The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Samir Shakir Sumaidaie, the interim Iraqi ambassador to the UN, said, “I cannot blame a Kurd for feeling anger. But I can plead with him to contain his anger, because angry people often do stupid things, and they end up hurting themselves. Arabs, on the other hand, must acknowledge the injustice that has been done to the Kurds. By acknowledging the injustice, you take the poison out of the system. I’ve told this to Arabs in Kirkuk: We must admit what was done in the name of Arab nationalism to the Kurds, and of which you were perhaps the unwitting instrument.” Kurds’ anger, he said, would cool only when they began to see justice done, “especially for the families that suffered most in Kirkuk.” When Sumaidaie made these arguments to his fellow Iraqi Arabs, he told me, the response was grudging. Kurdish intransigence over Kirkuk, with occasional threats of war and separation, was having its answer among Arabs. “Nationalism ignites nationalism,” Sumaidaie said. “I think we should get away from nationalism and move toward humanism.”

  A government official in Baghdad who was a self-described Iraqi liberal told me that more and more leaders were reacting to Kurdish threats with an attitude of “good riddance.” The benefits in keeping the Kurds happy might not outweigh the costs. “The truth of the matter is, the Arabs of this country—eighty percent—are getting tired of these threats of secession,” he said. “And one day their answer will be: ‘Secede.’”

  * * *

  NEVERTHELESS, during three visits to Kirkuk, I kept meeting citizens of each ethnicity who still wanted to live together. In particular, Kirkukis who had spent their whole lives in the city seemed more willing to surrender part of their own historical claim to it in order to coexist peacefully with other groups. The idea of a multiethnic city, I realized, still existed in the minds of people in Kirkuk; it was not just a desperate piece of cheerful public relations from American and British officials.

  An Arab in his twenties named Mohamed Abbas, whose family had come to Kirkuk when he was six for his father’s military service, described to me the hurt of losing Kurdish friends after the war. “I don’t want to leave because I’ve gotten used to this place, to the way of living here.” He had recently been detained overnight by Kurdish police for having no ID card. “Maybe if this had happened during Saddam’s time, I would have been locked up for days,” he said. “And a Kurd might have been tortured.” Abbas thought that Arabs and Kurds could live together in Kirkuk if the politicians allowed them to do so. “We’re human beings and they’re human beings,” he said. “In my opinion, the city of Kirkuk, the Kurds have every right to it. They have more rights in Kirkuk and they deserve Kirkuk. But still, we can’t just go anywhere and leave the house. Where would we live?”

  On the other side of town, I met a young Kurdish engineer named Sardar Mohamed. He had somehow survived all the years of ethnic cleansing in the old Kurdish neighborhood of Imam Qasim, where he and his wife and children were squeezed into one house with his two brothers and their families. “If there had been no war, in fifteen years you would find no Kurds at all in Kirkuk,” he said. When the American invasion seemed imminent, Mohamed went down into his basement and cut a square out of the plaster wall, behind which there was a concealed room. He planned to hide there if the Baathists started rounding up young Kurdish men, as they had done in 1991. Instead, the Baathists fled the city. After the fall of the regime, Mohamed’s family experienced a rebirth of sorts. They built a new outhouse and extended the kitchen, and they filled it with new appliances. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have the money,” Mohamed said. “But I wasn’t sure I would keep this house. I didn’t know if I’d need the money in the future for food.” His wife had dropped out of school because there was no chance for a Kurdish woman who didn’t correct her nationality to find a job. After the liberation, she reenrolled and obtained her degree. “Before, we didn’t know when we’d be arrested or expelled,” Mohamed said. “Now we have hopes for the future.”

  As for the Arabs who enjoyed all the rights and privileges that were denied his family, Mohamed was of two minds. It would be easier for everyone if they left. “But their kids, when they’re born here, there’s a kind of relationship to the land, and it’s not those kids’ fault that they’re in love with the place where they were born,” he said. “It’s unfair for them to have to leave.” The only reason for Kirkuk to join Kurdistan, he said, was that Arabs didn’t treat Kurds fairly. The important thing was for Iraqis’ minds to change. If the imported Arabs would just admit that they came to Kirkuk through Arabization and displaced the Kurds, “They can stay and even bring more Arabs,” Mohamed said. If a government in Baghdad ensured that all Iraqi citizens would be treated equally, he would gladly live under its flag instead of in Kurdistan.

  Kirkuk suffered inordinately from bad ideas, and the old ones had engendered some that were new: that the historical clock could be turned back forty years, or that Iraq could be carved among its Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds without enormous bloodshed and countless individual tragedies. The weakest idea in Iraq was the idea of Iraq itself. Barham Salih said, “There is no Iraqi identity that I can push my people to today. I want to have an Iraqi identity, but it does not exist.” Samir Shakir Sumaidaie said, “To get away from what Saddam did, where ethnic identity is what mattered most, to a society where citizenship is what matters—that transition is not an easy transition. We have to make it, though.”

  The obsession with ethnic identity had become the ultimate legacy of Saddam’s rule, his diabolical revenge on his countrymen. Nowhere could this be more strongly felt than in Kirkuk. “Saddam is gone, but we’re not through with him,” an Arab there said. “Even if he’s not here, it’s like he planted problems for the future.”

  * * *

  ON MY LAST EVENING in Kirkuk I went to see the citadel with Luna Dawood. She wore high-heeled sandals; although her hair was uncovered, she had pinned it up as a gesture of respect. She had visited the citadel only once, in 1988; after the residents were removed and the houses destroyed, she developed an aversion to the place.

  At sunset, we made our way through the souk, past little Kurdish shops that sold bread, yogurt, and ancient-looking tools, past a blacksmith’s forge, and then we followed an alley that led us to the top of the plateau. The citadel spread out before us, a vast and nearly empty field of dirt and dead grass and broken stones and scattered monuments. A pack of wild dogs roamed menacingly, and the sole human inhabitants were an old Turkoman and his family. They were squatting in the marble dwelling of a long-departed imam. The Turkoman told us that he had once lived in a house a few yards away. He brought his family back after the fall of the regime, and somehow he had been allowed to stay. “This is my original place,” he said. “I’m a poor man, I have nowhere to go. Where should the poor man go?”

  We crossed the field, toward an octagonal gold-and-blue tower that an Ottoman pasha had built for his dead daughter, and the ancient clay minaret of the Tomb of the Prophets. Luna, who had been walking in stunned silence, abruptly said, “They are stupid. They destroyed their history.” At the far end of the citadel, perched above the dead riverbed, was the abandoned house of the Turkoman woman who sold shoes and purses in the souk. Behind it, the orange ball of the sun was sinking. On one of the house’s walls, someone had painted, “Long live the Turkomans—they are crowns on the heads of the Kurds.” There was graffiti on other walls, too: “Kirkuk is the heart of Kurdistan,” “The citadel of Kirkuk is the sign of the Kurds,” and “The citadel of Kirkuk is a witness of its Turkomanness, whatever the conditions.” On the courtyard wall of another half-ruined house, someone had painted, “The Turkoman people are brothers with the Kurdish people,” but someone else had painted over the last two words.

  “Ghosts are here,” Luna murmured. “I can hear them in the night. Under the ground, my mother said when we were children, there’s a road from Kirkuk to Baghdad. Underground, there’s a door somewhere—for people who wanted to escape Kirkuk.”

  Her disquiet grew as we approached the Tomb of the
Prophets. “This isn’t the citadel I know. I told you, I came once before. But there was a road, and people. I don’t even know where that road was.” She had come with three friends, one of them a Muslim, after she had a dream about the prophet Daniel.

  We stood before the entrance, Down below, in the city, muezzins were beginning the evening call. I went inside the bare chamber and waited for Luna to follow, but at the doorway she recoiled with a muted cry. I followed her out.

  “It was gold!” she exclaimed. When she visited the shrine after her dream, the tombs and walls had been covered in gold leaf; all of it had been scraped off. “Now I’m sad,” Luna said. “Really, now I’m feeling depressed, because I can see the difference between that time and this visit. I can’t feel the holy mystery of the place. That time when I prayed, I felt Daniel would give me my wishes. But now I don’t feel it’s holy. I’m even afraid to go inside.”

  It was getting dark, and we started back. Luna was silent again. Just before the opening to the alley that descended to the souk, there was a square hole in the ground. She stopped. “I remember the well we just saw. I remember there were trees. Now I’m remembering—I visited this place as a child.”

  Dusk had settled over the souk. The market stalls were closing up amid the last calls of prices, and the sweepers were cleaning up the day’s trash. Luna spoke so quietly that she might have been a ghost herself. “What is a human being worth, if they steal such a place? It’s better to be ignorant of all that’s happening around us, because right now being human means nothing to me. I’m very sorry you brought me to this place. I shouldn’t have come.”

  11

  MEMORIAL DAY

  ON THE EVENING OF NOVEMBER 8, 2003, at around 7:40 p.m., a two-Humvee convoy pulled out through the front gate of the American base at the Rashid military camp in south Baghdad. The mission was to pick up a sergeant attending a meeting at the combat support hospital inside the Green Zone. The convoy belonged to the scout platoon of Headquarters Company, 2-6 Infantry—John Prior’s battalion. In the rear left seat of the lead vehicle sat a twenty-two-year-old private named Kurt Frosheiser.

  There was nothing obvious to set Private Frosheiser apart from the tens of thousands of other young enlisted men who served in Iraq. He was from Des Moines, Iowa. He had a twin brother, a married older sister, and divorced parents. He had been an indifferent student and a bit of a rebel through high school, and by age twenty-one he was a community college dropout, living with his sister’s family, delivering pizza, and partying heavily. He had a brash, boyish smile, with his father’s full mouth and lidded eyes; he liked Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Chicago Cubs; and one day in January 2003, he flew through the door with the news that he had just enlisted in the Army.

  His father, Chris, wasn’t thrilled to hear it. There was a war on terror going on, and the strong possibility of a land war in Iraq. But he didn’t try to argue with his son. In February, Kurt dropped by his father’s apartment around two in the morning after a night out drinking and said, “I want to be part of something bigger than myself.”

  Kurt watched the invasion of Iraq on TV looking more serious than his sister Erin had ever seen him. He still had the option to get out of his obligation, but he left home on April 16 for Fort Knox, Kentucky, and basic training. In June the family drove down to see him at Family Day, and Chris Frosheiser was stunned by the transformation: his son, standing at perfect attention on Pershing Field for forty-five minutes in his dress uniform. It was the same in August, when they went back down for graduation: Private Frosheiser, marching, singing with his classmates, “Pick up your wounded, pick up your dead.” The words sent a chill through Frosheiser, but the music, the sharpness and tightness of the formation, the bearing of his son, filled him with pride. Something new and important was happening in Kurt’s life. After the ceremony, Kurt told his father, “You weren’t hard-core enough for me.” Chris always lingered in the gray areas, asking questions; Kurt wanted the clear light of an oath and an order.

  They all drove back to Des Moines for their last two weeks together at the end of summer before Kurt would join the First Armored Division in Germany. He partied every night, but the departure hung over everyone, and on the last night, when Erin dropped him off at one final party and turned to look at him, he said, “I know,” and ran off.

  “Well, old man, I’m probably not going to see you for two years,” Kurt told his father late that night. They both started to cry, and Frosheiser ran his hand through his son’s crew-cut hair. “I know I’m going to be in some deep shit. But you know me, I’m a survivor.” Frosheiser knew that the words were only meant to comfort him. His son said, “Live your life, old man.”

  In Germany, Kurt was bored out of his mind and eager to join the rest of his division in Iraq. On the phone with his father once, he mentioned that it looked like there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” Not necessarily, his father said, there might be other reasons for the war, such as democracy in the Middle East, WMD might just have been the easiest to sell to the public. Kurt’s officers at Baumholder prepared him and the others for what had become guerrilla warfare in Iraq, telling them not to pick up trash bags, not to take packages that kids would rush up to give them, and when Kurt repeated it all to Erin she couldn’t begin to imagine herself in such a place, where a mother like her couldn’t let her children outside the house for fear that something would explode.

  Then suddenly Kurt was on a transport plane to Kuwait. By the end of October he was in Baghdad, just as the Ramadan Offensive was heating up.

  On November 6 he managed to get online and e-mailed his sister: “Our sector that we patrol is a good one we don’t get shot at that much nor do we find IED’s (improvised explosive device) that’s their main way of attacking us they usually put them in bags but now their putting them in dead animals or in concrete blocks to hide them better. It’s kinda scary knowing their out there but like I said our secter is pretty secure so I’ll be allright.” Writing to his father about his first mission out in the city, an uneventful night drive, Kurt was more explicit: “I found myself thinking that I’m in a country where a lot of soldiers lost their lives but where we at it was so quiet except all friggin dogs barking the Iraqs hate dogs so they’re all wild probably never had a bath their whole lives this country is a shit hole they dont have plumbing so they dig little canels and let all the shit and piss run into the streets it smells so fucking in some places and from what the other scouts who have been here from the beginning theyre places that smell so bad you almost throw up. From what I see its goin to take a lot longer then Rumsfeld and G.W. are saying to get this shit hole up and running.” He spoke to his father once briefly on the phone. “IEDs, old man, IEDs,” he said.

  On the evening of the 8th, Kurt was sitting on his bunk, sorting and counting his ammunition, when word came of a mission to the combat support hospital. He was training for his license as a Humvee driver, and he jumped at the chance to experience driving through Baghdad by night. In his few days with the battalion he had already earned a reputation as a hard worker who was quick to volunteer. He and his best friend in the unit, Private Matt Plumley of Tennessee, raced each other to the vehicle. Because the right rear door was hard to open, they both headed for the left. Kurt got there first.

  Five minutes out of the base, as the convoy was cruising north toward downtown Baghdad, on the left shoulder of the dark highway thirty feet ahead two 130-mm. artillery shells packed with Russian C-4 detonated in a tremendous blast—flash of light, black smoke, flying dirt, smell of explosives. The legs of the driver, Private First Class Matt Van Buren, were torn with hot chunks of shrapnel, but he accelerated another few hundred yards along the highway, thinking that he would try to make it to the Assassins’ Gate, until the staff sergeant sitting next to him, Darrell Clay, told him to stop.

  A muezzin somewhere began calling the faithful to prayer. In the back of the Humvee, Kurt was slumped in his seat.
When Plumley checked his pulse, there was none. He had been looking out the window—which had no protective glass—his head turned to the left, and a piece of silvery metal 1¾" by ½" by ½" traveling upward had penetrated the right side of his skull just below the Kevlar helmet between the eye and ear and breached his brain. Private Kurt Frosheiser was airlifted by helicopter to the combat support hospital in the Green Zone, where he was pronounced dead at 8:17 p.m.

  At six-thirty CST the next morning, a Sunday, the phone rang in Chris Frosheiser’s cramped bachelor apartment in Des Moines. It was a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard, two blocks away and trying to find the address. “I have a message from the Army,” he said tersely. Frosheiser knew then, because the week before he had asked an officer what to expect if something happened to Kurt, and the officer had said a phone call if wounded, a visit if killed. Frosheiser met the lieutenant colonel outside the building and invited him in, going through the motions in case it was all a mistake, and they briefly made small talk in the living room. Frosheiser went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. When he returned, the lieutenant colonel suddenly stood at attention. “I regret to inform you that your son Kurt was killed as a result of action in Baghdad.”