The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Cyclone-Seven-Five thumped away beneath us as the hills receded. “Sure is beeeoootiful country,” crowed Corwin. “This is like home in Arizona.” The mountains to the north blocked the horizon, gashed with snow, a trail of fluffy white clouds clinging to the granite, “trash” in Lancaster’s aviation language. The four American army flyers looked at it all intently, back-chatting like Vietnam aircrews, filling the radio lines with complaints and transponder checks and torque calculations. They were humorous, intelligent men who happily mixed politics with avionics. At the back of the helo, Sergeant Charles Nabors sat in silence most of the time. You learned a lot by flying with them and listening to them, the lines crackling, mud huts slipping beneath the hull of Cyclone-Seven-Five, another little womb-bubble in which I could crouch with my cassette recorder and feel safe, with a Cyclopean eye on the world. Far to the west, the Tigris glistened.

  CORWIN: Sure I know this is history. I guess this is going to be the state of Kurdistan, whatever they say.

  LANCASTER: If we have to stay here more than three months, my humour level will be going down.

  CORWIN: I just hope it’s not going to be a quagmire like Beirut, Lebanon. I just hope Bush knows what he’s doing.

  LANCASTER: He’ll have to, ’cos I tell you the people won’t put up with shit. This is costing a whole bunch of money. We’re costing between 2,500 and 3,000 dollars here on this helo every hour in maintenance alone. Moment. Contact provider on 375, I’ve got a mission up to Five-Delta. Only thing I’m concerned about is the fuel pump in that altitude. Just look at that village. It looks like the Old Testament.

  CORWIN: It’s just like you read in the Bible. Tarsus is west of here, that’s where Paul came from. And Mount Ararat’s to the east. Isn’t that something? I was in Izmir where they imprisoned Richard the Lionheart. I was fifteen miles from Troy earlier. Just think, Homer, the Odyssey . . . There’s so much blood on this ground, it’s unbelievable. All in the name of Christianity—all that blood and gore.

  LANCASTER: How long do you reckon this quagmire will last? CORWIN: I’ll bet you a can of beer not a month and a half—Bitburg Pils. What about the Kurds?

  LANCASTER: They don’t trust us.

  CORWIN: No—rightly so.

  LANCASTER: Did we help them out when the rebellion happened? NABORS (at the back of the helicopter): I had a four-year-old kid die in my arms. I guess she had dysentery. She was very dehydrated. We took her on board with all her family for Zakho to try and save her. She began breathing very bad and I held her in my arms, like. All the men in the family knelt beside me on the helo and put their hands on her. They were praying, you see. Her father put his hand on her forehead and prayed and looked away. That’s how the Kurds all prayed for her on the Chinook, for the little girl. You see, they knew she was gonna die. Then she just died. She went like that. In my arms.

  I walked to the back of the Chinook. Nabors’s eyes were filled with tears.

  Below us drifted the remains of a medieval—perhaps neolithic—village, grass-covered circles and roads of antiquity in what was once Iraq. They were good men on Cyclone-Seven-Five. They were transporting food into Yekmal camp, high in a Turkish mountain ravine, and Lancaster took us in, cursing the ground control, swearing when he tore refugee tents out of the ground with the wash of his rotors. There were 60,000 people under canvas below us and when Corwin switched off the engines we suddenly heard the sound of 60,000 people talking. When we took off, we were back in our glassed, Olympian world, swooping over pine stands and waterfalls, victorious in flight, safe in our little existence of transponders and torques and oil pressure above Kurdistan. Perhaps it is with this detachment that we create nations.

  Certainly, the operation to save lives sometimes bore an uncanny similarity to the opposite. It was the daily mission report that gave you a palpable sense of unease. “This is the twenty-eighth day of Operation Provide Comfort,” it would announce. “As of six a.m. . . . a total of 1,954 missions have air-dropped 8,713 tons of supplies . . . All sorties are being flown by the U.S., the UK, France, Canada, Italy and Germany . . . total coalition forces . . . continue to grow, with over 13,146 military personnel from eight countries now participating . . . ” Where had we heard this language before? Why, only two months earlier, the same literary hand was welcoming us to the twenty-eighth day of Operation Desert Storm. The number of missions and sorties, the number of coalition partners, the strength of military personnel were presented to us then with the same bravado and pride. Then, the F-16s and A-10s delivered ordnance on a target-rich environment. Now the CH-47s delivered rations and blankets on a refugee-rich environment. War-speak had become peace-speak, a unique but almost imperceptible linguistic shift. Only the uniforms had changed: instead of kitty-litter yellow, they wore mountain green.

  There was nothing self-serving about these American servicemen who returned to Iraq. They had a far more acute sense of responsibility than their political masters—most guessed they would be returning long before Bush and Major said so—and an impressive desire to save life. I helicoptered into Ilikli—a ravine of grass, poplar trees and a frothing stream that the American Special Forces called “Happy Valley”—to find young soldiers opening wells and springs, installing pumps and water spigots and medical vaccination tents. Sergeant Johnny Hasselquist of the U.S. 10th Special Forces Corps, whose Kurdish interpreter had been a member of the Iraqi invasion force in Kuwait the previous August, had been administering medicine to sick refugees for two weeks, living beside them, sharing his food with them, falling sick himself with acute diarrhoea in order to stay with the civilians he was sent to rescue. There was the same infinite sadness about his account of events as Charles Nabors had experienced:

  We had a baby girl die yesterday. We knew the kid would die. She was premature. She wouldn’t eat. She was dehydrated. We told the mother to boil the water she gave her baby but whatever we told her, she wouldn’t boil it. She took the water from the stream, which is contaminated. She said it tasted OK. We said “Boil it.” She wouldn’t. So the baby died.

  These men were all now seeing at first hand a kind of suffering they had rarely witnessed before in their lives. There was no doubt about their humanity when faced with this torment of the innocents. They knew they had a responsibility to these people, that they should “be here.” What was lost was the narrative sequence, the missing link between Operation Desert Storm and Operation Provide Comfort. Saddam’s regime had committed atrocities aplenty against the Kurds. Indeed, the Americans now encouraged journalists to travel down to the “liberated” town of Halabja, the scene of one of the monstrous gassings ordered by Chemical Ali in 1988. But all of this missed the point. These Kurds were not dying in the mountains because Saddam had suddenly decided to resume his persecution now that Kuwait was liberated. His army had turned viciously against the Kurdish people because they had responded to our demands to rise up against the Baathist regime. Their predicament now was brought about—directly—by our encouragement, our policy, our appeals. We, the West—and our “friendly” Arab dictators in the Gulf— bore responsibility for this catastrophe, yet we dressed it up to our advantage and deleted everything that happened between the liberation of Kuwait and the arrival of these hundreds of thousands of teeming masses in the mountains. Yes, we did have responsibility for them—but as victims of our political immorality as much as of Saddam’s cruelty. Like the daily mission reports, our humanitarian “relief” was the flip-side of war.

  It was scarcely surprising that the Kurds, having reached the frozen wastes of their mountains, now refused to leave them. The American and British commanders were anxious to persuade them to return south under Western protection, to live in the vast tent cities that the Americans were erecting around Zakho and the Iraqi towns to the east. The snowline was disappearing, the last frosts a dirty grey stain along the peaks. Soon the heat would be up, the water would grow fouler and there would be widespread disease. But the Kurds wouldn’t budge. We put this down to fe
ar of Saddam—they were frightened that his army would return to kill them all—but we understandably ignored the fact, which every Kurd explained with great eloquence, that they didn’t trust us to protect them if they moved out of the mountains. We promised we wouldn’t allow Saddam’s killers to reach them, but we were the ones who had told them to destroy Saddam and then left them to their fate less than two months earlier.

  This was Sergeant Frank Jordan’s problem when I found him standing boot-deep in a field of poppies at Tel el-Kbir, not far from Zakho. The last time we had met, the U.S. reservist from Maine—a very kind man with spectacles and lots of lines on his face—had been up to his ankles in sand in southern Iraq, trying to cope with the thousands of Shia refugees to whom he could give no tents and little food. Now he was guarding hundreds of tents and thousands of ration packs with scarcely a refugee to take advantage of them. The American role in Iraq had come full circle.

  The United States had taken just three days to transfer Jordan from Safwan to Tel el-Kbir, and now the fifty-three-year-old grandfather was waiting for the Kurds to come down from the mountains. But of course, they were not coming. It was not quite the same Sergeant Jordan whom I found now. Instead of the desolation of sand, he was surrounded by thick, ripening corn and those sad, blood-red poppies. Instead of coping with the aftermath of war, he was waiting to cope with the results of our betrayal and beginning to realise that perhaps the war was not over after all. “There was a lot of shooting up in the hills last night,” he said. “And when I was in Zakho, there were lots of Iraqi soldiers and I was nervous because I kept thinking about snipers.”

  Under the terms of an understanding solemnly agreed between the Allies and the Iraqi authorities in Baghdad, the Iraqi army would withdraw farther south while the representatives of the Iraqi state—the police—would remain behind to ensure “law and order” and the sovereignty of the Iraqi nation. It would debase the nature—and the gravity—of the crisis in northern Iraq to mock Jordan’s concerns, but Gilbert and Sullivan would have found the inspiration for a lively operetta down the road in Zakho, where hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were pretending to be policemen, while hundreds of Iraqi secret policemen pretended to be civilians. The American troops were going along with this charade, even though the policemen were carrying Kalashnikovs and the Americans M-16 rifles. A policeman’s lot was not a happy one.

  Only the tens of thousands of Kurds refused to abide by this theatrical code because they, at least, acknowledged that the Iraqi soldiers were not policemen and that the U.S. civil affairs officers were soldiers. If the latter would only acknowledge the reality of the former, then the Kurds might feel secure enough to come down from the mountains. In the meantime, the operetta continued. “What is your name?” I asked one of the Iraqi “policemen” outside the Zakho police station. “My name is policeman,” he replied as his plain-clothes colleagues laughed. If I stopped to chat to a schoolteacher, an engineer, a stall-holder, two or three young men in civilian clothes would glide to my side to listen. Asked for their identity, they would chorus asker (soldier) or taleb (student). How earnestly Saddam Hussein must have fostered higher education in Kurdistan. So why did his people not love him?

  “We want the Americans to stay,” announced one city worthy. “Why they no come?” And here one had to go back to Sergeant Jordan’s tents. For many of the marines constructing the massive, empty encampment at Tel el-Kbir were members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit which, back in 1983, as the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit, played a somewhat different role in Beirut. In 1982 the Israelis invaded Lebanon and the U.S. Marines turned up to evacuate the PLO guerrillas trapped in the city. “Mission accomplished,” they officially announced when they left a few days later. There followed the massacre of hundreds of unprotected Palestinian civilians by Israel’s Phalangist allies. America’s conscience— and a public outcry not unlike the one that greeted the Kurdish exodus—sent the United States back to Beirut to “protect the civilians,” a mission that quickly involved the Marines in the Lebanese civil war because they took the side of the Phalangist government installed by Israel. In October 1983, 241 American servicemen—most of them members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit—were killed by one of the Middle East’s first suicide bombers. In 1990 the Iraqis had invaded Kuwait; the United States drove them out and again announced, in effect, mission accomplished. Then came the uprising we had encouraged and the television pictures of the Kurdish trek into the mountains that sent the Americans back to Iraq. The parallels were not exact, of course, but they were understood. Sergeant Jordan was fearful that if the Americans stayed too long in northern Iraq, they would be suicide-bombed again. Twelve years later, his fears would prove true. But he saw it all in simpler, more human terms:

  When they told us to withdraw from Safwan, they told us not to look back. But from my armoured vehicle I saw a little Iraqi boy. He didn’t wave or give V-signs like the others. He just stared at me with these fixed eyes and then he rubbed his tummy, never taking his eyes off me. He must have been so hungry . . . I was so angry . . . for two days, I couldn’t talk to anybody. Now I can’t stop thinking about the numbers of dead Kurds, about 1,000 dead a day.

  Yet the Middle East’s conflicts overlap like the tectonic plates that, every few decades, shift malignly below the region and bring down its cities and offices and apartment blocks and mosques. North of the Iraqi border one night, I was unable to find a room at any of the truck-stop hotels on the southern Turkish border road and ended up driving into the hills at night because a Christian missionary had told me of an ancient village where I would be given a bed. My Turkish taxi-driver was negotiating the potholed road when orders were suddenly screamed at us from the darkness. I opened my door, told the driver to douse the headlights and put on the inside light of the car. Running down the road towards us, rifles to shoulders, was a squad of Turkish soldiers. They wore blue berets—soldiers of Turkey’s Special Forces—and shouted aggressively as they stood around the car. I didn’t understand a word, but I didn’t need to. My driver was now beside the car, arms in the air, torchlight full in his face. In such circumstances, I use the “outraged Brit” performance. I put my hands on my hips and bellowed: “What on earth is going on?”

  An officer walked up to me and I stuck out my hand. It’s a sure-fire way of reducing tension among angry soldiers. However furious or frightened or drunk, no officer wants to humiliate himself by refusing to shake hands with a perfectly friendly stranger. The soldier duly moved his rifle to his other hand and shook my hand and smiled and asked, in absolutely flawless English: “What exactly do you think you are doing here?” I told him. I was looking for a bed, I had been told of this village in the mountains and I planned to spend the night there. “Do you know there’s a problem here?” he asked.

  Ah yes, there was indeed a problem. The Kurds. If the Kurds of Iraq were prepared to rise up against Saddam—and then get betrayed by us—and then flee to the mountains, the Kurds of Turkey were also, some of them, prepared to rise up against Atatürk’s Turkish state because they, too, would like to live in a country called Kurdistan. This was the same “Kurdistan” that President Wilson had initially agreed to protect more than seven decades ago but which, like Armenia, was simply forgotten in the wastes of American isolationism. The Turks, as we have seen, had dealt with inspirational cruelty with their “Armenian problem” seventy-six years earlier. Now a system of military repression, resettlement, “ethnic cleansing,” torture and extrajudicial murder was being used by the Turkish state to deal with the current “Kurdish problem.”

  And of course, the Turks were now doubly fearful of Kurdish nationalism because the Kurds of Iraq were demanding their own nation and a million and a half of them wanted to flee across the Turkish border into the Turkish part of their “homeland.” Since Turkey was a NATO ally and a “friend” of the United States— hence America’s cowardice in addressing the Armenian Holocaust—Washington was also anxious to keep the Kurds of Iraq i
nside Iraq, which was an unspoken and all-important reason for sending U.S. troops to protect the Kurds inside Iraq and persuade them to leave the mountain frontier and move back towards their Iraqi homes. This was also one reason why Sergeant Jordan had been told to pitch all those tents outside Zakho. The Iraqi Kurds had to be kept away from their fellow Kurds in Turkey. The Iraqi Kurds had to be protected. But so did the Turkish state, as I would soon learn to my cost.

  I had grown used to “choppering” around northern Iraq. The Americans gave us an almost Vietnam-like freedom on their helicopters, obligingly issuing us passes to travel on any machine to mountain fastnesses that would have taken days to reach by road or on foot. Our documentation and helicopters were arranged by a bald American civilian air controller with a hook instead of a right hand. Even on the most fog-bound or gale-kicked days, he would send us off into the mountains with his men to watch the Kurds surviving and dying in the snow-covered camps. I turned up at the Salopi air base on 29 April with my haversack of notebook, maps and spare clothes, a day of horizontal rain and wind when at least twelve helicopters were thumping and roaring on the apron. “Captain Hook” was soaked and scarcely looked at me as he handed me my chit and pointed through the storm. “Go! Go!” he shrieked in my ear and I ran towards the green, jerking chopper whose crew were beckoning to me through the rain. They didn’t seem to have the usual laid-back panache that I was used to seeing in Corwin, Lancaster and the others. The pilot gestured impatiently at me from the cockpit as I climbed aboard, and one of the crew gave me a fierce shove from behind that had me landing on my belly on the floor.

  That’s when I realised that this was an Apache gunship, a big tank-killer, not one of those nice friendly Chinooks with a long snout, but a sharp, pointy, state-of-the-art piece of military aggression packed with serious-looking Americans. I sat on the spare seat, struggling into my safety harness as the machine bashed up into the sky. That’s when I noticed that all the Americans were in civilian clothes. And that they were all carrying pistols or snipers’ rifles. The American opposite, a big, beefy man with a lantern jaw, leaned towards me and shrieked in my ear: “Where you from?” England, I said plaintively. A journalist from The Independent newspaper. “Jeeesus Christ!” he shouted and turned to his neighbour and screamed in his ear. The two men frowned at me, the muscular guy shaking his head in disbelief. He leaned towards me again. “There must have been a fuck-up!”