Invisible Nation Read online

  Invisible Nation

  Invisible Nation

  HOW THE KURDS' QUEST FOR STATEHOOD

  IS SHAPING IRAQ AND THE MIDDLE EAST

  Quil Lawrence

  For Faiz and Maria

  Contents

  Maps

  Acronyms

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue: The Prodigal Republic

  (Mr. Talabani Goes to Washington)

  1. The Stolen Sheath

  2. Betrayal and Holocaust

  3. Shame and Comfort

  4. Burning Down the House

  5. Carnival in Limbo

  6. A Most Convenient Foe

  7. The Northern Front

  8. No Friends but the Kurds

  9. Deeds to the Promised Land

  10. The Believers

  11. The Feast of the Sacrifice

  12. Securing the Realm

  13. Something That Does Not Love a Wall

  Conclusion: Visible Nation

  Key Events in Iraqi Kurdish History

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Acronyms

  AKP Justice and Development Party (Turkey)

  CPA Coalition Provisional Authority

  GOI Government of Iraq (pre-April 2003)

  IMK Islamic Movement of Kurdistan

  INA Iraqi National Accord

  INC Iraqi National Congress

  ITF Iraqi Turcoman Front

  KDP Kurdistan Democratic Party

  KDPI Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran

  KIU Kurdistan Islamic Union

  KRG Kurdistan Regional Government

  MKO Mujahideen-e-Khalq Organization

  OPC Operation Provide Comfort

  ORHA Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance

  PKK Kurdish Workers' Party

  PUK Patriotic Union of Kurdistan

  SCIRI Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (since 2007 the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council)

  Cast of Characters

  KURDS

  Salah al-Din al-Ayubi ("Saladin") United the Muslim world under his Ayubbid Caliphate in 1174 and conquered Jerusalem.

  Sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji Led two Kurdish rebellions against the British, in 1919 and 1922.

  Sheikh Ahmed Barzani Led the first uprisings in the Barzan areas of Kurdistan in 1932.

  Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)

  Mulla Mustafa Barzani Led Kurdish rebellions from 1943 to 1975; founded the KDP in 1946.

  Masoud Barzani Mulla Mustafa's son; took over the KDP in 1975 and became the first president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in 2005.

  Nechirvan Idris Barzani Masoud's nephew; first prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

  Masrour Barzani Masoud's son and chief of KDP security.

  Sami Abd-al-Rahman KDP commander who ran as an independent in the 1992 elections.

  Hoshyar Zebari KDP foreign envoy and Iraqi foreign minister 2003-present.

  Fadhil Mirani KDP liaison to General Jay Garner in 1991.

  General Babakir Zebari Head of the KDP military and later chief of the Iraqi Armed Forces.

  Muhammad Ihsan KDP operative with CIA coup attempts in the 1990s, and later KRG human rights minister.

  Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)

  Mam Jalal Talabani Formed the PUK in 1975. Iraqi president 2005-present.

  Ibrahim Ahmad Kurdish intellectual and cofounder of the PUK.

  Hero Ahmad Talabani Ahmad's daughter, Talabani's wife, and Iraq's first lady 2005-present.

  Bafel Talabani Mam Jalal's son and PUK counterterrorism chief.

  Qubad Talabani Mam Jalal's son; PUK representative in Washington and then KRG representative to the United States.

  Kosrat Rasul PUK military leader and later vice president of the KRG.

  Nawshirwan Mustafa Cofounder of the PUK and deputy to Talabani; split in 2006 to form his own party.

  Barham Salih PUK representative in Washington and later deputy prime minister of Iraq.

  "Mam" Rostam (Rostam Hamid Rahim) PUK pesh merga leader in Kirkuk.

  Ramadan Rashid PUK underground resistance leader in Kirkuk.

  Islamists

  Sheikh Othman Abdulaziz and Ali Abdulaziz Brothers from Halabja who founded the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK).

  Ali Bapir Leader of Komala Island (Islamic Group), which splintered from the IMK in 2000.

  Mullah Krekar (Najmaldin Faraj Ahmad) Spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam and a Kurd who fought in Afghanistan.

  "Abu Wa'el" An Iraqi Arab who allegedly tried to make contacts with Ansar al-Islam for Saddam Hussein's security services.

  Independents

  Mahmoud Othman KDP leader with Mulla Mustafa Barzani; later independent Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament.

  Najmaldin Karim Mulla Mustafa Barzani's personal physician; later president of the Washington Kurdish Institute

  Hussein Sinjari PUK liaison to General Jay Garner in 1991, then pro-democracy advocate.

  OTHER IRAQIS

  Ahmed Chalabi Secular Iraqi Arab exile and leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC).

  Abd Aziz al-Hakim Shi'ite Arab leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

  Adel Abdul-Mahdi Member of SCIRI and Iraqi vice president 2005-present.

  Ibrahim al-Ja'fari Head of the Shi'ite party Da'wa Islamiya (Islamic Call) and prime minister of Iraq in 2005.

  Nuri al-Maliki Da'wa member and prime minister of Iraq 2006-present.

  Ayad Allawi Secular Shi'ite, former Ba'athist, and founder of the Iraqi National Accord (INA); Iraqi prime minister from June 2003 to April 2004.

  Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein Head of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement.

  TURKS

  Abdullah Öcalan ("Apo") Leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) 1974-present; imprisoned in Turkey since 1999.

  Turgut Özal President of Turkey 1989-1993.

  Abdullah Gül Turkish foreign minister 2003-7; elected president of Turkey in August 2007.

  Recep Tayyip Erdo?an Prime minister of Turkey 2003-7.

  Deniz Bölükba?1 Turkish diplomat and negotiator with the U.S. military in 2003.

  General Ya?ar Büyükanit Chief of General Staff, Turkish Armed Forces 2006-present.

  Murat Karayilan PKK military commander.

  AMERICANS

  Henry Kissinger Secretary of state and national security advisor to President Richard Nixon and President Gerald Ford.

  Brent Scowcroft Kissinger's assistant and later national security advisor to presidents Ford and George H. W. Bush.

  Peter Galbraith Democratic Senate staffer and later ambassador in the Clinton administration and occasional consultant to the KRG.

  Bob Baer and Warren Marik CIA agents based in Kurdistan in the mid-1990s.

  Lieutenant. General Jay Garner (ret.) Commander in Iraq of Operation Provide Comfort in 1991, and later director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq (ORHA) April-May 2003.

  Morton Abramowitz Ambassador to Turkey 1989-91.

  Marc Grossman Ambassador to Turkey 1994-7; undersecretary of state for political affairs, 2001-5.

  Tony Lake National security advisor to President Bill Clinton 1993-7.

  George Tenet Director of Central Intelligence 1997-2004.

  Bob Deutsch U.S. State Department advisor on Iraq 1995-7; deputy ambassador to Turkey 2002-5; deputy senior advisor on Iraq 2006-present.

  Paul Wolfowitz Deputy secretary of defense 2001-5.

  Douglas Feith Undersecretary of defense for policy planning 2001-5.

  L. Paul Bremer America's postinvasion presidential envoy and directo
r of the Coalition Provisional Authority May 2003-June 2004.

  General David Petraeus Led the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul 2003-4; supervised the training of Iraqi security forces in Baghdad 2004-5; commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq 2007-present.

  John D. Negroponte U.S. ambassador to Iraq July 2004-February 2005.

  James Jeffrey Deputy to Negroponte.

  Zalmay Khalilzad White House envoy to the Iraqi opposition 2002-3, ambassador to Iraq 2005-6.

  Ryan Crocker U.S. ambassador to Iraq 2006-present.

  PROLOGUE

  The Prodigal Republic

  (Mr. Talabani Goes to

  Washington)

  ON SEPTEMBER 13, 2005, JALAL TALABANI, the first democratically elected president of Iraq, walked beside President George W. Bush past an honor guard into the East Room of the White House. Talabani might have marveled that when he had started his struggle against the government of Iraq, Harry Truman strode these same halls. Now the septuagenarian Kurdish guerrilla, in a tailored suit and silk tie, came to represent Baghdad in Washington and at the U.N. General Assembly. Bush introduced him to the assembled press corps, and Mr. Talabani delivered the first of two messages he carried to the White House.

  "Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President, for your kind remarks. It is honor for me to stand here today as a representative of free Iraq. In the name of the Iraqi people, I say to you, Mr. President, and to the glorious American people, thank you, thank you, thank you," Talabani said in his near-perfect English.

  The two men could not be more different. Fit and trim, Bush kept a constant laddish grin, displaying the sheer confidence that had carried him through his entire presidency. Talabani, laboring under the weight he had gained since he stopped running around mountains, wore a more bemused smile under his white mustache. Bush was born in 1946, the same year a teenage Talabani joined a student underground resistance against Iraq's monarchy. By the time Bush went away to boarding school, Talabani was an important lieutenant in the guerrilla war against Baghdad that would consume the next four decades of his life. Improbably, both men were presidents now and they needed each other badly. Talabani wanted to make sure that America would finish the job it started in Iraq, after two years of bumbling occupation. Bush desperately wanted someone from Iraq to do what Talabani had just done—thank him and assure him that the Iraq invasion was not a historic blunder.

  Talabani gave his gratitude without guile; the people who supported his presidency truly felt indebted to America. Not Arab Iraqis, whose affection for the United States by that time had disintegrated along with their own sense of security in cities like Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra. Rather, Talabani spoke sincerely on behalf of the millions of Kurds in the north of Iraq, for whom America still seemed a friend and a liberator. The Kurds had turned out in great numbers on Iraq's Election Day and supported the American agenda as a block. And Talabani's second message went directly to them, without President Bush even noticing.

  Used to fielding questions in four languages, Talabani called on a journalist from Al Arabiya satellite news. After the exchange in Arabic, Bush quipped, "I'm not sure if I agree or not." The Washington correspondents laughed. They thought it even funnier a few moments later when Bush yielded the last question to his guest. Talabani picked an older-looking reporter from the Voice of America and then feigned mild surprise when the question came not in English or Arabic, but Kurdish. Talabani begged President Bush's indulgence.

  "Yes, answer his question—perfect," Bush said with mock exasperation, oblivious to the history being made. He let Talabani finish and without waiting for a translation, said, "On that cheery note, the press conference is over." Bush ushered Talabani back out of the hall, between two tall rows of flags, American and Iraqi. But Kurds all over the world were cheering. The reporter, an old friend of Talabani's, had asked a question about the United Nations, but that didn't matter. After a century of struggle, a head of state had spoken Kurdish in the White House. Jalal Talabani had planted the flag of Kurdistan in Washington, D.C.

  SADDAM LIUSSEIN'S REGIME ended for most on April 9, 2003, when American soldiers used a tank retriever to pull down his likeness in Baghdad's Firdus Square. For millions of ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq, the regime ended the following day, when they pulled down a similar statue in the northern city of Kirkuk. The difference was that the Kurds pulled down the statue by themselves, without an American soldier in sight. From that day on, the history of Iraq and of its northern Kurdish zone diverged like alternate realities—one a sort of dream, the other a nightmare. Americans now sit transfixed by their entanglement in the horrible civil war unfolding in Arab Iraq, but they scarcely notice that Iraqi Kurdistan is slowly realizing all of America's stated goals for the region.

  The Kurds are the largest ethnic group on earth that has no homeland. When European powers shared out the Ottoman Empire after World War I, they promised but never delivered a state to the millions of Kurds living around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Today they might number more than twenty-five million, but a precise figure is impossible to calculate, because none of the four countries wants to fully recognize them. About four and a half million live inside what is now Iraq, which has been the crudest host, the only country that ever subjected them to outright ethnic cleansing. Kurds are predominantly Sunni Muslims, although nationalism has generally overshadowed currents of religious fundamentalism—after all, their oppressors, the Arabs, the Persians, and the Turks, have always been Muslims as well.

  As Iraq and the region brace for a monumental conflict between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims, the Kurds have no natural side. During the dark days of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni Arab world never lifted a finger to protect them as co-religionists. The Shi'ites in Iran sheltered them at times, but always with a clear self-interest. Through a history that dates back to biblical times, Kurds have survived by compromising with greater powers, but it's no secret that they've always desired a country of their own. Several of their greatest leaders in the twentieth century turned to America, the land of freedom and self-determination, to aid them in reaching that goal. Each time American promises fell victim to political expediency, leaving the Kurds holding the bag. America's sad record of betraying the Kurds changed, however, through two accidents, made by two presidents named Bush.

  The first accidental liberator of Kurdistan was President George H. W. Bush. At the outset of his 1991 Gulf War, Bush had no intention of becoming the protector of the Kurds—or the Iraqis, for that matter. Bush desperately wanted to keep the 1991 Gulf War short and neat. After restoring Kuwait's monarchy, he tried to put the Iraq djinn back in the bottle, but his rhetoric about freedom and a new world order sent a different message. Believing the American army was at their back, the Kurds and Shi'ite Arabs rose against the dictator. Fearful of empowering Iran and destabilizing the region, Bush told his half-million troops to remain behind their line in the sand. Once Saddam realized—to his amazement—that he had survived, he embarked on his last great wave of atrocities, slaughtering the rebels in the thousands.

  Bush and his team of realists might have ignored the killings, but their own propaganda about human rights snared them. After declaiming to the world that Saddam had once "gassed his own people"—the Kurds—Bush couldn't abandon them completely. Along with France and Britain, the United States sponsored a tiny safe haven in northern Iraq, where a no-fly zone kept the Kurds safe from Saddam. It was the bare minimum, but enough. Bush had prepared the fertile ground, and the seed of modern Kurdistan sprouted.

  The Kurdish safe haven was supposed to serve Washington's Iraq containment strategy, a launching pad for the harassment of Saddam Hussein. But there was an unintended consequence: one of the most successful nation-building projects in American history. The Kurds held elections, set up their own social services, and started educating their children in Kurdish, not Arabic. They banned the Iraqi flag and the currency with Saddam's face on it. It wasn't always pretty, but for the next dozen years Kurd
ish leaders stumbled their way toward political maturity. America's policy amounted to benign neglect, doing little more than patrolling at thirty-five thousand feet, but when the Kurds expanded their tiny safe zone across all of the ethnic Kurdish north, the American air support effectively expanded with them. Though the Kurds constantly pressured for more assistance, the laissez-faire approach may have served them in the long run, keeping them from developing a culture of dependency on Washington.

  By early 2003, the Kurds had pushed the limits of shadow statehood as far as they could, living off blackmarket oil smuggling and whatever Saddam allowed the U.N. Oil-for-Food program to let through. Some aid organizations set up shop, but no foreign company considered investing in a country that might not be there in the morning. After half a generation in limbo, their fate wasn't clear until another accidental nation builder came along. President George W. Bush set out to finish the job his father had started, and again, unwittingly, he succeeded at a different task. The destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime and the collapse that followed left Kurdistan as the only fully functioning part of Iraq. The Kurds will never willingly go back-—America has played midwife to a Kurdish homeland that cannot be unmade, save by catastrophe. That catastrophe could begin with American departure.

  I MADE MY first trips to Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan in the spring of 2000 as a freelance journalist, and have returned over the past eight years for the BBC. Despite many other assignments in the interim, I have been unable to turn away from either of the two histories unfolding in Iraq. Like anyone who knew Iraq under Saddam, I wished for the kind people I met to find freedom and happiness after he fell. Certainly I never dreamed that life could get worse than it had been under such a dictator. The joyful chaos of Iraq's liberation quickly wore away under the relentless daily defeats of civility and humanity. My trips there became a catalog of car bombs, simmering hatreds, and endless American missteps. At the scene of massacres, survivors cursed whatever evil force was determined to prod Iraqis into a fratricidal civil war, and then like players in a Greek tragedy, they rushed to fulfill that prophecy. Believers in the new Iraq felt their optimism crushed and their hearts broken—it would be dishonest not to count myself in their number.