Talabani sensed his moment to seize the mantle of leadership. He broke with the KDP and formed his own political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK. And then, on June 1, 1976—after working feverishly to procure sufficient foreign money and weapons—Talabani launched a “second Kurdish revolution” against Saddam and the Iraqi government.
By 1979, the Kurds were fully reengaged in their bloody struggle with Baghdad, but rarely had they felt more isolated. The Ayatollah Khomeini—who for years had lived in exile in Iraq—now seized full control of the government of Iran. Saddam Hussein seized full control of the government of Iraq. The Carter administration cut off funding for the Kurdish rebels. And Mustafa Barzani died in Washington on March 1, 1979. His son, Massoud Barzani, picked up where his father left off, but tensions between the Talabanis and Barzanis continued unabated, and the Kurdish people entered the 1980s with little hope of achieving the freedoms for which they had fought so hard and so long.
Crimes against Humanity
It is difficult to adequately describe the evils that Saddam Hussein and his regime inflicted upon the Kurdish people in the 1980s, but even a brief description helps explain why Talabani fought so hard to free his people from Saddam’s reign of terror.
From 1986 to 1989, Saddam launched Operation Anfal, a military campaign designed to neutralize Kurdish opposition to him once and for all. Heading up the operation was Saddam’s first cousin, a man named Ali Hassan al-Majid, who eventually became known as “Chemical Ali” because of his use of chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds. After the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003, both Saddam and Chemical Ali were tried in an Iraqi court, convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged for crimes against humanity. Part of the charges against them: killing at least 180,000 Kurds using poison gas and mass executions.
“I smelled something dirty and strange,” a fifty-six-year-old Kurdish woman testified during the trial, her voice cracking with emotion as she recalled with horror the events of June 5, 1987, the day that Iraqi forces dropped bombs filled with poison gas on her town. “People were falling to the ground. They vomited and their eyes were blinded. We couldn’t see anything. We were all afraid.”501
“I saw dozens of women and children walking with their eyes red; many were vomiting blood,” a Kurdish doctor told the court. “Everything in the village was dead—the birds, the animals, the sheep. . . . I treated a man whose entire body was full of chemical bubbles, but he died a few days later.”502
During the trial, which began on August 21, 2006, the court “heard more than seventy witnesses who described chemical air attacks, villages being burned, and Kurds being rounded up and tortured,” the Reuters news service reported. The prosecution also presented the court with official Iraqi government documents authorizing the attacks.
“The first document was a 1987 memo from Iraq’s military intelligence seeking permission from the president’s office to use mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin against Kurds.”503 A second document proved that “Saddam had ordered military intelligence to study the possibility of a ‘sudden strike’ using such weapons against Iranian and Kurdish forces.” A third document—an internal memo written by an Iraqi military intelligence officer—confirmed that Iraqi intelligence “had received approval from the president’s office for a strike using ‘special ammunition’ and emphasized that no strike would be launched without first informing the president.”504
Betrayal
On August 2, 1990, Saddam ordered Iraqi forces to invade Kuwait, claiming Iraq was the rightful owner of Kuwait’s territory and oil. This, in turn, triggered President George H. W. Bush (“Bush 41”) to marshal an international coalition to protect Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states from Iraqi aggression and to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The president ordered U.S. forces to war on January 16, 1991. Operation Desert Storm turned out to be a dazzling success, but there were unintended consequences for the Kurds.
On February 16, as U.S. and Coalition forces augmented a punishing air campaign against Iraqi forces in Kuwait with a stunningly effective ground campaign, Bush 41 publicly called upon “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”505 The theory in Washington was that while the U.N. Security Council had not authorized a U.S. overthrow of Saddam’s regime during the liberation of Kuwait, perhaps the U.S. could inspire a successful coup in Baghdad anyway.
Talabani and Massoud Barzani saw their moment to achieve liberation with U.S. assistance. They immediately ordered their Kurdish paramilitary forces in northern Iraq into action against Saddam’s forces, even as the leaders of Shia paramilitary groups in southern Iraq did the same. But when Saddam counterattacked and began killing Kurdish and Shia guerrillas and civilians in large numbers, the U.S. refused to come to their aid.
“I made very clear that we did not intend to go into Iraq,” Bush 41 said at the time. “I condemn Saddam Hussein’s brutality against his own people. But I do not want to see U.S. forces who have performed with such skill and dedication sucked into a civil war in Iraq.”506
Kurdish leaders were stunned by what they saw as an American betrayal. They implored Washington to protect their civilians from another Saddam-driven genocide. But at first, the White House turned a deaf ear to their pleas.
“I made clear from the very beginning that it was not an objective of the Coalition or the United States to overthrow Saddam Hussein,” Bush 41 insisted. “So I don’t think the Shiites in the south, those who are unhappy with Saddam in Baghdad, or the Kurds in the north ever felt that the United States would come to their assistance to overthrow this man. . . . I have not misled anybody about the intentions of the United States of America, or has any other coalition partner, all of whom to my knowledge agree with me in this position.”507
It was winter and bitterly cold in the mountains of northern Iraq. But as Kurdish casualties mounted rapidly due to Iraqi air strikes, several million Kurdish civilians decided to brave the elements and flee into southern Turkey. Few of the refugees had food, water, tents, or warm enough clothing for themselves or their children.
News coverage of the mushrooming humanitarian crisis and the fervent and unrelenting pleas of the Kurdish leadership eventually moved the U.S. and the U.N. into action. The U.S. launched Operation Provide Comfort, creating a no-fly zone over the Kurdish provinces of Iraq—enforced by American fighter jets—to keep Saddam’s air force from bombing the Kurds any longer. It also created an airlift operation to bring seventeen thousand tons of desperately needed humanitarian relief supplies to the Kurds in northern Iraq and southern Turkey.
The Silver Lining
By God’s grace, there was a silver lining to the initial (and brief) American inaction on behalf of the Kurdish people. Though the delay was inexcusable, U.S. financial and political support for the Kurds finally did kick in and was a great blessing, saving many lives and eventually convincing the vast majority of the Kurdish refugees to return to their homes. What’s more, the U.S.-designed no-fly zone operation effectively separated Iraqi Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq. No longer was Saddam Hussein able to attack the Kurdish people. Thus, in effect, Kurdish autonomy was established.
Talabani and Barzani wasted no time. Though there was no love lost between the two men, they knew they now had widespread international moral and political support. They also knew they had to leverage that support to create an independent enclave as quickly as they possibly could.
Their own internal tensions notwithstanding, they and their advisors soon created the Kurdistan Regional Government. They formed a parliament. They drafted a democratic constitution. They organized free and reasonably fair elections for the first time in Kurdish history. They began to encourage within Kurdistan everything that had not been possible when Saddam ruled them—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, a free press. They also began building diplomatic ties with the rest of the world and trying to
attract financial aid and direct foreign investment.
Was it messy? Yes, it was. Was it fractious? Yes, that too. But it was happening. With (belated) U.S. assistance, a new and real democracy was being born in the heart of the Muslim world.
Regime Change
Twelve years later, when President George W. Bush (“Bush 43”) decided to liberate the rest of the Iraqi people and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, Talabani was ready to assist his American friends in every way he possibly could. He provided much-needed intelligence to U.S. military commanders. He provided political advice to CIA operatives trying to identify tribal leaders throughout Iraq who would be willing to help overthrow Saddam, neutralize the Iraqi military, and then govern the country in a post-Saddam world.
On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced on the orders of Bush 43. U.S. ground forces entered Baghdad on April 5. Four days later the city was initially secure, and Iraqi citizens—with U.S. military assistance—tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in the heart of the capital. As TV cameras beamed the remarkable images live around the world, ordinary Iraqis immediately leaped on the toppled icon of twenty-five dark and murderous years. They stomped on the statue’s head and face. They cursed it, and the man in whose image it was created. They chanted, “Death to Saddam! Death to Saddam!”
“Mam Jalal was in Suly when Saddam’s regime fell,” Talabani’s spokesman, Mala Bakhtyar, told me during an exclusive eighty-minute interview in one of the president’s offices in Sulymania (aka “Suly”). “It was a very dramatic moment for him, for all of us. He had tried for years to persuade Saddam to respect Kurdish rights and embrace democracy, but Saddam wouldn’t listen.”508
Bakhtyar revealed that Saddam had actually sent a private message to Talabani just weeks before the U.S. and Coalition forces arrived to liberate the country. The Iraqi leader was trying to buy off all of the opposition groups in an effort to keep them from working with the Americans. “Saddam wanted Mam Jalal to know that he was granting amnesty to all of the opposition groups in Iraq, except Talabani.” Talabani sent a message back to Saddam saying, “History will not grant amnesty to you. History will remember that you used chemical weapons against your own people.”
On April 22, 2003, just after arriving in Iraq to begin working on reconstruction and assembling a new government, the first two people U.S. Lieutenant General Jay Garner went to see were Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Talabani told Garner the Coalition needed to form an “advisory group” made up of leading Iraqi dissidents against the Saddam regime who could help lay the foundation of a new democracy.
Talabani laid out who the members of the group should be, who should not be included at the beginning, what religious backgrounds the members would need to have to make it truly representative, what their roles should be, and how they should interact with Garner and his team. He also insisted that the new Iraqi government have a federal structure that would give significant freedom and autonomy to the Kurdish people, given all that they had been through over the years.
Garner was impressed.
“If this works, I’ll make you a provisional government,” he told Talabani and Barzani. “You’ll still work for me, but I’ll make you a provisional government.”509
Garner then started going through his own to-do list.
“What are we going to do about a constitution?” he asked.
“We already thought about that,” Talabani replied. “We’ll have a big tent meeting, and we’ll bring in somewhere between 200 and 300 people. Jay, this will be a mosaic of Iraq. It will be all the ethnic groups, all the religions, all the professions . . . the genders, [and together] we’ll write this constitution.”
“How quick can you do this?” Garner asked.
Talabani smiled and proposed the week of July 4.
A New Iraqi Leadership Emerges
Garner did not make it to July 4.
He was replaced by a far more experienced and savvy diplomat, Ambassador L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer III, who served as the presidential envoy to Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004.
It was Bremer who would turn Talabani and Barzani’s suggestions into reality, creating an initial advisory group of seven Iraqi prodemocracy leaders he dubbed the “G-7.”510 It was Bremer who would eventually turn the G-7 into the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) with twenty-five senior Iraqi prodemocracy leaders, including both Talabani and Barzani. It was Bremer who created a rotating presidency so that each month a different member of IGC would preside over the group, minimizing tensions and preventing any one member from gaining too much power too quickly. It was also Bremer who over the course of the next twelve months helped the IGC make a series of essential decisions—from creating cabinet positions and filling them with the right people to laying the groundwork for an Iraqi parliament, an Iraqi constitution, and the country’s first truly free and fair elections.
By the spring of 2004, the contours of the new Iraqi government were taking shape, and Talabani had his eye on the presidency, even traveling to Washington in an effort to rally support in Congress and among top Bush administration officials. But by early May of that year, the Coalition plan formulated by Bremer and approved by the White House, the State Department, and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was to offer the presidency not to a Kurd but to a Sunni Arab. The role of prime minister was going to be offered to a Shia Arab, and Bremer strongly believed the Coalition needed to balance tensions between the two religious groups and give Sunnis a significant stake in the political process.
On Sunday, May 16, Bremer pulled Talabani aside and tried to let him down gently. “For too long they [Arab Sunnis] have felt underrepresented in the new Iraq, Mr. Talabani,” Bremer explained. “We have to use this government as an opportunity to broaden Iraq’s political base.”511
Searching for a President
Bremer’s leading choice for the presidency was Adnan Pachachi, an eighty-one-year-old secular Sunni from a prominent Iraqi Sunni family. Educated in Egypt, Pachachi had served as Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations in the late 1950s and again in the late 1960s, while later serving as Iraq’s foreign minister. During the Saddam Hussein years, he lived in exile in Abu Dhabi, returning to Iraq for the first time after the 2003 liberation, though he had actually opposed the U.S. invasion. Widely respected by U.S. officials, Pachachi was invited to serve as a member of the IGC upon liberation. He helped develop the Transitional Administrative Law—essentially a draft constitution—and served a rotation as president of the IGC.
To Bremer and his colleagues, Pachachi seemed like a perfect caretaker for the fledgling democracy until national elections could be held the following January and the first freely elected Iraqi president could emerge.
But when word leaked out that Pachachi was likely to be named president, sharp criticisms began throughout Baghdad. Religious Sunnis objected to Pachachi’s secularism. And some leading Shias objected in principle to a Sunni Arab receiving so lofty a position. They could see a Sunni in the role of vice president, perhaps, but certainly not the presidency itself. Other members of the IGC simply didn’t trust Pachachi to be a strong enough leader. He had, after all, opposed the liberation of Iraq from the outset. Why should he now run the country?
Bremer needed to move forward. At the end of the month, he would be handing full sovereignty back to the people of Iraq and leaving the country for good. Iraq needed to have a new government in place and an orderly transition. So with the blessing of the White House, Bremer offered Pachachi the role in spite of the growing criticisms against him and scheduled a press conference for Tuesday, June 1, 2004, to announce Pachachi as Iraq’s new president and Ayad Allawi as the new Iraqi prime minister.
But that morning, Bremer’s military aide handed him a cell phone. It was Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy.
“Astonishing news,” Brahimi began. “Pachachi has declined the position. I’m dumbfounded and don’t know what got into him. What do we do now?”512
Bremer was e
qually stunned. He and Brahimi considered delaying the press conference for several days, but in the end decided that would be a mistake, fearing internal rivalries on the Iraqi Governing Council would only intensify over time.
“We’ve got to close the whole deal”—the new prime minister and the new president—“or it will all unravel,” Bremer concluded.
Emerging from the Shadows
In that moment of crisis, Bremer turned not to Talabani but to Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer, who was serving as the IGC’s president-of-the-month and had been actively pursuing the post.
Though he was the youngest member of the IGC—barely half Pachachi’s age—Ghazi in every other way fit the image Bremer wanted for the first sovereign president of Iraq. He had been born in Mosul, the heart of Sunni Islamic fervency in Iraq. He was religiously devout but politically moderate. He had been educated in Saudi Arabia (the birthplace of Sunni Islam) as well as the U.S. (the birthplace of democracy) and held a master’s degree in civil engineering from Georgetown University. His English was excellent, and he had a gift for television interviews. He was tech-savvy, having run a successful telecom business in the Saudi kingdom before returning to Iraq after liberation.
What’s more, he had strongly supported the U.S. war of liberation. Despite his youth—or perhaps because of it—he was widely respected on the IGC as a passionate young Reformer.
Ghazi gratefully accepted the appointment. When Bremer officially transferred full sovereignty back to the Iraqi people on Monday, June 28, 2004, it was Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer who became the president of Iraq’s interim government.
His tenure was impressive. He was well liked and well trusted, and he was not afraid to speak his mind. He publicly denounced Sunni Radicals—such as Al Qaeda in Iraq, for example—as the “armies of darkness” trying to trigger a civil war in Iraq. What’s more, he insisted these were not real Sunni Muslims, because they were killing Muslims when the Qur’an forbade such actions. The so-called Sunni Radicals were actually secular people with “sick minds.” These insurgents were more like a “mafia” than a religious movement, he argued, power-obsessed fanatics with a deep-seated “hatred of democracy.” Many, he noted, were not even Iraqis but had infiltrated from other countries. “This is not a battle between Iraqis,” he said. “This is a battle between evil and good.”513
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