Category Archives: Kurds

Iraqi opposition goes for the heart

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Suleimaniya city cen­ter(® 2002 Christo­pher Allbritton)

Three mem­bers of the Iraqi oppo­si­tion move­ment showed up at Colum­bia University’s Polit­i­cal Union to make the case for war. They appealed to the hearts of the audi­ence — a mainly sym­pa­thetic one — but unfor­tu­nately not the minds.
The speak­ers were:

  • Dr. Ala Fa’ik, vice pres­i­dent for the Iraqi Forum for Democ­racy, for­merly of Bagh­dad and a mem­ber of the steer­ing com­mit­tee of the Inter­faith Coun­cil for Peace & Justice,
  • Qubad Tal­a­bany, the deputy U.S. Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan, who works closely as a liai­son with both the White House and Con­gress, and
  • Feisal al-Istrabadi, esq., a found­ing mem­ber of the Iraqi Forum for Democ­racy, who is an activist on var­i­ous human­i­tar­ian issues relat­ing to Iraq. Istra­badi is also a mem­ber of the plan­ning com­mit­tee for the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, serv­ing on its Tran­si­tional Jus­tice and Demo­c­ra­tic Prin­ci­ples work­ing groups.

All three men told us that Sad­dam was wicked. All three gave a litany of evils that Sad­dam had inflicted on the peo­ple of Iraq. And all three made the case that Sad­dam should be removed because he’s a bad man. Jef­frey A. Klein, who writes for Kur​dish​Me​dia​.net, summed it up best: “Sad­dam Hus­sein is one of the great crim­i­nals of our era. He has taken Mesopotamia, the cra­dle of civ­i­liza­tion, and turned it into a giant con­cen­tra­tion camp.“
There is no doubt about that, but are the “human­i­tar­ian issues,” as Istra­badi claimed, the best rea­son for going into Iraq? “The human­i­tar­ian rea­sons are stronger than the rea­sons for going into Kosovo,” Istra­badi told one ques­tioner. “The United States missed an oppor­tu­nity by focus­ing on the weapons of mass destruc­tion instead.“
Tal­a­bany agreed: “Weapons of mass destruc­tion and the ter­ror ties are excel­lent rea­sons for oth­erthrow­ing the Sad­dam regime,” he said, “But there are other rea­sons. Most impor­tant is the desire of my peo­ple to sow the seeds of democ­racy in the soil of the tyrant. The time has come to bring peace to Iraq. The time has come to lib­er­ate Iraq.“
As to argu­ments from anti-war activists that the loom­ing Iraq war is “all about oil,” he said: “I do not believe the US and the coali­tion of the will­ing will go to war for oil. I do believe there are eas­ier ways for these gov­ern­ments to get oil than to go to war. But Iraqis in Basra, Bagh­dad and Suleimanya don’t care why the U.S. wants to lib­er­ate them. If it’s oil, then so be it.“
Fa’ik, as a peace activist, called for a restora­tion of the “one­ness” of Iraq, and claimed that through­out all its his­tory, Iraq had been an open, tol­er­ant soci­ety. “I stud­ied my his­tory very well,” he said. “You walk into the museum and go into the Mesopotamian exhibit and you will see my face there. I am Sumer­ian, I am Chaldean, I am Assyr­ian, I am Arab, I am Mus­lim. Iraq is an open soci­ety.
“We have to bring back that one­ness of Iraq. We have to bring back what’s been bro­ken by that regime.“
Of the three speak­ers, Fa’ik was the least cred­i­ble, if only because of his rosy-eyed view of the his­tory of Iraq. Iraq was ruled for cen­turies by the Ottomans, with tribal dif­fer­ences held in place by a com­bi­na­tion of enlight­ened provin­cial rule and Turk­ish scim­i­tars. After the British con­quered it in 1915, it was a colo­nial state until 1958 when a coup brought Col. Qasim to power. Fa’ik’s vision of a peace­ful, open Iraq is dis­cred­ited even as recently as 1995 when the Kurds in the north fought a vicious civil war.
In essence, the speak­ers were beg­ging the United States for lib­er­a­tion. The mood among the speak­ers and the audi­ence, which was heavy with Arab and Iraqi stu­dents, was dark when the sub­ject of France and Ger­many arose. The speak­ers also sought to reas­sure the audi­ence that Amer­i­can troops would be wel­comed.
“Rest assured that Iraqis will wel­come an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary pres­ence because they will be seen as lib­er­a­tors, not as occu­piers,” said Tal­a­bany. “If there is any anti-American sen­ti­ment it will be because we felt you let us down in 1991.“
The occu­pa­tion, he said, will be more like Italy after World War II rather than Ger­many or Japan — pre­sum­ably, short and sweet. Now we know who the White House has been lis­ten­ing to as it makes its occu­pa­tion plans.
“Overnight, Iraq will not trans­form into a func­tional democ­racy,” said Tal­a­bany. “But we have shown in the north that will proper resources you can give power to the peo­ple. And a free Iraq will be a major player in the Mid­dle East and a reli­able Amer­i­can ally. We will work to have an Iraq that will not be anti-Israel. We hope to have an Iraq that can play a con­struc­tive role in the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity. Upon lib­er­a­tion there will be an end to the war that the Ba’ath party has been wag­ing on the peo­ple of Iraq.“
Istra­badi was per­haps the most dog­matic of the speak­ers. Lay­ing out his points in his lawyerly way, he opened his part of the pro­gram with this:

  1. “There will be mil­i­tary action soon, by which I think by the first of March. With­out it, there is no point in talk­ing about democracy.”

  2. “If this regime sur­vives, then the Kurds will not accept rein­te­gra­tion and they should not. If you believe in the ter­ri­to­r­ial integrity of Iraq, you should act now.“
  3. “This war will tar­get ter­ror infra­struc­ture of the regime, not the civil­ian one as in 1991.”

He then attempted to dis­pel the ideas that Iraq is the “Arab Yugoslavia,” liable to fall apart into war­ring tribes the moment Sad­dam is removed, an idea pro­moted by Peter W. Gal­braith which he called “non­sense.“
“You have had too fre­quently in Iraq geno­cide and eth­nic cleans­ing,” Istra­badi said. “But with one excep­tion, there is not an exam­ple in the mod­ern his­tory of Iraq in which the Kurds rose to mas­sacre the Arabs of a vil­lage or vice versa.“
What geno­cide had gone on had been com­mit­ted by the cen­tral gov­ern­ment against eth­nic groups it believed were in revolt, he said. “This says Iraqis have a high sense of cohe­sive­ness. Left to their own, they will be able to rebuild their coun­try.“
His fur­ther made his case to act now and not wait for a coup or a change of Saddam’s heart by rip­ping apart Fa’ik’s vision of Iraq as one big happy fam­ily. “One of the rea­sons I feel it is nec­es­sary for the United States to inter­vene, is if there is a coup, blood will run in the streets of Bagh­dad as peo­ple take vengeance,” he said. “There is much vengeance to be had in Iraq after 35 years.“
Only the United States mil­i­tary can pre­vent that, he said. (On this he’s prob­a­bly right.)
He went on to detail his vision of a tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment. It would last two to three years at most, must pro­vide imme­di­ate ben­e­fits to the peo­ple of Iraq, would hold munic­i­pal elec­tions within six months and regional elec­tions within another six months after that and begin imme­di­ate crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions. The other duties must be to ful­fill oblig­a­tions to the U.N. regard­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion, he said, and human rights agree­ments must be adhered to. “It’s crit­i­cal to me that the tran­si­tional period not be seen as a final sta­tus,” he said. “I don’t think the tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment should be the gov­ern­ment that signs a peace treaty with Israel. That should be the per­ma­nent gov­ern­ment.“
And most impor­tant, he said, the United Nations should not lift the sanc­tions. Instead they should be sus­pended so that the tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment doesn’t gain con­trol of the country’s trea­sury and the per­ma­nent lift­ing of sanc­tions is an incen­tive to democ­ra­tize.
“If you want to ensure the tran­si­tional fig­ures do not become tran­si­tional in the Iraqi sense of the word — by that I mean last­ing 40 years — you can­not hand over the purse strings of Iraq,” he said. “Sad­dam did not imme­di­ately rule by fear. He co-opted the elite dur­ing the 1960s and ‘70s by drown­ing them in cash.“
The gen­eral con­sen­sus was that if pro­test­ers are anti-war, they are pro-Saddam, even if the pro­test­ers do not con­sider them­selves so. One Saudi woman asked if the United States shouldn’t take the Arab street into account, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that inno­cent Iraqis will die. Istra­badi said, as an Iraqi, he didn’t care what “some guy in Cairo” thought. Tal­a­bany said that peo­ple danced in the streets in Afghanistan when the Amer­i­cans came. Fa’ik fully admit­ted to hav­ing a nar­row view on the sub­ject and only cared about Iraq.
Istra­badi deplored “col­lat­eral dam­age,” as he put it, but said it was a weak argu­ment to say, “Inno­cent peo­ple will be die because of Amer­i­can bombs, so it is immoral to bomb.“
“Peo­ple are dying now!” he replied.
Istra­badi and the oth­ers missed a key point, how­ever. Through­out this evening, I heard them say sev­eral times, “The Iraqi peo­ple are all that mat­ter.” Well, actu­ally, the Amer­i­can peo­ple mat­ter, too, since the Iraqi oppo­si­tion is ask­ing our sol­diers — and pos­si­bly our civil­ians — to die for them. It mat­ters very much what “some guy in Cairo” thinks because if he teaches his sons that the infi­dels came into Iraq and con­quered it — and there will be peo­ple who think that regard­less of how well it goes — those sons could come to New York and kill peo­ple here. Maybe with a sub­way bomb. Maybe with some­thing worse. The “col­lat­eral dam­age” might not be lim­ited to Bagh­dad, and blood will flow in the streets of New York, Wash­ing­ton, Chicago…
There are only two really valid rea­sons for Amer­ica to take mil­i­tary action against another coun­try and that is to pro­tect the national inter­ests of the United States and to pro­tect the lives of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. One can argue that invad­ing Iraq will do both. One can also argue it will do nei­ther. I fall into the lat­ter camp and believe Fa’ik, Tal­a­bany and Istra­badi, as well-meaning as they are, as ask­ing the United States to place its own cit­i­zens in dan­ger from ret­ribu­tive ter­ror attacks so that they can free them­selves from Sad­dam. Lib­erty and democ­racy are wor­thy goals, and the United States should pro­mote them, but at the expense of lives here at home? I’m not sure if I could sup­port that.
But per­haps I could. As I wrote once before,

This cuts to the heart of my own ambiva­lence on the mat­ter of Iraq. I don’t trust the Bush admin­is­tra­tion to act in any but the most venal, self-serving man­ner. I don’t believe in going to war and killing inno­cent peo­ple if there’s no greater goal than access to oil and some slip­pery geopo­lit­i­cal goal of “benign” hege­mony that no one will admit to on the record. But if there were a real com­mit­ment to democ­racy and a free Iraq that was truly lib­er­ated not just from Saddam’s thug­gery but from the United States’ ambi­tions as well, then I might just con­sider that some­thing worth fight­ing for.

I have a great affec­tion for the Kurds. I hope they find their inde­pen­dence and free­dom. I really do. But like large swaths of the Amer­i­can pub­lic, I’m not con­vinced that the Bush White House is com­mit­ted to a demo­c­ra­tic Iraq. It is sell­ing out the Kurds, has shut down pro-democracy radio sta­tions and told Kuwaitis not to worry about a Shi’ite state.
Moti­va­tions mat­ter when a coun­try goes to war. Moti­va­tions — whether lib­er­a­tion or plun­der — deter­mine how the day after the war goes. What hap­pens if Iraqis, hun­gry for lib­er­a­tion, find them­selves under a petit-Saddam or a new Hashemite king backed up by Amer­i­cans troops based in their coun­try for decades?
Are we pre­pared to find out?

Spotlight on Ansar al-Islam

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The spot­light is now on Ansar al-Islam, a guerilla group of Islamists caus­ing trou­ble in the extreme south­east of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell pointed to the group as Exhibit A in America’s case to link Bagh­dad with al Qa’ida. On Sat­ur­day, Ansar agents killed Shawkat Hajji Mushir, a PUK gen­eral and mem­ber of the rul­ing coun­cil, along with sev­eral other peo­ple (accounts vary on the num­ber killed.) Mem­bers of the FreeRe­pub­lic web site are con­vinced this is the open­ing shot in the war and that a major attack on the United States is immi­nent. Their fears are based on events in Afghanistan on Sept. 9, 2001, when Ahmad Shah Mas­soud of the North­ern Alliance was assas­si­nated by Qa’ida agents pos­ing as jour­nal­ists two days before the attacks on Wash­ing­ton and New York City. His death robbed the Taliban’s oppo­si­tion of their most charis­matic and mil­i­tar­ily com­pe­tent leader.
Saturday’s killing is not the same thing. Ansar has been involved in assas­si­na­tions for some time, killing a gov­er­nor of a Kur­dish region and nar­rowly missed killing one of the Kur­dis­tan Regional Government’s prime min­is­ters. In Feb­ru­ary 2001, they killed Franso Hariri, a promi­nent mem­ber of the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party lead­er­ship. Not to dis­miss the seri­ous­ness of the killings, but Ansar’s actions are not a new tac­tic and Mushir is not a fig­ure on the level of Mas­soud to the Kurds. For that mat­ter, it’s unlikely the pesh­mer­gas would be as effec­tive as the North­ern Alliance was even if Mushir had lived.
So while Ansar is def­i­nitely dan­ger­ous, how dan­ger­ous is still unclear. Pow­ell claims the group proves a link between al Qa’ida and Bagh­dad. He also claimed that the group is oper­at­ing a “poi­son and explo­sive train­ing cen­ter camp” but, when opened to jour­nal­ists over the week­end, the site proved to be under­whelm­ing. The Inter­na­tional Cri­sis Group has a PDF avail­able that attempts to down­play the group’s sig­nif­i­cance, call­ing it a “minor irri­tant in local Kur­dish pol­i­tics.” That’s not entirely true, either, as Ansar is extremely desta­bi­liz­ing to the PUK and to a lesser degree the KDP.
The real ques­tion is how tight is Ansar with Bagh­dad and how tight is it with al Qa’ida. There’s no ques­tion Bagh­dad is help­ing to fund Ansar, using it as a proxy force against his Kur­dish ene­mies to the north. And there’s no ques­tion the group’s leader, Mul­lah Krekar, has at least been inspired by Osama bin Laden and the Tal­iban — vil­lages under Ansar con­trol live under harsh restric­tions found in Afghanistan prior to the Taliban’s fall. But the links aren’t clear — as with most things in the intel­li­gence busi­ness.
How­ever, Jef­fery Gold­berg of the New Yorker — who should have jour­nal­ism awards named after him — has another great piece that touches on links between al Qa’ida and Bagh­dad via Ansar al-Islam. The piece is osten­si­bly about how the CIA and other intel­li­gence agen­cies run their analy­sis process, but at the end, he lays out the cur­rent think­ing in the CIA regard­ing Ansar, al-Qa’ida and Bagh­dad.

Infor­ma­tion gleaned from the inter­ro­ga­tions of high-level Al Qaeda pris­on­ers pushed Tenet to rethink the opin­ion, advanced by C.I.A. offi­cials such as Paul Pil­lar, the National Intel­li­gence Offi­cer for the Mid­dle East, that ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences between the sec­u­lar Sad­dam and Islamic rad­i­cals, such as Al Qaeda, made it unlikely that these two ene­mies of Amer­ica would form an alliance. Clearly, the Rums­feld view, which main­tains that the com­monly held hatred of the United States trumps ide­ol­ogy and the­ol­ogy, is ascen­dant, at the C.I.A. as well as at the Pen­ta­gon. Pil­lar him­self, in a faxed com­ment, con­ceded that, “despite major dif­fer­ences, tac­ti­cal coöper­a­tion is pos­si­ble,” but added that “the con­tin­gency that would be most likely to moti­vate Sad­dam to develop a rela­tion­ship with rad­i­cal Islamists that would be deeper than lim­ited tac­ti­cal coop­er­a­tion would be a belief that he was about to lose power” — such as in a United States-led attack on Iraq. [Empha­sis added — Ed.]
Accord­ing to sev­eral intel­li­gence offi­cials I spoke to, the rela­tion­ship between bin Laden and Saddam’s regime was bro­kered in the early nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of Sudan, the pan-Islamist rad­i­cal Has­san al-Tourabi. Tourabi, sources say, per­suaded the osten­si­bly sec­u­lar Sad­dam to add to the Iraqi flag the words “Allahu Akbar,” as a con­ces­sion to Mus­lim rad­i­cals.
In inter­views with senior offi­cials, the fol­low­ing pic­ture emerged: Amer­i­can intel­li­gence believes that Al Qaeda and Sad­dam reached a non-aggression agree­ment in 1993, and that the rela­tion­ship deep­ened fur­ther in the mid-nineteen-nineties, when an Al Qaeda oper­a­tive — a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdul­lah al-Iraqi — was dis­patched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas train­ing. Al-Iraqi’s mis­sion was suc­cess­ful, and an unknown num­ber of train­ers from an Iraqi secret-police orga­ni­za­tion called Unit 999 were dis­patched to camps in Afghanistan to instruct Al Qaeda ter­ror­ists. (Train­ing in hijack­ing tech­niques was also pro­vided to for­eign Islamist rad­i­cals inside Iraq, accord­ing to two Iraqi defec­tors quoted in a report in the Times in Novem­ber of 2001.) Another Al Qaeda oper­a­tive, the Iraqi-born Mam­douh Salim, who goes by the name Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, also served as a liai­son in the mid-nineteen-nineties to Iraqi intel­li­gence. Salim, accord­ing to a recent book, “The Age of Sacred Ter­ror,” by the for­mer N.S.C. offi­cials Daniel Ben­jamin and Steven Simon, was bin Laden’s chief pro­curer of weapons of mass destruc­tion, and was involved in the early nineties in chemical-weapons devel­op­ment in Sudan. Salim was arrested in Ger­many in 1998 and was extra­dited to the United States. He is await­ing trial in New York on charges related to the 1998 East Africa embassy bomb­ings; he was con­victed last April of stab­bing a Man­hat­tan prison guard in the eye with a sharp­ened comb.
Intel­li­gence offi­cials told me that the agency also takes seri­ously reports that an Iraqi known as Abu Wa’el, whose real name is Saadoun Mah­moud Abdu­latif al-Ani, is the liai­son of Saddam’s intel­li­gence ser­vice to a rad­i­cal Mus­lim group called Ansar al-Islam, which con­trols a small enclave in north­ern Iraq; the group is believed by Amer­i­can and Kur­dish intel­li­gence offi­cials to be affil­i­ated with Al Qaeda. I learned of another pos­si­ble con­nec­tion early last year, while I was inter­view­ing Al Qaeda oper­a­tives in a Kur­dish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kur­dish intel­li­gence offi­cials iden­ti­fied as a cap­tured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a body­guard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, when Zawahiri secretly vis­ited Bagh­dad.
Ansar al-Islam was cre­ated on Sep­tem­ber 1, 2001, when two Kur­dish rad­i­cal groups merged forces. Accord­ing to Barham Salih, the Prime Min­is­ter of the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan, the group seized a chain of vil­lages in the moun­tain­ous region out­side the city of Hal­abja, and made a safe haven for Al Qaeda fight­ers. “Our intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion con­firmed that the group was declared on Sep­tem­ber 1st at the behest of bin Laden and Al Qaeda,” Prime Min­is­ter Salih told me last week, in a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion from Davos, Switzer­land. “It was meant to be an alter­na­tive base of oper­a­tions, since they were appar­ently antic­i­pat­ing that Afghanistan was going to become a denied area to them.“
Salih also said that a month before the Sep­tem­ber 11th attacks a senior Al Qaeda oper­a­tive called Abdul­rah­man al-Shami was dis­patched from Afghanistan to the Kur­dish moun­tain town of Biyara, to orga­nize the Ansar al-Islam enclave. Shami was killed in Novem­ber, 2001, in a bat­tle with the pro-American forces of the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan.
The Ansar al-Islam enclave, accord­ing to Salih and Amer­i­can intel­li­gence offi­cials, soon became the base of oper­a­tions of an Al Qaeda sub­group called Jund al-Shams, or Sol­diers of the Lev­ant, which oper­ates mainly in Jor­dan and Syria. Jund al-Shams is con­trolled by a man named Mussa’ab al-Zarqawi, a Jor­dan­ian of Pales­tin­ian extrac­tion. Zar­qawi is believed by Euro­pean intel­li­gence agen­cies to be Al Qaeda’s main spe­cial­ist in chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal ter­ror­ism. Zar­qawi is also believed to be behind the assas­si­na­tion, on Octo­ber 28th, of an Amer­i­can A.I.D. offi­cial in Jor­dan, and also two unsuc­cess­ful assas­si­na­tion attempts: last Feb­ru­ary 20th, Ali Bour­jaq, a Jor­dan­ian secret-police offi­cial, escaped injury when a bomb det­o­nated near his home; and on April 2nd gun­men opened fire on Prime Min­is­ter Salih’s home in Sulaimaniya. Salih was unhurt, but five of his body­guards were killed; two bystanders were killed in the Bour­jaq assas­si­na­tion attempt.
The Admin­is­tra­tion believes that Zar­qawi made his way to Bagh­dad after the United States’ inva­sion of Afghanistan, when he was wounded. Accord­ing to Amer­i­can sources, Zar­qawi was treated in a Bagh­dad hos­pi­tal but dis­ap­peared from Bagh­dad shortly after the Jor­dan­ian gov­ern­ment asked Iraq to extra­dite him. Amer­i­can intel­li­gence offi­cials believe that Zar­qawi was also among an unknown num­ber of Al Qaeda ter­ror­ists who have sought refuge in the Ansar al-Islam over the past sev­en­teen months.

OK. I have a great deal of respect for Gold­berg; his arti­cle on Iraqi Kur­dis­tan was the inspi­ra­tion for my own trip. I can’t just dis­miss the con­tacts that he has detailed here, even if he does pref­ace the whole thing with a “This is what the CIA thinks” kind of state­ment. It is likely there is some kind of con­tact between Iraq and al Qa’ida. The ques­tions are how long has it been going on? How deep are the con­tacts? Have the con­tacts grown in the last two years (i.e., because of a fear of an Amer­i­can inva­sion of Iraq?) Are these iso­lated con­tacts or do they show just the most vis­i­ble strands of a tan­gled skein of inte­gra­tion? I don’t know. And I don’t think any­one else does either.

Ansar al-Islam kills PUK minister, two others

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Ansar al-Islam's territoryDamn. Ansar al-Islam mil­i­tants shot and killed a promi­nent PUK mem­ber in the Kur­dish par­lia­ment along with two other Kur­dish offi­cials Sat­ur­day night, The New York Times is report­ing. Shawkat Hajji Mushir, a found­ing mem­ber of the Patriot Union of Kur­dis­tan and a close asso­ciate of Jalal Tal­a­bani was nego­ti­at­ing with Ansar mem­bers in the belief that a sub­stan­tial num­ber of them wanted to defect. It was, how­ever, a trap.
I never met Mr. Mushir, but if he was any­thing like the pesh­merga fight­ers I met when I toured the Ansar front out­side of Hal­abja in July last year, he would have been a warm and hos­pitable man who loved his coun­try. The fact that he was will­ing to nego­ti­ate with Ansar al-Islam — with only light secu­rity — indi­cates that he believed a level of trust could be cre­ated between the Islamist mil­i­tants and the sec­u­lar Kur­dish gov­ern­ment. I found the cre­ation of a sec­u­lar democ­racy open to all faiths to be the over­rid­ing goal of most of the Kurds I met while in Iraq last year. Unfor­tu­nately, Ansar doesn’t agree and is at war with the PUK and KDP. Mr. Mushir paid for this goal with his life.
My sym­pa­thies and thoughts go out to the fam­ily, friends and col­leagues of those killed, who were work­ing against time, tyranny and uncer­tainty to cre­ate a bet­ter world for them­selves and their children.

U.S. hangs Kurds out to dry — again; allows occupation of Iraqi Kurdistan by Turkey

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Hameda Farag, 46.JPG
Hameda Farag, 46, a vic­tim of 1988 Hal­abja attack, pho­tographed in Halabja’s sin­gle hos­pi­tal. It was near sun­set when she smelled some­thing odd. “I didn’t know it was a chem­i­cal attack until I fled to Iran,” she said. She was preg­nant at the time and lost the child. Since then, she has had three mis­car­riages and now can no longer have chil­dren. At the time, the world didn’t care. The United States still doesn’t. ®2002, Christo­pher Allbritton

1975. 1988. 1991. 1995. And now 2003.
Those dates will be burned in the col­lec­tive mem­ory of Iraq’s Kur­dish pop­u­la­tion, which, for the past 12 years, has built a nascent democ­racy in the very face of Saddam’s tyranny. But now, it seems, that the exper­i­ment will be stran­gled in the crib because the United States is nego­ti­at­ing with Turkey to occupy the Kur­dish area in north­ern Iraq.

The plan, which is being nego­ti­ated in closed-door meet­ings in Ankara, the Turk­ish cap­i­tal, is being bit­terly resisted by at least some lead­ers of Iraq’s Kur­dish groups, who fear that Turkey’s lead­ers may be try­ing to real­ize a his­toric desire to dom­i­nate the region in a post-Saddam Hus­sein Iraq. The Kur­dish offi­cials say they fear a mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion by the Turks could also prompt Iran to cross the bor­der and try to seize sec­tions of east­ern Iraq.
Amer­i­can diplo­mats and senior mil­i­tary com­man­ders, led by Pres­i­dent Bush’s spe­cial envoy, Zal­may Khalilzad, are said to be encour­ag­ing the Kur­dish lead­ers to accept the Turk­ish pro­posal. While Wash­ing­ton has strongly sup­ported the autonomous Kur­dish region in Iraq over the past 12 years, it is eager to secure the per­mis­sion of Turkey’s lead­ers to use Turkey’s bases for a pos­si­ble attack on Iraq. (Empha­sis added.)

This is a betrayal on the level of the Algiers Accord in 1975, when Sec­re­tary of State Henry Kis­sen­ger pulled the rug out from the under the Kurds who were fight­ing Sad­dam with the help of the Shah of Iran. On the level of Hal­abja, when Sad­dam gassed that Kur­dish vil­lage (among oth­ers in his bru­tal al Anfal cam­paign) and killed 5,000 men, women and chil­dren in less than 20 min­utes and the United States (and the rest of the world) stood by.
Turkey has been dri­ving a hard bar­gain to allow the United States to use its bases for this inva­sion. Back in Decem­ber, it even asked for 10 per­cent of Iraqi oil annu­ally. And back in Octo­ber, I wrote about the Kur­dish plans for auton­omy within a post-Saddam Iraq here and here. (If you’d like to see a copy of the pro­posed Kur­dish con­sti­tu­tions given to me by Dept. Prime Min­is­ter Sami Abdul Rah­man, click here and here.) The offi­cial word is that the Turks’ role will be extremely lim­ited, with a few thou­sand troops con­fined to the north­ern regions near the Iraqi-Turkish bor­der. They would be under Amer­i­can com­mand and lim­ited to human­i­tar­ian duties.
How­ever, the Times story quotes a Turk­ish offi­cial — it doesn’t say if the offi­cial is with the mil­i­tary or the civil­ian gov­ern­ment — as say­ing the deploy­ment would far exceed the num­bers talked about with the Amer­i­cans. And Turk­ish prime min­is­ter, Abdul­lah Gul, sug­gested that the Turk­ish Army’s role would go beyond human­i­tar­ian con­cerns to pro­tect­ing Turk­ish inter­ests in the region.
“Turkey is going to posi­tion her­self in that region in order to pre­vent any pos­si­ble mas­sacres, or the estab­lish­ment of a new state,” Gul told Turk­ish reporters.
This isn’t fair. I met sev­eral of the men and women work­ing to cre­ate a democ­racy, flawed as it is, in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, and I can’t even imag­ine the dis­ap­point­ment that this news must have gen­er­ated. Adding insult to injury, the Amer­i­cans intend to seize the oil-rich cities of Kirkuk and Mosul for them­selves, to pre­vent the Iraqis from sab­o­tag­ing the oil pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties there and the Kurds from seiz­ing them for them­selves. (Kirkuk is the pro­posed cap­i­tal of an envi­sioned Kur­dish autonomous region.) Turkey has long cov­eted both Kirkuk and Mosul, hav­ing lost them to the young King­dom of Iraq in 1926.
I wor­ried about just this devel­op­ment back in Octo­ber, and said Amer­ica was send­ing mixed sig­nals to the peo­ples of the region. As I wrote back then,

Kurds cer­tainly think a democ­racy is in the cards, what with their pro­posed con­sti­tu­tion and all. Fowzi Hariri, the smooth, British-educated deputy head of the KDP Bureau of Inter­na­tional Rela­tions, told me in July that “We want Bagh­dad.” I didn’t know what he meant by that, but he went on to explain that the Kurds want the chance to hold the office of chief exec­u­tive in a Fed­eral Repub­lic of Iraq. “We want a direct say in gov­ern­ment,” he con­tin­ued. “When­ever we have relied on other sys­tems or peo­ple, we have ended up with a dic­ta­tor­ship.“
That was a thinly veiled barb at the on-again, off-again sup­port from the United States. My sus­pi­cion is that we’re at it again, telling the Kurds they will have a place at the table in order to lure them into com­mit­ting to a fight against Sad­dam while we tell the Kuwaitis, Turks and Syr­i­ans that a messy, unpre­dictable demo­c­ra­tic Iraq is “not in the cards,” as the Kuwaiti said to Kristof. And when the ham­mer hits the anvil, I think we’ll hang the Kurds out to dry.

Some­times it sucks to be right.

Chalabi in Iraq

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The Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment, based in Arbil in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan, has revealed that Ahmed Cha­l­abi, leader of the Iraqi National Con­gress, based in Lon­don, arrived in the Kur­dish enclave Fri­day. This marks the first time Cha­l­abi has set foot inside Iraq since an unsuc­cess­ful Kur­dish rebel­lion in the mid-1990s that was ruth­lessly crushed by Saddam’s troops.
“Mr. Ahmed Cha­l­abi is now in Salahud­din,” located some 30 miles east of Arbil, the defacto cap­i­tal of both the Kur­dis­tan Demo­c­ra­tic Party (KDP) and the KRG, an unnamed source reported. Yes­ter­day he vis­ited Suleimaniya, cap­i­tal of the rival PUK ter­ri­tory. He’s appar­ently in the region prepar­ing for a meet­ing of the Iraqi oppo­si­tion groups in mid-February. The meet­ing of Iraq’s oppo­si­tion groups is aimed at fol­low­ing up on a Lon­don con­fer­ence, dur­ing which the groups formed a 65-member com­mit­tee — to which a fur­ther 10 names were later added — that could form the basis of a new Iraqi gov­ern­ment when Sad­dam Hus­sein is routed from power.
Cha­l­abi, 57, is a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure, hav­ing been sen­tenced in 1992 in absen­tia by a Jor­dan­ian court to 22 years in prison for bank fraud fol­low­ing the col­lapse of Petra Bank, which he founded in 1977. This blot on his record has caused the U.S. State Depart­ment to look skep­ti­cally at Cha­l­abi as a power locus in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Inter­est­ingly, if the INC is plan­ning a mid-February meet­ing of oppo­si­tion lead­ers on Iraqi soil, that could mark the start of the mil­i­tary cam­paign against Iraq. As soon as the bombs start falling, Cha­l­abi and his group would be in posi­tion to declare a new gov­ern­ment, with masses of Iraqi defec­tors flock­ing to their ban­ner. At least that’s prob­a­bly the plan. Why declare a gov­ern­ment in exile when you can declare a new gov­ern­ment on native soil?
By the way, the bomb­ing cam­paign I men­tioned above was leaked today in the Times (and else­where) in an attempt to fur­ther rat­tle Bagh­dad. The plan, for you lazy peo­ple who don’t want to click on the link, calls for 3,000 precision-guided muni­tions to be launched in the first 48 hours of a bomb­ing cam­paign. “The ini­tial bom­bard­ment would use 10 times the num­ber of precision-guided weapons fired in the first two days of the Per­sian Gulf war of 1991, and the tar­gets would be air defenses, polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary head­quar­ters, com­mu­ni­ca­tions facil­i­ties and sus­pected chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal deliv­ery sys­tems, mil­i­tary and other Pen­ta­gon offi­cials say.” The prob­lem with this plan is that most of Iraq’s mil­i­tary tar­gets are cen­tered in civil­ian neigh­bor­hoods. If the bomber wings hit Bagh­dad — a city of four mil­lion peo­ple — hard, which they prob­a­bly will since Iraq is a highly cen­tral­ized coun­try, thou­sands of civil­ians will die. Even if the bombs are 80 per­cent accu­rate, that’s still about 600 bombs that could go astray. That’s a lot of civil­ian casu­al­ties — all of which will be shown on Al Jazeera.
This bomb­ing tac­tic, while mil­i­tar­ily sound, sounds like it could bring up com­par­isons with Dres­den in World War II, in which the city was reduced to ash as a way of “soft­en­ing up” the civil­ian population’s will to resist. Let’s hope civil­ian deaths are kept to a min­i­mum, not only for their sake, but for ours.