That day in Sulimaniya soldiers from the 173rd had arrested another group of Turkish Special Forces, who were in possession of not just weapons but also explosives. The Americans had acted on intelligence that the ITF was plotting to assassinate the Kurdish head of Kirkuk's city council, but when they swept the party headquarters, they scooped up eleven more Turkish Special Forces. This time there was no polite feeding them a meal and showing them to the border. The idea that Turks would be trying to stir up trouble in Kirkuk again made the Americans on the ground livid—and it was an opportunity for a little payback. The Americans not only handcuffed the Turks; they put their heads in black sacks like al-Qa'ida suspects on their way to Guantánamo.
In Washington the Turkish ambassador, Faruk Lo?o?lu, received the news with shock and anger. His job had been difficult since March; now he had no choice but to protest at the highest levels. Lo?o?lu spoke with both Marc Grossman at the State Department and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon about the matter, and before long Bob Deutsch was heading home from the foreign minister's office with the proverbial backside of his suit hanging in tatters. When the embassy called the military in Baghdad and Kirkuk, however, the U.S. Army didn't want to let the Turks go. Their concern about the assassination plot was real enough that even with direct pressure from high-level Bush administration officials, it took almost two days to get the Turkish soldiers released.
The Turks stuck to an official line that the Turkish Special Forces were part of the same peacekeeping unit that had been in northern Iraq for years and that their intentions were peaceful and completely known to the Americans and the PUK. Officially, this explanation was accepted by Washington, and the diplomats set about the work of apologizing to Turkey for the treatment of the soldiers. But U.S. officials watched with interest as the Turkish military conducted its own investigation, and a few months later effectively ended the careers of the senior officers involved with the Sulimaniya operation.*
"My view was that this was an admission of guilt," said Deutsch. "It was confirmation that something was going on that either wasn't authorized or they weren't going to admit was authorized."18
Even if it had been a rogue operation, the bagging of the Turks was a diplomatic disaster, which Ankara would fume about for years. "A big mistake on the part of our American friends," said Lo?o?lu, "Once you take this action, it cannot be erased, and it's a permanent scar on Turkish-American military relations."
The incident became a symbol for the Turkish public that the friendship with America was over—but interestingly, the Turks had probably been the ones who leaked the news of the hoods used on the commandos. The Turkish press trembled with righteous rage and alleged that the entire incident had been arranged and filmed by Bafel Talabani. But again, it was the Turks who eventually put the incident out on film—a Turkish feature film. Valley of the Wolves, a blockbuster in Turkey a few years later, wove a tale of an American conspiracy to foment a state in northern Iraq and use it as a beachhead to help the Kurds destroy Turkey.*
For the Kurds, another crash in Turkish-American relations was like winning the lottery for the second time in six months. In Washington's view, Turkish concerns now ranked right down there with keeping "evil" Iran and Syria happy. Bremer made reference to the Turks as a "colonial" power that wouldn't be welcome in Iraq, even as the Turks prepared to offer troops to help the coalition in places like Anbar province. Even lip service was too much of a bother for America: for a full year no one in the U.S. government so much as mentioned Ankara's archenemy, the PKK guerrillas living openly in the mountains of northern Iraq, even though Washington considered the PKK a terrorist organization. The Turks lost their eyes and ears on the ground in Iraq and found themselves in the humiliating position of begging briefings from the U.S. embassy in Ankara. Without lifting a finger, the Kurds had bought themselves at least a few years of protection on the northern front.
THE NEW IRAQ was not following the script set out for it by the Bush administration of sweets and flowers, reconstruction and democracy. As the summer wore on, bombs methodically erased all semblance of civility. An explosion that destroyed the Jordanian embassy was marked down to resentment against Jordan's support for Saddam in 1991. A bomb at the Baghdad office of the United Nations that killed twenty-two people, including the estimable leader of the mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was explained as lingering resentment of the U.N.-enforced sanctions. When the next bomb hit the International Committee for the Red Cross, it was clear something more sinister was at work. Coalition spokespeople, Governing Council members, and even wounded bystanders all spoke of outside agitators trying to ruin their great country (just as many had claimed Kuwaitis had done the looting). But in all their sweeps and cordon searches, coalition forces only apprehended a handful of foreign fighters. When Saddam Hussein's two sons, Qusay and Uday, died in a spectacular shootout with troops from the 101st Airborne in the city of Mosul on July 23, the Americans hoped in vain that the bombs and the insurgency would slow down. No one, Iraqi or American, wanted to face the reality that the wave of carnage was homegrown and independent of the regime's "dead-enders." But this was dawning on the Kurds who had come to Baghdad.
Returning home one night Hussein Sinjari flagged a taxi—one of the thousands of jalopies that Baghdad residents had taken to the street in hope of making a living. Getting into a stranger's car at midnight felt fine in the first months of Baghdad's happy anarchy—though it would look suicidal only a year later. Sinjari had a Thuraya satellite phone—there were still no cell phones in central Iraq—and he got a call from an American journalist. As the driver navigated the blacked-out streets, Sinjari chatted away on the phone, keeping his head crooked so the antenna could catch a signal through the window. After a few minutes Sinjari ended the call, pushed down the phone's stubby antenna, and looked up at the driver. The man stared at Sinjari, at his fancy shirt, cuff links, and the high-tech gadget he had just put back in his sport coat.19
"You are Mossad," the driver said.
The urbane and worldly Baghdad of Sinjari's dreams vanished into a cold sweat creeping up his neck. He looked out the open window into the dark and realized he had no idea where the driver had taken him.
"You were talking on the phone like Jewish people talk," the driver continued.
"English? Of course not," said Sinjari, and then thinking fast, "it's because I'm a doctor. You know that all doctors speak English." This was good Iraqi logic, but the driver wasn't sold, and a pistol materialized in his hand as the motor idled in a nameless alley.
"Even your Arabic you speak with a Jewish accent," he said.
"Not at all," said Sinjari, struggling to keep his voice steady. "It's a Moslawi accent."
Using the distinct Arabic of Mosul, which is just outside his hometown, Sinjari starting babbling, peppering his speech with as many colloquialisms as he could. The driver lowered the barrel of the gun.
"I'm sorry, Doctor! You're right. You know, I have cousins up in Mosul, and they speak the same way," said the driver, now a friend and brother Arab. "And to think I was going to kill you right here! My brother is a mu-jahid in Fallujah, fighting the Americans," the driver offered by way of explanation.*
Sinjari begged to be let off at the next corner, insisting it was his address. When he asked about the fare, the driver told him the ride was free of charge, and instead of arguing, Sinjari walked away as quickly as he could.
"I decided to be more careful and stopped taking taxis," recalled Sinjari, who still couldn't bear to dress down. "People advised me that I look European; they said, 'What are these stupid clothes? You have to look ordinary.' But I don't like mustaches," said Sinjari. Though his newspaper, Iraq Today, thrived at first, Sinjari became harder to find at the Baghdad office. Before long he had moved back to Erbil.
BY CONTRAST, MUHAMMAD Ihsan, the KDP's human rights minister, went looking for trouble. Posing as a producer for Beirut's LBC news channel, Ihsan looked up a former leader of the Mukhabarat, hoping for clue
s about where the eight thousand Barzani tribesmen were buried. Though reprisal killings had begun against senior Ba'athists in Baghdad, Ihsan wasn't on a "Nazi-hunting" mission.
"I was expecting these people to think that the game is over and maybe we can give them a chance to try for forgiveness," said Ihsan. But instead he found the agent to be unrepentant and undefeated. The Mukhabarat director told him that the mass graves in Iraq held only Sunni Arabs killed by revolting Shi'ites.20
"Saddam made only two mistakes," the agent continued, "withdrawing from Kuwait and not finishing the job he did on the Kurds."
Ihsan couldn't believe his ears and felt his anger rise, but he didn't want to blow7 his cover. Besides, the man had four burly sons hanging around the house and bragged about a fifth son whom the Americans had hired to do security up in Mosul. Fuming, Ihsan ended the "interview" and left. Returning to the house with Kurdish commandos a day later, Ihsan found it empty.
Buying information proved the most effective tactic. While many important records had been seized—some by the Kurdish authorities, others by Shi'ite parties or NGOs—the U.S. Army had no mandate to guard documents. By the time the CPA set up an office on the crimes of the regime and began preparing a case against the fifty-five most wanted war criminals, tons upon tons of documents had been looted, pilfered, or intentionally destroyed. Ihsan spent thousands of dollars in Baghdad marketplaces buying up documents that might suggest where the eight thousand Barzani tribesmen had been buried. The free market kicked in, and eventually Ihsan found he could get exactly the documents he wanted—for a much higher price. Through luck and persistence over two years, he finally located a town in the western desert called Bussia, near the Saudi border.
Throughout the process, Ihsan kept the CPA involved, letting them know what he was finding as he traveled around the country, eventually documenting 284 mass grave sites across Iraq. He assumed the Americans would have a keen interest—besides the WMD argument, Saddam's atrocities had been a major motivation to get America behind the war, and forensic evidence of Saddam's hundreds of thousands of victims would surely play a major role in the case against him. To his dismay, Ihsan discovered that the Americans had no interest in documenting the atrocities.
"They thought the history of Iraq started on April 9, 2003," Ihsan said ruefully.
American soldiers did nothing to secure the grave sites, and some civilians went out to the spots with bulldozers in a hopeless attempt to turn up an ID card or recognizable clothing of a loved one. Instead their efforts left much of the evidence in a jumble that would be almost impossible to decipher. Ihsan understood that the soldiers were not trained as forensics experts, but he expected the CPA, once it got running, to take on the issue—for the sake of the war crimes tribunal and also out of respect for the millions of long-suffering survivors wondering where and how their loved ones had died. He contacted the CPA staffer in charge of human rights, who assured him that technical assistance would be forthcoming.
"I got nothing from them. That's when I started calling the CPA 'Can't Provide Anything,' " said Ihsan.
Of the nearly three hundred grave sites, the CPA eventually performed forensic investigations at only two. With over thirty million dollars allocated for transitional justice and human rights, the Americans spent almost nothing to help Iraqis find their dead. Kurdish representatives in Baghdad lobbied the CPA constantly about the issue without effect. By the time Ihsan finally located the grave site of the missing Barzanis, Sunni insurgents controlled many of the mass graves—some insurgents no doubt the same people who had done the killings. If Ihsan had ever believed in the American vision for a new Iraq, his daydream ended with his last forays into the western desert, where Sunni sheikhs refused to help him find the bodies of Kurds twenty years dead.
"There is no way to reconcile with them," said Ihsan, "because if they have a chance, they would do it again."
* The CPA order to abolish the army was drafted by Walter Slocombe, a former Pentagon official in the Clinton administration, a rare Democrat on Bremer's team. Bremer also consulted with Douglas Feith on the decision, which they saw as an easy way of eliminating a huge block of Ba'athist bureaucracy, since the army was almost completely AWOL at the time. Bremer said in press conferences in Baghdad that he had simply formalized the disappearance of the Iraqi army, but even as the order came down, members of Garner's team had been negotiating with former Iraqi officers about how to bring them back as a constructive force in the new Iraq. In September of 2007 Bremer made public a letter he had sent to President Bush advising him of the decision to dismantle the army, as well as Bush's approving response.
† This conversation is recounted by Bremer in his memoir. He goes on to say that he and Barzani discussed how abolishing the army had prevented the Kurds from seceding from Iraq and causing a regional war. Bremer recounts the conversation with such a brazenly exculpatory structure that it's worth doubting. Years later when I asked Masoud Barzani if he thought Bremer had made mistakes, he demurred. I asked him instead to name the things he thought Bremer had done well, and Barzani smiled, saying only, "Now that is a difficult question."
* In his defense, Bremer did prominently use this veto to prevent religious parties on the council from rolling back Iraq's family law, which, on the books at least, supported women's rights better than other countries in the region.
* Brigadier General Abdullah Kilicarslan and Major General Sadik Ercan were quietly put out to pasture.
* The opening scene of the film featured one of the Turkish soldiers nabbed on July 4 supposedly committing suicide because of his humiliation at the hands of the Americans. The movie details the wanton slaughter of Iraqis by Americans, and for good measure, there's a subplot about a Jewish vivisectionist harvesting organs from wounded Muslims. The Turkish first lady praised the film for its accuracy, prompting protests from Washington and Jerusalem.
* Fallujah had already proven a flashpoint since U.S. troops fired into a crowd of protesters, killing seventeen people on April 28, before the occupation had lasted a full month. Troops from the 82nd Airborne said they were returning fire from the mob, but Human Rights Watch later disputed the claim.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Feast of the Sacrifice
"CAN'T PROVIDE ANYTHING" SUMMED UP the CPA's entire fourteen-month existence from the Kurdish perspective, and Ambassador Bremer seemed unable or uninterested in accepting anything either. The Governing Council spent so much time trying to divide the tasks of governance with perfectly equal patronage to every constituency that results became an afterthought. The Kurds had plenty to offer in terms of expertise and relatively disciplined manpower. Prominent Kurds took over the water ministry and the ministry of municipalities, and some were even hired by the CPA as outside advisors to Iraq's new government. But politics outweighed effectiveness, and no job was too small to be considered a crucial bargaining chip, even down to collecting the garbage.
"At one point we had a garbage crisis in Baghdad," recalled one CPA staffer. "I looked around and thought, where the heck can I quickly get garbage trucks. Then I saw Mam Jalal."1
Talabani was happy to provide PUK municipal trucks and workers, and the garbage got picked up. But it didn't last in the zero-sum game of Iraqi politics, where even collecting garbage looked like a power grab. Other parties complained, and Talabani sent his garbagemen home. The same process had taken place between the KDP and PUK when they set up their government in 1992; they had quibbled over every single driver, tea boy, and bodyguard job. But no lessons were accepted from the Kurdish experiment—many Arab delegates still considered the Kurds unruly rebels from the north. Kurds who prominently helped the coalition were often treated as foreign interlopers in Baghdad, as with Hero Talabani's collaboration with the CPA's bumbling effort to create a new Iraqi news network. Many in the CPA also resented the Kurds' independent attitude.
"People working in ministries would talk to Shi'ites and Sunnis and hear bad things said about the K
urds," the CPA staffer remembered. "They'd see the pesh merga running around like they owned the place and see the offices in the north under Kurdistan Regional Government control. There was some jealousy around that and a lack of appreciation of the model they could be for the rest of the country."
As mostly American advisors took de facto control of Iraq's provincial governments, three of the eighteen provinces remained in completely local control: Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulimaniya. The CPA disbursed funds to the Kurdish region but let the Kurds run their own affairs, which bred resentment among the Arab parties, who egged on CPA suspicions of the north.
"It was hard to convince the CPA that the Kurds were the good guys," said one State Department Iraq specialist. "They were meeting with all the Arab parties, most of whom don't like Kurds. They would be the ones telling the Americans, 'We're going to build our country, everything is going to be great, except we've got these wild Kurds up to the north.'"
Because the north remained calm, few7 in the CPA or the U.S. military made the trek to Kurdistan, and that made it even easier to take projects and resources away. One CPA project allocated six hundred million dollars for water and sanitation work in the north, but by the end of the CPA's term, USMD took away five hundred million dollars to devote to more troubled parts of the country.2
And the Kurds' position wasn't helped when their representatives in Baghdad took their new freedom of speech so seriously. An aging but still feisty Mahmoud Othman came out of retirement in London to take up a position on the Governing Council. He seemed an excellent choice, as a well-respected Kurdish leader clearly not in the pocket of the KDP or PUK. Othman soon became a self-appointed ombudsman for the council and began an affair of mutual love with the news media, much to the consternation of the many Republican Party loyalists coming out for short stints from Washington. Othman vigorously criticized the petty motives of many council members, but he saved his most withering words for the CPA and its contractors, who had begun to dwarf any other tribe in Iraq for waste, corruption, and ineptitude.
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