At the end of October, Baghdad suddenly switched tactics and pulled out of the three northern Kurdish provinces, expanding the safe haven by default. With characteristic hubris, Saddam told the Kurds that they'd never survive without him and informed the legion of Kurdish civil servants that they had to relocate to Iraqi government territory or lose their salaries. But the Kurds stayed. Doctors, teachers, and traffic cops all went without their paychecks for months. The U.N. had slapped a total embargo on Iraq, and Saddam was now laying siege to Kurdistan even within that blockade. But the Kurds realized something that perhaps only their closest enemies understood: they had a country now.
"The decision in 1991, it made it like an incubator," said Nawshirwan Mustafa, for many years the deputy head of the PUK. "But imagine for a person who has been against the central government all their life—for fifteen years or thirty years they live in caves or mountains. They were against law and order, wanted to destroy the state. Suddenly they become the master of the land? They should change from freedom fighters to statesman? It's not easy."30
Washington unwittingly had become the midwife to a de facto Kurdish state, something it certainly never desired. Despite the conspiracy theories flying about the region, especially in Turkey, no one in the U.S. government suspected at the time that America had permanently altered Iraq; rather, they thought they'd managed a very clean exit. In retrospect, then CIA chief Robert Gates explained it: "Never mistake for malice that which is easily explained by stupidity or incompetence."31
Marc Grossman, who would later become ambassador to Turkey and a major figure in the second Bush administration, recalls a brief conversation with General Jim Jamerson, on a hillside overlooking the Khabur bridge connecting Turkey to Iraq. Jamerson wondered how long it would be before the U.N. took over the whole operation.
"We thought it would probably take thirty days," said Grossman.
The United States kept patrolling the safe haven in Iraqi Kurdistan for twelve more years. American jets overhead protected the Kurds from their exterior enemies—Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. But who would protect the Kurds from one another?
* That theory didn't seem quite as crazy with the revelation that Saddam had sought approval from the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie. When he asked Glaspie what America thought about his dispute with Kuwait, the ambassador replied that it was a local matter. Then she took a vacation and got out of the heat. Saddam may well have thought he had been given a green light.
* Its easy to forget that humanitarian intervention, which followed later in Somalia and Kosovo, began only in 1991, and changed the way the international community viewed crises like Rwanda and Sudan. Now it was possible to ask why the United Nations authorized intervention in northern Iraq and not in Darfur, for example.
* When Garner got a similar order in 2003, he must have felt a wicked sense of déjà vu. In 1991 Garner came into the operation with no background—he scrambled to find any books written about the Kurds. He found only one book, penned by the aforementioned Stephen C. Pelletiere, who had theorized that the Iranians were responsible for the gassing at Halabja. Years later, while Garner was lecturing at the Army War College, a member of the audience asked him if he had read any books about the Kurds before his time there. He mentioned the one title, and the questioner indentified himself as Stephen Pelletiere. Garner asked him, "Where the hell were you in 1991?"
CHAPTER FOUR
Burning Down the House
QUBAD TALABANI, THE YOUNGER OF MAM Jalal Talabani's two sons, grew up mostly in the care of his grandfather, Ibrahim Ahmad, in the comfortable anonymity of London, south of the Thames. Born in 1977, Qubad arrived just in time for his father to slip back into Iraq to launch the PUK's rebellion—a war that would continue for twenty-five more years, sometimes fighting the Iraqi regime, sometimes fighting other Kurds. His mother, Hero, returned to Iraq to fight at her husband's side when Qubad turned two, and his brother, Bafel, six. Other than the odd meetings at their grandfather's house—full of rebels, coup plotters, and the occasional spy—Qubad tried to live the life of a normal young Londoner. But he couldn't escape the infernal question, "What's a Kurd?" On the playground, in the classroom, as a teenager mingling at a pub, Qubad resigned himself to a twenty-minute explanation before every conversation of who, what, and where were the Kurds.
The question still followed him years later when Qubad Talabani moved to the United States to assist and apprentice with Barham Salih, by then the PUK representative in Washington. Qubad's twenties had brought some political awakening, lots of creative border crossings, and a few close calls with guerrilla warfare. He had stopped trying to masquerade as a regular young man. On a hiking trip in New York with his American fiancee's family he couldn't help but ask, "So you do this for fun?"
His future father-in-law asked, wasn't he having fun? "Yeah," Qubad replied, "but the last time I did this there were people with guns chasing me and I had just burned my own house down."
Qubad had started going "home" to Kurdistan in the early 1990s, when the Kurds suddenly found themselves with a de facto country to run. In August 1996, as his summer holidays ended, he prepared to return to England to complete a degree in engineering. At the end of the month he set out toward Erbil to register with his university via the only working fax machine in the province. His father's pesh merga turned him back; the PUK and KDP were fighting, and he was advised to wait. In a few days, they said, the PUK would have Masoud Barzani on the run, if not completely wiped out. The following day, however, Talabani's men were running away. As a matter of family honor, they doused their family house in gasoline and torched it rather than have their enemy take shelter there. As the house went up in smoke, Qubad followed his father's war party into the peaks and crags along the Iranian border.1
FREE KURDISTAN, ON the other hand, didn't from the start resemble a burning building, astounding all predictions.
Since the 1980s the Kurdistan Front had used the rhetoric of democracy in all its international public relations. In May 1992 it actually held an election, which Masoud Barzani's KDP expected to win in a walk. His family name was still the rallying cry for the Kurdish struggle, and his troops had been much stronger during the intifada. What's more, the jahsh tribes, counting for hundreds of thousands of votes, had pitched in with Barzani—perhaps because his more traditional style suited them better than the PUK's modern image, perhaps for protection.2 Many of the jahsh had taken Saddam's silver during the Anfal campaign, apprehending, if not personally executing, thousands of mostly PUK supporters. While Talabani didn't challenge the amnesty given to them before the intifada, he unsuccessfully opposed giving the jahsh tribes voting rights in the elections.3 Some tribes and clans sat on the fence and enjoyed a cheap bidding war between the parties with promises of patronage and actual cash paid, though economic hardship kept the sums low.4
Budding democracy in Kurdistan was not well received in the neighborhood, and sent the Turks into a fit. Long before anyone in Washington considered that the safe haven had become its own country, conspiracy-minded Turks had seen through it as an American plot for Kurdish independence, expansion, and the destruction of Kemal Atatürk's dream. It fed such fantasies when a few of the American airdrops of food and water ended up in the hands of Turkey's Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) rebels, one load falling directly to the PKK on the Turkish side of the border.5 The United States exhibited its usual schizophrenia. The Turks demanded that America renew its permission to fly out of Incirlik every six months, a constant source of stress that would dog the U.S. Turkish relationship for the next dozen years. As the United States fought to protect the Kurdish safe haven, it resisted the idea of promoting democracy there for the same old reasons: Turkish sensitivities and a fear of dismembering Iraq. The State Department put out an order well in advance that staff should be nowhere near Kurdistan on Election Day.
With just a week to go before the election, the Kurds hit a snag. The "indelible" ink they'd imported from Germany washed right off the f
ingers it was supposed to mark after people voted. They needed new ink, and it had to be expedited through Turkey. The request ran up a chain of U.S. officials, who realized they could make or break the Kurds' first democratic exercise. "Do we really want to just shrug our shoulders?" one diplomat asked Marc Grossman, in Ankara. The U.S. embassy wrestled with the Turks, and at the last moment, with resistance from Washington, finally got the Kurds their ink.
It was a real election, with a runoff planned if no candidate won a majority in the first round. Kurdish leaders actually hit the campaign trail and vied for influence; Sami Abd-al-Rahman, Mahmoud Othman, Jalal Talabani, and Masoud Barzani all spoke in public rallies, as did the Islamist candidate from Halabja, Othman Abdulaziz. The vote should have settled disputes and allowed the Kurdistan Front to move forward. However, Barzani won with only 45 percent of the vote, not by the vast margin he and his supporters had predicted. The PUK placed a surprisingly close second, with 43.6 percent, and succeeded in outflanking Barzani with more aggressive language about Kurdish rights, and a pledge not to negotiate with Saddam.6 Though Talabani was older, he appeared more modern and internationalist than Barzani. Observers on hand said the elections were fairly clean—for Kurdistan. "I think everybody cheated," said Mahmoud Othman. "We don't know who cheated better."
Othman and Abd-al-Rahman certainly expected to do better, and had their parties won a larger share, it might have defused some of the tension that ensued. The Kurdistan Front stipulated the high threshold of 7 percent for a party to get any seats at all, and none of the minority parties qualified. A heated dispute led to a fifty-fifty power-sharing agreement in the parliament between the KDP and PUK, with five seats added for the minority Christian Assyrian Kurds, making an unwieldy parliament of 105 seats—6 of them held by women. The Kurdistan Front handed out ministries: one each for the Iraqi Communist Party, the Assyrian Democratic Movement, and the Kurdistan Toilers' Party, and the rest divided up between the PUK and KDP. Each KDP minister had a PUK deputy and vice versa; each menial job handed to a KDP loyalist had to be matched with a PUK patron. Othman, Abd-al-Rahman, and the Islamist party sat out.
The runoff election between Barzani and Talabani was postponed indefinitely after tensions flared and never faded. Kurdistan was neatly divided into two spheres of influence: Barzani's northwest against Talabani's southeast. Almost immediately influential Kurds—from military commanders to tribal leaders to poets to doctors—started lining up on one side or another, though Mahmoud Othman notably remained neutral. Barzani opened channels to the Turks, while Talabani tacitly supported the PKK. Any ideological differences were dwarfed by a pure battle of personalities.
"If you read the program of both parties at that time, or even now, and remove the title, you can't tell which is KDP and which is PUK," said Othman, who soon afterward resumed life as an exile back in London.
Even without the battle lines drawn, Kurdistan was free but desperate. For decades the least developed part of Iraq, it now went without the meager aid Baghdad had given. The region produced little but tobacco and grain and had served as a virtual colony to Baghdad.7 The price of heating oil increased two hundred times over the previous subsidized rate,8 and people started hacking down the remaining forests for lumber and charcoal. Most families found themselves selling off their heirlooms. The government lived off customs revenue from borders with Iran and the more lucrative Khabur bridge crossing to Turkey. At the same time, nongovernmental organizations started setting up shop. Their number was small, but given the poverty of the countryside, their cash made a difference. The NGOs also had the curious habit of hiring local Kurds based solely on their talents without regard to clan or family connections. The United Nations did the same, planting the seeds of a meritocracy. However, not all the people setting up shop were as nongovernmental as they seemed. Some time during 1992, Ahmed Chalabi arrived.*
IN MAY 1991, still believing that Saddam would fall under his own weight, President George H. W. Bush signed a "finding," authorizing the CIA to take a shot at removing the Iraqi dictator. By the end of that year the White House had authorized forty million dollars to that end, including an anti-Saddam propaganda campaign directed internationally by John Rendon, a cloak-and-dagger PR specialist.9 Bringing the Iraqi opposition together has often been compared to herding cats. By the summer of 1991 the agency discovered a fiercely intelligent Iraqi exile they thought could lash the different groups together, the ex-banker Ahmed Chalabi. A secular Shi'ite Arab who had left Baghdad as a child, Chalabi formed the Iraqi National Congress (INC), based in London. By the fall of 1992, Chalabi moved to Iraqi Kurdistan and hung out his shingle as a rebel. His association with the CIA didn't come out right away, and was better concealed by the fact that Chalabi started bucking the CIA's direction almost from the outset.
The Kurdish parties already knew Chalabi from opposition conferences in Beirut and Vienna, where they made a marriage of convenience. Chalabi needed the Kurds for their boots on the ground, and eventually, their liberated territory; it allowed him to operate from inside Iraq and not be taken as an armchair revolutionary. What's more, Chalabi's domineering personality soon pared down the INC's membership. The religious Shi'ite factions, based in Tehran, didn't like the INC's Western support. Also halfway out the door was the Iraqi National Accord (INA), a group of ex-Ba'athists and military officers close to England's MI6. Chalabi needed the Kurds to give the impression that the INC was more than his cabal. The Kurds had a similar opinion of Chalabi from the outset—he was their token Arab so they could convince the United States that their program was pan-Iraqi and not just Kurdish.10 When Chalabi arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan, however, he found that everything, including his INC, got caught up in the competition between Barzani and Talabani.
Chalabi landed in Iraq with fewer than a hundred people, including the pesh merga assigned to him by Masoud Barzani. The INC intelligence chief, Arras Habib Karim, came from an old KDP family of Fayli Kurds and was able to converse with the locals in their own language.* The Kurdistan Regional Government based itself in Erbil, but Barzani quartered the INC in an abandoned hotel up the hill in Salahudin, a KDP stronghold. It's hard to say whether Barzani brought them close so he could show off his influence over the INC or if he just wanted to keep tabs on Chalabi.11 The INC paid off the squatters living in the hotel, gutted it, refurnished it in fine style, and hired a small army of employees, presumably with CIA money. Chalabi then set out to rally recruits for the coming war with Saddam. Another war came instead.
With all of Kurdistan fighting over crumbs, the revenue coming in at the Khabur bridge from Turkey suddenly looked like a king's treasury, and it became the focus of a cold war between the KDP and PUK. Ostensibly, the elections had unified the pesh merga, but minor disputes led each side to charge the other with misusing Kurdistan's army.12 Before that war turned hot, both parties did some settling with smaller factions. Most important, the PUK began what would become a long feud with the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK), which Iran was strengthening along the border from Darbandikhan all the way up to Ranya.
Four years of senseless civil war in Kurdistan began on May 1, 1994, in a tiff between a KDP landlord and a couple of PUK shop owners. In the city of Qala Diza, a tribal leader named Ali Haso Mirkan laid claim to a stretch of land given to him by the Iraqi government in 1973, which then took the land back from him in 1980 to put up government buildings. The government offices were sacked in the 1991 uprising, and the original owners of the land reclaimed it and put up some shops. Mirkan's son was a KDP security guard; KDP officials apparently gave him a new deed for the property The PUK sent a team to negotiate on behalf of the shopkeepers, and it's unclear who turned the parley into an ambush. Both Mirkan and a PUK official were killed along with many of their men, but each party's leader claimed no involvement.13 Talabani was in France at the time meeting with President Mitterrand. As usual in the Middle East, this appeared less of an alibi than a conspiracy—KDP supporters theorized that Talabani h
ad planned his absence so he could come back and negotiate once his troops had seized power.
PUK and KDP areas suddenly separated like oil in water. Talabani's troops took the towns of Ranya, Sulimaniya, and Koi Sanjaq. In most cases the KDP supporters were allowed to withdraw peacefully. Many were bused to the eastern city of Halabja, where the KDP formed a quick alliance with the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan. In the northern cities of Zakho and Dohuk, Barzani ordered all PUK pesh merga to evacuate. Many of the smaller commanders fell prey to ambushes on the roads—Talabani wasn't in the country to control his coalition, and Barzani apparently didn't stop his men from engaging in tit-for-tat violence. PUK prime minister Kosrat Rasul* met with Barzani to negotiate but claimed he could not control the actions of another PUK commander, Jabar Far-man, who had amassed two thousand pesh merga and was threatening KDP headquarters. By the time Talabani returned to Erbil, flown in by a Turkish helicopter, full-fledged war raged in Kurdistan. The Turkish help probably wasn't aimed at ending the war so much as ensuring that neither side really won. A similar message from Iran warned the PUK not to wipe out Barzani's headquarters.14
The oasis of free Iraq now began to self-destruct, just as Saddam Hussein had predicted. The schism ended any serious efforts to threaten Baghdad, but at the same time it gave Ahmed Chalabi's INC a much more practical raison d'etre. The INC, along with the Iraqi Communist Party, offered to play peacemaker and started setting up white-flag checkpoints between the warring Kurdish factions. Chalabi's stock went way up with local Kurds, and in Washington as well. By mid-July peace negotiations convened in Paris with Madame Mitterrand's loan of the president's summerhouse. Najmaldin Karim flew in from Washington along with other notable neutrals. The PUK sent Nawshirwan Mustafa, Talabani's deputy, and the KDP sent Sami Abd-al-Rahman, who had allied himself with Barzani. On July 16 they signed an agreement, including provisions for the drafting of a constitution, holding the long-delayed runoff election, and sharing revenue from the bridge to Turkey. Peace lasted about four months.15 By December 1994 the PUK laid siege to Erbil, surrounding the KDP's remnants in the Sheraton Hotel* just south of the old citadel. On January 15, 1995, after the INC helped get most of the KDP staff out, the PUK attacked the few dozen fighters who refused to leave the Sheraton. Erbil belonged to Jalal Talabani, and the bullet marks stayed on the side of the hotel for a decade.
Invisible Nation Page 9