Category Archives: Kurds

Mea culpa on Paul Moran

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I’d like to apol­o­gize about the Paul Moran piece below. I don’t know that Paul Moran was work­ing for Ren­don Group at the time of his tragic death and I should not have said or insin­u­ated that he did. I stepped over the line from valid crit­i­cism of gov­ern­ment and pri­vate firms to smear­ing a man who can’t defend him­self, and that was wrong.
A com­menter, call­ing him­self Eric Camp­bell, who was the reporter with Moran at the time of his death, wrote in and said this:

I am the ABC reporter who was work­ing with Paul Moran when he was killed. The immense grief his fam­ily is suf­fer­ing has been com­pounded by the unend­ing rep­e­ti­tion of false claims about him on the inter­net.
It is prob­a­bly too late to repair the dam­age, but in the inter­ests of decency, peo­ple should recog­nise the fol­low­ing:
Paul’s assign­ment for the ABC in north­ern Iraq Iraq was as my cam­era­man. He was not the reporter. It is absurd and wrong to say there was a con­flict of inter­est.
Paul was not work­ing for the Ren­don Group at the same time. He was never any employee of the Ren­don Group. Like many free­lance jour­nal­ists, he did occa­sional audio visual pro­duc­tion work Ren­don and other PR com­pa­nies.
His work was never pro­pa­ganda. It was cor­po­rate videos, news webs-sites, and in the case of his orig­i­nal work in Kur­dis­tan, pro­duc­tion and train­ing work to help the Kurds set up a TV sta­tion.
He rightly felt sym­pa­thy for the plight of Kur­dish civil­ians after see­ing the suf­fer­ing they had been through under Sad­dam Hus­sein. He felt the media should do more to report this, as well as many other issues he felt strongly about such as the plight of refugees and asy­lum seek­ers. There is no con­tra­dic­tion between that and his work as a cam­era­man or reporter for such broad­cast­ers as the BBC and ABC.
He obtained the inter­view with an Iraqi defec­tor through a con­tact at the INC he had worked with in Kur­dis­tan. That is not sin­is­ter. It is how jour­nal­ists get sto­ries.
Paul never made any secret about his free­lance pro­duc­tion work. He sim­ply did it to pay the bills betwen broad­cast assign­ments, like any other free­lancer.
He was a man of great integrity who was widely loved. The fact that John Ren­don came to his funeral in Ade­laide, along with dozens of oth­ers from around the world who had worked with him, is sim­ply a reflec­tion of that.
Go ahead and crit­i­cise the INC, the CIA, the Pen­ta­gon, who­ever. But do not make Paul the vil­lain, because he wasn’t.
He took on a risky assign­ment to work for the ABC dur­ing the war Kur­dis­tan because he believed the Kurds were an impor­tant part of the story. He was dis­dain­ful of jour­nal­ists who just got news from press brief­ings, believ­ing they should always go to where the story was. He paid for this with his life.
Eric Camp­bell
Reporter
ABC TV

The IP num­ber that showed up with the com­ment tracer­outes back to a machine in Aus­tralia, so I’m going to accept that Camp­bell is the author of this note.
I’d like to extend my apolo­gies to Moran’s fam­ily and to his friends. But most of all, to my read­ers. It was shoddy jour­nal­ism.
How­ever, I should have made it more clear that I did not con­sider Paul a “vil­lain” in this. I felt that the most sting­ing crit­i­cism was right­fully aimed at Ren­don and the Pen­ta­gon. I still con­sider it ques­tion­able for a jour­nal­is­tic enter­prise such as ABC to hire some­one with ties to a PR firm so closely tied to the Wash­ing­ton power struc­ture, but that should not be read as a crit­i­cism of Moran. As Camp­bell pointed out, he took jobs to pay bills — some­thing every free­lancer has to do. Includ­ing myself. (Never for a PR firm, but for mag­a­zines that don’t con­tribute to my for­eign pol­icy aspi­ra­tions.)
My sin­cer­est apolo­gies to Moran’s friends and family.

Ethnic violence in Kirkuk

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Three Turkomen were shot dead in eth­nic vio­lence in Kirkuk on Sat­ur­day, end­ing months of rel­a­tive calm in the Kur­dish region of Iraq. It’s unclear exactly what’s hap­pen­ing, but that seems to have been the cap on two days of vio­lence in Kirkuk and Tuz Khar­mato to the south, with at least 10 peo­ple being killed, some of them at the hands of Amer­i­can troops. The Asso­ci­ated Press reports that in addi­tion to police shoot­ings, artillery or mor­tar fire “rocked” the city on Sat­ur­day.
While a sin­gle week­end does not an internecine con­flict make, the fall­out has reached Ankara, where a “mob” of about 100 Turks attacked the office of the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan there. Kur​dish​Me​dia​.com reports that about 23 Turk­ish police offi­cers and a num­ber of pro­test­ers were injured in the melee.
“Kirkuk is Turk­ish and it will remain Turk­ish,” shouted the pro­test­ers. “Damn Tal­a­bani, damn the pesh­merga.” (Jalal Tal­a­bani is the Secretary-General of the PUK.)
In Kirkuk, the Turk­men rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the interim Iraqi Gov­ern­ing Coun­cil called for the Kirkuk police to be dis­armed.
All this is hap­pen­ing as the Mid­dle East Newsline reports that Turkey will con­tribute 10,000 troops to patrol the Sunni Tri­an­gle extend­ing west and north of Bagh­dad. They will remain under Turk­ish com­mand and sep­a­rate from the two inter­na­tional divi­sions rumored to be en route to Iraq.
This is most alarm­ing. I wrote, dur­ing the war, that I felt the Turkomen were cry­ing wolf about the threat to their secu­rity in a bid to play Turkey and the United States off one another so as to reign in the Kurds when it came time to estab­lish a gov­ern­ment in Kirkuk.

[Salim Otrakchi, a Turko­man spokesman] said the Turkomen were espe­cially wor­ried about Kirkuk because the PUK had promised it would not go into the city with its forces and it did any­way.
At this point, it’s prob­a­bly a good idea just to tell you that I don’t believe what any­one is telling me at face value. The Kurds, deep in their hearts, really do want an inde­pen­dent Kur­dis­tan and this talk of fed­er­al­ism is the prac­ti­cal side of Kur­dish nation­al­ism. If they thought they could get away with it, they would bolt Iraq and never look back, I think. The Turkomen don’t really feel that threat­ened, but they see the Kurds with their new bud­dies, the Amer­i­cans, and worry they’ll be left out of any set­tle­ment and devel­op­ment plans in the north. So, they’re try­ing to play the Turks off the Amer­i­cans to keep the Kurds in check. And the Turks … Well, actu­ally, I believe them when they say they’re wor­ried about their secu­rity. They’re a truly para­noid bunch.

While this may be an iso­lated inci­dent, as I men­tioned, I could also be wrong in my orig­i­nal thoughts on the sub­ject. I watched with dis­may as in the days fol­low­ing the cap­ture of Bagh­dad and Kirkuk as the Kurds drove Arabs from land they felt had been taken from them under Sad­dam Hussein’s Ara­biza­tion pro­gram. Revenge was being taken and the U.S. wasn’t doing enough to stop it.
Well, now the U.S. has its hands full with the Sunni Tri­an­gle and the guer­rilla fight­ers there. Most of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan has had but a sprin­kling of Amer­i­can troops with most of the secu­rity being pro­vided by Kur­dish forces. Per­haps long-simmering ten­sions are start­ing to boil over after a bru­tally hot sum­mer.
I hope not. But — and I apol­o­gize for again refer­ring back to myself — as I wrote on Jan. 12, 2003:

Instead of a nice, clean occu­pa­tion that results in the first Arab democ­racy — and a net­work of Army bases from which to project power through­out the region — I pre­dict the United States will have years of guerilla insur­gency from nation­al­is­tic Iraqis (some of the fiercest nation­al­ism in the Arab world), the dirty job of sup­press­ing Kur­dish and Shi’ite inde­pen­dence move­ments and Sunni power grabs, the prob­lem of al Qai’da slip­ping across the bor­ders (with the help of Iran and sym­pa­thetic Saudis) into the coun­try to stike at Amer­i­can troops and med­dling in Iraq’s inter­nal affairs by Turkey, Iran, Saudi Ara­bia and Rus­sia. And don’t for­get the resent­ment in the region that will occur when the United States begins exploit­ing the Iraqi oil fields for its own pur­poses. No one will like that, least of all the Iraqis.

So far, it appears only the last pre­dic­tion hasn’t come to pass. Let’s hope this lat­est inci­dent isn’t the start of some­thing far worse.

Kurds appoint first woman prefect in Iraq

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Thank good­ness for a lit­tle good news from Iraq. Mudira Abu Bakr has been appointed town pre­fect of the Dukan region near Suleimaniya, mak­ing her the first woman “gov­er­nor” since the found­ing of mod­ern Iraq in 1921.
“I will work accord­ing to my action plan to pro­vide the best pub­lic ser­vices for the peo­ple of the Dukan region and I will do my best to ensure the rule of law,” Abu Bakr told jour­nal­ists at a cer­e­mony to mark the occa­sion.
Good for the Kurds. Abu Bakr joins Nas­reen Mustafa Sideek Bar­wari, the min­is­ter for recon­struc­tion and devel­op­ment in the Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment, in rebuild­ing Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. The appoint­ment of Abu Bakr and Sideek Barwari’s con­tin­ued duties is in marked con­trast to devel­op­ments to the south, where con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious lead­ers are encour­ag­ing, or even forc­ing, women to cover up and pull back from the rel­a­tively equal sta­tus they held under Sad­dam Hussein’s reign. (“Rel­a­tive” is the oper­a­tive word here. They were more or less oppressed equally.)
Inter­est­ingly, women attained much of their equal sta­tus in the 1980s dur­ing the Iran-Iraq war, when the men were sent to the front lines to die and women entered the work­force to replace them — a sim­i­lar dynamic to what hap­pened in the United States dur­ing World War II. After the 1991 Gulf War and the impo­si­tion of sanc­tions, how­ever, jobs dis­ap­peared and Sad­dam began encour­ag­ing a reli­gious revival to hold on to power. Women were usu­ally the ones who paid the price, and the _hijab_ became more com­mon as Sunni cler­ics railed against West­ern immoral­ity.
But in the north, the Kurds were one their own. When I was there last July and, more recently, dur­ing the war, I often saw women work­ing in stores or in busi­nesses and not wear­ing head scarves. One of the women, an Arab from Bagh­dad who had moved up to Arbil, worked at the Arbil Tow­ers, the hotel I stayed at, and came out to a Fox News party I attended. The Kur­dish _peshemergas_ at the table seemed not to mind (or notice) as she flirted with one of the network’s cam­era­men.
And Arbil, in the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party’s ter­ri­tory, is much more con­ser­v­a­tive than Suleimaniya and the nearby Dukan region, which is con­trolled by the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan. Women _peshmergas_ are unthink­able to the KDP, but on the day of the lib­er­a­tion of Kirkuk, I ran into an all-woman squad of PUK _peshmergas_, fully armed with Kalash­nikovs and wear­ing the yel­low green head­band of their party. I was sur­prised when I saw them loung­ing in the back of a truck, and it must have showed. They looked at me, then smiled and laughed at my expres­sion.
So Abu Bakr’s appoint­ment is good news, indeed. Now let’s hope the rest of the coun­try can see the good that women such as Sideek Bar­wari and Abu Bakr have done and can do, and learn from their exam­ple.
[NOTE: I had a color-blind moment when I wrote this and said the PUK’s color was yel­low. It’s green.]

A Farewell to Arms

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(From left) Mala Shakhi, PUK member of Parliament, Brig. Gen. Jalal Aziz, myself and Brig. Gen. Rabar Said, pose in front of the command center in Taqtaq the day before Kirkuk fell. (c) 2003 Christopher AllbrittonBAGHDAD — This is the farewell note, both to Iraq and to you, the read­ers. Tomor­row I will drive to the Jor­dan­ian bor­der through Bagh­dad and thence to Amman.
The war here is wind­ing down, and the long, labo­ri­ous process of rebuild­ing has started. Much of the activ­ity in Bagh­dad involves the U.S. com­mand look­ing for qual­i­fied peo­ple to help get the city back on its feet. Water and power still have to be restored. A state econ­omy now lacks the state, so peo­ple have no jobs; no one is there to pay them. Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen in Kirkuk are a hair’s breadth away from Yugoslavia-style eth­nic clashes. Mosul is still sav­age, with lit­tle order. One reporter who returned from there yes­ter­day described it to me as “like Mogadishu” with the city divvied up into ter­ri­to­ries for armed gangs and almost no civil author­ity. There are fewer than 300 Amer­i­can troops for a city of two mil­lion peo­plel. This has gone almost com­pletely unre­ported from what the journos in Arbil are hear­ing from edi­tors back home. No one seems to care about Mosul, they say.
“They [the Amer­i­cans] have given up on Mosul,” said one reporter, who asked to remain anony­mous. “It’s ter­ri­fy­ing.” He could have been talk­ing about his edi­tors, too.
At the same time, other cities are calm­ing down — at least dur­ing the day. Kirkuk sports traf­fic lights that work, cops in the street and a bustling street mer­chant com­mu­nity. At night, how­ever, there is still shoot­ing and thug­gery.
All of this will set­tle down even­tu­ally — or explode into civil war — but the ques­tion is how long will it take? I think the vio­lence will con­tinue at a low throt­tle for months, but even that would be a wel­come con­trast to 35 years of Ba’ath Party sys­tem­atic ter­ror and three wars since 1980.
Whether Iraqis gets the gov­ern­ment they deserve, how­ever, is a dif­fer­ent story. Their neigh­bors don’t wish to see a new Amer­i­can client state in their midst and can be expected to med­dle most mis­chie­vously. Also, the frac­tured nature of Iraqi soci­ety, thanks the Ba’ath Party’s repres­sion and play­ing one group off another will take a long time to heal. Free-wheeling democ­racy is not in the cards for quite a while, if ever, thanks to the major­ity Shia pop­u­la­tion and the eth­nic divi­sions in the north. If elec­tions were to be held in the next few months (not likely) they would prob­a­bly bring to power a gov­ern­ment friendly to Iran and hos­tile to the United States and every­one else in the region. The Kurds would walk out and demand _de facto_ — or even _de jure_ — inde­pen­dence. The United States can not allow this.
Still, many Iraqis are opti­mistic about the future. “We are happy,” said Hoshang Sadraddin, 22, a Kurd in Arbil. “We want a demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment, a future. And for all the peo­ple in Iraq to live in peace.“
“I look for a bet­ter life in the future,” said Jasim Khid­hir, 18. “I look for­ward to suc­cess in life, get­ting an edu­ca­tion, that is my dream.“
And in Bagh­dad, an Arab who wouldn’t give his name smiled at me and said in halt­ing Eng­lish that he was happy that democ­racy had come to Iraq. The sen­ti­ment was gen­uine, if a lit­tle pre­ma­ture.
We’ll see. The Kurds I’ve talked want the United States to stay “for­ever” as Assan Ahmen Awla, 30, a taxi dri­ver, told me. Amer­ica is seen as the Kurds’ insur­ance against con­trol by Bagh­dad and Arab vio­lence. The marchers in Bagh­dad demand­ing a quick end to Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion, he said, were incited by Ahmed Cha­l­abi and the INC to stir up trou­ble against the Amer­i­cans, so they will leave and the INC can seize com­plete con­trol. Cha­l­abi, obvi­ously, isn’t pop­u­lar up here. Nei­ther are Arabs in gen­eral.
“I think for­ever I will chose Amer­i­can troops to keep us away from the Arabs,” said Taha Muhammed Has­san, 30, a fruit ven­dor. “We know what the Arabs will do if they have con­trol.“
Sen­ti­ments like these, as well as threats against Kurds in Tikrit, Bagh­dad and the south­ern part of the coun­try are omi­nous signs, both for a coher­ent coun­try and a demo­c­ra­tic future. Delshad wrote me to tell me his thoughts:
“The heavy her­itage of more than three decades of dic­ta­tor­ship and oppres­sion will need many, many years to be over­come and Iraqis to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what is lib­er­a­tion and its lim­its. And if the Amer­i­cans keep in their cur­rent role [of] being only observers stand­ing aside then things can’t get bet­ter!!“
Oth­ers sug­gest democ­racy isn’t that big a deal to them, that jobs are a pri­or­ity rather than self-government. “We choose jobs, not democ­racy,” said Hemin Sul­tan, 28, a trans­la­tor.
Given that much of the coun­try is work­ing at sub­sis­tence lev­els, even in the rel­a­tively pros­per­ous cities of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, his opin­ions are under­stand­able. But I worry that unless the Iraqis demand democ­racy for them­selves the United States won’t give it to them… I believe the White House would pre­fer a docile Iraq to one that can say no to Amer­i­can inter­ests. But of course, I’m con­sti­tu­tion­ally inclined to oppose the idea of an Amer­i­can empire based on com­mer­cial ties, so I do hope the Iraqis real­ize that real democ­racy — unruly, net­tle­some and untidy — is in their long-term best inter­ests.
But while the Iraqis have just started a long jour­ney into the future, the Back​-to​-Iraq​.com jour­ney is com­ing to an end. B2I has suc­ceeded beyond what I expected or envi­sioned when I began writ­ing it in Sep­tem­ber 2002. Through the months, the site has man­aged to pro­voke, enter­tain and — hope­fully — enlighten peo­ple. It’s gar­nered some atten­tion and peo­ple have said it’s a new form of jour­nal­ism and that it’s his­tory mak­ing.
I don’t know if it’s all that, but I’m cer­tainly flat­tered by the com­pli­ments and the acco­lades. This was jour­nal­ism with­out a net (although it was on the Net.) I’ve stum­bled a few times, almost los­ing my bal­ance, but look­ing back over the site, I hope it was good enough.
Now I’m going home. The sto­ries that I’d like to do require money and time that I sim­ply no longer have. The loom­ing eth­nic con­flict in north­ern Iraq, the role of the Turks, the treat­ment of women, the fate of the polit­i­cal pris­on­ers and the new government’s fal­ter­ing first steps are all sto­ries that I would love to pur­sue, with the style and tech­niques I’ve devel­oped on the site. I’d also wanted to find Salam Pax.
As for the future of B2I, I’m work­ing on that. The site and list­serv will remain up for as long as the server has power, but I’m still unde­cided on what to do next to push for­ward the con­cept of inde­pen­dent, reader-funded jour­nal­ism. I will use the site and the pre­mium email list to announce any­thing new, so stop in every now and then to say hello.
I do plan on return­ing to Iraq in a few months to check in on how things are going. Those dis­patches will also be pub­lished here and on the list­serv. Donors who have donated will con­tinue get pre­mium con­tent and pho­tos when­ever the site is active.
A note about dona­tions: I am no longer actively solic­it­ing them. The mis­sion is over — for now. Save your cash or donate it to other indy jour­nal­ists. It’s impor­tant to develop this genre of jour­nal­ism, and reader con­tri­bu­tions are key. We all proved that this kind of endeavor is pos­si­ble. I may be the first, but I sin­cerely hope I’m not the last. I believe other inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ists will soon strike out and cover major events along­side the major media. I hope they break more sto­ries than I did, and chal­lenge their main­stream col­leagues to keep up.
A few of those main­stream­ers here — most enthu­si­as­ti­cally from Fox News, oddly enough — think the ideals that B2I brings to the table are grand and think some­thing like this site could be the future of the craft. They bemoan the top-down edi­to­r­ial con­trol and like the idea of read­ers’ input in decid­ing what to cover.
That can wait for a bit, how­ever. For now, I must bid you farewell. I’m dis­ap­pointed and sad to do so, as I feel like I’m leav­ing early. The real­ity of a lim­ited bud­get is an incon­ve­nient fact of life, how­ever. I hope you all don’t hold it against me.
It’s been a truly fan­tas­tic jour­ney and I am sin­cerely grate­ful to every­one who donated, read, sent in feed­back, argued on the com­ment boards or wished me well. While truth may be the first casu­alty in war, I hope I was able to save a small shard of it. But it’s hard to say. Many times since I’ve been here, lis­ten­ing to the claims of Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen or Assyr­i­ans, I’ve thought that there is no such thing as *Truth,* only myths that peo­ple tell their chil­dren to get them through to the next gen­er­a­tion. His­tory doesn’t exist here, at least not in the Amer­i­can sense; the past is never really past and his­tory isn’t some­thing that hap­pened long ago; it’s very much alive and kick­ing. In this ancient place, a land of empires, gods, gar­dens, wars, blood and beauty, at the heart of it, you will find only sto­ries. I hope I’ve been able to bring a few of them home to you.
Sin­cerely,
Christopher

What now for Iraq?

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EN ROUTE TO BAGHDAD — Some­one asked me why should I ques­tion J.‘s opti­mism and how many Iraqis kiss­ing me would it take for me to be con­vinced. There’s no ques­tion many, many Iraqis (espe­cially the Kurds) are happy that Sad­dam is gone. But it’s not so sim­ple as that.
In Tikrit, and in other places such as Mosul, a lot of peo­ple aren’t happy to see Amer­i­can forces — and not just because those forces have failed to pro­vide secu­rity. The sit­u­a­tion in the cities is volatile, and eth­nic hatreds could flare into civil war with­out too big of a push. Already, we’ve heard reports that Kurds have begun dri­ving Arabs out of vil­lages around Kirkuk, reclaim­ing their old lands. The reck­less­ness of the PUK and the KDP in post-Saddam Iraq could bring Turkey into the mix when the United States draws down its forces. No one knows what’s going to hap­pen, and the ini­tial giddy opti­mism I encoun­tered is giv­ing way to guarded anx­i­ety about the future.
I don’t believe the United States went to war to make the Iraqis happy. It didn’t go to war to free them. The United States went to war for geopo­lit­i­cal self-interest (See “Why Iraq?” on B2I for a look at some of the rea­sons.) If the ques­tion is “Are the Iraqis happy that Sad­dam is gone?” the answer is undoubt­edly yes — most of them, any­way. But that opens up a host of other ques­tions that will have to be answered in time. It is much, much too early to declare the peace won and the sac­ri­fice in blood and trea­sure a wor­thy invest­ment in Iraq’s and the United States’ futures.
The anti-war crowd (in which I usu­ally include myself) has often under­es­ti­mated or under­stated the gen­uine good that came out of this war, i.e., the removal of a tyrant. But the pro-war crowd has equally under­es­ti­mated the dan­gers of the after­ef­fects of this war: insta­bil­ity in the region, alien­ation of allies, increased risk of ter­ror­ist attacks, etc. Yes, the Iraqis are free — free to turn on their neigh­bors and kill them. Yes, the fear of vis­its from the Ba’ath Party has been removed, but now they fear armed gangs steal­ing their homes. This is still a nation in ter­ror, and a sta­ble, inclu­sive gov­ern­ment is a long way off.
If the goal is estab­lish­ing a rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­racy, pow­dered wigs and all, that’s likely to fail. Iraq in 10 years will more likely resem­ble author­i­tar­ian Egypt than friendly, par­lia­men­tary Canada. Would that be bet­ter than Sad­dam? Of course, absolutely. Is that what the Iraqis expect and deserve? Emphat­i­cally no. Would such an out­come make the region more sta­ble and the United States safer? No one knows, and any­one — includ­ing me — who says they do is speak­ing from beliefs and assump­tions rather than a pos­ses­sion of data.
I’m en route to Bagh­dad today (Thurs­day) and will file back what the sit­u­a­tion is there.
*Tech­ni­cal Note*
Due to a snafu with the send­mail pro­gram on my server, two dis­patches may have been missed. I believe it’s been resolved now. I apol­o­gize for the inconvenience.