Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  Lahor had had a busy morning. Heading into the town of Khurmal, one of the pesh merga lost his leg to a mine. Then a few snipers started taking shots at the advancing platoon from the old radio tower behind Khurmal. Lahor went with a few dozen Kurds to take the tower, already in ruins from a U.S. air strike. The snipers offered to surrender, but something about them didn't seem right. As they came a bit closer, Lahor's suspicions were confirmed. The pesh merga raised their rifles to shoot and the would-be prisoners of war detonated suicide vests, exploding before Lahor's eyes. They were the first suicide bombers of the day, but not the last.

  Once they cleared the tower, one of Lahor's men scaled up the flagpole to pull down Ansar's white banner, which had "God is great" written across it. Of course all the pesh merga are Muslims as well, and when the man climbed down, a dizzy spell hit him, and he bent over with nausea, shouting, "God forgive me. God forgive me!"

  When Labor took Bafel's phone call, he was creeping up the ridgeline with two of the American soldiers he knew from the advance team at Bakrajo airstrip. One of them was along to "spot," or call in coordinates, for air support; the other worked the hill with a .50-caliber sniper rifle that could hit a target a mile away. After the call, the green prong realized they had to move faster to help yellow prong get out of the cemetery outside Sargat. The spotter traded his M4 rifle with one of the pesh merga for a massive PKM machine gun, with a long belt of finger-size shells.

  "I've never seen anything like it," said Lahor. "He fired the thing with one hand and said, 'Follow me.'" Lahor did, moving from boulder to boulder, grenade to grenade. At one point he stood up to take a look at the enemy, with his big turban making him a head taller.

  "I really wanted to impress the guys and say we shouldn't be scared. I felt the heat of the bullet pass my ear. And there was a tall pesh merga standing behind me," Lahor said. The round hit the tall Kurd in the chest, but the man didn't fall. As Lahor helped rip away the man's heavy clothes, the hot slug came away with his shirt—it must have been out of range and spent its force before impact. One of the Americans quickly wrapped the wound.

  "Okay, guys, I'm not going to stand up anymore," said Lahor.

  As part of the PUK's first family, both Bafel and Lahor had dedicated pesh merga following them, treating them with as much deference as a battlefield would allow. In the mêlée below, Bafel stood behind a low wall with an experienced soldier named Muhsin.

  "Look, if you think it wise, perhaps we should move," Muhsin suggested. Bafel asked why, and he answered, "Because just a few feet from you there's an RPG that hasn't exploded." They scurried to another stone wall.

  Finally the green prong got in position to see Bafel and the captain pinned in the valley below. As they started firing down the mountainside from a kilometer away, the Ansar gunners began to break. Alternating fire from down in the gully and away on the mountain, the pesh merga killed many of the Islamists and drove the others back up the hill. The last kilometer had taken almost four hours to win, but the PUK had Sargat.

  None of the Americans in the yellow prong had been seriously wounded, but several Kurds were too badly shot up to walk. Bafel suddenly realized he was exhausted. Sheikh Jafr radioed from the rear for the men to halt, and a few minutes later a truck arrived with hot lamb kebabs and bread. The Americans looked on in disbelief as the Kurds stopped everything for lunch. Up on the ridge Lahor and his companions had simpler fare. "We'd stick our hands in the rice bucket and then stick our hands in the beans bucket. It was the most delicious thing," he said.

  Along the ridges, Kurdish-American forces then began the painstaking work of clearing caves of the Ansar survivors. In Sargat, an American team searched for evidence of the chemical laboratory that had helped start the war. They found what they thought might be traces of chemicals and poison, but nothing conclusive. Bafel took several pesh merga to case the house that had belonged to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, " Qudama the Engineer." He found a hole in the wall made by a U.S. bomb, but the room had been cleaned out before the missile hit. The most convincing evidence of an al-Qa'ida connection came in the form of the prisoners—foreign fighters from Palestine, Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, as far as Pakistan, and as near as Baghdad—but few of them wanted to be taken alive.*

  "One guy came out of a cave and surrendered," said Bafel. "We sent some pesh to arrest him. I turned my head away, and he exploded." The militant had been hiding a grenade and killed himself and one of the pesh merga. The Kurds changed tactics, firing rocket-propelled grenades down the mouths of the caves. They still lost half a dozen men to suicide tricks—sometimes the Islamists surrendered and then pulled out hidden weapons and began shooting again until the pesh merga blew them down. In the end the pesh merga insisted the prisoners strip naked before coming close and then sent them down the mountain that way, provoking some funny looks from the Americans.

  Thirty-six PUK soldiers died in the battle with Ansar fighters, and none of the Americans was seriously injured. The victors couldn't be sure just how many of the seven hundred or so Ansar fighters had died, but they estimated about three hundred. They seized documents and computers from the bombed-out buildings, but the nickname "little Tora Bora" may have earned a second meaning. As had happened in the assault on al-Qa'ida in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, the time between the air strikes and the ground offensive allowed a large number of Islamists to escape over the border to Iran, where some faced arrest and others slipped through the cracks. Still, the towns belonged to the PLK, and the senior leadership hosted a banquet the day after the battle in Taweela, Ansar's deepest territory. Almost as soon as the shooting stopped, thousands of Kurdish civilians started their way along the road back to their homes, some of them leading their flocks up the same road the pesh merga had cleared only days before.

  As much as defeating Ansar, the Kurds delighted in proving their mettle to the Americans, and it seemed a natural next step to turn around together toward the Iraqi front. Many of the Americans seemed tempted to join the Kurds in taking back Kirkuk, but the orders coming down from Central Command were to keep the Kurds out of the rest of the fight, and the Pentagon sent some reinforcements. A thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade had landed at the KDP's airstrip in Bashur on March 26th, amid great fanfare.

  "Americans are asking you to make the world a better place by jumping into the unknown for the benefit of others," the brigade's commanding officer, Colonel William Mayville, said to the men as they left their base in Aviano, Italy.15

  On the ground, the Kurds couldn't help but puzzle at why the Americans arrived by parachute to a long, friendly airstrip the KDP had spent a month refurbishing. Some of the parachutes missed the base by miles, and they spent the next day digging their heavy equipment out of the deep mud. Nor was the jump a surprise. Marine General Pete Osman had come into northern Iraq through Turkey and held a press conference advertising the paratroopers' arrival three days earlier. The show helped keep Saddam Hussein's army guarding the north, but the troops themselves had been placed under the control of Special Forces Colonel Charlie Cleveland, mostly to make sure the Kurds didn't overreach. As much as they wanted the Iraqi army tied down, the Pentagon wanted the Turks and Kurds to stay within their borders.

  Less than two weeks into the war, many Americans' assumptions turned out wrong. Shi'ite Arabs in the south, who rose up violently in 1991, stayed indoors this time, and though the U.S. Marines had reached the edge of Nasiriya, the southern capital of Basra still hadn't welcomed American or British aid. American forces started to look dangerously overextended as they stretched toward Baghdad, surrounded by civilians still too scared to express support. The Iraqi opposition tried to rally the population, but not everywhere.

  "Yesterday the Iraqi opposition called for uprising in Iraq, but Kirkuk is a special case," Talabani told a news conference the day after Ansar's defeat. "We don't want any kind of mistake that would cause problems for our American friends or our Turkish brothers."

&nb
sp; U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad smiled next to him and nodded in approval. Talabani and Khalilzad fielded questions from the foreign reporters, ignoring Barham Salih's attempts to take a few questions from Sulimaniya's own inquisitive press. Both men seemed a bit off their game. Talabani told a flat joke about a woman in Sulimaniya complaining that after all the money she had spent taping her windows shut, she now feared that Saddam wouldn't even gas Kurdistan. Khalilzad gave him a terribly staged laugh. The American envoy also stumbled through a list of the opposition forces who had agreed to coordinate with the U.S. coalition. Talabani nudged him and said, "You forgot Chalabi."

  "Oh yes. I'm glad you mentioned that," Khalilzad said, and added with another awkward laugh, "I'm getting old."

  The missing northern front had left Chalabi's small group of fighters stuck in Kurdistan, which seemed just fine with the U.S. State Department. But Chalabi hungered for Baghdad. I had taken a drive to the southernmost point of the Kurdish safe zone in late March and discovered several hundred INC soldiers busing in from Iran. A number of them, including some U.S. citizens equipped with Thuraya satellite phones, declared Chalabi their leader and the next president of Iraq. They took over some buildings in the town of Kalar, just two hours' drive from Baghdad. On the drive back to Sulimaniya I saw a tall white stallion in the back of a pickup truck headed for Kalar and couldn't help but suppose it to be the white horse Chalabi planned to ride into Baghdad. PUK officials had trouble with Chalabi's recruits and later arrested some of them, claiming they were all hired mercenaries from Iran.16 In fact a small number of them had been trained in Hungary by U.S. Special Forces. When General Tommy Franks realized that his troops in southern Iraq had virtually no translators, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and more than five hundred of his soldiers to Nasiriya, apparently without the knowledge of the State Department, or the knowledge of the troops on the ground in Nasiriya, who treated them like refugees when they arrived.17

  Things would go smoother in the north, Talabani promised. The opposition's leadership council, with its many committees, would help guide the liberating forces, but no one would be making any grabs for land or power.

  "Every step will be done in full coordination, and there will be no movement of pesh merga towards Kirkuk or Mosul and other towns," Mam Jalal repeated, smiling.

  He didn't mean a word he said.

  * The cameraman, Paul Moran, was a freelancer working for the Australian Broadcasting Company, but he also had worked for the Rendon Group, a PR firm used extensively by the CIA, which had helped set up) the INC. The coincidence of his death only days after arriving in Kurdistan gave rise to some absurd conspiracy theories that Ansar al-Islam somehow knew about his connections.

  † A U.S. Special Forces officer with the Tenth Group, Third Battalion told me a few days after the bombing that the target had been selected by U.S. Central Command, acting on intelligence from the PUK and other sources. He said Komala had been sharing space with Ansar and planned to support them in the fight, so it wasn't an error from the U.S. perspective.

  * SOF soldiers almost never give their names for interviews.

  * This according to Sheikh Jafr at a press conference a few days later, as well as Ayub Nuri, who saw among the casualties an Algerian passport and a man whose name was "al-Baghdadi." I saw a dead Saudi near Sargat a few days after the assault. He had pretended to surrender and then shot one of the pesh merga who came to arrest him. The Kurds killed him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Deeds to the

  Promised Land

  INSIDE THE CITY OF KIRKUK, U.S. MISSILES had been taking out specific targets for several days during the last week of March 2003, and rumors filtered out to the north that Saddam's fearsome Republican Guard there had rounded up a group of young men for execution. The Ba'ath Party headquarters in the center of the city looked as likely a target as any, but in his house just a few blocks away, Ramadan Rashid, a slight, gray-haired goldsmith, didn't fret about the bombs. Rashid was born in Kirkuk in 1953. He had left the city and lived in Erbil for some years, but moved back and opened up his gold shop again in 1996. As neighbors, the Ba'athists knew Rashid and had even tried to recruit him as a spy on his regular business trips to Erbil. He had begged off, claiming that he had too many responsibilities, supporting his family and his brother's on the shop's meager income. In fact, Rashid had even more responsibilities than he let on. He was calling in the air strikes.1

  Rashid joined the Kurdish resistance as a teenager and wound up in an Iraqi prison before he turned twenty. His torture by the Ba'athist government only steeled his resolve, and when he got out of jail in 1974, he made his way to the hills and joined the pesh merga. That meant leaving his home—Kirkuk was the prize of all Kurdish independence struggles, but it was no place for guerrilla warfare. A citadel has guarded the eastern entrance of the city for millennia, and overlooks an open-air bazaar nearly as old, but otherwise the city is flat and bare. Even the Khasah River seems denuded—five bridges and numerous dams and weirs cross it, but only a trickle of water flows through. Rashid fought for the PUK against Saddam in the mountains until 1991, when he joined the all-too-brief Kurdish reconquest of Kirkuk.

  Through the early 1990s Rashid lived in Erbil, helping out with the CIA's bungled coup attempts. When Saddam's army busted into the north to help the KDP in 1996, Rashid discovered to his surprise that he wasn't on any of the Ba'athists' lists for assassination. He accepted a general amnesty and headed back to Kirkuk. To avoid suspicion he moved into a house as close to the Ba'ath Party headquarters as he could find, and audaciously buried a few dozen Kalashnikovs in his garden.

  Rashid had a few close calls over the years, including a forty-eight-hour interrogation with Kirkuk's Mukhabarat. Rashid sensed in the beginning of that ordeal that the Iraqis didn't have solid evidence against him, so he stayed calm and acted the part of a meek Kurdish grandfather. The agents kept leaving him to sweat in a tiny cell.

  "This is your file," one of the agents told him, holding up a thick manila envelope, "and if I send it with you down to Baghdad, only the file will come back."

  Rashid knew they had hidden cameras on him and were watching for signs he might crack after they stepped out, so even then he kept his cool. His intuition paid off, and eventually the Iraqis changed tack, asking if he would work for them. For a year after his release they kept on him before giving up, but saved his name for their files, checking in periodically to see if he had changed his mind. After the arrest, Rashid's superiors in the PUK offered to pull him out, but he wanted to stay on. Fie would periodically go north to report in person, always taking the road to Erbil and then crossing over to Sulimaniya—which added an extra four hours to the journey. If the Iraqis caught on, they would think he worked for the KDP, and it would help throw them off the trail a bit.

  Six months before the U.S. invasion, Talabani promoted Rashid to lead all the PUK cells in Kirkuk. For the first time Rashid saw the scale of the operation—not only the sources inside the Ba'athist government but also his many friends, neighbors, and even his brother, who also worked for the underground. They dispensed Thuraya satellite phones to spotters around the city. It was death to be caught with one of the phones, which couldn't be used behind closed doors—the phone needs an open sky to function. Rashid called at night or went to a friend's half-finished apartment building to make the calls during the day. Kurdish neighborhoods in Kirkuk had been put under a special curfew, and many feared that the Iraqi army would start rounding up young Kurdish men, but Rashid had no shortage of volunteers for the underground.

  "The organization was so strong in Kirkuk. Kirkukee Kurds were risking their lives to do this job. And they were desperately glad to do it," said Rashid.

  As the air strikes started taking their toll on the city, Rashid fed reports back to the PUK about where the bombs had hit and how many casualties they had inflicted. Rashid found himself getting more than information from his Ba'athist informants—now they requested protection from the Amer
icans and Kurds, whom they assumed would soon flood the city.

  JUST ACROSS THE battle lines in the PUK-held city of Chamchamal, Kirkukees were just as desperate to go home. Many had been waiting decades in refugee camps and were now watching the Iraqi army garrison at Qara Hanjir on the ridge. On the morning of March 27, the Iraqi army that had looked down on them all those years suddenly turned to smoke. Seconds later the sound from the American bombs echoed across the valley.

  At the police station in Chamchamal, dozens of pesh merga, Kurdish civilians, and news-starved journalists had gathered to look up at the ridge. Some pesh merga raced out to the checkpoint on the road to Kirkuk, daring one another to go farther out of town. On the roof of the station a bear of a man in Kurdish fatigues stood surrounded by Kurdish police. General Rostam Hamid Rahim, a fifty-year-old pesh merga legend, peered up at the ridge through binoculars. Up the hill a small truck was moving back and forth—it looked like survivors were pulling out.

  "Mam" Rostam, as everyone called him, wouldn't have lasted a minute undercover as a civilian. Everything about the man said fighter, from the scars all over his body to the violent gestures in his speech. Now he was smiling, laughing, and shouting with his friends at the ruined Iraqi bunkers up the hill. Rostam, like all his contemporaries, had seen time and torture in Kirkuk's prisons as a teen. As one of the first PUK militants, he had fought nonstop from the 1970s through the '90s. He counted his father and two brothers as martyrs for Kirkuk, and the Ba'athists threw another brother in jail because of Rostam's activities. He sent his wife and children to exile in Germany for their protection. After the uprising in 1991, Ali Hassan al-Majid had singled out Shorja, Ros-tam's neighborhood in Kirkuk, as an example for the rest of the city's Kurdish inhabitants. With dynamite and bulldozers, Iraqi troops razed about four hundred houses, treating Shorja like so many Kurdish villages during the Anfal campaign.