Mahmoud was shot in spring 2002 in northern Iraq, a region that had been an all-but-forgotten seam in the wars in the Middle East. No one much noticed that day, though a new war was gathering. The American military had chased the Taliban from Kabul several months before, and President George W. Bush’s administration had switched focus. The northern portion of Iraq, loosely protected by a no-fly zone, was a semiautonomous Kurdish enclave, a statelet within a state, where Washington was quietly renewing engagement with the Kurds, seeking allies for the war ahead. Ryan Crocker, an American diplomat, had come to Sulaimaniya, capital of the eastern portion of the Kurdish zone, to meet with the officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of two principal Kurdish parties. The PUK ruled Iraq’s northeast, mixing promises of democracy with old-time cronyism and centralized party power. It had descended from a guerrilla force—the peshmerga, those who face death—that waged mountain war against Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Iraq. But the party’s surviving military leaders were now older and mostly softer, interested in politics and business more than in fighting a lonely war. Its military formations were small, inadequately equipped, and unevenly led. And they had outright enemies—Hussein to the south and an Islamic fundamental movement in their midst. This was the territory in which Karzan Mahmoud operated, as a bodyguard, in a land of hidden danger and treachery.
The three assassins arrived near the home of Prime Minister Barham Salih at 3:45 P.M. on April 2, wearing a mix of traditional peshmerga dress and modern camouflage uniforms. It was a chilly spring afternoon. A light rain shower was falling. The assassins had shaved their beards and looked neat, resembling officers from the local Ministry of the Interior. For their approach, they had bought a local white-and-orange Volks-wagen taxi so that they might blend in. The prime minister’s residence, a two-story house, was located several lots from the corner, set back several yards from the road. As the taxi neared, Salih was finishing a meeting with the city’s director of intelligence and preparing to drive to meet Crocker. The security teams of both men waited outside. The taxi stopped at the corner. The assassins stepped out. They wore Kalashnikovs on slings. They moved casually toward the officials’ bodyguards, who suffered the confidence of numbers. The guards, after all, were twelve.
Mahmoud was Salih’s driver that day. Moments before, he had left his white Nissan Patrol, and was walking through the drizzle toward the taxi when it pulled up. He was wearing a blue suit and red tie. He had intended to visit a market at the corner, but the taxi diverted his attention. Mahmoud was twenty-four, a peshmerga for six years. A polite man, he emanated decency, respect, and kindness of an order that could seem a fault. He approached the three men to tell them that they should move their car down the street. No one was allowed to park here. He was drilled in manners and protocol. It showed.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
The lead man had a question. “Is Dr. Barham home?”
“Yes,” Mahmoud answered. “What do you need?”
About fifteen feet separated the two men. The man stepped forward, swung his Kalashnikov up to level, and fired a burst at Mahmoud’s face.
Mahmoud was small statured, the sort of athlete whom larger and more powerful men misjudge. He had spent five years in intensive tae kwon do training, which had left him limber and loose and equipped him with dodges that could look instinctive. He sensed the shift—from routine traffic encounter to terrible danger—in the instant the assassin’s face changed. The Kalashnikov muzzle rose. Mahmoud fell. He bent his knees, forcing his shins forward toward the ground. As his lower body dipped in that direction, he pushed off the balls of his feet and threw his shoulders in the other, backward, while raising his chin and arching his spine. His hands rose and extended, to protect his face. It was a blind rearward snap-dive, a desperate juke that risked slamming the back of his head onto asphalt. It saved him from the first blast. As Mahmoud arched while falling, his combined movements changed the angle his face presented as a target. Two bullets hit him in the head. They did not strike squarely. Both grazed him, each slicing a groove from his lower forehead, by his eyebrows, to his hairline. Then came more. He had pushed his hands up into the space between the muzzle and his face, directly into the path of a long automatic burst. Several bullets tore through Mahmoud’s right elbow and forearm. At least two hit his left hand, shattering fine bones. An instant had passed. Mahmoud slammed onto the street, his right arm useless, his left hand ruined, his brow about to pour blood. He was alive.
He heard gunshots. The three attackers were striding forward and firing. He was at their feet. Mahmoud had a thought: pistol. The bodyguards kept a pistol in the map pocket of the door of his vehicle, which was running, doors closed, about twenty feet away. He needed this gun. He could visualize the weapon—a 9-millimeter semiautomatic with its magazine and fourteen rounds inserted. If he could reach it he could fight. The assassins must have thought they had killed him, because they were firing toward other bodyguards. Adrenaline had put Mahmoud in an extreme state of alertness. Now it propelled his will. He rolled onto his side, spun from his young legs to his feet, and bounded in his suit toward his SUV. His shattered right arm dangled in its sleeve. His face was wet with blood. His revival must have startled the assassins: The dead man rose. He reached the car in several wild, zigzagging lunges, each turn meant to frustrate attempts to shoot him in the back.
One of the gunmen zeroed in on Mahmoud a second time. He fired a burst. As with Mahmoud’s first dodge, the zigs and zags kept him alive. They were not enough to spare him. A round hit his lower left back. Mahmoud reached the Patrol nonetheless. He was a lean young man, a martial-arts expert rippling with adrenaline and purpose, fired by the cornered animal’s will to live, but without working fingers or hands. He swung his right hand at the door. The pistol was right there. There. His hand had no grip. He could not make it lift the handle. Karzan Mahmoud had performed his last act in the service of Prime Minister Salih’s security detail. The assassin fired again. The burst rode up Mahmoud’s left leg, shattering the femur and the hip, reducing to fragments the main load-bearing bones and joint on his left side.
The long arc of the history of automatic small arms was almost complete. From the days of Fieschi and Puckle, to the work of Gatling, Gardner, and Nobel, through the marvels of Maxim, who conceived the most important steps, rapid-fire infantry arms, at first a dream and then expensive, had become ordinary and available to almost anyone. At first, when few combatants had them, they were instruments of imperialism, state power, and army-meets-army international war. Now they empowered disorder and crime. In Iraqi Kurdistan, as in large tracts of the developing world, every party had assault rifles, and the assault rifles were almost all patterned on the original Kalashnikov. They had come here from many sources: from Iran, Romania, Russia, Egypt, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, and China. They had arrived to markets by many means: shipped across borders from outside, looted from state arsenals, handed out by neighboring governments hoping those who used them would frustrate Baathist rule. Some had been made in a factory that the Baathists had built for themselves. And now they were so locally abundant that buying one was only a matter of a young man’s asking where to shop. Created in the race among nations to develop weapons that might ensure national security and improve soldiers’ chances in war, they had been imitated, replicated, miniaturized, and fine-tuned, cycle after cycle, design by design, shipment by shipment, until something like parity among riflemen had been reached. Parity, it turned out, meant not just that any modern fighter could be well equipped. It meant that almost anyone could be shot. Parity looked like this: Karzan Mahmoud toppled and fell, landing in a puddle of cold standing water. There he lay, on his back, blinking up into raindrops peppering his face. He had no idea how many times he had been hit. His body was broken; his mind, for the moment, was strangely detached. His blood stained the puddle red. He thought he heard thunder.
Only a few seconds had passed. He did not have much time. Ov
er the decades the men and women who studied the effects of modern military rifle bullets on the so-called human frame had documented the physical processes now playing out within Mahmoud. They knew the ways that different bullets fired at different ranges cut through human skin, human muscle, and all forms of human flesh. They understood how these bullets snap and shatter human bone, and how the knifelike shards of bullet jackets and ruptured bone intermingle and radiate outward, cutting more tissue as they scatter. Those scientists, and pseudoscientists, with their thawed human limbs and severed human heads filled with pseudo-brains, had documented and described how the parts that make up a man can be made to break. Many of their tests had been on cadavers. Karzan Mahmoud was not a cadaver. Not yet. He panted, moaned, struggled for comprehension, blinked through blood and gritted teeth. What was he to do? His wounds outmatched him. If the puddle were a bathtub, he would drown. He had reached incapacitation, that hard-to-measure but you-know-it-when-you-see-it performance state that ballistics scientists had tried to ascertain and guarantee. Theory was theory. Laboratory work was laboratory work. Forensic autopsies were forensic autopsies. From these pursuits, the physical processes happening within Mahmoud—who was suffering from a form of violence common in our time—were almost precisely sketched in the books and the minds of those who knew what firearms do to men. Technical studies did not sketch this: what it looked and felt like when military rifle bullets smacked human life, when incapacitation meant not just preventing action but summoning death, when rifles and gunfights were stripped of engineering, politics, romance, or any whiff of fable.
Gatling spoke of sparing men the horrors of battle, so that their lives might be saved for their country. Was Mahmoud lucky that those two early shots had grazed his forehead and not blasted his cranium into chunks, as the experts knew they could? He remained alive, spared not because the machinery of war had made his services obsolete, but because an angle of impact, twice, had been oblique. He was a leaking mess of holes, many of them limned with bullet fragments and the broken bits of bones that had given him his shape. His blood was flowing out and time had become excruciating, if short. Was this better? Not youth, not will, not fitness, neither training nor hard-won knowledge could bring a man broken in this way back to what he had been, seconds before. Slogans and money meant nothing here and now. Even ideas were few. Karzan Mahmoud was not a cadaver. Not yet. He was a man who wanted to stand and feel the handle of a pistol wrapped within his shooting hand. He could not. Instead, he was fighting sleep.
And the gunfight raged. The three attackers were all firing. The battle flowed around him. Mahmoud wanted to participate. But nothing worked. He felt cold.
“Yunis,” he called to another driver. “I’m hurting.”
“Yunis,” he said. “Yunis?”
Time slowed for Mahmoud. For others, it raced. The street where Salih lived was an alley with the contours of a vertical-sided irrigation canal. In such a place, the members of a group could not readily disperse to fight, or even get out of one another’s way. The guards returned fire. Mahmoud looked over and saw one of the attackers slumped on the ground nearby. A bodyguard had shot him. The man looked dead.
The two remaining attackers were charging, firing their Kalashnikovs on automatic as they came, sweeping the street with lead. Ramazan Hama-Raheem, one of the intelligence chief’s guards, had been between the taxi and the gate. As Mahmoud was hit, he spun to face the fight. He had an instant to react. He fired his Kalashnikov, and thought he hit one of them in the leg. As he fired he was struck. A bullet blew apart his right shin, another broke his right hip. He twisted, falling, and was raked by more. A burst hit him in the back. Another shredded his left thigh. One round hit his upper left arm. Another grazed the top of his skull. He landed on the ground with one working limb: his right arm. His assault rifle was useless to him now. He could not lift it. But with a right arm, he had a chance. He drew his Makarov semiautomatic pistol. He fired and fired, but he struggled for aim and after seven shots was out of ammunition. With only one working arm, he had no way to reload.
Another guard, Balan Faraj Karim, who had been inside a guard hut when the attack commenced, joined the fight. He had not seen the taxi arrive, or the three assassins advance. He stepped into a shootout midway through its course. There had been two groups of bodyguards on the street. The attackers had charged into their midst, splitting and confusing them. Karim scanned the bedlam. He had only seconds to figure it out. It was not clear who was who. He saw a man trotting in his direction—a stranger in peshmerga dress. Karim decided: foe. He raised his weapon. The other man fired first, a long rippling burst. Karim felt the bullets splatter through him. They seemed to hit him everywhere. He collapsed. The man rushed by.
Gasping, Karim looked himself over. He had been shot in the stomach, the left shoulder, the right thigh, and multiple times in the left leg, including through the ankle and the calf. Another bullet had hit the back of his neck, probably as he spun and fell. It had passed through meat without hitting spine. He was helpless; a heap. He could do little more than watch, at least until his own time ran out. He looked around. He saw the collapsed forms of other guards, and that of the prime minister’s secretary, Amanj Khadir, who had also rushed outside and been shot. He watched another friend from the prime minister’s security detail, Shwan Khzar, firing his assault rifle. But Khzar’s Kalashnikov ran out of bullets. As he tried switching to a pistol, the man who had shot Karim opened fire with another burst. Khzar fell. The attacker limped down the street, away from the gate, stepped around a corner of a cinder-block wall, and was out of sight.
This surviving gunman, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, had decided to forgo entering the prime minister’s compound. His two accomplices were dead. He was alone now; there seemed little chance to press further. He hobbled across a vacant lot. He had a few seconds to think. A bullet had passed through his lower left leg, but missed bone. He could walk, and his uniform could help him. Passersby might not suspect him of his crimes. He reached the road and hailed a taxi. When it pulled over, he stepped in and gave an address. Soon he was moving away from the mess of bodies he had left behind, enveloped by city traffic.
The survivors in front of Salih’s house stirred. The prime minister had by luck been kept from harm. He had been seconds from stepping outside, but a telephone had rung. An aide called him back, and he had not entered the kill zone. At the sound of gunfire his aides rushed him deeper inside. On the asphalt, Balan Faraj Karim, immobilized by his wounds but one of the few men outside still conscious, scanned the street. He did not see the prime minister. This was the only good sign. His eyes settled on Mahmoud. Karim called to him.
“Karzan?” he said. “Karzan?”
There was no answer. He knew that Mahmoud was dead.
Karzan Mahmoud was not dead. He was sliding back and forth between sleep and consciousness. Soon he was aware of being jostled. A white Land Cruiser was beside him. Hands lifted him and put him in the back. A shopkeeper’s face was above Mahmoud, consoling.
“What happened?” Mahmoud asked. “Who shot us?”
The shopkeeper shushed him. “Don’t talk,” he said. “Don’t talk. You’re okay.”
At the hospital, Mahmoud overheard that the prime minister’s secretary had died. The staff cut away his blood-soaked suit and dress shirt. The doctors worked. Mahmoud was naked and sedated: the wrecked remains of a young man. He saw gloved hands pull fragments of bullet and bone from his arms. A policeman questioned him.
“What is your name?” he asked.
Mahmoud answered.
“What is your phone number?”
Mahmoud answered again, but now he had a headache. He was wheeled off for X-rays. Before surgery, he saw the prime minister at his side.
“You helped me,” Salih said.
“You are okay?” Mahmoud asked.
“Yes.”
“Be careful, Dr. Barham,” he said. “Be careful.”
The surgeons worked on Mahmoud, the f
irst time, until 2:00 A.M. They tallied wounds from twenty-three bullets. None had hit his spine or vital organs. The bullet that entered his back had cut only muscle and flesh. The head grazes had not fractured his skull. Twenty-three bullets, the doctors said. While Mahmoud was asleep, and the anesthesia was wearing off, he heard his mother’s voice.
“Karzan,” she said.
He woke. The doctors, he learned through a haze, had quarreled over whether they should amputate his right arm and left leg. For now he retained them. He asked questions about the attack. No one wanted to answer. On the third day, he read a newspaper and learned that five of his friends had been killed. Three others, besides himself, had been crippled. Elsewhere in the hospital, Balan Faraj Karim woke to doctors who explained why they had amputated his left leg. He misunderstood. “No,” he cried. “You do not need to cut my leg.” He argued. “Send me somewhere,” he said. “To Europe,” he suggested. “A different doctor can keep my leg.” But his leg was already gone.
The surviving attacker, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, did not make it far. He was captured while hiding in a house in the city. In the months that followed, Khadir occupied a solitary-confinement cell on the second floor of the city’s jail, in conditions that might drive a sane man mad. His room was a concrete closet, chilly and unlit, accessible through a small steel door. There, before Kurdish security officials led him away and executed him, he sat in the darkness, his skin growing paler and his flesh growing softer, passing hours praying to his understanding of his god. He expressed no regret. When the opportunity presented itself, he voiced satisfaction, even pleasure, at what he had done. Conversations with Khadir did not follow linear thought, and his ruminations were prone to militant tautology. Doe-eyed and eager for company, he talked openly, but kept his history neat and free of gray. He had been born in Erbil in the mid-1970s and claimed to have left Iraq for study in a religious school in Yemen. He was cagey on the question of whether he met jihadists while abroad. He denied that he had. He also punctuated the denials with laughter and self-satisfied smirks. “I am very clever,” he was given to saying. This confirmed something self-evident: I lie.
The Gun Page 48