Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  PERHAPS THE OLD warriors realized the endgame had begun, because both the KPD and PUK started a race to the bottom of dishonorable deals. In the summer of 1996 the KDP took issue with the Surchi tribe, which controlled a blind canyon along the crucial Hamilton Road. Barzani accused the tribe's leader, Hussein Agha Surchi, of breaking his neutrality by letting his son radio information to the PUK. The KDP staged a predawn raid on Hussein Agha's home, flattening his family compound and killing the sixty-five-year-old man, who reportedly died with his boots on and a warm gun in his hand. The KDP claimed that the dozens of Surchis killed in the raid had resisted arrest, but that didn't explain the destruction of their homes and the sale of their considerable business assets. 33 After that the tribes got the message and stayed out of the conflict.

  For his part, Talabani cozied up to Iran, to the great consternation of the White House. Earlier in the conflict, Tehran had aided Barzani and the Kurdish Islamists in Halabja. The United States routinely scolded the Kurdish leaders for talking with the Islamic republic, but also understood that the Kurds needed to placate the Iranians inside what they considered their sphere of influence. After the Drogheda conference, Tehran quickly assembled its own repeat performance, with the same KDP and PUK delegations reaching the same unenforced deal. In the summer of 1996, though, Iran wanted something from Jalal Talabani.

  The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) had been keeping a base of exiled militants near Talabani's hometown of Koi Sanjaq since 1992.34 But the KDPI had abused its welcome, staging a raid across the border against an Iranian military base. Tehran pressured Talabani, and he made them a deal. On July 27, thousands of Iranian revolutionary guards with heavy artillery crossed into Iraqi Kurdistan, passing through Sulimaniya to Koi Sanjaq. They shelled and rocketed the camp from the hills above, leaving it a smoking ruin. Typical of deals with Jalal Talabani, however, there was some fine print: he warned the KDPI in advance that Iranian soldiers were coming, and when they hit the camp, most of the families had evacuated.35

  Talabani disputes to this day what he got in return. He and all the PUK leaders claim that any weapons and ammunition from Iran came at gouged, black market prices. But suddenly, Talabani began wiping up the KDP, probably using Iranian territory to skirt around Barzani's battle lines. The PUK leader launched an all-out offensive down the Hamilton Road quite deliberately on August 16—the fiftieth anniversary of the KDP's founding, and Masoud Barzani's fiftieth birthday. Barzani claims the assault had Iranian artillery and air support; in any case it sent his men fleeing to Salahudin.36 Barzani sent out pleas in all directions warning about Iranian incursions, and he pushed for the Clinton administration to tell both Iran and Baghdad not to interfere in the north. His only response from Washington was another invitation, this time from Assistant Secretary of State Robert Pelletreau, to meet for the next stage of peace talks. The State Department started negotiations with KDP and PUK members in London, completely detatched from reality. The elimination of the Surchis, the bombing of the KDPI, then the offensive on Barzani's birthday—all made for a summer of mayhem on the ground in Kurdistan. Somehow, Washington failed to notice. Barzani then did the unthinkable. Telling his people he had no other option in the face of the PUK's aggression, Barzani welcomed forty thousand of Saddam Hussein's troops into Erbil on August 31 to help him.

  In a region fabled for broken deals and rented loyalties, Barzani's invitation to Saddam Hussein may go down as the most shocking bargain since God wagered with Satan that the devil couldn't break Job. While back in 1966 Talabani had also fought with Baghdad against other Kurds, that was before the era of Anfal and Halabja, poison gas and mass graves. Most appalling to Barzani's own supporters must have been seeing the Iraqi army roll through Qushtapa, where Saddam had collected some eight thousand members of Barzani's clan for execution in 1983.

  The Americans were the least prepared. "We had no clue. We felt absolutely blindsided by it," said Ken Pollack, "I know that the KDP says that they warned us. Whatever signals they were sending were too esoteric."

  In London, the peace talks had been proceeding at their normal slow pace, and the State Department's Bob Deutsch pushed for an agreement on how the Americans and British might monitor a cease-fire. On August 31, Hoshyar Zebari had just called for a recess until the next morning so he could consult with Barzani back in Kurdistan. "We broke because we weren't making any progress," Deutsch recalls. "I went back to the hotel and immediately the phones started lighting up as we got information about Erbil."

  When Zebari showed up the next morning to negotiate, the Americans were sure he had been playing dumb and sent him home. In fact the deal with the devil had probably been in the offing since at least July. State Department officials knew that Nechirvan Barzani had been making trips to Baghdad. The KDP had been sporting some new artillery and vehicles37 and Saddam's tanks had been in motion weeks in advance. Rumors of KDP collaboration with Baghdad had spread around Kurdistan all summer, and Ahmed Chalabi's INC and Talabani's PUK both pushed the theory to the CIA station, which dutifully reported it back to Washington.* On August 31, as the offensive raged, Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz took some delight in revealing that Barzani had requested Saddam's intervention nine days earlier in a letter in which he addressed the Iraqi dictator as "Your Excellency"—Barzani's version of kissing Saddam, and then some.38 The KDP sat through the entire London conference knowing that the Americans were about to look very foolish.

  IN A BACKHANDED compliment to Chalabi's INC, the Iraqi army hit them first, at Qushtapa on the way to Erbil. Helicopters and tanks overwhelmed the few hundred INC volunteers before dawn, and by daylight Iraqi soldiers were rounding up Chalabi's recruits for execution. Ninety-six died the morning of August 31, and many more disappeared into Saddam's interrogation chambers. The INC's Arras Habib Karim made a frantic call to London, reporting that dozens of their operatives were in Saddam's hands, and that he himself had narrowly escaped from Erbil. Chalabi immediately made arrangements to fly back to Iraq.39

  Erbil's streets trembled as hundreds of Iraqi tanks rolled into the city from four directions. The majority of the PUK forces retreated east toward the mountain-pass town of Degala, but the PUK's Erbil native Kosrat Rasul held on with a brigade of pesh merga, holed up in the parliament building as Iraqi helicopters made the windows shake. Rasul waited until nightfall and finally retreated. He lost about three hundred men as he fought his way out of the city around eleven P.M.40

  "We knew Saddam would attack," Talabani said. "The Americans told us, 'Don't worry. If Saddam attacks, we will hit them.' We were depending on this. Otherwise we'd have used another tactic. If we knew America would not be helping us, we would have been coming out and saving hundreds of our forces. If the American airplanes came, we could have attacked the Iraqi army and gotten their tanks! But they didn't do it. We were obliged to retreat from Erbil in a very bad condition."

  It quickly dawned on the nineteen-year-old Qubad Talabani that he wasn't going to reach England in time for school, though his summer vacation was clearly finished. The morning of the attack he awoke to the sound of his father pacing in the garden and shouting into a satellite phone. With his fluent English, Qubad found himself pressed into service as his father's satellite phone operator. He fielded calls from the press and spoke with the State Department's Robert Pelletreau several times, waiting for word about American air strikes. In their final conversation, Pelletreau told Qubad he was heading into an NSC meeting and would call back in two hours. That was the last word from him.

  After the rout in Erbil the pesh merga prepared to make their stand at Degala, then fell back to Koi Sanjaq. Qubad Talabani remembers an angry and despairing call from Barham Salih. He told Salih to keep hope, maybe the line would hold at Koi Sanjaq. But Salih's information in Washington was better than what the PUK could see on the ground. "What are you talking about? Koi fell twenty minutes ago," Salih said over the scratchy line.

  Koi's mountains protect a clear alley to
Sulimaniya, and when they fell, the PUK's spirit crumbled. "In that part of the world, when your morale is gone, it's over," said Qubad. "You don't have technology—it's just pure balls that gets you through these battles." His father knew that as well. At some point during the day, Mam Jalal quietly took his son into the study and closed the door. There was very bad news. "Look, your mother . . . we're not sure where she is," Qubad recalled his father saying. "You have to be strong. People are going to look to you to judge the mood. However you may be feeling inside, you've got to put on a brave face."

  Hero Talabani, the daughter of Kurdish intellectual Ibrahim Ahmad—who led the schism with the KDP in the 1950s—had been a late convert to the Kurdish resistance. As a student, Hero had no interest in politics, despite her father's prominence. After she married Talabani, she couldn't help but get involved, and in the 1970s she chose to stay with him in the mountains, sending her two sons back to her father's care. Hero is a slender woman, unassuming but intense. She was one of the few female members of the Kurdish parliament in 1992, and she also helped create the PUK's company of female pesh merga, which saw combat in the civil war, and helped found the Kurdish branch of the NGO Save the Children. On the same day Qubad had been told not to go to Erbil to fax in his university registration, his mother responded to a request from the NGO's office there—they needed her to bring in the payroll. War zones are always cash-only, so Hero Talabani put the forty-five thousand dollars in her suitcase and made what she had hoped would be a quick overnight trip to the Kurdish capital.

  Like many other Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani had claimed a house in Erbil after the uprising; the Talibanis' house had belonged to Iraqi vice president Izzat al-Douri. When Hero got to the house, on the north edge of town, a repairman surprised her by knocking at her door. "Why are you here?" she asked suspiciously. "No one is supposed to know I'm in town."

  "I didn't know you were back," the man replied. "I just had to tell somebody. I came on the road from Kirkuk, and it was full of Iraqi tanks."

  Hero drove to the parliament building and found Kosrat Rasul gathering reports from all around the city. Kosrat expected an attack the next morning—August 31—and advised her to get out of town. One of the PUK's senior politicos, Omar Fattah, went with her back to the house, where they called Talabani by satellite phone. He asked his wife to leave. Moments later Kosrat called her on the satellite phone to make sure she had already left, and she put him off. Fattah tried to persuade her, and Kosrat even sent pesh merga to the house to plead, but she wouldn't go.

  "I didn't do it. I don't like to run away. It's very bad for the morale of the pesh merga," she said.

  When the attack began, it was like nothing she had ever seen. "From the roof we saw a line that was all fire—the Iraqi artillery. I lived for many years in the mountains, but this shelling was something else," said Hero. "You couldn't hear one or two—it was mixed together like bursts from a Kalashnikov. I informed my husband. I think I phoned Barham [Salih] also, in the U.S. that it had started."

  By the following day the PUK line fragmented, and Hero's small group found the Talibanis' house on the front line of advancing KDP and Iraqi troops. As artillery shells started landing nearby, Hero's convoy pulled out. But the conspicuous group of cars started drawing fire. One of her bodyguards shouted over the din that it was time to run—a good decision, as the closest pursuers seemed more interested in looting Talabani's Oldsmobile, with the satellite phone in the back, than in actually catching the PUK first lady. They sprinted some distance in the clear before someone spotted them and started lighting up the ground with bullets. Hero's guards grabbed her by each arm and ran. "I cannot run like them," she said. "I was like a cartoon—running but my legs were not on the ground."

  They sprinted across an open lot with bullets flying, but miraculously, no one was hit. In the safety of an alleyway the small group looked for a house to hide in, but several civilians held up a Koran and begged them not to enter. Finally they started jumping over the garden walls behind successive houses, stopping when they reached a high wall, and huddling down in a corner. Hero grabbed the chance to smoke the cigarette she had been dying for.

  "We've got to write to the director of Rambo and apologize," she told Fattah. "I've always said no one could be shot at like they do in those movies and have nothing happen. Now we've just done it."

  The next hours robbed her of her sense of humor. While scaling the next wall, Hero fell, hitting her head and landing on her back with a crash. They found an empty house where she could lie down to recover, and Hero asked her soldiers to find her some local clothes—she was wearing jeans and a striped T-shirt, which were now quite dirty and out of place to begin with in conservative Erbil. They holed up for the night and changed houses the next day. Hero started losing her own morale. One of the men in the group was a relative stranger and was acting frightened. Fearing he would give them away, Fattah sent the man looking for a new, safe location, and when he left, the group deserted him and moved. The next afternoon they commandeered a car and tried to drive out of the city amid the looters and Iraqi tanks.

  Hero hid a Browning pistol under her borrowed dress, but they passed the checkpoints without being recognized. The car broke down just past the last KDP checkpoint on the road to Degala, and miraculously an empty taxi materialized. When she caught up with the retreating PUK army, Hero says, Kosrat Rasul's men nearly pulled her arms out with joy.41

  NEWS OF THE Iraqi incursion came to the U.S. embassy in Ankara by an urgent call from the CIA's six-man team in Erbil—they needed to get out fast. Marc Grossman, now the ambassador to Turkey, talked to the Turks about letting the men cross the border. But the number trying to escape mushroomed. Iraqi troops, with KDP help, were rounding up all the opposition groups based in Erbil—the Turcomans, the Shi'ites, the Islamists, and especially the INC and anyone who had been working with Americans. 42 An additional thirty-nine INC men had been executed in Erbil and scores more fought to the death.43 Then Grossman got another call from northern Iraq, informing him that at least six hundred people were running for Zakho, fearing that Saddam had marked them for death for associating with foreigners. Back in London, Bob Deutsch feared the worst.

  "Get all of the Americans out of there tonight," Deutsch remembered advising the administration. "We didn't know what deal Barzani had cut with Saddam," he said, "Obviously in retrospect the deal was that he would give him the INC people. But it could just as easily have been a deal that said 'we'll give him the Americans.'"

  Grossman talked to the Turkish foreign ministry again and this time he chartered a plane to fly out to Diyarbakir.44 In Erbil the KDP admitted that Iraqi Mukhabarat agents had probably infiltrated the city, and panic ensued. Grossman found himself reprising his efforts from 1991; fortunately he knew the logistics of southeastern Turkey inside and out. Embassy officials sent buses to the border and loaded up exactly the number of people for whom they had seats on each flight from Diyarbakir. At first it was just the Americans and their associates, but over the following days a mini-exodus began, and about seven thousand people fled toward the Turkish border. When they reached Zakho, Julia Taft, from the aid coalition InterAction (and later a member of the Clinton State Department), lobbied hard to get them all out. Someone back in Washington had a guilty conscience, because suddenly the United States began airlifting seven thousand Iraqi Kurds. Rather than process them all in Turkey, Washington ordered U.S. Air Force planes to take the Kurds to a secure, if bizarre, location: the U.S. territory of Guam. The FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service processed the refugees there. Eventually most of them ended up in places like Nashville, Tennessee, and Harrisonburg, Virginia.45

  Meanwhile the PUK arranged for its own extrication. Talabani had been putting out an announcement internationally that his wife had been captured, in the hopes that it would give her some protection if she did fall into KDP or Iraqi hands. When Hero appeared, four days after the assault began, the PUK leadership abandoned any
defense of Sulimaniya and made for the familiar refuge of Iran. The KDP later charged that this was a case of theatrics and that Talabani was trying to appeal for international intervention. In any case, the momentum, all important in irregular warfare, had left the PUK and they needed a safe distance to regroup. Talabani made preparations to abandon his headquarters at Qalaat Chowlan, above the city.

  Still more Londoner than Kurdistani, Qubad Talabani accepted his father's surreal notion that the house needed to be burned to the ground before enemies could loot it. Still, the smell of smoke shocked him a bit as he finished his breakfast. Following the smell he discovered to his horror that an overzealous pesh merga with two cans of gasoline had started the fire—in the computer room. Worse yet, he hadn't removed the computers first. Qubad rushed in to save the equipment and yelled at the soldier, who hadn't realized that a laptop—rare and expensive in Kurdistan—should be treated any differently than the desks or chairs being thrown on the fire. As the Talabanis joined a massive convoy leaving Sulimaniya, some munitions started cooking off somewhere in the compound, giving the PUK a startling send-off.

  The Iraqi army had apparently made a bargain with the KDP that they would only stay in Erbil for a few days, and they honored it, redeploying to Qushtapa—probably less out of respect for Barzani than from fear that Washington might eventually make up its mind to do something. Still, the KDP had taken Erbil, never to relinquish it. Continuing to level the charge that Talabani was using Iranian revolutionary guards, Barzani followed the PUK's collapsing line all the way up to the mountains near Qala Diza. Talabani had slipped across the border to Iran and then reentered Iraqi Kurdistan near the mountaintop town of Zele. The snowy peaks became a combat zone. There Talabani discovered he was sharing Zele with an old friend—Ahmed Chalabi, and the remnants of the INC.