Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  But in Washington it was back to the old math—Turkish interests outweighed the Kurds without question—and suddenly the U.S. State Department also seemed unable to utter the word Kurdistan.* Inside Iraq the Kurds finally figured out that baiting the Turks was a bad idea and tried to cool down the conflict. In an hour-long interview, Masrour Barzani used the word de-escalation % dozen times.23

  "Let's be optimistic, and hope that the ties and the friendly relations will win," Barzani said. But the KRG couldn't help but try to leverage the situation to get some recognition from Ankara.

  "What we can do depends on how willing Turkey is to get a peaceful solution. We are willing to play any constructive role if we are included in this process," Masrour said.

  The Turks successfully transformed a long-scheduled meeting of Iraq's neighboring countries in Istanbul on November 3, 2007, into an emergency meeting on the PKK, and the pressure finally yielded some concrete results. Washington began to share real-time satellite intelligence with the Turks and pressured the Kurds in Iraq to shut off the PKK supply routes. With the onset of winter, the possibility of a major ground incursion receded, and the Turks limited themselves to air strikes and some small forays of ground troops across the border. Still, the Kurdish leadership couldn't help suspect that they, and not the PKK, would have been the primary target of a full-scale Turkish invasion, should it come.

  QUITE APART FROM and undeterred by troubles with the PKK, a different kind of Turkish invasion had already taken place in Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkish businessmen, engineers, and contractors, indifferent to politics, had crashed across the border, investing about three billion dollars. The run on Turkish cement drove the price up as far away as Ankara, and Turkish logos hung over hundreds of new buildings. While American and European companies remained shy of anything associated with Iraq, the Turks, alongside companies from Jordan, Lebanon, and Dubai, snapped up multimillion-dollar construction deals. They started working on Er-bil's airport, designed to be larger than most in the region, let alone the rest of Iraq. By 2006, the city of Erbil seemed to double in size, with competing shopping malls springing up along the highways, most of them full of Turkish consumer goods.

  "There's really no alternative to Turkey," said Ilnur Cevik, a Turkish journalist who had covered Iraq for years and then cashed in on his close contacts with the Kurdish parties to facilitate a construction business. "Turkey sells 1.5 billion dollars in goods here every year—the volume is incredible," he said.

  The Turkish government wasn't stopping Turks from working in northern Iraq, but Cevik lamented that Ankara wasn't really helping foster economic ties either. Some Turkish nationalists thought that boosting the Kurdish economy was like fattening up the Kurdish tiger that would soon consume part of Turkey. Cevik thought the economic ties would eventually bring peace between the Kurds and Ankara, on terms that would favor the Turks. Pointing out Iraqi Kurdistan's obvious landlocked condition, Cevik concluded that sooner or later, the Kurds would need to make some concessions to Turkey, and then his investments, already topping a hundred million dollars, would be even more lucrative, as Turkey became an economic pipeline to the new country. Trying not to smile, he said, "Think if everything collapses in [Arab] Iraq—the Kurds cannot sustain any autonomy without the Turkish blessing."

  The Turkish business interests in Iraqi Kurdistan started to pull some weight—by 2007 some six hundred Turkish companies were operating inside the KRG. Even as the Turkish army gnashed its teeth at the border, the government did not close the lucrative crossing to Iraq, where Turkish merchants trucked in cement, fuel, and consumer goods. The Turks who came south to staff the company offices in Erbil and Sulimaniya often got along well with the locals—they were mostly Turkish Kurds from the southeast.

  THE FINAL GROUP clambering over the lines to reach Kurdistan weren't Kurds at all, but victims of the growing violence and economic desolation in Arab Iraq. Hundreds of Arab day laborers booked rooms in cheap hotels or slept on the steps of the mosques across the north, turning out at dawm in the hope of earning a day's wage working in the construction boom. In Sulimaniya the PUK security forces estimated at least eight thousand Arab laborers had come to the city of eight hundred thousand by the middle of 2006. For the most part they were glad to have the jobs, and the laborers getting ready to sleep on the steps of Sulimaniya's biggest mosque told the same story as economic migrants the world over. They came north for the chance to eke out a living in safety and hoped to bring the rest of the family later. One day laborer, his tongue loosed by some of the readily available alcohol, expressed what many Arabs probably felt about the new racial dynamic that put them at the bottom. "The Kurds treat us like Jews—like Jews!" he said in disgust. By 2008 Arabs had competition even for menial jobs, as laborers began to arrive from as far as the Philippines and Ethiopia.

  The relative peace and stability of Iraqi Kurdistan also attracted another echelon of immigrants. Suddenly doctors, academics, and other professinals from across the south began moving to Kurdistan. In Erbil thousands of Arabs bought apartments in the high-rise buildings under construction near the airport—a development called "Dream City" sold flats at $150,000 apiece. The Kurdish authorities required Arabs coming north to register, more or less granting them a visa to own property and live in the Kurdish region. But the Arab professionals were more than happy to do the paperwork—in Baghdad kidnappers had declared open season on them.

  "All the famous doctors have moved to Erbil," said Dr. Thamir al-Hasafa, sitting in the garden of a simple rented house. "The medical students here are very happy!" Hasafa, a general practitioner, and his wife, Karema, a gynecologist, rattled off a short list of Baghdad's best-known doctors and professors of medicine, who had all recently moved north, some of them taking sabbaticals or academic exchanges to Erbil's tiny medical school. Some said they wanted to wait for the violence in Baghdad to blow over, but Hasafa and his wife were making a more permanent move and had purchased a flat in Dream City. They still longed to return to their life and their family practice in Baghdad, but Hasafa had better reasons than most to stay in the north.

  In December 2004, while driving home from his Baghdad clinic, three cars spun into the street and boxed him in, just a block from his house in the al-Wiya neighborhood. A dozen gunmen grabbed the doctor from his car, trussing him up with his own suit jacket. They kicked and punched him as they pushed his face down to the floor in the back of one of the cars—at some point in the scrum Hasafa broke his leg, but at the time it seemed the least of his worries. Medical doctors had become a favorite target of Iraq's kidnapping epidemic, and their families often ended up ransoming dead bodies. The Iraqi police had proven useless in preventing the for-profit criminal gangs.

  Hasafa hardly had time to contemplate his horrible situation though, for miraculously the kidnappers stumbled into a police checkpoint. They started shooting at the cops, and in the chaos, Hasafa wriggled his way out of the car and onto the ground, shouting that he was a doctor and a kidnap victim. As the police overpowered the gangsters, it looked like a rare thing would result—a prosecution of kidnappers in Baghdad. Hasafa gladly pressed charges, and interrogations revealed that the watchman hired by his neighborhood had sold him out to the gang as a man rich enough to kidnap.

  Then it all went wrong. Members of the kidnappers' families paid Dr. Hasafa a visit, asking him to drop the charges against the men, one of whom was a serving policeman. Hasafa refused, but soon learned that his assailants had been freed after promising to collaborate with American soldiers against the insurgents.24 That pushed him over the edge. In January 2005 Hasafa fled with his family to Jordan and eventually to London, where one of their sons, also a physician, lived.

  Watching from afar as Baghdad continued to deteriorate, the family had an idea. The two doctors had run a family practice in Mosul for many years until they returned to their native Baghdad in 1999, and it allowed for contact with many Kurds, even some influential people who would sometimes come to Mosul fo
r treatment. Leaving his wife and children in London, Flasafa returned to Iraq, but this time directly to Erbil on one of the new international flights. He didn't mind that the Kurdish authorities asked him plenty of questions and made him register.

  "This is normal," said Hasafa, keen that the Kurds should keep out a certain class of people from the south—like the ones who kidnapped him. "They asked us simple questions. They have the right—otherwise the terrorist will come up here."

  In November 2005 his wife and daughters joined him from London, and within a year Hasafa and his wife had set up a clinic in Erbil. They were learning medical vocabulary in Kurdish, but still struggling with the growing number of Kurds in Erbil who spoke no Arabic. Both maintained there is no tension, no enmity between Arabs and Kurds. A few Kurdish friends nodded supportively as the doctors asserted that the Kurds loved Arabs; they only had trouble with Saddam Hussein.

  "That's why we decided to come here. They are Iraqi; we are Iraqi. Even most of the Kurdish people, they are proud to be Iraqi," said Hasafa. And then he laughed as his Kurdish friends sat in incredulous silence, too polite to contradict him.

  "If Kurdistan becomes a country, then we will become citizens," his wife added, more convincingly. By 2007, however, Hasafa was thinking he would rather move to London—between the Kurdish doctors and all the Arabs moving north, the competition was making business slow.

  HOSHYAR DARBANDI RETURNED to Kurdistan from Stockholm to make a go of it in April 2006. This time he brought his wife and two children, obviously "Swedish-Kurds" with European clothes and mannerisms. His ten-year-old son, Paiv, sported a spiky Euro hairdo that looked out of place among other kids his age. Darbandi's wife, Torin, shared his eagerness to come back to their homeland, but the sacrifice weighed heavier on her. For all its progressive talk, Kurdistan was still a century behind Sweden's attitude toward women and was only beginning to tackle issues like honor killing and even female circumcision. Their eight-year-old daughter, Pelin, required an outright bribe to return to Kurdistan: her father bought her a puppy. "That dog is fifty percent of the reason I'm able to stay," her father joked. Darbandi himself still looked half convinced about returning, perhaps because he was only halfway home. He had moved his family to the comfortable hilltop town of Salahudin, not his native Kirkuk, and it was easy to see why.

  As with the rest of Iraq, the political inertia allowed for the most violent forces in Kirkuk to rule the day. In the center, the city hall that the Kurds joyously liberated in April 2003 was its own little green zone by 2006, to protect against an epidemic of bombs, shootings, and criminal kidnappings plaguing Arab Iraq, and now Kirkuk as well. Mixed or contested areas had the most potential for violence, which saw Iraqis killing each other more than they attacked foreign troops. The only way to speak with members from all of Kirkuk's ethnic and religious factions at once was to attend the weekly city council meetings in the city hall. Ramadan Rashid, the former PUK underground leader, felt in more danger now than he ever did while eluding Saddam's security forces.

  "I'm under constant threat of assassination," Rashid said, and recounted how his brother, who had also worked in the Kurdish underground before the war, was killed by Sunni Arab gunmen in January 2006 after dropping off his kids at school. On June 13 one in a long string of car bombs killed twenty-two people just outside city hall, shattering Rashid's office windows. He knew he didn't have adequate protection, but Rashid refused to leave the city he had fought so long to liberate from Saddam. But he didn't blame Kirkukees who moved out, or those like Hoshyar Darbandi, who decided against returning.

  In October 2006, I drove from Sulimaniya to visit Hoshyar Darbandi, stopping first to see his cousins in Kirkuk.* Since the opening of Kirkuk in 2003, it was a much shorter drive between Sulimaniya and Erbil, with lower mountains to cross. The highway passes through Kirkuk's new sprawling Kurdish section and doesn't really involve entering the red zone, which by now made up the southern three quarters of the city. Along with a relative of Darbandi's named Ali, I drove down the same old frontline route through Chamchamal and over the ridge at Karahangir that had been so forbidding for all the years before the war. The car driving in front of us showed just how much things had changed. The Chevy Caprice listed to one side as it motored along, crammed full of Arabs returning home from a day's labor in the prosperous north. The rear left tire looked so low it might blow out, but as we tried to pass, the Arabs sped up. When we finally overtook the car, I caught the driver's eye and pointed to his tire with concern, without considering what a hair-trigger everyone's nerves and pride were riding on. I got an angry look in return. The Arab had taken my pointed index finger as a common obscene gesture, signifying my intentions with his mother. He floored the Chevy and came after us.

  Ali drove as fast as he could toward Kirkuk, and more specifically to the pesh merga checkpoint at the entrance to the town—the last formal sign of Kurdish control before the disputed city. They waved us through the checkpoint—a car with a Kurd and a foreigner was fine with the pesh. Then Ali pulled over to one side. When the Arabs came through, they all stepped out of their car, their driver marching deliberately toward my door, which I quickly locked, seeing the anger in the man's face. As he started wrenching away at the door handle, Ali opened his and spoke as fast as he could. The first word he said was "ajnabi." I was a foreigner, he said, and didn't understand what I had done. I was pointing to the tire. A mile south of here yelling out "foreigner" was patently suicidal. Even in this part of Kirkuk I had taken care not to wear sunglasses or my seat belt, the telltale signs of an American that people can notice even from the street. But within the last few hundred meters of Kurdistan, being an American still afforded some protection, and the pesh merga from the checkpoint rushed over to prove it.

  The angry Arab outside my window paused at Ali's explanation—or perhaps because of the Kurdish soldiers nearby. I opened my car door. "Afwan—ana ajnabi," I said—pardon me, I'm a foreigner. He smiled for a moment and made a formal face, and in forced English he said, "I am sorry." We all had a good laugh, and I stepped over to look at his rear tire with him—taking care not to point my finger.

  The approach to Kirkuk from Sulimaniya disoriented me in other ways as well—so many new neighborhoods had sprung up in the north of the city that I couldn't tell where I was. But when I reached the center, it was the same dreary destruction, with no improvement from my last visit or the one before. It looked as bad as it did in April 2003, and Darbandi's cousins agreed. His uncle Abdul Hamid Omar took me up to the roof of their tiny house as his wife cooked up a small feast for that evening's Ramadan fast-breaking. I surveyed the rooftops, and the neighborhood looked like a beehive. He pointed out the original walls of the houses, and then the new ones—during Arabization Kurds had been forbidden to buy new homes, so anyone who wanted to remain in Kirkuk had to subdivide.

  "By 1996 we had divided up these two houses to hold nine families," said Abdul Hamid, pointing to the smaller thin walls in the courtyards.

  All of that was supposed to have ended, to be reversed. But Abdul Hamid said things weren't changing at all. Despite dominating the city government and the armed forces in town, the Kurds of Kirkuk were mostly crammed into the same sections of the city. It wasn't the Ba'ath Party keeping them there—they were simply afraid to leave the safety of the Kurdish quarter. Before, getting a job had been hard; now it was potentially deadly if the job involved a commute out of the neighborhood.

  Abdul Hamid had taught school for thirty-four years before retiring and had expected a grant of land from the government, a normal perk that came with schoolteachers' pensions. The Ba'athists had never given it to him, since he refused to change his nationality to Arab. Now the new Kurdish government wasn't giving him any help either. All the legal land was tied down in the dispute over how to "normalize" the city—Kurds wanted to move in, but Arabs in the city had dug in their heels, waiting for compensation. In the meantime illegal houses were springing up all over the northern fring
e of the city. I asked Abdul Hamid how many Kurds now lived in Kirkuk.

  "Anyone who tells you they know the answer is a liar," he said.

  He asked me to stay for the fast-breaking, but I begged off, telling him I wanted to go see his nephew in Salahudin before it got too dark on the roads; he nodded in approval, as much for my caution, I think, as for Darbandi's decision not to bring his family back into Kirkuk.

  Darbandi had moved into a new part of Salahudin I had never seen before, called New Massif.* Along the ridge past all the KDP official buildings, dozens of lavish three-story concrete houses perch on the hillside, looking south all the way to the lights of Erbil. Darbandi's house had a grand staircase out front and a modern kitchen with marble tile and new appliances. The roads around the houses would be paved soon, and the exclusive community already had underground sewage pipes and electric cables. Many of the KDP's top cadres had built in the same neighborhood. The ostentatious homes up here matched the shopping centers down in Erbil, made of mirrored glass and reinforced concrete. One supermarket boasted a massive video screen outside, usually showing a soccer match. The Kurds loved the malls and went to see and be seen as much as they went to buy the Chinese electronics and clothing stacked on the shelves.

  "For us a supermarket is big news!" said Darbandi. The Kurdistan he had returned to was a strange combination of modern boomtown and the scarred and neglected land of the Anfal campaign. Kurdistan was building in leaps and bounds, but it had started decades behind Arab Iraq with its oil riches, not to mention the European paradise Darbandi had left behind in Sweden. Electricity generation had stalled, leaving Kurdistan with rolling blackouts, but up here in the posh neighborhood of New Massif, a separate power plant kept electricity running twenty-four hours, and Darbandi's kids could watch the same cartoons they knew from Sweden on satellite television. Fancy sports cars suddenly could be seen around the north, including a few Hummers, looking like rich-kid toy versions of the military vehicles still patrolling the country. Some locals sported the sort of conspicuous consumption notorious in the Gulf States—ten-thousand-dollar designer cell phones and jewel-encrusted watches. Darbandi looked a bit uneasy talking about the wealth around him. He had taken a job as an advertising executive with Korek, the cell phone company that dominated KDP-controlled Kurdistan. I tried not to grimace.