No one had bothered to explain the TAL to the public. Sunni Arabs, still without any clear leadership emerging from the ashes of the Ba'athist regime, felt they had been left out of the TAL drafting process. Sistani made clear to Shi'ites that the interim law didn't please him. On that point Moqtada al-Sadr outflanked the older cleric, declaring from the outset that the process was imposed by occupiers. The Kurds protested the idea that their pesh merga might be disbanded until they saw the reality—U.S. military forces on the ground in cities like Mosul, ignoring the madness from Bremer about disbanding the country's only friendly militia, essentially reflagged the Kurdish fighters and started calling them Iraqi forces. The Kurds took the cue and simply never enforced the parts of the law they disagreed with. The TAL seemed a triumph only to Bremer and the small coterie inside the Green Zone who had helped him write it.
Other realities soon came home to roost. Three weeks after the signing of the TAL, on March 31, an SUV carrying four American contractors mistakenly drove into downtown Fallujah, which had clearly become a no-go zone for all but the maddest journalists, much less small groups of Americans in baseball caps and wraparound sunglasses. The men were killed, mutilated, and finally hung in pieces from a bridge on the west side of the city; video of the incident showed Fallujans celebrating. The U.S. military resisted the idea of a retaliatory strike, but then Washington pushed for a show of force. The marines began an all-out attack, but then just short of them taking the city, politicians intervened again, saying that the assault wasn't playing well internationally. From a counterinsurgency perspective, it was like taking half a course of antibiotics and then stopping just when the infection was angry. A negotiated solution created the Fallujah Brigade, an indigenous force that pledged to control the city on Baghdad's behalf. By summer insurgents took complete command and control of the Fallujah Brigade and the city. Fallujah became a rallying cry for extremists worldwide, and for the first time the enemy had formally won territory from the U.S. Army.
Around the same time Fallujah ignited, the coalition forces tried to arrest a key aid to Moqtada al-Sadr on murder charges and lit up another open rebellion. Sadr's Mahdi Army took several southern cities, and again coalition forces fought bloody street battles. The counterinsurgency maxim that rebels win by not losing proved itself again: The coalition easily crushed Sadr's forces in every encounter, but when the dust settled with another cease-fire, Sadr's power and prestige had doubled.
As the two battles finally quieted, the coalition suffered a final, near-fatal self-inflicted wound. Back in January CPA officials had economically released news of the investigations into abuse at Saddam's notorious prison, which had become an American detention facility. At the end of April, however, the photographs taken by MPs at Abu Ghraib shocked Iraqis beyond their worst conspiracy theories. After seeing photographs of naked Iraqis stacked in a pyramid, threatened by dogs, and led on a leash, those who still believed in Washington's good intentions were finished. It didn't matter that Saddam had done much worse for decades—supporters of America didn't have a leg to stand on. With two months left to go, Bremer's CPA was a dead man walking.
The White House implored the U.N. to send back Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian diplomat who had shepherded the new Afghan government's constitutional process. Brahimi had been through Iraq in February, and he reluctantly returned to Baghdad to give some international legitimacy to the interim government that Bremer and the CPA were selecting. By that time Bremer's ship had so clearly lost its rudder that Condoleezza Rice sent her own man, former ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, to take matters in hand. None of this changed Bremer's unflappable autocratic style, as Brahimi's final press conference on June 4 in Baghdad made clear.
"I'm sure he doesn't mind my saying it," said Brahimi. "Mr. Bremer is the dictator of Iraq. He has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this country."
Indeed, it became clear that Bremer, with input from Blackwill, was handpicking the new government. For prime minister, they selected Ayad Allawi, the secular Shi'ite former Ba'athist who had worked with the British MI6 and the CIA in the 1990s. The Kurds expected the ceremonial position of president to go to Jalal Talabani, and Talabani, along with Barham Salih, had been to Washington to canvass old contacts to make sure this would happen. Upon their return to Baghdad, Bremer broke the news—he had decided that the president had to be a Sunni Arab.
"For too long, they have been underrepresented in the new Iraq, Mr. Talabani," Bremer told him. "We have to use this government as an opportunity to broaden Iraq's political base."6
With that lecture from a man whose knowledge of Iraq was a year old, Talabani returned to Sulimaniya without any position in the new government. Barham Salih had expected to become foreign minister but was instead named to a token position, deputy prime minister for national security. The KDP, which had sent more active lieutenants to Baghdad, fared much better. Hoshyar Zebari stayed on as foreign minister, and Roj Shaways took up one of the vice presidents' seats. Still, the KDP had been shut out of the power ministries like defense, finance, and oil, making it harder for the Kurdish believers to argue they would ever get a fair shake in the new Iraq.
In what he portrayed as a clever security move, Bremer decided to hand over power from the CPA two days early, to evade any major insurgent attacks. It wasn't paranoia—the Green Zone was clearly infiltrated by an increasingly sophisticated insurgency. Earlier in June, when the new government held its inauguration ceremony, insurgents had discovered the top-secret location and lobbed mortars nearby. So on June 28 Bremer quickly shook hands with Ayad Allawi and did what can only be described as "slinking off." He left a recorded farewell address for the Iraqi people. Bremer had an Iraqi honor guard of one, consisting of Barham Salih, ever the good host. The two men rode most of the way to the plane in silence, but at one point Bremer looked at Salih and shook his head.
"You Iraqis are a difficult bunch of people," Bremer said. Then Bremer climbed up the stairs into the waiting plane and waved good-bye.7
Bremer would be remembered in Iraq for two things. He introduced the new print currency without Saddam's picture on it, which Iraqis would thereafter refer to as "Bremers"—as in, "How many Bremers to the dollar today?" Also branded with his name were the hideous concrete blast walls that English-speaking Iraqis unaffectionately started calling "Bremer barriers." Bremer became a self-described punching bag for the American failure in Iraq, but it's hard not to take a swing, since he insisted on absolute control while in office for a year that battered the believers in the new Iraq and in America. Later in 2004 President Bush awarded Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom but didn't think for a second of offering him another job. Besides President Bush, only a few others will express their support for Bremer's actions, if not his style—they are, of course, Kurds.
"I don't like Bremer personally," said PUK deputy Nawshirwan Mustafa. "But for me it was very important to demolish the Iraqi army. The de-Ba'athification, the end of the Mukhabarat—these for me were favors from God. You cannot imagine."8
The KDP's Nechirvan Barzani stated it more brazenly, praising Bremer for the errors that have made Iraq's fragmentation, and therefore Kurdistan's independence, more likely. "No really, I like Bremer," Nechirvan is fond of telling guests, savoring the irony with a smirk. "If there is one Kurdish person who likes him, it's me. Because if not for Bremer, the situation in Iraq would never have been like this today . . . It would have been much better!"
* The PUK's Kosrat Rasul insists that his men had a key role in helping U.S. troops get to Saddam; General Petraeus downplayed the Kurdish role in the capture.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Securing the Realm
ON THE EVE OF IRAQ'S FIRST DEMOCRATIC elections, January 30, 2005, Kurdish General "Mam" Rostam spent a long evening in his newly reclaimed Kirkuk home, answering phone calls from PUK pesh merga around the city as well as Kurds within the city's multiethnic police force. The elections, he
felt sure, were finally going to restore the Kurds to their rightful place in control of the city. Rostam was still very grateful to the Americans; he said that if George Bush had been running, he would have won every single Kurdish vote. But the old warrior wasn't entirely pleased with what the Americans had done in Kirkuk. The police force was too multiethnic, Rostam thought, and the GIs were relying on too many Turcomans and Arabs. A Turcoman was in charge of the police in fact, and Rostam mistrusted that any of the potential saboteurs for the next morning's elections would be properly dealt with. He had given his men different orders. One of them called in to say he had apprehended an Arab with a rocket-propelled grenade in a car, driving after the Election Day curfew. Rostam was pleased until the pesh merga told him what he had done.
"You took him to the police? Why didn't you just kill him like I told you?!" Rostam said, then terminated the call and looked up at the guests around his dining room. "If it had been in my hands, you'd be looking at a dead body! They're brainwashed—raised on terror," Rostam said of the Arabs, refilling whiskey glasses around the table. "They can't be reformed. So I've told my guys to kill whomever they arrest."
Late into the night before the vote, Rostam and his pesh merga patrolled the streets looking for anyone the slightest bit suspicious, which for Rostam meant any Arab out after curfew. Still wearing his pesh merga fatigues and a beige vest with many pockets, Rostam went personally to checkpoints around the city, glorying in the cheers he got from Kurdish troops and civilians when they recognized his weathered bulldog's face. One reclaimed Turcoman village had slaughtered a dozen sheep for him and his men, Rostam said, though it could have easily been more from fear than affection.
Almost two years since the liberation of the city, Kirkuk looked much the same—a dreary and bombed-out wreck that seemed to be full of refugees, either those returning or those soon to be turned out of their homes. The Americans had succeeded in stalling the reverse ethnic cleansing inside the city, but the process for adjudicating property claims had never gotten off the ground. The government in Baghdad didn't seem much concerned with enforcing the parts of the transitional administrative law dealing with return and compensation in Kirkuk. Thousands of Kurds had returned, but with their houses still occupied, they took to living in the soccer stadium, waiting every day for the news that the government had homes for them. The city felt frozen in time at April 2003, when the statue of Saddam came down. The term of the U.S.-appointed interim government had nearly gone. All in all, Mam Rostam was plenty glad he had ignored the law, and the U.S. Army, and simply reconquered his old neighborhood—no one else in Iraq seemed to be getting anything done.1
In Baghdad the interim government had taken power in June 2004, promising a firm hand—that of former Ba'athist Ayad Allawi. The secular Shi'ite had long painted himself as the man who could bring Iraq under control, and rumors spread that he was personally carrying out executions of terrorists at Abu Ghraib. Allawi let the rumors flourish, and the Western media soon noticed that the Iraqi prime minister's half smile and thick frame resembled that of television gangster Tony Soprano. Public opinion had been calling out for martial law and capital punishment, and Allawi quickly installed curfews and special powers over the police and military. Such sweeping power for a head of state might have raised concerns, except that the Iraqi police and army couldn't really carry out the orders. During the first assault on Fallujah in spring 2004, the army had fallen apart, and the police were no better. On the books Iraq had 115 batallions of combined security forces, but despite assertions by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon officials admitted that few, if any, could operate effectively without direct U.S. supervision.2 Allawi was now in effect the generalissimo of an empty barracks.
American leadership had also changed hands and style. Ambassador John Negroponte delayed his arrival in Baghdad, avoiding the appearance that he was taking over the reins from Bremer as viceroy. Like Bremer, Negroponte had no Middle East experience, but his deputy, James Jeffrey, was a plainspoken New Englander who had served as the deputy chief of mission in two neighboring countries, Kuwait and Turkey. Both men also had experience in Vietnam: Negroponte as a diplomat and Jeffrey as a soldier. The new ambassador would serve a short tenure, and make his most important mark in reducing the U.S. government's patronizing role after Bremer's overbearing CPA. Though the staff began to change over from Republican-faithful CPA recruits, the majority still had next to no understanding about the quiet enclave in the north of the country.3
The U.S. military rotated in a team more cognizant of the reality—a swelling insurgency—and more attuned to the fact that it could only be defeated when Iraqi troops got on board. General David Petraeus was assigned the task of retooling the army's training, but an entire year had been wasted. Car bombs were now set off daily instead of weekly, and the fight turned slowly from one against America and its Iraqi recruits to an ethnic and sectarian war. In the absence of any order to replace the twisted regimen of Saddam's dictatorship, Iraqis turned to co-religionists and kin for safety. Americans coined a few dramatic terms that oversimplified the country nicely, most important, the concept of a "Sunni triangle" of stiff resistance, with arms extending roughly west from Baghdad toward Fallujah and Ramadi and northwest through Baquba, Samara, and Mosul. While the Kurds largely took shelter in their homogeneous north, the new realities came home to them as Arab gunmen in Mosul began targeting Kurds along with U.S. troops. In mid-September 2004, three pesh merga were ambushed and beheaded there, and soon Kurdish families started moving away, or at least toward the eastern bank of the Tigris River.
Americans fixated on Fallujah as a factory of suicide vests, car bombs, and the roadside booby traps that had started to kill U.S. troops in large numbers. The city was under the control of Iraqi and foreign mujahideen, and Taliban-like rules were being enforced. Since the Marines' half-finished assault on Fallujah in April 2004, the city's name had become a rallying cry in Friday sermons across the country, a one-word refutation of America's invulnerability and Baghdad's control. Though Mosul and Ramadi had become just as comfortable to insurgent forces, America had been girding itself for an all-out assault on Fallujah, advising civilians to leave the city in November 2004.
This time the Americans trusted only a token Iraqi force to join in the assault. Alongside U.S. Special Forces the Iraqi soldiers seized Fallujah's largest hospital on the west side of the Euphrates River, just across the bridge from which the U.S. contractors had been hanged six months earlier. The Iraqis guarded the hospital to prevent insurgents from grabbing it or claiming that the Americans had bombed it. As a deafening avalanche of munitions rained down on the few people left in the city, the Kurdish and Shi'ite soldiers in the hospital allowed the Sunni Arab doctors from Fallujah to come to work, preparing for wounded survivors from the city. But that didn't mean they got along.
"They're all terrorists here, even the doctors in the hospital," said one Shi'ite recruit. In turn, all the Sunni doctors claimed that the "Iraqi" soldiers had broken into storerooms, stealing medical supplies as well as cash and cell phones from the lockers of the hospital staff. Feelings of national unity did not abound among the Arabs, but one of the Kurdish commandos took the prize for intolerance.
"I hate all these Arabs," he said. "I've got a picture of Ariel Sharon hanging in my living room—he's the one who knows how to deal with Arabs. I wish I could send my children to live in Israel."
The hospital took mortar fire from insurgents inside the city, which hit so close that branches blew off the trees in the courtyard, inspiring a bit more fraternity among the Iraqis taking cover inside. The Americans responded with tanks, rockets from helicopter gunships, thousand-pound bombs guided in with lasers, howitzers, and the jackhammer of .50-caliber machine guns. Somehow the insurgents in Fallujah continued to shoot back with their rockets and small arms, drawing the Americans into the city street by street. Sniper fire on the west bank of the river also came from a cluster of houses southwest of th
e bridges, which the U.S. soldiers kept referring to as the "Kurdish village." Any Kurds who lived there were long gone to the north—which is where many of the insurgents had apparently gone as well. America's telegraphed punch in Fallujah showed the insurgency for the hydra it had become—U.S. forces retook the city, but the insurgents simply reared up elsewhere. Iraq was starting to look like a real war, and one America could lose.
Ten days into the Fallujah offensive, on November 17, 2004, the city of Mosul fell to insurgents. American officials admitted that the police chief and apparently his entire five-thousand-member force had disappeared or gone over to the side of anti-Americans. The Kurds could only shake their heads—this was the force set up by General David Petraeus, which they considered a rehabilitation program for Ba'athists. Masked gunmen surprised the head of Mosul's anti-crime task force and led him out of his house, which they set alight, and executed him along with his son and brother-in-law in front of the burning building.4 Another group of insurgents burned down the governor's house but didn't find him at home.* Bodies appeared in the street, some of them beheaded, terrorizing the city's inhabitants. With the U.S. military's resources focused on Fallujah and units from all across the country pulled in, the Americans had nowhere else to turn yet again—they asked the Kurds for help, ethnic sensitivities be damned. The insurgency was driving the Americans and the Kurds closer together.
At first the Americans finessed this arrangement, announcing that "national guard" troops from outside Mosul had come in to help, and thus avoiding the sensitivities in Turkey and the rest of Iraq about Kurds taking over security in an Arab city. Of course "national guard" translated into Kurdish as pesh merga. Two thousand troops—half KDP and half PUK—streamed into the city, some wearing traditional Kurdish baggy trousers and cummerbunds, others wearing the uniform of the new Iraqi National Guard, created the previous June. This time they received the grateful cooperation of the U.S. Army First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division, which scrambled to call some of their units back from Fallujah to help. Nominally the Kurds came under the coalition leadership, but they kept their old pesh merga chains of command intact. Their presence in Mosul was supposed to be a temporary fix, but the Americans had lost some illusions about needing help from their friends, and the Kurdish soldiers never left. Beyond the National Guard, the party offices began setting up checkpoints to protect the Kurdish neighborhoods, primarily on the eastern bank of the Tigris, in an attempt to stem the flow of Kurdish families fleeing the violence.*
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