The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  A few days later, I brought Aseel to the Green Zone. She had never been inside its fortified perimeter, and as we walked toward Makiya’s house down quiet tree-lined streets, past crew-cut soldiers jogging in their regulation shorts, past the trickling fountains of villas occupied by American NGOs, Aseel was amazed. “It’s a whole new city,” she said. “It’s a different country.”

  The interview took place in Makiya’s conference room, with his books stacked on the table. He told her about his Memory Foundation, questioned her about her office skills (Aseel’s knowledge of software reflected the fact that Iraq was at least a decade behind the West), and finally he said, “If you work here you will hear things about me. For example, you will hear that I’ve been to Israel.”

  Aseel looked him in the eye. This wasn’t customary for Iraqi women, least of all in conversation with someone important. But she wasn’t easily cowed, and she had something to say. “I want to have a stamp in my passport saying I’ve been to Israel, just to show it’s allowed.” Then she recounted her family’s story. When she was five, her father’s mother told her that in the 1920s the family had been attacked because they were Jews. They were hidden in the house of a Muslim family, and they decided that it was safer to become Muslims themselves than to risk more attacks. “When I asked my father about it, he said not to repeat it to anyone,” Aseel recalled. “He said, ‘The old ones would hate you, and the new ones would hate you.’” Her father meant Jews and Muslims alike. This was the secret that Aseel had hinted at on the day I met her. Speaking of it had become the ultimate test of whether she could be free.

  There was another woman in the room during Aseel’s interview. Wallada al-Sarraf was in her early fifties, a small, attractive, blunt woman with dyed hair who smoked and wore jeans and a suede jacket. There was a melancholy defiance about Wallada. She came from a family of wealthy Shiite bankers in Najaf, and as a teenager in Baghdad she collected Beatles and Stones records and traveled in the same circle of Jesuit high school friends as Makiya—the vivacious rich girl and the bookish boy from humbler stock. His architect father designed the Sarraf house. Makiya left Iraq for good in 1968, the year that he turned nineteen and she seventeen and the Baath Party took power. Then, one by one, her entire family, twelve brothers and sisters, went into exile. Wallada married a businessman and stayed behind. She had three sons, and she survived the growing repression, the wars, the decade of sanctions that destroyed the family fortune. She created her own protected world, an internal exile of poker games and art salons where friends trusted one another enough to say what they thought. She drove her boys to swimming lessons and squash games in the heat of summer so that they would expend their energy and be too tired at night to think—too tired to hate the regime, or be seduced by it, or turn to religious fanaticism like so many other Shia their age. Wallada once said to me, “Imagine living in a country where no one is allowed to discuss God or sex.” She lived there her whole life, doing all she could to preserve the atmosphere of her own youth while Iraq went backward. Then came the Americans and Kanan Makiya. Now she was working with him at the Iraq Memory Foundation.

  Toward the end of March, I took a trip with Makiya and Wallada to Kurdistan. He wanted to look at a piece of land his father owned in the mountains near Dohuk and talk to Kurdish human-rights officials about documents from the Anfal, before continuing north to give a speech in Ankara. I wanted to get out of Baghdad, which was becoming more tense by the day.

  We traveled with an old Kurdish friend of Makiya’s named Shirku Abid and his peshmerga bodyguard. Shirku, whose name means “mountain lion,” was an imposing man, with brush-cut white hair and a powerful nose under thick black eyebrows; he was a veteran of the Kurdish struggle who had lived in England for years and was now running an Internet company in Baghdad. As soon as we crossed the green line into the hills above Kirkuk, we all began to relax and chatter in loud voices. I could almost feel the pressure leaving my lungs. The hills were covered with spring wildflowers, and there were wedding parties in the fields, the Kurdish women dancing in bright red and green robes with their hair uncovered, and families were picnicking in celebration of Now Ruz, the Zoroastrian new year.

  “We were Zoroastrians before we were Muslims,” Shirku said. “And it’s a pity we didn’t stay with this civilized religion. Instead we went with this backwardness.”

  “I feel safe here,” Makiya said.

  Shirku said, “We waited so long for this great day. I’m only sorry for the comrades who didn’t live to see it. The achievement is magnificent—the end of backwardness. Not only Saddam, but backwardness. And we mustn’t stop, we must keep on struggling against the backwardness, in the mosques, everywhere. We must begin Iraq’s true liberal party.”

  The next morning we woke up at a hotel in Dohuk and did something that was impossible down south: We took a long walk. The mountain air was fresh, the lake was brilliant blue, and in the distance to the north was the snow-capped ridge that marked the border with Turkey. It was hard to believe that forty miles away, in Mosul, a war was going on. As long as we stayed on the trail to avoid old land mines there was absolutely nothing to fear. Shirku and Wallada walked ahead, and as Makiya and I followed, he told me what had happened in his life since his return to Iraq.

  When they were teenagers, he and Wallada had loved each other. But he was too shy to speak up, and some perverse instinct had compelled her to flirt with another boy on the last occasion they were together. Makiya made up his mind to forget her, and he left Iraq for college in America. When Wallada’s sister visited him in Cambridge a couple of years later, she found Makiya with an Iranian woman and wrote to Wallada that he had gotten married. It wasn’t true, but now it was Wallada’s turn to plunge into despair and try to forget. So she accepted a marriage proposal. Her husband-to-be asked, “Is there anyone else?” Wallada replied that she loved Makiya but he was now beyond her reach. She thought that she would learn to love her husband, but it never happened, and she never got over Makiya. Two and a half decades passed, in which they saw each other twice briefly outside Iraq. When Makiya returned to Baghdad in April 2003 after thirty-five years away, they met at a dinner party and realized that nothing had changed. He was in the process of getting a divorce from his second wife, but Wallada was still unhappily married. They were working together now, traveling together, and enmeshed in a secret relationship that satisfied neither of them. As we caught up with Wallada and Shirku, Makiya said that he had seen the same thing happen in places like Lebanon: During historic upheavals, people’s personal lives underwent their own revolutions.

  We drove farther north, to Amadiya, a walled Ottoman city on a hilltop at the foot of the steep mountain range along the border. We sat at an outdoor restaurant with a view across a plunging ravine of Amadiya and the spectacular white peaks beyond it. There were Arab families here on vacation from the south; I’d heard that doctors and other professionals from Baghdad were taking cuts in salary and status to come work in the safety of Kurdistan. As we ate, I watched Makiya and Wallada, realizing now that her wry deflating tone, her refusal to grant him his lofty thoughts—“Kanan doesn’t know this country, he thinks they want what he wants”—expressed the opposite of contempt. She wanted him, not Iraq; but she had them together, and it was terrible.

  Shirku took in the sublime landscape with a sweep of his hand and cursed. “Bloody British! Couldn’t they see this isn’t Iraq?”

  Our destination was the old border town of Zakhu, where Makiya and Wallada would spend the night before crossing into Turkey. As we finished the last part of the drive in darkness, Shirku told us the story of his student years in Baghdad, when he was both a communist and a Kurdish nationalist. It was 1963, and the Baath Party, having taken power for the first time in a coup, was trying to wipe out its enemies. Shirku was arrested and thrown in jail. The Baathists had many enemies, and they kept the Nasserists in one cell, the communists and Kurds across the corridor in another. Shirku endured several days of b
eatings, of being hung in the air from his wrists with his arms behind his back. He had expected to be arrested and tortured ever since he was recruited into the Kurdish movement by an older man named Mohamed Sadiq, and he found that he was able to endure it. Sadiq himself had disappeared. One day, jailers threw a body into the cell—barely a skeleton, skin on bone, with blood all over the face and the eyes gouged out. “I was afraid to look,” Shirku said. The small shape of the head was familiar. “I had a feeling it might be him.” Shirku approached the body and whispered in the ear, “Mr. Sadiq, this is you and this is me. I’m Shirku here.”

  Shirku gave him water. Sadiq could hardly speak, but in a croaking voice he said, “I’m going to die. And I tell you, I didn’t confess, I didn’t say anything about you or your other comrades. But that means that your life belongs to me. My life is in your hand now. You have to work all your life for the thing I died for.”

  Sadiq made Shirku repeat an oath, which Shirku repeated to us thirty-one years later in the car: “I swear on my honor and the honor of Kurdistan and my people that I will always be frank and truthful with what I think, what I do, to keep distance from whatever makes me weak, to strive to succeed with my struggle, and not to separate my life and my fate from the poor people of this earth. I will not be afraid of anyone on this earth, and I will not bow my head to anyone on this earth. I will dedicate my life and my fate for the unification and liberation of Kurdistan.”

  Sadiq was taken away the next morning to die. Shirku was eventually released, but he left jail with an insatiable desire for revenge. It wouldn’t leave him alone; he couldn’t live with it. After the Baathists were thrown out of power toward the end of 1963, he heard that one of his torturers had been arrested. Shirku lied his way into the prison and found the man in his cell. He kicked him hard in the stomach until the jailers intervened. It didn’t satisfy Shirku completely, but he found that he could live again.

  Makiya, who had been listening carefully, said, “It’s interesting, Shirku. You don’t like weakness in other people, do you? But we’re weak, we human beings.”

  “That’s true,” Shirku said. “I don’t like it.”

  I asked Makiya what kind of oath he would take if his life were on the line.

  “Mine would be as close as possible to an idea,” he said. “It would be a liberal idea, it would be an idea that started in Iraq but extended to the rest of the Arab-Muslim world.” He had advocated this idea in all of his books, he said, but now he was tired of simply writing: He wanted to live it, here in Iraq. “Now here’s a problem I have, you see. I, unlike Shirku, have grown deeply aware of my own weaknesses and my own frailties. It’s difficult in conditions like that, when your idea rests on a notion of our frailty as a species, to swear allegiance to an ideal. Because the premise is our weakness, our inability to hold up to impossible ideals.”

  Makiya’s answer didn’t completely satisfy Shirku. “George, for forty years I wanted to take over the machine that tortured me and reverse-engineer it, crush it, and then make it work for me.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “You have to protect the liberal values with that ruthlessness,” Shirku said, and in the darkness of the car I could almost feel his fist clenching. “We are talking about defending a future of generations, and that cannot be done just by some slogans. You’ve got to protect it. You cannot escape from that, especially in a society like Iraq. It’s impossible to escape. It means you are not serious about your liberal ideas if you don’t protect it.” This ruthlessness involved forcefully pushing liberal ideas, but it also meant, as he put it, stopping certain people from breathing—thugs such as Moqtada al-Sadr. “Then you will attract a lot of militias, people in parties, intellectuals, attract them into this momentum and then give them direction. If they know the direction has also strength behind it, force behind it, there’s hope of reverse-engineering this process of madness, backwardness—getting out of this backwardness. There’s not any other way you can do it. But now, in the absence of that, this backwardness is flourishing here, and it’s truly a disappointment to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of liberal and forward-thinking people in Iraq.”

  A week later, I was back in Baghdad. On the day before my departure from Iraq, the CPA closed down Moqtada al-Sadr’s newspaper al-Hawza for sixty days for inciting attacks against coalition forces. But as a show of strength it only revealed weakness, for the Americans hadn’t prepared for what followed. That night, thousands of Moqtada’s militiamen took to the streets. Their chants could be heard all over the city. Wallada, who had also returned to Baghdad, was driving home when she ran into a mob of young men in black brandishing Kalashnikovs. American soldiers were trying to block the militiamen, and they looked as scared as she felt. Wallada quickly threw a scarf over her hair and somehow managed to reach the house, where she was trapped. It was the first night of an insurrection that would last the better part of two months. By the end, much of what the occupation had been trying to achieve in Iraq lay in ruins.

  9

  INSURGENCIES

  CAPTAIN JOHN PRIOR’S TOUR in Iraq was scheduled to end in the middle of March, almost exactly a year after he entered the country with the invasion force. Prior made the final rounds of the humble offices where he’d put in so much time: the gas station, the propane station, the sewer department. His Iraqi counterparts didn’t disguise their feelings: They were dismayed to see him leave. “We were like wounded people thrown in the road, and no one would stop,” the director general of the district sewer department told Prior, “and you came along and picked us up and saved us. This is how we look at it. Religion, nationality—none of this matters.”

  I accompanied Prior to his last meeting with the Zafaraniya Neighborhood Advisory Council that he had helped coax into existence. The NAC (Prior was now pronouncing it with a soft c after learning that “nack” was Iraqi slang for “fuck”) met at the unlovely concrete housing project for employees of the Atomic Energy Commission. The sewage swamps of the previous August were gone. Prior sat down in a cramped office with nine or ten council members. They were unhappy to be losing him, but the council members spent their last two hours with Prior complaining bitterly. “Our authority as the NAC is still shaky,” Ahmad Ogali, the chairman who had invited me to lunch in August, said. “I don’t want compliments and nice phrases. People don’t trust us. They come up to us and ask for something, and we can’t do anything for them. It makes us look bad.”

  In fact, because of a dispute with the Governing Council, Paul Bremer had let months go by without signing the legal order drafted by the CPA in late 2003 that would spell out the authority of the local councils. This delay, along with the two-and-a-half-month stoppage of the military’s emergency funds, left the councils and the soldiers working with them in limbo, bringing reconstruction to a near standstill, and preventing local government from developing into a power center that could compete with the militias and the insurgents for popular support. All of this was far above Prior’s level, but as the American in the room he was the one to hear about it.

  When the meeting ended, Prior stood and said with a touch of ceremony, “I leave here knowing that the job is not finished. There will always be a hole in my heart because I couldn’t see it through to the end. But I leave knowing that Baghdad and Zafaraniya are in good hands, because they’re in yours.” He presented the council members a certificate of appreciation. “I hope to come back someday with my family to see my friends here,” he said, “and I promise not to wear tan or green.”

  A councilman said, “We give you thanks, and apologies for any mistakes we might have made.”

  “No apologies necessary. If anything, we are guests in your nation and we should be apologizing for our flaws.”

  Prior left Iraq for Germany, then went home on leave to see his fiancée. In early April, violence exploded all across Iraq. The two precipitating events behind the uprisings had come in the last days of March: the closing of al-Hawz
a by the CPA on March 28, and the killing of four American private security contractors by insurgents in Falluja on March 31, their bodies subsequently charred, hacked to pieces, and strung up from a bridge over the Euphrates by a delirious mob. The Falluja incident was a gruesome but predictable ratcheting up of the war in the west. The newspaper shutdown was a self-inflicted American wound. But the origins of the crisis that followed lay further back and deeper down than the two events at the end of March. The decisions surrounding both of them showed how precarious American control in Iraq had grown during the year of the occupation, how badly all the gears were meshing—between Americans and Iraqis, between military and civilian, between Baghdad and Washington.

  * * *

  THE GUERRILLA WAR that followed the invasion of Iraq caught the U.S. military by surprise. It shouldn’t have. The CIA issued several secret prewar intelligence reports warning of the possibility of an insurgency. During the sprint from Kuwait to Baghdad, the Fedayeen Saddam, the paramilitary forces led by Saddam’s younger son Qusay, harassed the invaders’ supply lines with hit-and-run attacks and intimidated Iraqi civilians by publicly and brutally murdering those who welcomed the Americans. Lieutenant General William Wallace, the commander of V Corps, observed, “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we war-gamed against.” The first suicide bombings hit American checkpoints around the time Baghdad fell; a few weeks after that, what the military called improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, began blowing up convoys in the capital. General Franks’s achievement of toppling the regime in just three weeks, hailed at the time as a brilliant new form of warfare, allowed thousands of Iraqis to melt away into the population or go into hiding and fight another day. Franks and the administration’s civilian leaders would later describe the chaos and insurgency that followed the fall of the regime as the inadvertent consequences of their war plan’s “catastrophic success.” As it turned out, there was nothing inadvertent about it.