Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  DURING ANFAL THE Iraqi regime trusted the international community to be as silent as it had been when Saddam began gassing Iran. If they needed proof positive of the world's indifference, they got it in Halabja, a religiously conservative city on the eastern edge of Iraqi Kurdistan. Halabja was not part of Anfal, bureaucratically defined as the campaign against the Kurdish countryside. The PUK took control of the mountainside city on March 15, 1988, with clear assistance from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. That put the Iranians within striking distance of the important reservoir at Darbandikhan Dam. As before, such direct cooperation with the enemy brought out the worst of Saddam's wrath.

  A city of about sixty thousand, Halabja had already been ravaged by the war. Iraqi attacks on nearby villages had driven thousands down from the surrounding mountains into the city for shelter. The Iraqis had then bulldozed parts of the city as a punishment for supporting the rebels. On the day of the gas attack, March 16, many civilians were hiding out in cellars, taking cover from a conventional artillery bombardment that morning. It was the worst place for them to be when the planes started to drop chemicals, which are heavier than air and sink into the lowest ground. The invisible onslaught continued for several hours without pause. Those who reached the city after the attack found hundreds of bodies asphyxiated in their basement bomb shelters. Survivors described an initial wave of burns that spread to anything they touched—probably napalm and phosphorus. Then they spoke of the same sickly sweet smell. By then most Kurds knew what that meant, but could do nothing. Dr. Golpi's mother, older brother, and several nieces and nephews died in the attack. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards in the city slowly walked out as darkness fell, wearing their gas masks.37

  Many victims spent their final hours stumbling about the streets laughing hysterically—one of the more macabre symptoms of nerve gas. In what became an iconic image, a man named Omar was found dead on top of a swaddled child he was shielding with his body, to no avail. Survivors made for the hills, but still the gas they had inhaled ate away at them, killing hundreds as they fled. As many as five thousand people died that day, and Halabja's soil was still deemed potentially toxic almost twenty years later.38 Exiles from the area began to hear reports about the attack on Iranian radio, and the government in Tehran sent a team of reporters to document the massacre.* But Baghdad had no fear of the publicity.

  "I will kill them all with chemical weapons!" Ali Hassan al-Majid said in a taped phone call. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community and those who listen to them." And Majid wasn't wrong. In Washington, Barzani's old physician, Dr. Najmaldin Karim, desperately tried to draw attention to what was happening. Karim had stayed on in America and studied neurosurgery—as a resident he had even met President Reagan in the hospital after the president was shot and had told Reagan about the Kurds. But when he began pushing the information about Anfal, he found only deaf ears in Washinton. Even though the Pentagon was giving Saddam satellite targeting information to help against Iran, the White House viewed the gassing of the Kurds as an internal Iraqi issue. A Defense Intelligence Agency report even suggested, conveniently, that it might have been Iran, and not America's ally, that had done the gassing in Halabja.* As in 1975, Washington was cynically hoping for a costly stalemate.39

  Peter Galbraith, a staffer for Senator Claiborne Pell, had been traveling in Iraq during 1987 and practically stumbled on the empty villages of Anfal. The experience affected Galbraith deeply, and when he returned to Washington, he reported on what he saw as an unfolding genocide against the Kurds. Maine senator George Mitchell passed a nonbinding condemnation. 40 But the world was still interested in keeping on Saddam's good side. The war with Iran was drawing to a close, and corporations in the United States and Europe were blinded by their interest in reconstruction contracts with the oil-rich dictator in Baghdad.

  Jalal Talabani traveled first to London and then to Washington in June 1988 carrying a big white book listing three thousand villages destroyed in Anfal. Dr. Karim hosted him in the United States. Talabani was a quick study of the new international media game, but could not at first shake his hard-line leftist days. Karim recalled that during his first interviews in London after Halabja, Talabani would still talk about having contacted "Comrade Gorbachev and our comrades in China." By the time he reached America, Talabani had tailored his message, yet he still found nothing but closed doors. Defeating Iran ranked first, pleasing Turkey second, and the Kurds didn't even make the list of Washington priorities. "We got nothing official. We had one meeting outside the [State Department] building, and they almost murdered the official who authorized it," Karim recalled.

  The Anfal campaign killed as many as one hundred thousand people and displaced twice that number. For a population of only a few million Iraqi Kurds, it was a holocaust. The pretense that it was just part of the war with Iran soon fell away. The chemical bombings continued after that war ended officially on August 20, 1988, when the eighth and final phase of Anfal hit the Barzani heartland from August 25 through 29. With practiced efficiency Saddam's troops killed several thousand more Kurds, mostly KDP families, and then smashed through the mountain valley, burning the bodies of the dead and demolishing another seventy-seven villages.41

  When the attacks continued after the truce with Iran, Peter Galbraith and a few others tried to act but found that American interests wouldn't allow it. Iran had to be contained, and Turkey mollified. Saddam had even made new friends—Midwestern farmers and rice growers started to love him after the increased trade negotiated by Reagan. As Galbraith and Senator Pell tried to push a "Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988" through Congress, a rice lobbyist wept on the phone, accusing Galbraith of genocide against American farmers.42 The bill, loaded with sanctions, failed. Congress just didn't care to agonize over a distant war between two unsavory regimes, and most Americans had no idea that a people called the Kurds were being slaughtered in the cross fire. That would remain the case, but only until the next time the United States let the Kurds down, in 1991.

  * April 16, 1970, memo from Kissinger to Nixon, declassified in 2006. Kissinger added, "The Shah of Iran is an island of stability in an otherwise unstable area" and "the Shah's foreign policy, while increasingly flexible, is openly based on a special relationship with the U.S. From our viewpoint, he is a good friend."

  * Ta'mim means "nationalization," and referred to Iraq's assumption of state control over the oil industry in 1972. Salahudin, of course, was named after Saddam's misappropriated Kurdish hero, Saladin.

  * Twenty years later, as the second Bush administration prepared to invade Iraq, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld must have expected questions about his Baghdad trips. For a while the American media seemed too polite to mention it (just as they never harped on Bob Dole's happy photographs with Saddam when Dole ran for president in 1996). It appears the first public question Rumsfeld got about his past contact with Saddam was from Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia, in a congressional hearing on September 20, 2002. Rumsfeld put the trip in context, saying that America's main concerns in 1983 were Syrian ties to the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, and the Iran-Iraq war. The following day, CNN's Jamie Mclntyre asked Rumsfeld about it, and Rumsfeld added an extra detail. "In that visit, I cautioned him about the use of chemical weapons, as a matter of fact, and discussed a host of other things," he said. A Pentagon spokesman later clarified that Rumsfeld must have mentioned chemical weapons not to Saddam but to Tariq Aziz.

  * One of the negotiators who brought the PUK into the fold for Iran was a young hardliner by the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to a PUK official.

  * This information, including audiotapes of Ali Hassan al-Majid, comes from a trove of documents (about eighteen tons of them) discovered by the PUK in 1991 and turned over to the U.S. Senate—that is, given to staffer Peter Galbraith, who managed to get them flown out of northern Iraq. A team from Human Rights Watch helped analyze them and did
extensive follow-up interviews in Iraqi Kurdistan.

  * Taimour's story was told to dozens of journalists and researchers over the years—he was kept safe in northern Iraq but used quite extensively by the PUK for propaganda against Saddam Hussein. Since he was seen as the sole survivor, it was a necessary evil for him to be exploited this way, though more than one interviewer came away just wishing the boy could be left in peace. In 1997 the Iraqi government had supposedly put a bounty on Taimour's head, and he was granted asylum in the United States. Human Rights Watch researchers eventually found five other survivors of the pits.

  * Kaveh Golestan, a photographer and later a BBC cameraman, was among the last survivors of those who had covered the attack on Halabja. He said that some of the Iranian reporters had handled clothing inside the town and later died of cancer, perhaps from exposure to residual mustard gas. Kaveh himself was killed by a land mine during the 2003 invasion.

  * A CIA analyst at the time, Stephen C. Pelletiere continues to promote that theory, based mostly on the fact that many of the dead in Halabja had blue lips, which could be evidence of a blood agent that Iraq did not possess at the time. Washington had a motive to push this story, at least until Saddam became an enemy in 1991, but Pelletiere seems to believe it sincerely and still pops up occasionally to claim that Iran gassed its own allies to death in 1988. Whenever he does, as in a January 2003 New York Times op-ed, a dozen or so experts are obliged to debunk him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Shame and Comfort

  BEFORE DAWN ON AUGUST 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein's army rolled into Kuwait, crossed the empty waste between the border and the capital, and sacked Kuwait City. By the middle of the day the Kuwaiti army vanished like a mirage and the royal family fled. U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled his trip to a conference in Aspen, Colorado, and began looking at America's scant military resources in the Gulf. Secretary of State James Baker, meeting with his Soviet counterpart in Siberia, urgently requested that Moscow stop any arms shipments it had en route to Baghdad.1 The Gulf War had begun, and in a London café, Hoshyar Zebari held up a newspaper and shouted with joy.

  "It's over! We're through!" Zebari said to a friend, who had no idea what the Kurdish exile was talking about.2

  Zebari had relocated from Kurdistan to Europe in 1988 to represent the Kurdistan Front—what remained of it after Anfal. The devastating campaign left the rebels demoralized and weak, and Zebari decided the next wave of Kurdistan resistance would not be fought on the battlefield. Though he had done time as a guerrilla fighter, Zebari had also studied abroad and finished a master's degree in sociology. By the time he became known as a spokesman for the Kurds, he looked more suited to a professor's tweed jacket than a rifle and bandolier, but that was part of Zebari's message.

  "With 1988 we were really devastated. After Saddam had used chemical weapons, no matter how brave, how gallant a pesh merga you are, this really changed the dynamics of armed struggle. We needed to look for other ways. There was a heavy emphasis on internationalizing," Zebari said.

  Zebari began to cultivate journalists, activists, and politicians in Europe and America. He had direct access to a rare thing—human intelligence from inside Iraq. And he had his own compelling story to offer. Born in the town of Akre in 1953, he had been imprisoned and tortured by the regime as a teenager. The charge was trumped up; his real offense was his family. Before Zebari was born, his older sister had married General Mulla Mustafa Barzani, uniting two important Kurdish clans. That made Barzani's sons Zebari's nephews, though Zebari was a decade younger than Masoud Barzani, who would step up to lead the KDP after his father's death in 1979. While Zebari was abroad, Saddam's security services went after his family. Two of his brothers died in car "accidents," and another was killed with thallium (used in rat poison), both favorite methods of the secret police.

  Zebari set up Kurdistan Front offices in Rome and Berlin and finally decided by 1990 that London should be the hub of his foreign operations. There was only one problem: he had been doing all his European travel on fake Syrian and Iranian passports and had no visa to the U.K. He flew from Tehran to Vienna on his Iranian passport and there booked a flight on British Airways to London. Zebari put on his most expensive suit and waited until the final call to board the plane. Rushing through the gate, waving his first-class ticket, he was not questioned. When he arrived at Heathrow, he asked the immigration officials for asylum. Looking over the press clippings in which Zebari had denounced Saddam and been sentenced to death, they told him it wouldn't be a problem.

  The front had been focused on Saddam's atrocities throughout the 1980s and did some "naming and shaming" of German, French, British, and American companies they accused of supplying Iraq with precursor chemicals and technology for weapons of mass destruction. Zebari arranged conferences where Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani would speak about the Anfal to anyone who would listen. Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the French president, became a champion of their cause. Both leaders began predicting far and wide that Saddam was keeping too large an army to remain peaceful and that he was dangerously in debt to the Gulf States after the war with Iran. In early 1990, Jalal Talabani told an incredulous audience at Chatham House in London that Saddam would probably invade Kuwait.

  "They said, 'Oh no, Mr. Talabani, you shouldn't exaggerate. It's not good for your reputation,'" Talabani recalled.

  On the day of the invasion, Zebari took his office assistant over to the Kuwaiti embassy in London and found a crowd of Kuwaiti tourists who had gathered in a panic seeking information from home. After a while a Kuwaiti diplomat ventured out to inform his citizens that there may have been some military maneuvers on the border, nothing to be concerned about. "They shouted at him, 'Don't you watch television? Our country is finished. Saddam's at the Saudi border,'" said Zebari.

  In the dawn of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the Kurdistan Front office in London played the media buzz for all it was worth. Equipped with a fax machine, Zebari made himself the kind of source journalists love, providing the networks and newspapers with information and analysis and fluently discussing the careers of people like Ali Hassan al-Majid, whom Saddam had installed as the governor of Kuwait (as he had for Kurdistan during the Anfal campaign). The Kurds already had a cadre of columnists and reporters on their side—William Satire and Jim Hoagland among their champions in Washington, D.C. Dr. Najmaldin Karim bought a cell phone for his car—one of the early, briefcase-size models—and it rang off the hook. Those who had called them Cassandras now called up for advice. But acres of newsprint could not protect the Kurds remaining inside Iraq. Saddam's vice president, Izzat al-Douri, warned them not to take advantage of the moment, and he left nothing to the imagination. "If you have forgotten Halabja, I would like to remind you that we are ready to repeat the operation," said al-Douri.3

  As the U.S. air war against Iraq began in January 1991, the Kurds remained invisible in the West, with back-door-only diplomatic recognition. A junior British diplomat met Zebari at a London restaurant; a few American policy makers would call him on the sly for advice. Senator Claiborne Pell, at the instigation of his aide Peter Galbraith, invited a Kurdish delegation to Washington that February. Jalal Talabani stayed with Najmaldin Karim in his home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Karim had to push for some additional arrangements when Zebari sheepishly confessed he still didn't have a legal travel document (the Home Office in London sped up his request for a passport). Madame Mitterrand joined the delegation, raising its profile. Talabani and Zebari gave impassioned speeches to the U.S. Congress, but they couldn't get through to the Bush administration. The Kurds pushed Mitterrand to make a plea during her meeting with Barbara Bush, but it went nowhere.

  Still, as the American troops massed on the Iraqi border, the Kurdish delegation in Washington was upbeat—conversely hoping that Saddam would be as defiant as possible, requiring the Americans to really crush him. Zebari had become something of a newsaholic, and he glowed with each opportunity to denounce S
addam on radio or television. By mid-February the Iraqi army was surrendering in the tens of thousands, and Zebari proclaimed at a Washington press conference, "The battle for Kuwait is over. But the battle for Baghdad has just started!"

  Zebari wasn't crazy; he had just made the mistake of listening to President George H. W. Bush. The morning of February 15, in a speech from the old executive building, Bush went off-script, and according to his memoir, "impulsively added" the following: "There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside."4

  Bush wrote that he was anxious to see what his remarks might do, and he told the press a few days later that if Saddam were overthrown, he "wouldn't weep for him."

  If there was any deliberate message in the president's remarks, it was not geared toward the Iraqi people, said Robert Gates, who was then Bush's CIA chief. "Our hope had been that at the end of the war the defeat would have been so humiliating that the army would have overthrown Saddam. So when President Bush called on the Iraq people to do this themselves, what he really meant was the Iraqi military."5

  It was the beginning of what would be called the "one bullet" policy. Washington wanted a kindler, gentler Sunni Arab general to blow off Saddam's head and then put Iraq and its oil back on line for the world. But Bush failed to clarify that nuance, and his remarks were rebroadcast on the BBC, the Voice of America, and the CIA's propaganda transmissions to Iraq. Regular Kurds and Shi'ite Arabs heard it as a clarion call to rebellion. Conspiracy theories in the Middle East already pushed the idea that the all-powerful United States had tricked Saddam into invading Kuwait.*