The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Two years later, just before the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam made his announcement outside Kirkuk’s municipal building that all human life be removed from the citadel. According to Gha’ab Fadhel, the director of Kirkuk’s archaeological museum, who oversaw the bulldozing of dwellings, the purpose of the citadel project was simply to excavate and restore ancient monuments. The 850 Ottoman-era houses on the site were ill kept, unhygienically crowded, and mostly occupied by poor renters. “Their removal had nothing to do with politics,” he insisted. But the citadel was the heart of the city. On the Muslim holiday of Eid, Christians joined Muslims to celebrate at the Tomb of the Prophets, an ancient shrine where Daniel and Ezra were apocryphally said to be buried. On Christian holidays, the Muslims reciprocated.

  At the souk below the citadel walls, the Turkoman owner of a women’s dress shop recalled that, years ago, the citadel was the site of many feasts. In the quiet of summer evenings, he used to hear the sound of cooking oil, and the scent of grilled meat would drift down into the market. “From what I hear,” he said, “Turkomans were living there.”

  “Why do you say that?” a Kurdish customer asked. “We were living there, too.”

  Across the alley from his shop, a Turkoman woman selling shoes and purses told me, “We were the last people to leave the citadel.” Her father, a wealthy trader in seeds, had a large house by the western gate that overlooked the river. He built houses on the citadel for Jews whom he employed as scribes. “We had relations with so many people on the citadel,” she said. “Like family, not neighbors.” One day, Baathists knocked at the door: The family had a month to vacate their house. “The citadel was the most beautiful place,” she said. “My childhood was there. I see it every day.” She pointed to the remains of a stone wall, overgrown with yellow grass, just visible above the shops across the alley.

  The Gulf War and sanctions delayed the final destruction of the houses until 1998. By then, the citadel had been empty for eight years, and no one was allowed up there except members of a Republican Guard unit, who were positioned on the citadel to suppress an uprising or attack. The attack came in April 2003, in a wave of Kurdish peshmerga and American Special Forces soldiers sweeping down from the north, and the dream of Arab Kirkuk collapsed overnight.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS after the liberation of Kirkuk, a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant with the 173rd Airborne Brigade named Jordan Becker was told by his company commander to sort out a problem in Arrapha, the neighborhood where Luna Dawood lived. Among the thousands of Kurdish deportees who had come back to Kirkuk after the war to reclaim houses and land—in some cases chasing out Arab occupants, in others finding that the Arabs had fled—sixty-seven families were squatting in the fine houses abandoned by top oil company officials in Arrapha. The Kurds had been living for years in refugee camps in the hills around Suleimaniya. Becker, who had a shelf full of books on Kurdish language and Middle Eastern history in his tent at the American base, was given the mission to tell the Kurds that they had to vacate so that the oil officials could return and the industry could be revived. At the first house that he visited, the wife swore that if the Americans made her leave, she would light herself on fire.

  The lieutenant returned to the base and conferred with his captain. They decided that he should go back and try again, but this time Becker, a blue-eyed southern Californian who was built like a corner-back, left his body armor behind. In this less threatening guise, he sat down with the family for two hours. “I knew their lives had been miserable,” Becker said, “and I knew they were going to go on being miserable for a while. When you read about history and politics, you don’t learn about the mentality of these people. And what I learned about these people is that they have a sense of history and historic patience. They have a sense of what’s best for their community, and when you convinced them that they were going to drive a wedge between their community and the Arabs, and between their community and the Americans, they realized they didn’t want to do that.” Becker’s argument to the Kurds was an abstract one: “If you have a house in a country that’s unstable and violent, then all you have is a house. But if you have a house in a country that’s stable and ruled by law, then you have a lot more than a house.” Then he made his approach in more concrete terms. “I know you’ll find a place to live, because you’re Kurds, and you haven’t had a place to live for twelve years, and you haven’t had a country ever. But just because you won a war doesn’t mean you’ll get shit for free. But if you support law over victor’s justice, you’ll be investing in the future of Iraq.” Becker smiled. “And they said, ‘That’s cool.’”

  The Kurdish squatters left Arrapha. That was in the early weeks, when the Kurds regarded the Americans as saviors and were willing to postpone rectification a little longer. The paratroopers in Kirkuk were far out ahead of their counterparts in Baghdad that first summer. The companies lived in safe houses around the city rather than out at the isolated air base; Becker’s battalion hired fifty translators locally because the American company with the contract was going too slowly; the soldiers moved around Kirkuk with ease, sometimes in SUVs; the battalion had already opened nine police stations with seventeen hundred cops chosen with a careful eye to ethnic balance and equipped with vehicles and weapons. The CPA was a distant nuisance that didn’t approve plans or release money nearly fast enough to satisfy the 173rd Airborne Brigade. For the time being, Kirkuk felt like a city under control.

  As paratroopers, they were used to three-week missions, and Becker’s battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Dom Caraccilo, a stocky, impatient, snuff-dipping forty-one-year-old from upstate New York, made no secret of his frustration at being stuck in Iraq for months on end. “If you’re going in to kill something, you’ve got to set it up so when you leave you can achieve the goals and objectives you went in there with,” Caraccilo said in his gravelly voice, as we sat in his quarters and he spat into a water bottle. “In the past we had this ‘civil-affairs battalion will come in and take care of civil affairs.’ That’s bullshit—it doesn’t work. Why it doesn’t work, I don’t know.” The soldiers who were trained to operate mortars and call in air strikes now had nothing to do, so they trained the police force. The signal operators worked with the fire department and emergency services. The support and transportation platoon resettled returning refugees. But the chief role that the Americans played in ethnically divided Kirkuk was, as one soldier put it, that of “a bouncer in the middle of a nasty bar fight.”

  When I went back to Kirkuk in the summer of 2004, a new unit had taken over, and the historic patience of the Kurds was running out. The rhetoric of the city’s three major ethnic groups was growing extreme, and the prestige of the Americans had plummeted. Lieutenant Becker’s speech to the family in Arrapha articulated better than any high officials the policy of the occupation authority: Old grievances must be settled according to law, not force. Until a legal mechanism was in place, the status quo had to be maintained. Yet, more than a year after the removal of Saddam, the legal mechanism for resolving individual property cases had barely begun to function. As for a larger political solution to the status of Kirkuk, the occupation authority avoided imposing one, and the interim constitution postponed it until an elected government could write a permanent constitution. Kirkuk remained dangerously stalled, while facts that could force the most extreme outcome steadily accumulated on the ground.

  After the invasion, thousands of Arabs in the north were uprooted from their homes. A report by the refugee organization Global IDP put the total number at a hundred thousand, although the absence of international organizations in Iraq made it impossible to reach an accurate count. Northwest of Kirkuk, in the village of Amshaw, Mohamed Khader and the other Kurds expelled in 1963 had taken over the partly demolished houses of the Arabs who were brought to Amshaw in the 1970s. The houses were abandoned when the Kurds arrived, Khader said. I found those same Arabs squatting in the bombed barracks and helicopter hangars of an Iraqi air
force base just west of the city, near the American base. Two old men who spoke for the fifty-two families there said that Kurdish fighters had chased them out of Amshaw at the end of the war.

  “We have young men who believe Amshaw belongs to them,” one of the Arab men, Ali Aday, said. “I tell them, ‘My son, they say it belongs to the Kurds.’ They say, ‘How can it? We were born and raised in those houses.’” The old man pointed out that the number of Kurdish families who had taken over Amshaw was just half the number of Arabs who had fled—there were enough houses in Amshaw for twenty-five Arab families to return and live together with the Kurds. “We just want to know who will give us our rights,” Ali Aday said. American soldiers in the area had given the refugees blankets and food and told them to stay put until the problem could be sorted out by law. “Where is the government that will give us our rights? Is it from America? From the Iraqi government? We don’t know. It isn’t possible to just leave us here without our rights.”

  A mile away, a forlorn camp of seventeen tents stood in a field next to a military pillbox. A ragged turquoise flag with a crescent moon and star—the symbol of the militant Iraqi Turkoman Front—hung limply in the heat. The camp was also symbolic—the tents were empty—but a handful of men were standing watch. They were Turkomans who had been expelled in 1980 from Bilawa, the village of the engineer who had corrected his nationality. They showed me copies of property deeds from 1938, black negative images of British documents; they also had Ottoman-era deeds, they said. Part of their land had been taken over by the air force base, and another part was occupied by a wealthy Arab supporter of the old regime, who refused to leave. The Turkomans also claimed the land where the Arab refugees were squatting in helicopter hangars. It was hard to imagine how all this could ever be worked out.

  “The solution is for everyone to go back to where they’re from,” one Turkoman said. “Before Saddam, where were these Arabs? This is the solution, exactly. We want it just like before Saddam.”

  On the other side of the city, hundreds of Kurdish families had taken up residence in the tunnels and under the grandstands of Kirkuk’s soccer stadium, which was built in a razed Kurdish neighborhood. On a dusty plain beside the stadium, hundreds more families were living in tents. The director of a Kurdish refugee organization estimated that nine thousand families had returned to Kirkuk. Most of them were expelled more than a decade ago—taken by government truck beyond the provincial border and dumped in no-man’s-land with the few belongings they had managed to salvage—and had lived in refugee camps ever since. More of them were pouring into Kirkuk every day—at the height of the return, as many as five hundred a day—even though living conditions were squalid and almost no help was offered by the Americans, international aid groups, or the city government. A Kurdish man named Farhad Mohamed echoed what the Arabs on the other side of the city told me. “I really don’t know who will give us a house, because there are many many governments in Iraq,” he said. “We hope the new government won’t be like Saddam’s.”

  The two chief Kurdish political parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, began to accelerate the return of Kurds in advance of a census and elections. Government employees in Suleimaniya, northeast of Kirkuk, were told to return to Kirkuk and promised that their salaries would be sustained until they found new positions. In Erbil, forty Kurdish families originally from Kirkuk were ordered to vacate the government building in which they had lived for years as refugees and that a politically connected businessman planned to turn into a supermarket; they were given three thousand dollars apiece and sent back to their hometown. A month later, I found a number of them in Kirkuk, building simple houses illegally in the old Kurdish neighborhoods of Azadi and Rahimawa. Others without means were squatting in government buildings; others still, with political contacts or firepower, had chased Arabs out and taken back their old houses or simply laid claim to new ones. Some Arab leaders told me that Kurds, including ones who had never lived in Kirkuk, were moving to the city in order to tip the ethnic scale. One of them called the effort “Kurdification.”

  Meanwhile, Arab “benefiters” were leaving. Sabiha Hamood, the woman who moved with her family from Baghdad in the late 1980s into the old Turkoman neighborhood of Taseen, sold the house a few months after I met her, taking advantage of the inflated prices that Kurds were willing to pay. In Qadisiya, a neighborhood in the south of the city, I met a group of Arab men attending a funeral. They took me back to a dingy cinder-block house, into which three families who had been forced from their homes were squeezed. In the immediate neighborhood, they said, a hundred Arab families had sold their houses to Kurds and left the city. The men were Shia, former policemen and soldiers, now unemployed and filled with grievances. Riyadh Shayoob, who came to Kirkuk from Basra in 1986, when he was five, had been driven from his house in a Kurdish area and been refused employment by the new Iraqi police force. He was making a meager living selling trinkets in the souk, where he suffered contempt and threats from Kurds. Some of them, he said, mockingly sold CDs with images of Arab prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib. “They told me, ‘Go back where you came from. Don’t stay in Kirkuk,’” Shayoob said with a melancholy smile. “Before, I had Kurdish friends, but now they don’t support me. They’ve turned against us.”

  Government jobs went to Kurds; the mayor and the police chief were Kurds; all the television networks were in Kurdish; the Arabs were being driven out of the city; the Arabs had no one powerful to back them: The list of Arab complaints was long, and it bore a striking resemblance to the predicament of the Kurds in Kirkuk under Saddam. To these men, the Kurds were now the benefiters. “There’s more injustice now than under Saddam,” a bearded, tough-looking man named Ethir Mohamed insisted. “Even if Saddam did these things, what’s our guilt? We did nothing to them.”

  In Kirkuk, the Arab-Kurdish conflict was intensified by the insurgency. The Kurds were often considered collaborators of the Americans, while many of the imported Arabs sympathized with the Sunni or Shiite resistance forces. Moqtada al-Sadr often thundered that the Kurds were Muslim apostates and faced damnation; hundreds of Kurds fled to Kirkuk from Samarra and other Arab cities after being denounced in Sunni mosques as traitors. The Arab men in the cinder-block house were followers of Sadr’s representative in Kirkuk; their mosque had been raided by American soldiers who discovered a cache of weapons and arrested around thirty people. All of the men vowed to stay in the city. “Kirkuk has turned into a jungle,” Ethir Mohamed said. “If someone comes to force me to leave, then either I’ll kill him or he’ll kill me. This is the law of the jungle.”

  Among imported Arabs, I heard that the chemical weapons dropped on Halabja were actually sacks of plaster dust. This theory was offered by a fireman employed by the oil company, whose house in Arrapha looked directly across a field at the former mansion of Ali Hassan al-Majid—known, ever since he directed the gassing of the Kurds, as Chemical Ali. An Arab woman who was a retired teacher from the southern city of Kut said, “Iraq is part of the Arab nation, not the Kurdish nation. The Kurds are guests in Iraq—and they want to kick the Arabs out?” What I seldom heard was any acknowledgment of the crimes committed against Kurds in Kirkuk, or any shame at having been the benefiters. This only deepened the sense among Kurds, especially among the deportees who were returning, that it would not be possible for them to live alongside imported Arabs in Kirkuk.

  * * *

  THE KURDISH PLAN for Kirkuk was absolutely clear. The imported Arabs had to leave, every one of them, even those born in the city. The government should compensate them, and perhaps find them land and jobs in their provinces of origin, but allowing them to stay in Kirkuk would be to endorse the injustice of Arabization. After Kurdish deportees had been resettled, and the earlier demographic balance had been restored, the province would hold a census. (The 1957 census showed that the provincial population was almost 50 percent Kurdish.) The outcome of this census was a foregone conclusion to
the Kurds: They would be the majority group in the province. Equally predictable was the result of the referendum that would follow: The province would vote to join the autonomous region of Kurdistan, and the city of Kirkuk would go with it.

  None of this was stated in Iraq’s interim constitution. Article 58, which delineated “Steps to Remedy Injustice,” was purposefully vague about the future of Kirkuk. It called for “the injustice caused by the previous regime’s practices in altering the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk” to be redressed. It stated that “individuals newly introduced to specific regions and territories … may be resettled, may receive compensation from the state, may receive new land from the state near their residence in the governorate from which they came, or may receive compensation for the cost of moving to such areas.” (Not “must.”) The status of contested cities like Kirkuk would be deferred until after the census and a permanent constitution, “consistent with the principle of justice, taking into account the will of the people of those territories.” This bland language raised more questions than it answered. Did justice belong to individuals, or to groups? Did it require only the restoration of confiscated property, or did it also require the restoration of Kirkuk’s demography to the period before Arabization? Wouldn’t forcing Arabs to return to the towns “from which they came” create new injustices and perpetuate the cycle of revenge?