by Robin Wright
—JORDAN’S KING ABDULLAH
For the foreseeable future, the Middle East will be engulfed in a contest between the familiar and the feared, between the comfort of long-standing local traditions and the lure of global political trends. In a region where ways of life date back millennia, it will be a tug-of-war, bloody at times.
Along the way, change will often require sorting out the past or at least trying to move beyond it. Progress will otherwise be overpowered.
Iraq is the starkest case.
In November 2002, during the buildup to the Iraq war, I went to see Barham Salih, the prime minister of Kurdistan. The northern region of Iraq, about the size of Switzerland or twice the size of New Jersey, was then isolated from the outside world, so it took a while to get there. I flew first to Iran, spent several days in Tehran getting assorted permissions, then flew west to Iran’s Kermanshah province, and finally took a three-hour cab ride to the border with Iraq. In a cold, drizzling rain, I checked in at a hut used mainly by truckers and smugglers who ferried goods into Iraq in defiance of United Nations sanctions. I was asked to sign my name in an old-fashioned ledger to note that I was leaving the country. Then I walked across a no-man’s-land—illegally, since I did not have a visa—into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
I was not the only American in Kurdistan. U.S. intelligence and Special Forces officers were already secretly in the northern Iraqi province, almost six months before the invasion and as diplomacy was only midstream at the United Nations. The Americans were conducting reconnaissance, negotiating access with Kurdish leaders, checking out four unused airfields, setting up listening posts, probing the strength of Kurdish troops, and becoming familiar with the starkly beautiful region of craggy mountains and tranquil lakes.
The American experiment in creating a democracy in the Middle East was already in the works.
I stopped first in Sulaimaniyah, a bustling city with tree-lined streets and its own Ferris wheel, about four hundred miles north of Baghdad. Sulaiman is the Islamic version of Solomon. The suffix-iyah citifies a name. Sulaimaniyah was named after an eighteenth-century Kurdish prince. It is one of two Kurdish capitals. Irbil is the other.
Born in 1960, Barham Salih is an erudite man with a smoothly bald pate; the sides and back of his hair are neatly barbered, as is his mustache. He speaks the Queen’s English, is a dapper dresser, and has a penchant for fine red wines and cigars. Arrested twice by Saddam’s regime, he graduated from the University of Cardiff in Wales and did graduate work at the University of Liverpool. He was a Kurdish representative in Washington before returning to join the government. I had known him for more than a decade, and we had been debating the future of Iraq through most of it.
Salih invited me to his family house in Sulaimaniyah so we could watch the American election results. He was closely monitoring the 2002 vote, in part to see if it would have any impact on U.S. plans in Iraq. He was both nervous and excited by the prospects of American intervention.
“We still have a precarious relationship with the West in this part of the world. Our admiration is shaded by suspicion from past experience,” he told me. “But we’re hoping the United States will be a partner in bringing about a better Iraq. And I’d be surprised if the United States allows this opportunity to go down the tubes.”
I asked him if he had any reservations. He hesitated for a moment.
“Living in the West was a very useful opportunity for me to see debate in the British Parliament and America’s Congress. It was wonderful!” he said, with a laugh. “But as I am reminded daily since I returned to Iraq, your Western societies took hundreds of years to get that far. Modernity is the rejection of so many traditions and sources of identity. We are not anywhere near this point.
“As prime minister,” he added, as the U.S. election results on CNN streamed across the bottom of his television, “I spend a lot of time with traditional people who want to build a mosque when my instinct is to build a school. I fully believe that the Middle East can’t continue in the way of the past. There’s simply too much change taking place everywhere, and globalization makes us part of it, whether leaders like it or not. But there’s no place the saying that ‘old habits die hard’ is truer than in the Middle East.
“My concern,” he said, “is that removing a dictatorship does not mean democracy will work—right away or perhaps at all. I have been warning the Americans about this. But I don’t know whether they understand.”
Kurdistan was a model for both the potential and the dangers of change in Iraq.
The world’s largest ethnic group without a state, the Kurds were particularly keen on ousting Saddam Hussein. They had never wanted to be part of Iraq in the first place.
An Indo-European people, the Kurds are closer ethnically to Persians than Arabs. Kurdish tribes have inhabited the inhospitable mountains for millennia. An early mention of the Kurds—people in “the land of Karda”—was found in cuneiform writings of the Sumerians some 3,000 years before Christ. Saladin, arguably the greatest warrior in Middle East history, was a Kurd. Born in the twelfth century, he came from Tikrit, which, ironically, was also Saddam Hussein’s home town. Saladin went on to become the vizier of Egypt. He recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Ever since, leaders in the region have coveted the idea of being the next Saladin.
After the Ottoman empire’s collapse, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised the Kurds their own country. But the agreement fell apart. Today, the estimated thirty million Kurds—although estimates vary widely—are divided up among four countries: More than one half are in Turkey. Iraq and Iran each have about twenty percent. More than five percent are in Syria. Smaller numbers are in Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Kurdish diaspora includes significant numbers in Europe as well as Israel, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.3
For the Kurds, life in modern Iraq was never easy. They always felt like outsiders, as non-Arabs, and continuously agitated for real autonomy. Relations with Baghdad were often tense. But Saddam Hussein’s rule was the most brutal.
In the 1980s, Saddam’s army razed hundreds of Kurdish villages. More than 180,000 Kurds were detained. Thousands were executed, their bodies dumped in mass graves, their families never notified. In 1987 and 1988, the Iraqi military fired chemical weapons on two dozen Kurdish towns and villages.4 The grisliest attack was in Halabja, where some 5,000 Kurds died from mustard gas and the nerve agents tabun and sarin. The bodies of mainly women, children, and the elderly littered the streets where they had dropped. Guy Dinmore of The Financial Times recorded the gruesome scene when he arrived shortly afterward.
It was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and suddenly it hangs on one frame. It was a new kind of death to me. You went into a room, a kitchen, and you saw the body of a woman holding a knife where she had been cutting a carrot.
The aftermath was worse. Victims were still being brought in. Some villagers came to our chopper. They had fifteen or sixteen beautiful children, begging us to take them to hospital. So all the press sat there and we were each handed a child to carry. As we took off, fluid came out of my little girl’s mouth and she died in my arms.
Halabja ranked as the most devastating chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in modern times. The city was under Salih’s jurisdiction, just down the road from Sulaimaniyah. It served as a constant reminder of the Kurds’ vulnerability.
In 1991, the Kurds rose up one last time against Saddam in response to an appeal by President George H. W. Bush to topple the Iraqi leader after a U.S.-led campaign had forced him to retreat from Kuwait. But Baghdad quickly crushed the Kurdish revolt, again killing thousands and forcing one million to flee to the borders of Turkey and Iran. Baghdad then punished the five million Iraqi Kurds by cutting off funds, food, fuel, electrical power, and any human traffic in or out of their landlocked enclave. Saddam wanted the Kurds starved into submission.
The threat of military action hung over every action the Kurds took. “If the current government in Bag
hdad remains in power, the prospect of another genocide is very real,” Salih told me. “Iraqi tanks are literally an hour or so away. Most Kurds have contingency plans for what they’ll do if something should happen again.”
The Kurds lived under double sanctions. As part of Iraq, they also came under the toughest punitive measures ever imposed by the United Nations.
The Kurds, as a famous proverb laments, had no friends left but the mountains.
Yet the rugged people of northern Kurdistan, some of whom still wear the baggy pants and colorful turbans of tribal tradition, are a scrappy lot. In the 1990s, they slowly began transforming the north, reconfiguring what they had and smuggling in the rest to survive.
Outside Sulaimaniyah, a little oil refinery assembled from the cannibalized parts of cement, sugar, and soft-drink factories noisily pumped out 3,000 barrels of oil a day. Its slogan: “Where there’s a well, there’s a way.” Unable to get passports, Kurdish officials converted time abroad as students or workers into second nationalities. Salih had a British passport, his minister of education was a Swede, the ministers of reconstruction and of human rights were Germans. Other officials were Belgian, French, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, and Swiss.
“I don’t think there are any Portuguese among us,” reflected Defense Minister Sherdl Hawezey, seriously.
The Kurds also adapted their skills. Salih was a civil engineer and statistician. His intelligence chief, Khasro Mohammed, was a former veterinarian specializing in poultry diseases.
“Both jobs require research and investigation,” Mohammed told me, somewhat bemused.
To compensate for having no postal system, dozens of Internet cafés had opened in the previous three years. The Internet elsewhere in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was heavily censored and required a police permit to get full access, but Kurds had cheap, unrestricted connections. Satellite dishes, perched atop mud-brick homes in the countryside and dangling with laundry off apartment balconies in the cities, brought in the outside world. As we watched the U.S. election results, Salih flicked between CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the BBC with his remote. The Kurds had also launched their own television stations, some with satellite links on Kurdsat that beamed into the United States and Europe. One station aired an equivalent of Saturday Night Live with irreverent pokes at Kurdish politicians.
Kurdistan, which was divided into eastern and western regional governments, had the early trappings of democracy. One of the first signs was a decision by the two regional governments to form a united front and hold elections in 1992 for a single new Kurdish legislature. Although two parties dominated politics, others contributed to feisty public and parliamentary debates.
Freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly were also taking root. Several regional newspapers began questioning policies and politicians.
“Every week, someone comes through my office asking me to do something about the papers,” Salih told me, with a sigh.
Hawlati, or The Citizen, was the particular bane of Kurdish politicians after its launch in 2000—on a 1967 printing press. It exposed a military commander’s illegal kickbacks on government contracts. It published secret government communications. Its investigation of a Kurdish official led to his arrest for kidnapping and murder. And its editorials blasted government inefficiency, corruption, and heavy-handedness.
“Politicians understand that allowing criticism is more important than stopping criticism—no small thing in Iraq,” Hawlati’s editor Aso Hardi told me. Some papers were independent; others were tied to political parties. “But at least we have a lot of parties,” Hardi said. The rest of Iraq was then ruled by the all-powerful Baath Party, which controlled every media outlet, print or broadcast.
Free enterprise had also produced a taste of globalization in Kurdistan. A new fast-food outlet, complete with golden arches, had introduced Big Macs and Happy Meals—but as MaDonal’s.
“I have to wait until sanctions end to make it the real thing,” explained owner Suleiman Kasab, a former hamburger flipper at a McDonald’s in Austria.
Kurdistan was hardly self-sufficient. The Kurds relied heavily on the United Nations, which under the sanctions arrangement channeled thirteen percent of Iraq’s oil revenues back into the north and provided a daily food ration for every Kurd (and every Iraqi). The income helped rebuild the villages that Saddam had destroyed. It paid for new schools, clinics, a justice ministry, and a Central Bank independent of Baghdad. It helped develop agriculture, pave roads, and plant three million trees.
The Kurds, however, did figure a way to generate revenue by turning the tables on Saddam, who also relied on illicit trade to circumvent international sanctions. The Kurds taxed smugglers bringing sanctions-busting goods across from Turkey and Iran, through Kurdistan, into the rest of Iraq—to the tune of one million dollars a day.
“Our dinar—the old one, without Saddam’s picture on it—is now stronger than the currency in the rest of Iraq,” Salih told me.
Kurdistan had evolved into a state within a state. It had done so well that many Kurds, who made up about twenty percent of Iraq’s twenty-six million people, liked to boast that the north could be a prototype for the rest of Iraq.
“Kurdistan has traditionally been the least developed part of Iraq, economically, politically, and socially,” Salih reflected. “If we could achieve this in Kurdistan, we could easily achieve it in the rest of Iraq.”
Yet Kurdistan also reflected a core tension within Iraq and the wider Middle East. Two often-rival forces—traditional clans and modern parties—shaped local politics. They were not always a good fit. Despite their unity in opposition to Saddam Hussein, they divided Kurdistan into two halves for a reason.
Politics in the western sector—which bordered Turkey and had its capital in Irbil—was dominated by tribe and clan, specifically the Barzani clan.
Mustafa Barzani, a charismatic, dagger-wielding fighter, launched the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq. He founded the Kurdish Democratic Party in 1946. In 1961, he led an armed struggle against Baghdad to win autonomy from Arab-dominated Iraq. In the 1970s, the United States initially encouraged the uprising to pressure Baghdad, only to turn around and negotiate a deal between Iraq and Iran in 1975 that pulled the rug from under the Kurds. Baghdad crushed the rebellion. Barzani was forced into exile; he died four years later in Washington, D.C. His son Masoud, who still wore the traditional Kurdish baggy pants and turban, inherited power.
“Until 1975, the Kurds looked at the West as saviors,” Salih told me. “But after the Kurdish rebellion collapsed, the United States became synonymous with the notion of betrayal.” Henry Kissinger, who crafted both sides of the policy flip-flop, was still a dirty word in northern Iraq almost three decades later.
“We’re afraid the United States will get involved, make promises, and then betray us again,” Salih said.
Politics in the eastern sector—which bordered Iran and had its capital in Sulaimaniyah—was defined by Kurdish intellectuals who broke away from the Barzanis after the 1975 Kurdish rebellion was quashed. They formed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a modern, leftist, and less clan-based party. It was led by Jalal Talabani, a portly and congenial lawyer with wavy hair who preferred Western suits.
The two sectors collaborated when Saddam cut off north Kurdistan in 1991. Yet they remained serious political and economic rivals. Both also had their own branches of the Peshmerga, a Kurdish militia whose name means “those who face death.” In 1995, tensions erupted into open clashes between the two parties over disputes about land and revenue sharing from their taxes on smuggling. Fighting continued sporadically for two years. Barzani finally turned to Baghdad. Although Iraqi troops had earlier killed three of his brothers, twenty-nine family members, and some 8,000 Barzani clansmen, he invited Saddam’s forces into the north in 1996 to regain territory lost to Talabani’s militia.5 Talabani damned Barzani as a traitor to the Kurdish cause.
It took years to really patch things up. The month before my visit, the K
urdish legislature had held its first meeting in six years. The driver who took me from Sulaimaniyah through the stark, brown mountains to Irbil had never been to the western sector. For him, it was like going to a foreign capital. He was quite nervous.
I called on Barzani at his scenic mountaintop villa overlooking Irbil. I asked him if fighting among the Kurds was really over.
“Yes, it was an unfortunate thing to happen,” he told me. Born in 1946, Barzani is short and still rather cherubic looking, although he is widely reputed to be stubborn and tough. He also prefers to speak in Kurdish and rarely leaves Kurdistan.
“Because of confidence-building measures,” he said, “trust has come back to people. The rank and file of the Kurdish parties have been convinced that war leads to the destruction of their people.”
With peace among the Kurds and U.S. intervention looming, the bigger question had become whether the Kurds wanted out of Iraq altogether.
On the eve of a war likely to determine Iraq’s fate for years to come, one way or the other, I asked Barzani if Kurdish leaders were willing to give up his own father’s dream of an independent Kurdistan and remain in a new Iraq. The answer could also determine the future of Iraq.
“We do want self-determination,” he replied, sitting back against a brocade settee in an ornate reception hall. The Kurds wanted a “voluntary union” in a federal framework. “There is a desire and will to preserve the unity and territorial integrity of this country within the state of Iraq. We never asked for an independent Kurdish state,” he added.
“These are only accusations of neighbors.”
Separately, when we had crossed paths in Tehran, I had also asked Talabani if the Kurds felt they would be better off on their own.
“No,” Talabani told me. “That’s very shortsighted. What we have is not stable or permanent. We need to…reunite with Iraq for a permanent democratic life.”
Landlocked, economically stranded, and politically hostage to the demands, quirks, and preferences of neighboring countries, the Kurds had learned the exorbitant costs of going it alone during a dozen years of isolation, he said. The Kurds needed the clout and seaports of Iraq. They also needed a share of Iraq’s resources.
