The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  At the end of one long day, an old Kurdish farmer approached Luna’s desk. She presented him with a consent form that granted the government ownership of his family’s land in exchange for several thousand dinars. The procedures were finished; all that remained was for him to sign.

  “I would like some water first,” the old man said. Luna gave him a glass. He drank the water, signed the form, and fell dead in her lap.

  “The things I saw,” Luna told me, “nobody saw.”

  A few weeks before the American invasion, the government in Baghdad sent a secret order to officials in Kirkuk: Immediately burn all paperwork related to the Central Housing Plan—the regime’s euphemism for the ethnic-cleansing campaign. The Baathists were meticulous record keepers; outside the municipal building, officials torched three large garbage containers filled with papers, and the bonfire lasted almost twenty-four hours.

  Luna decided to ignore the order. “I can’t burn these things,” she said. “How can we compensate these people if these documents are burned?” Her motives were not entirely altruistic. Luna was a Baathist (a requirement of the job), and she wanted to protect herself against any accusations of misappropriating funds. She was also an admitted busybody. “You know, I put my nose in everything,” she said. “I want to know everything.” So she lied to her boss, and instead of burning the files she secretly drove several carloads back to the house in Arrapha that she shared with Fula and another unmarried sister. When I met Luna, most of the documents were kept on the roof of city hall, in an airless slant-ceilinged storeroom to which only she had the key. A waist-high sea of paper and dust inside had yet to attract the interest of either Iraqi or American officials, although among the documents that Luna salvaged were secret letters that exposed the Baath Party’s sustained effort to transform Kirkuk from Iraq’s most diverse city into a place dominated by Arabs loyal to the regime.

  Luna’s files spoke about not just the past but the future. After the invasion, Kirkuk became the stage of an ethnic power struggle. Kirkuk was compared to New York and, more often, to Sarajevo. How the new Iraq corrected the historical injustices recorded in the files would reveal much about the kind of country Iraqis chose to live in—or if it would remain a country at all.

  Inside the storeroom, Luna waded through the files and stooped to inspect them with a kind of wit’s-end affection, like a mother with too many unruly children. “Look—look—how many people? This land—this land—how many people?” she cried. “How could I work this all? Do you know how much I have in my mind? All this! All this! I must get it out!”

  * * *

  KIRKUK SAT NEAR THE FOOTHILLS of the Zagros Mountains, not far from the southern border of Kurdistan, the autonomous region that broke free of Baathist control in 1991. During the decades of intermittent fighting between the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas, the regime regarded Kirkuk, with oil fields outside the city comprising almost 9 percent of Iraq’s total reserves, as strategically vulnerable. In part, the Arabization program was aimed at securing Baghdad’s authority over this valuable resource. But the essence of Arabization was ideological. The history and demography of Kirkuk were an affront to the fascist dreams of the Arab Baath Socialist Party. It was a dense, cosmopolitan city along a trade route between Constantinople and Persia, and its layers of successive civilizations had nothing to do with Arab glory. Around the city’s markets and the citadel, residents still lived in close quarters, and a visitor found the variety of faces and dress, tolerant manners, public female presence, and polyglot street life of a mixed city. Kirkuk felt closer to Istanbul than to Baghdad.

  One local historian, an elderly Arab named Yasin Ali al-Hussein, told me that Kirkuk was built by Jewish slaves of the Babylonian captivity. Although scholars doubt this version, until the creation of Israel in 1948 several thousand Jews lived behind low arched doorways in the city’s twisted back streets, many of them near the old souk at the foot of the citadel. An Armenian church dated from the first millennium. (Christians made up roughly 5 percent of the population.) In the fourth century B.C., Xenophon noted the presence of an ethnic group that might have been Kurdish. Turkomans from central Asia, ethnically different from Turks, migrated to the region about a thousand years ago. During Ottoman rule, which was established at the citadel in the sixteenth century and lasted until the arrival of British troops during the First World War, many educated Turkomans became imperial officeholders, while Kurdish shepherds coming down from the mountains provided labor. More than a century ago, Arab immigrants began settling around Kirkuk, mostly in the farmland west and south of the city; these “original Arabs” were distinct in almost every way from those imported by the Baathist regime. E. B. Soane, a British intelligence officer who traveled through Mesopotamia disguised as a local in the years before the First World War, observed, “Kirkuk is thus a collection of all the races of eastern Turkey—Jew, Arab, Syrian, Armenian, Chaldean, Turk, Turkoman, and Kurd—and consequently enjoys considerable freedom from fanaticism.”

  Fanaticism became the legacy of the ethnic cleansing. After the fall of the regime, every aspect of Kirkuk’s history was violently contested. Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomans all made claims of ethnic primacy in a city where there were only pluralities. (According to the 1957 census, conducted before Arabization began, the city was 40 percent Turkoman and 35 percent Kurdish.) The elderly Arab historian refused to answer whether the Turkomans had come to Kirkuk before or after the Ottomans—the question was too sensitive. Ali Bayatli, a Turkoman lawyer, insisted that his people were direct descendants of the Sumerians and therefore the first residents of Kirkuk, with unspecified rights. Kurdish politicians had two slogans designed to end any argument: “Kirkuk is the heart of Kurdistan” and “Kirkuk is the Jerusalem of the Kurds.” Arabs, meanwhile, were angry about the sudden loss of power that followed the removal of Saddam. Luna Dawood’s view of her city’s future was grim. “It will be war till the end,” she said. “Everyone says Kirkuk belongs to us: Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans. To whom will it belong? We want America to stay here and change minds, to teach what’s freedom, what’s human. That’s what our people don’t know. They are animals.”

  Fifteen miles outside the city, on a road heading northwest, I met Mohamed Khader, a Kurdish farmer who was hoeing a vegetable garden next to a cluster of ruined-looking houses. Khader had recently returned to the area from Erbil, a city in Kurdistan, where he worked as a butcher. After the invasion, he and his two wives, their ten children, and twenty-five other families followed American and Kurdish soldiers south into Iraq, with the goal of reclaiming Amshaw, their ancestral village, from Arab settlers. Khader, who wore the traditional Kurdish pants that are drawn tight around the waist and ankles but hang loose around the legs, took me up into the surrounding hills. It was spring, and across the vivid green grass were patches of yellow wildflowers and bloodred roses, tragic emblems of Kurdish poetry.

  “This was the village,” Khader said, pointing at a pattern of grassy humps on the hillside. Shards of terra-cotta pottery lay in the dirt. “That was our house. Exactly here.” Farther up the hill, a field of jagged headstones marked the village cemetery.

  In 1961, the first phase of the long war between Iraq’s central government and Kurdish peshmerga began. The rebel Kurds demanded linguistic and cultural rights, control over regional security and financial affairs, and authority over Kirkuk and its oil. In 1963, following the coup that first brought Baathists to power, Iraqi soldiers attacked Amshaw and other villages. Khader was three years old. “I remember it like a dream,” he said, “a bad dream, with children crying and people fighting and dying.” The villagers fled north and were forced to retreat all the way to Erbil. Amshaw was razed.

  I asked Khader if his family was ever compensated for their loss.

  “Are you making fun of me?” he said, staring in disbelief. “They took everything. You see how I am now? That’s just how we left—no blankets, nothing.”

  For a decade, the central gove
rnment and the Kurdish guerrillas alternated between fighting and negotiating. The issues remained the same, up until now, and the cycle of distrust and misjudgment and betrayal was never broken: Kurdish demands, Arab acquiescence out of military weakness, increased Kurdish demands, Arab betrayal from a position of strength. After the Baath Party returned to power in 1968, Saddam himself, in secret talks with the Kurdish leader Mustapha Barzani, committed the regime to nearly everything the Kurds were asking, including a future vote on the status of Kirkuk after a census. The dwellings next to the vegetable garden where I met Mohamed Khader were built during this rapprochement—ostensibly to house returning Kurds in what was to be called New Amshaw. But the lands around Amshaw were already being distributed to Arab tribes from the south. When negotiations collapsed and fighting broke out again, the houses in New Amshaw were given to Arabs. In 1975, after the shah of Iran—prompted by Henry Kissinger—signed an accord with Baghdad and withdrew Iranian support for the Kurds, resistance collapsed. Oil-rich and militarily unchallenged, the regime began to Arabize Kirkuk in earnest.

  * * *

  SABIHA HAMOOD and her husband were Arabs who moved their family to Kirkuk from Baghdad in the late 1980s, lured by a free house and ten thousand dinars. “Arabs like us are known as the benefiters,” she said. “We came here just to live in a house. My husband used to work in the Ministry of Housing, but it wasn’t enough money to buy a house.” Like Hamood, the overwhelming majority of the benefiters were Shia, and many were employed in the military, the state security apparatus, or the civil service. The house offered to Hamood’s family was in a middle-class neighborhood called Taseen, across the road from the Kirkuk air base. It had been an almost entirely Turkoman neighborhood until, near the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the regime decided that Turkomans posed a security risk to the base. There was no policy of deporting Turkomans as there was of Kurds, so the five or six hundred families bought out in Taseen were scattered around the city. Hamood convinced herself that the former owner of her house had been handsomely compensated and bore no grudge.

  Several doors down was the house that once belonged to the family of Fakheraldin Akbar, a Turkoman woman who worked with Luna in the finance department. The house had been built by her father—two stories, nine rooms. One day in 1988, the family received a government letter declaring that a railroad was going to be built through the neighborhood. “They gave us three days,” Akbar recalled. “On the second day, policemen were standing outside the door. We took our furniture and went to stay with an aunt on the road to Baghdad.” The family was awarded a sum that represented less than a quarter the value of the house. The railroad was never built. A few years ago, attending a funeral in her old neighborhood, Akbar decided to go and look at the house for the first time since the family’s eviction. “I said to myself, ‘Let me just walk past the door. I won’t speak to them—why should I? I don’t know them, they don’t know me.’” The benefiters who were given the house had painted its beautiful wooden front door blue.

  Ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk proceeded in piecemeal fashion, but the Baathists were following a master plan. The plan was to make Kirkuk a predominantly Arab city, with a security belt of Arab neighborhoods encircling it, especially along the vulnerable northern and eastern edges, which faced Kurdistan. Accordingly, Kurds were forbidden by law to build, buy, or improve houses in Kirkuk. Any Kurdish family that couldn’t prove residence in Kirkuk from the 1957 census had no legal right to live there, which meant that thousands of Kurds were displaced to refugee camps in Kurdistan or else to inhospitable regions in the south. After 1980, the teaching of languages other than Arabic was forbidden in city schools. Kurds and other non-Arabs in Kirkuk were frozen out of government jobs; before the war, according to one Kurdish official, the oil company had eleven thousand employees, of whom eighteen were Kurds. The entire families of Kurdish peshmerga, of draft evaders, and of other security threats were deported. Kurdish neighborhoods were declared illegal and razed in order to widen a road, to build a munitions factory or a stadium, to expand a base—but always, to reduce the Kurdish population and replace it with Arabs.

  Some Kurds were given a choice: Leave the city or else become an Arab. This was called “correcting” one’s nationality, and thousands of Kurds and Turkomans agreed to undergo the humiliation in order to stay in Kirkuk or hold on to a job or obtain a business license. In Luna’s office, I met a middle-aged Turkoman engineer named Abdulrahman Sadiq. “I’ll tell you a nice story,” he said. In 1980, Sadiq’s family was displaced from a village called Bilawa, just outside the city limits near the air base, along with the other villagers, all Turkomans. His family, whose lands were given to an Arab, moved into the city. In 1999, Sadiq decided to buy a piece of land in Kirkuk. He was told that, in order to register the land in his own name, he needed to correct his nationality. He swallowed his pride and became an Arab—only to be told that he still couldn’t put the land in his name, because, although now an Arab, he was from Bilawa, not Kirkuk. So he had to register the property with his sister-in-law, who had also corrected her nationality but who was born in the city. The web of rules in which individual lives were caught, and the attendant indignities and absurdities, were an Iraqi version of apartheid.

  In her downtown office, a Kurdish architect and lifelong resident of Kirkuk named Hawry Talabani unfurled a map of the Baathists’ twenty-year urban master plan, drawn up in 1972 by a Greek company hired by the regime. The plan allowed for the city to be developed in one direction only—south, toward Baghdad. These became the Arabization neighborhoods, and they had a different feel from the old city—the lethargy of an overgrown village, with men wearing white dishdashas and women completely enshrouded in black abayas, the new buildings thrown up in graceless concrete along wide, empty streets. The few Kurdish and Turkoman neighborhoods in the center of town that survived demolition became strangled with traffic and were deprived of parks, sewers, and public transportation. The waters of the Khasa River were diverted west to irrigate Arab farmland, and the dried-up riverbed filled with garbage. While social engineering proceeded on a grand scale, the oil-rich city fell into ruin. “There was not a sincere thought of making Kirkuk a real city,” Talabani said. “Instead of development we are going back, every year.”

  A Kurdish journalist named Omar Abdelkhader took me around a very old neighborhood called Imam Qasim, along the riverbed just north of the citadel. He was born and grew up in Imam Qasim, the grandson of a mullah and the son of a teacher who led a clandestine Kurdish political organization in Kirkuk. The father was arrested in 1986 and executed in 1987; in 1988, Abdelkhader and his mother and sisters were put in a government truck and dumped beyond the provincial border. Over the years, the cousins and neighbors he left behind were packed into smaller and smaller quarters; compounds built for two or three families had to contain ten or twelve. In the back streets of Imam Qasim, antique houses of stone and mud in the Turkish style, with painted spiral pillars on either side of the doorway and arches around an inner courtyard, were literally caving in from neglect. Even the hilltop Kurdish cemetery where Abdelkhader’s father lay buried was as dense and confined as the city. “You can say Kurds were just surviving here. It wasn’t a life,” Abdelkhader said. “It’s like plant or animal species under threat. What Kurds were doing here to survive—they were changing their nationality, they were hiding themselves, they were eating shit, they were doing the worst jobs. Anything just to survive.”

  The year Abdelkhader’s family was expelled from Kirkuk, 1988, was the climax of the regime’s persecution of Kurds. The destruction of Kurdish villages in the mountains—known as the Anfal, a separate effort from the ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk—reached genocidal proportions, with chemical weapons used against civilians in Halabja and elsewhere. Toward the end of that year, the governor of Kirkuk wrote a letter to the official responsible for Arabization, the general secretary of the Northern Committee, Taha Yassin Ramadan—who, in addition to being Saddam’s close friend a
nd cellmate from youth and, more recently, the ten of diamonds in the deck of most-wanted playing cards, was a Kurd. Iraqis knew him as “the Butcher.” This letter, which was among the documents that Luna salvaged from city hall, offered a report on an intensive phase of the ethnic-cleansing campaign in Kirkuk, from June 1, 1985, to October 31, 1988.

  “We would like to inform you that we have followed the strict orders and instructions that you made for our work, which pushed us to work harder to serve the citizens, the sons of the courageous leader of victory and peace, Mr. President the Patriot Saddam Hussein (may God save him),” the governor wrote. What followed was a detailed statistical account of three years of ethnic cleansing:

  • 19,146 people removed from villages “forbidden for security reasons”

  • registration documents of 96,533 people transferred from Kirkuk to Erbil province in preparation for removal

  • 2405 families removed from villages lying near forbidden oil facilities

  • 10,918 Arab families, including 53,834 people, transferred to Kirkuk from other provinces

  • 8250 pieces of residential land and 1112 houses distributed to Arab families transferred from other provinces

  The letter noted that these removals, transfers, and distributions created a net gain of 51,862 Arabs in the province and a net loss of 18,096 Kurds during this period, making Arabs the largest group in Kirkuk for the first time. In addition, seven measures were taken “to make the city more beautiful,” including scattering all sellers of vegetables and fruits from the central city market to points around the city. “For any new building or service project that will be built,” the governor wrote to Baghdad, “we will give the priority to the new neighborhoods.” The letter concluded: “All this made it an easy matter to renew the surveillance process to prevent the leaking back in of families who have been included in the displacement, and also to prevent the leaking of saboteurs into the city … Now the displacement process from the city center is taking its course.”