Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  With each disaster that befell Iraq, the Kurds took a step forward. On the day Iraq's army was abolished in May 2003, Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani, son of the Kurds' greatest rebel leader, attended a graduation ceremony for Kurdish military cadets. In the rest of Iraq the abolition of the army meant hundreds of thousands of angry, insulted, unemployed men on the streets. For Kurdistan it meant that their sixty thousand irregulars now ranked as the second largest military force inside the country (smaller than the U.S. military presence, but bigger than the British army contingent inside the coalition). As death squads terrorized Arab Iraqis into silent complicity, Kurdish civilians flooded their security forces with telephone tips about any suspicious activity. As the count of American soldiers killed in action approached four thousand, not a single one of them had been killed inside the Kurds' three provinces. Construction cranes sprouted across the skylines of Kurdish cities. Cement factories worked at capacity—they also filled the south's endless need for ugly concrete blast walls to surround government ministries and homes. Kurdistan inaugurated its own parliament, selected a cabinet, and ratified a regional constitution. New exploration for petroleum in the north began before Baghdad had even restored prewar levels of oil production.

  Iraq's war started killing journalists and aid workers, and like most other outfits, the BBC limited its reporters' mobility. The golden year of reporting Iraq, when I could drive to Fallujah in my own car, ended in early 2004. From that point on, the only way to safely travel was to make the compromise of embedding with U.S. troops. When the roads became too dangerous to drive from the south, the Kurds opened up daily flights to Baghdad as well as Amman, Istanbul, and Frankfurt. As the Iraqi government went back to its arcane visa rules, the Kurdish officials simply stamped my American passport with a smile. At their airport as well as their border crossing from Turkey, the Kurds put up a banner reading "Welcome to Kurdistan." The second or third time I crossed under it, I realized that while my colleagues and I were chronicling the destruction of Iraq, we were witnessing the creation of Kurdistan.

  Kurdistan has everything the Bush administration promised for Iraq. It's a Muslim state that is pro-democracy, pro-America, and even pro-Israel. So in a dearth of good news, why isn't the United States crowing about this one great achievement in Iraq? Because Kurdistan's success could be cataclysmic. Like no event since the 1948 creation of Israel, a declared Kurdish state within the borders of Iraq will unite the entire region in opposition, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf. National liberation is a zero-sum game, and Syria and Iran have already seen unprecedented disturbances by their own Kurdish populations, inspired by the freedom Kurds now enjoy inside Iraq. Most important, Turkey, America's NATO ally, has fought a bloody war against Kurdish separatists for decades. The Turks see an independent Kurdistan in Iraq as an existential threat and have promised to intervene if Kurdistan grows too strong. The Iraqi Kurds understand this better than anyone, and have been willing so far to limit themselves to virtual statehood. No force within Iraq can stop them at the moment, and the forces outside have been kept at bay by the presence of the American army.

  When the Kurds offered their troops to aid the invading coalition in 2003, they thought for sure their luck had changed. After decades of betting on losers, it seemed the Kurds had finally hit the jackpot. But as Iraq's war becomes a regional conflagration, there's room for doubt. Iraq's Shi'ite Arab parties accept aid and influence from Iran. The Sunni Arabs can count on the same from the wealthy Gulf kingdoms. After their collaboration with Americans has marked them as traitors to other Iraqis, and as apostates to Islamic extremists, the Kurds now fear the United States is feeling in the dark for an exit.

  Iraq may yet recover its footing and Baghdad take its rightful place as a peaceful, vibrant, and opulent Middle Eastern capital. If it does, the Kurds might enjoy an autonomous zone inside Iraq, contributing their diversity to Iraq's mosaic and enjoying the country's vast wealth of oil, land, and rivers. I hope for this outcome, because it would cost so many fewer lives than the other possibilities. Far more likely, the madness in Iraq will continue and the Kurdish zone will be pulled into the fray or overreach as battle lines are drawn. And then America will have to decide if its prodigal republic is worth saving. Some realists may see Kurdistan as the perfect location for a residual LLS. force in the region to stare down Iran and keep a hand in Iraq. Kurdistan is the only place in the region still welcoming the idea of an American base. True believers in promoting democracy may see Kurdistan as the best place in the region to nurture the seed of representative government. Kurdistan could then become an albatross around Washington's neck: the country it helped create and must defend.

  More probably, political realists coming into Washington to clean up the mess will look at the Kurds the way the world powers always have, as a small, expendable player in their great game. I have never heard a moral argument against the Kurds' right to a homeland, but it's hard to imagine America is willing or able to embark on another moral crusade in Iraq, one with even less regional support than the invasion. Betraying the Kurds will likely be just part of the ugly price of escaping from Iraq, but the ramifications of throwing away America's most natural ally in the region may be far greater than in the past.

  This book draws on eight years of reporting on Iraq and the Kurds, as well as on the politicians in Washington whose decisions carry such heavy consequences so far away. It's inevitable that my perspective has been skewed by the many months of hospitality offered to me by Kurds, but this book is not intended to push their agenda. Rather, I hope it can help explain the vital role the Kurds play in the drama unfolding in this new, volatile Middle East. More than anywhere this understanding is needed in America—the country that accidentally enabled Kurdistan's creation and could just as carelessly cast it to the winds.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Stolen Sheath

  I am a bare dagger!

  My Motherland is a stolen sheath.

  Don Y think I am bloodthirsty.

  Go; find fault with the one

  Who unsheathed me.

  "THE DAGGER," BY KURDISH

  POET ABDULLAH PASHEW

  KURDISTAN WOULD SURELY BE A POWERFUL and recognizable country today had its most famous son not been stolen away by a higher calling.

  In the first half of the twelfth century, in the Mesopotamian city of Tikrit, the greatest Muslim warrior in recorded history was born to a family of soldiers. He would live to unite the lands of Islam and drive the Christian crusaders out of Jerusalem, and reign over his empire with tolerance and generosity. In keeping with their luckless history, no one seems to remember that Saladin was a Kurd.

  Salah al-Din al-Ayubi, "Saladin," followed in the footsteps of his uncle to become a soldier, then as now, an esteemed profession among Kurds.1 Through a combination of bravery on the battlefield and a genius for picking his battles, Saladin established the Ayubbid Caliphate in 1171 and ruled Egypt, Syria, and parts of Iraq. His conquest ended the divisions inside the Muslim kingdom, which had allowed the crusader army to enter and brutally sack Jerusalem eighty years earlier. Knowing his enemy well, he taunted the Christian Knights' chivalry until they foolishly marched through a night without water and met his mujahideen* at the battle of Hattin in 1187. Saladin burned the parched fields around the infidels and then attacked once the sun rose hot behind his charging cavalry. But Saladin also bested many of the knights when it came to their own sense of honor and chivalry. Jews, Christians, and Armenians living in Jerusalem remember his conquest for its fair-minded generosity, a stark contrast from the carnage inflicted by the crusaders upon anyone who wouldn't accept their faith.

  Saladin stepped into the realm of romantic legend when the Christians tried to take back the Holy Land in the third Crusade, led by England's King Richard the Lionheart. Facing the undisputed greatest fighter of the age, Saladin again managed to stretch Richard's forces out until they found the countryside around Jerusalem barren of fuel or forage, the wel
ls poisoned. In no condition to do battle, Richard's crusaders retreated fitfully. In the last battle of the crusader withdrawal, Saladin watched from a hillside as the Christian king fought off a vastly superior force, personally dispatching dozens of foes. When Richard somehow became unhorsed, Saladin couldn't bear to see his noble opponent simply trampled down. The sultan sent two of his own best horses down and made them a gift to the king in the middle of the battle. Richard and his men were treated with generosity in defeat, and Saladin signed a treaty allowing Christians the right of pilgrimage.

  Within a century of his death in 1193, even the West had canonized Saladin; Dante wrote him a place with the saintly pagans in Limbo. Of all those afforded a spot in Christian heaven's waiting room, Saladin was the only Muslim—and of course, the only Kurd.

  Modern Kurds are both possessive of their ancient hero and emphatically disdainful. On one of my first visits to the city named for him, Salahudin in northern Iraq, I assumed the identity of the statue in the center of town. Trying to impress my host, I asked about the Kurds' hero. He saw right through my pandering and informed me that the statue was not Saladin, but a more recent Kurdish poet.

  "We do not like Saladin," he said coldly.

  Saladin never proclaimed himself a Kurd. He fought for Islam and did no special favors to the Kurds in his kingdom, even when he was the most powerful man on earth. His best fighters often hailed from his homeland, and he trusted Kurdish warriors to lead troops and sometimes police his Turkish and Arab troops from looting too much after victory, though tensions existed between the races even then.2 Saladin could have made the Kurds a famous empire like the Persians or Ottomans, but instead he fought for God, leaving his people invisible.

  My host said that he admired Saladin simply for being successful and didn't think it fair to blame the ancient conqueror for the Kurds' modern-day condition. Saladin makes an important figure in today's clash-of-civilizations debate. Mainstream Muslims celebrate the conqueror as the best example of enlightened Islamic rule. Al-Qa'ida supporters also claim Saladin as a hero for driving out nonbelievers and establishing a caliphate, and also for his most barbaric act: beheading all the knights he captured from the orders of the Templars and Hospitalers (Saladin called them incurable cults that would endlessly make war in the Holy Land). The same so-called jihad Web sites declare that the modern-day Kurds are nothing more than American and Zionist tools.

  Saladin's unified front, from Cairo to Gaza to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad, is still the envy of Arab leaders, and over the centuries many have tried to claim his mantle. The most galling appropriator of Saladin was the Kurds' twentieth-century nemesis, Saddam Hussein. Also born in Tikrit, Saddam tried to convince the Arab world that he was the next Saladin, returning to repel the Western hordes, as well as the Persians.

  Still, Kurds are loath to give up such a local boy made good. Each time Saladin surfaces in a novel, video game, or Hollywood movie, the Kurdish Web sites light up with passionate lectures on his Kurdishness.* When Time chose Saladin as one of its "people of the millennium" in 1999, Kurdish nationalists beamed with pride. But they grit their teeth each time they rise to claim Saladin, bracing for the inevitable response: "What's a Kurd?"

  Kurds are physically fairer than Arabs, and many have angular features and some have blue eyes. But it's not always possible to tell them apart from Arabs, Turks, or Persians by appearance. Numerous stories of smuggling and escape involve Kurds not realizing that they are in a taxi full of other Kurds until they hear a few words in their native tongue. It may be easiest to say a Kurd is any native speaker of Kurdish (further complicated by the fact that there are at least four distinct dialects). Kurds are mostly Sunni Muslims, with a small Shi'ite minority, as well as a number of Jewish Kurds who now live in Israel, but they celebrate some Zoroastrian holidays like their springtime new year, Newroz. Religious minorities have a long history in Kurdish land, and early records after Muslim conquest gave the impression that Kurds weren't following Islam to the letter. Tribal loyalty has often trumped religion, and tribal sheikhs have often doubled as religious leaders.3 This may explain a saying in the region that the "Kurds are only Muslims when compared to infidels." Women are rarely veiled, and it's not a taboo for a woman to receive a visitor in her home without her husband or father there. Kurdistan has several storied female leaders, and in the more liberal city of Sulimaniya there is even a unit of women soldiers that saw combat in the 1990s.*

  KURDISH ORIGINS ARE unclear. Most of their creation myths involve a lost tribe being driven into the mountains, either fleeing from a child-eating giant or from King Solomon's harem after being sired there by djinns.4 Many historians trace the Kurds back to the Medes, an Indo-European people who established an empire around the sixth century B.C. This links the Kurds with the magi who attended Jesus's birth, and some Christian missionaries travel to northern Iraq with a bilingual booklet called The Kurds in the Bible, which they claim is used for English instruction.5 Early notices of the Kurds included mostly complaints that traveling through Kurdistan was dangerous because of local brigandry—and this from such authorities on the subject as the Mongol emperors. In several ancient languages of the region, Kurd is close to the word meaning "strong" or "warlike."6 Over the centuries the Kurds have seemed to excel at rebellion, highway robbery, and general unruliness.

  For several thousand years the Kurds have inhabited the area that now encompasses southeastern Turkey, northwest Iran, northern Iraq, and the eastern tip of Syria. Iraqi Kurdistan includes the provinces of Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulimaniya, each with an eponymous capital city. Maps of this "Greater Kurdistan" sell like hotcakes in the bazaars of northern Iraq, showing a territory spanning from Armenia to the Mediterranean. In fact, the Kurds could hardly be called a nation during the centuries leading up to the Ottoman Empire, though many prominent Kurdish chieftains rose and fell, often soldiers in the pay of passing conquerors. Kurdistan is most noticeable through the 1500s as the battlefield between the Turks and Persians. But nobody much cared to exactly define the borders of Kurdistan until oil was discovered in the Ottoman province of Mosul, and by that time the Europeans were making the maps.

  The turn of the twentieth century found Kurdistan in disarray after famines and massacres. In its last throes, the Ottoman Empire employed Kurdish soldiers as cannon fodder against the Russian army. The same Kurdish tribesmen were instruments of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in 1915, in which a million men, women, and children were slaughtered.* The Kurds hardly escaped the terror of the times, though, losing perhaps eight hundred thousand people to World War I and its repercussions.7 A famine in 1917 is reported to have killed 70 percent of the city of Sulimaniya.8 As the Kurds reeled from their ill-use by greater powers, the French and British were taking a carving knife to the Middle East—their spoils after winning the Great War. The British claimed Mesopotamia, then the bottom two thirds of what is now Iraq. Upon consideration they took the top third as well—then the Ottoman province of Mosul—for its strategic foothills. Their decision seemed all the wiser when the oil fields in the city of Kirkuk began to produce enough black gold to make the entire new country rich.9

  The Kurds, puzzled to find themselves in a country called Iraq, pinned their hopes on the president of the United States, in what would become a regrettable habit. Woodrow Wilson declared a new age of self-determination; his fourteen points for world peace became a holy document for the Kurds. In 1920 their promised independence was delivered in the French city of Sevres, which, later historians pointed out wryly, was known for fine china that is particularly easy to break.10 The Allies forced the Treaty of Sevres on the Ottoman Empire, explicitly giving the Kurds the right to form a country and include with it the Kurds from Mosul province. The Treaty of Sevres was the first time the Kurds had seen their names in print on an international document, and to this day it remains something like a Dead Sea scroll for Kurdish nationalists.

  But the treaty was stillborn. A visionary Turkish s
oldier by the name of Mustapha Kemal, later known as Atatürk, was determined to claw together a country from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. Though a secularist, Atatürk clung to the Muslim identity of Turkey to defend it against the clear Christian threats in the region, Greece and Armenia, and he also saw any ethnic division as detrimental to Turkey. Atatürk knew that Europe was ruined and bankrupt from the war and had no stomach to fight for the romantic notions of self-determination in the Treaty of Sevres, which had been signed by a puppet government in Istanbul. The Treaty of Lausanne superseded it in 1923, establishing modern Turkey and leaving Kurdistan divided and invisible.11 The Turkish state continued without mentioning the Kurds for most of the century, claiming that the millions of people in the southeast were "mountain Turks who have forgotten their language."*

  The British, meanwhile, were trying to get a handle on the new country they'd created: Iraq. Then as now, the country was around 60 percent Shi'ite Arabs, 20 percent Sunni Arabs, and 15 to 20 percent Sunni Arab Kurds, with minority ethnic Turcomans, Chaldo Assyrians, and Yazidis filling in a 5 percent margin. Winston Churchill, in charge of the Middle East, didn't seem opposed to the idea of Kurdish independence. The deputy head of the British Colonial Office, Arnold Wilson, described the Kurds in Mosul province as a troublesome bunch "numbering half a million and [who] will never accept an Arab ruler."12 But his boss, Sir Percy Cox, and the famous British Arabist Gertrude Bell wanted to keep the Kurdish territory in Iraq to help offset the Shi'ite Arab majority. The Kurds gave them no reason to think it would be easy—four British officers were murdered in Kurdistan during a few months in 1919. 13