U.S. military and diplomats came around to the same thought. The team on the ground for what would be called Operation Provide Comfort eventually comprised soldiers and civilians from a dozen nations, including many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).22 The U.S. Special Forces, surprising themselves as much as anyone, discovered that their training in dealing with indigenous militias made them perfect for refugee work. They arranged for aerial drops of food and water to landing zones in the mountains. The death toll of one hundred people every day slowed down, but the refugees still had nowhere to go. The coalition designed a vast refugee city on the edge of the Iraq border that some worried would be a new Gaza Strip inside Turkey. But then a novel idea came from Fred Cuny, a disaster specialist from Texas whom Abramowitz had brought in on contract. Cuny surveyed the refugees and discovered that most of the Kurds who had fled in this direction were urbanites from the city of Do-huk. The aid worker approached the soldiers and diplomats with a modest proposal.
"You gotta invade Dohuk," Cuny told Marc Grossman. "And if you do that, people will go home."
Almost simultaneously the Kurds were being snubbed again back in Washington. Hoshyar Zebari, Barham Salih, and Mahmoud Othman were finally invited to meet with Ambassador David Mack, a deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, with explicit assurances that they would make it past the lobby this time. But the meeting didn't please them much more than the one at the coffee shop had. Mack told the Kurds that the United States would send them neither a single dollar nor a single American soldier to help them inside Iraq.23 Zebari protested that the American soldiers were already on the ground in Turkey and should at least coordinate with the local Kurdish leadership, but Mack was silent. He then handed them a short statement of U.S. policy that had clearly been written in advance of the meeting: no contact with local leaders (it didn't even say "Kurdish"), no political aspect to the humanitarian mission, and a firm commitment to the territorial integrity of Iraq. The State Department had a clear idea that it didn't want to go creating any new countries.
"That, you could have sent us by fax," said Zebari.
But events back in Iraq knocked Zebari off his moral high horse. Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani had just been seen on television, worldwide, kissing Saddam Hussein on both cheeks.
THE KURDISTAN FRONT had decided to cover all of its bases. While the situation for civilians on the borders was stabilizing, the pesh merga could barely cling to their mountains against Saddam's attacks. With Washington still pretending not to know them, the Kurds felt a truce with Baghdad was their only chance. The Iraqi dictator was still shaky, looking for a deal himself that might quiet down at least one of his trouble spots. The parties selected Talabani to meet with Saddam, along with Sami Abd-al-Rahman and Masoud's nephew Nechirvan Idris Barzani.
"Saddam Hussein in a meeting is very polite, very calm," said Jalal Talabani. "He kissed us and he said, 'You are good strugglers, brave men. We thought we defeated you, we thought you'd never co
me back, and now you are on the ground. I'm now recognizing your rights.'" Talabani, quite literally, wasn't ready for prime time in the age of twenty-four-hour news. Kisses are a normal greeting between Middle Eastern men, but the image cut the legs out from under the Kurdistan Front.
In Washington, the Kurdish demand for guarantees was met with a glib State Department asking, "Why not wait and see what you get from Baghdad?" Talabani came back to Kurdistan dead-set against any more negotiations with Baghdad, not only because it looked bad, but also because he knew Saddam's promises were worthless. The Kurdistan Front outvoted him, believing that contact with Saddam could at least buy time. Masoud Barzani headed the next delegation to Baghdad. He didn't kiss Saddam when he got there, but remembering his father's betrayal, he didn't trust the United States much more than the Iraqi dictator. In fact neither the Americans nor the Iraqis were offering the Kurds much. They had hoped to force conditions on Saddam, but instead they found him defiant and not even willing to settle on the terms negotiated way back in 1970. Saddam all but told the Kurdish delegation that he was weak, and he knew that any concession he made would be like blood in the water to his enemies inside and out.24
BY APRIL 16 the United States finally came on board with Britain and France, agreeing to reenter Iraq and create a safe haven for the Kurds. Besides the further shame inaction would shower upon them in world opinion, the coalition decided it would rather inflict the refugee crisis back on Saddam than on Özal in Turkey, whose efforts to keep out the Kurds were technically refoulement—the refusal to shelter refugees, proscribed by international law. But the operation itself was something never before authorized by the international community: humanitarian intervention against the will of a sovereign state.
By that time, the military on the ground were glad to oblige. Operation Provide Comfort was a feel-good mission—more than Desert Storm, soldiers felt like they were doing an unambiguous good deed, and they certainly saved the lives of thousands. Many of the U.S. soldiers had never seen such naked desperation. When the choppers landed on the hilltops to deliver food, Kurdish mothers threw their babies on board. Combat doctors back in Incirlik found themselves running a nursery.
"They were coming back with tears in their eyes," said General Anthony Zinni, who coordinated the effort from the Turkish border. Zinni admits it was hard not to become a partisan—the Kurds' determination to survive impressed the American soldiers, who saw them as real freedom fighters. Still, Zinni wondered as he prepared to move his forces across the border into Iraq, when they would be leaving. "When we put the security zone in place—where's the exit? Nobody could see an end state," he recalled.
U.S. soldiers and British marines entered the Iraqi city of Zakho unopposed on April 20. President Bush had already extended the no-fly rule to include helicopters, and warned Iraq not to undertake any military action north of the 36th parallel.25 The French military set up a system of way stations to encourage refugees along the road; at each stop they would dispense just enough food and gasoline to get the Kurds to the next stop.
With only a few days to prepare, Major General Jay Garner got orders that he should fly to Incirlik air base and subsequently oversee the reinvasion of Iraq on the ground.* Like most of the U.S. military personnel involved, Garner immediately asked, "What's a Kurd?" He left his base in Germany with an overnight bag and didn't return for several months. Garner set up his headquarters in an empty Iraqi army base in the north of Zakho. Baghdad seemed eager to test the Americans' resolve and sent three hundred secret police up to Zakho to intimidate the locals. They set the tone by declaring the town's central well off-limits and threw a grenade into a crowd of civilians there, killing several. After numerous tense standoffs between the Americans and Iraqis, Garner pressured his Iraqi liaison, who pulled out all but fifty policemen. Kurdish civilians or pesh merga got the rest to leave by throwing their own grenade into the police station.26
By the end of May the coalition effectively recaptured the city of Dohuk on behalf of the Kurds. Humanitarian organizations took over the lion's share of the relief work, coordinated by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They were strange bedfellows. The military viewed the civilians as save-the-whales, "Kumbaya" dreamers; the postconflict aid workers felt uneasy alongside the practitioners of war. But the military needed the NGOs' expertise, and the NGOs needed the army's helicopters and incredible resources. Soon the aid workers figured out that it was more sustainable to employ Turkish truckers to bring in local food, instead of dropping meals-ready-to-eat by helicopter (thousands of which had been sifted through to remove the pork-based meals). Fred Cuny managed to scrounge combine harvesters and get the Kurdish wheat harvest in, and then sell it to none other than the Iraqi government, winning a bet with a delighted General Garner.27 For their part, the soldiers provided the aid workers some security against the Iraqi army and all-important transportation in and about a region somewhere between peace and conflict.
Operation Provide Comfort ranks among the most successful humanitarian missions in history according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. Inside several months, the majority of half a million refugees returned to northern Iraq and resumed their lives; in turn this inspired many of the million Iraqi Kurds in Iran to come home. Coalition troops, numbering about twenty-three thousand at their peak, only ever occupied the tiny northwest corner of Iraq, making a box around Zakho, Dohuk, and Akre. The no-fly zone, enforced by British, French, and American jets based in Turkey, extended along the 36th parallel. But the exact parameters didn't matter; it was their symbolic power that kept the Iraqi army out. Saddam wasn't yet sure he was going to survive, and he picked no fights with the Americans, keeping his helicopters out of the north. Two Kurdish cities showed the nature of the unspoken standoff: Sulimaniya lay south of the 36th parallel, but Saddam didn't assert his claim to it right away, knowing that resistance would be fierce. Kirkuk, on the other hand, also south of the no-fly zone, was a red line for the Iraqis and the Turks, and the Kurds knew better than to try to bait Americans into protecting them there. Oil-rich Kirkuk would never be part of the Kurdish safe zone.28
By June the acute humanitarian crisis and the immediate threat to Turkey had passed. Now even the U.S. government realized the absurdity of creating a Kurdish safe haven but refusing to communicate with the Kurdish leaders. General John Shalikashvili asked Jay Garner to set up a meeting with Barzani and Talabani, to which General Garner replied that he would have to find them first. Garner already had daily informal contact with representatives from the parties, but the leaders had remained aloof. The flamboyant Hussein Sinjari represented Talabani, while Barzani sent Fadhil Mirani, a longtime KDP member who had learned English in Nashville, Tennessee, where he had a car dealership.
Garner met his bipartisan Kurdish entourage at a landing zone in the far northeast near the Iranian border, where they agreed to take him to their leaders. He flew in with two Black Hawk transport helicopters and two Apache attack helicopters, as well as jet fighters overhead. The Kurds were strapped but tried to roll out the red carpet—Sinjari and Mirani had rustled up a looted Mercedes and BMW without even bothering to detach the Iraqi government plates. Mirani poked Garner in the ribs and said, "Damn, do you know what I could get for these back in Nashville?"
Talabani and Barzani gave Garner a warm Kurdish welcome with what food and drink they could scrounge and told him how grateful they were to America. They must have known that Garner was there to deliver the bad news—that the coalition troops were leaving as soon as they could. The Kurds desperately wanted the soldiers to stay, still fearing that Saddam would return at any moment. They politely nodded at Garner's assurances that help would be just across the border, in Turkey (what would be called Operation Poised Hammer). At some point Talabani noticed that Garner wasn't touching his drink.
"What's the matter, General, you don't like goat's milk?" Talabani asked. Garner allowed that he'd never liked milk and mused that it maybe explained why he turned
out so small (though he was as big as Masoud, who was sitting at his left). Garner asked for water instead. "Then he got that sly little grin he gets," said Garner. Talabani put his hand on the general's knee and said, "You don't drink Scotch, do you?" Two pesh merga appeared with a tray of Johnnie Walker Black. The meeting stretched through the afternoon.
"Jim Jones, Bill Hackett, Talabani, and myself—Barzani didn't drink—we sat there and we drank Scotch and began cutting the deal to get us out of northern Iraq," remembered Garner.
Before they left, Talabani asked Garner if he wanted them to call back to his base to let them know to expect him. On what phone, the general asked. Talabani showed Garner a room full of high-tech communications equipment that rivaled that of OPC headquarters. "Who in the hell do you talk to on this?" Garner asked. Talabani bragged that he spoke with John Major twice a day. Garner left the meeting thinking, "No wonder he's better informed than me."
Four days later, on July 3, General Shalikashvili flew in to meet with the Kurdish leaders and made a bargain: the bulk of the coalition would move out to Turkey, but they would leave behind a small contingent of Special Forces in Zakho under the command of Colonel Dick Naab.29 By mid-July, the last of the main force was pulling out, despite thousands of Kurdish civilians who showed up to protest their departure in Zakho.
Over the summer Barzani visited Baghdad, considering a deal. Hoshyar Zebari opposed it, and Talabani kept leaving the country whenever it looked like he might be required to meet with Barzani about the negotiations. As summer turned to autumn, the Kurds grew bolder. Skirmishes spread far south of the tiny safe haven around Dohuk. Unrest centered, as usual, in the city of Sulimaniya, thirty miles south of the 36th parallel.
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