With time to visit one more city on my tour of the north, we drove to Halabja. Kawan gave me a tip: Talabani was supposed to be visiting there that day to initiate a memorial to the victims of the chemical attack. This wasn't just a groundbreaking ceremony for the monument; it would be the first time Talabani had visited the city since the PUK had retaken control from the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (LMK). Kawan helped arrange a ride to the city with some Kurdish journalists.
The road east from Sulimaniya skirts foothills just north of a long verdant plain above Darbandikhan Lake, the snowy peaks in the distance across the border in Iran. Halfway to Halabja, we passed the town of Sa'id Sadiq, where the road forks north toward the Iranian border town of Pen-jwin, and everyone in the car compared stories of walking or driving this road during the mass exodus of 1991. We veered south on the road toward Halabja, and the mood turned serious.
Every fifty meters or so, on both sides of the road, a pesh merga stood at attention. Many of the men had new American-style military uniforms, but they packed a hodgepodge of weapons—short Kalashnikov knockoffs with plastic stocks, aging Russian sniper rifles, the occasional rocket-propelled grenade, like a fat harpoon slung over the shoulder. They were Talabani's honor guard, but their purpose was more than ceremonial. The PUK had only a shaky hold on this region. The road swung around and entered Halabja from the south, looking up into the bowl of mountains that holds the city. I couldn't help but think of how the poison gas, heavier than air, must have sunk down and poured through the streets. We pulled up to the town hall just in time for an opening speech by the mayor.
Jamil Abd-al-Rahman, Halabja's Islamist mayor, welcomed all the visitors to his city. He was the first man I noticed in Kurdistan with a bushy beard—most men sported as big a mustache as they could grow, but in Halabja quite a few had beards and wore some sort of head covering. No women attended the meeting, but a group of them watched the spectacle from the flat roof of a nearby house.
"We wish we could make our heart the carpets under your feet to welcome you," said the mayor, who had a reputation as something of a poet. Abd-al-Rahman had been Halabja's mayor for years, and a moderate voice among the fighting Kurdish factions and even his own LMK supporters. He spoke of bringing the Kurds together to rebuild Halabja, starting with this monument, to make Kurdistan's worst atrocity into a symbol of unity.
Abd-al-Rahman announced that engineers would begin cleaning up the city today, taking out debris still standing from the attack twelve years ago. Dozens of trucks and bulldozers had come from Sulimaniya, and the work crews with shovels began to clear out the area where the monument would go—the exact design was still under discussion. Also in dispute was the health risk of moving all the rubble. According to Dr. Fuad Baban, the head of Sulimaniya medical school and of a new postgraduate research institute in Halabja, the town had unreasonably high rates of congenital abnormalities and a high rate of miscarriage. He ticked off a list of other ailments common in the city—chronic respiratory illness, heart problems, and aggressive cancers.
Baban worried the excavation would stir up more poisonous residues still in the soil. He looked out as the workers, many with simple shovels, started breaking ground. The institute Baban worked with had tried for international support to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons, but not much came. He couldn't understand why the world didn't show more interest, even a cold scientific interest, in Halabja.
Halabja would grab some attention soon enough, though not for the reasons Baban desired. Starting around 1998 a group of the most radical Islamists from around Kurdistan had trekked across Iran to Afghanistan to make contact with Osama bin Laden and enroll in his al-Qa'ida training camp near Khost.16 Two years later, these men were returning and starting their own jihadi camp in the mountains above Halabja. The PUK may have had an inkling already that the group had formed, since Talabani never showed up in Halabja that day. Either he had called off the trip at the last minute or it had been a ruse from the start to test the security around Halabja.
By the following year several of the Islamist groups coalesced into one force, called Ansar al-Islam. They called their caverns above Halabja "little Tora Bora" for its comfortable similarity to their stronghold in eastern Afghanistan. Al-Qa'ida's leaders apparently took a strong interest in the Kurdish region as a safe place to lay low in 2001.
* Also signing were Dick Armitage, John Bolton, Elliot Abrams, Robert Zoellick, Paula Dobriansky, and Peter Rodman. The other nine names included important advisors to the Pentagon like Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Francis Fukuyama, and James Woolsey.
† Candidate Bush had shown little interest in foreign affairs beyond the Mexican border and had declared an aversion to nation-building. In his meetings with Bush, Wolfowitz said he admired the way the Texas governor would always bring the conversation back to basic themes the American people could understand when the discussion sank too far into details. Wolfowitz liked the idea of a president who didn't second-guess the experts in his cabinet. He even spoke fondly of handing cue cards to President Reagan on a visit to the Philippines when it looked like Reagan wouldn't remember Ferdinand Marcos's name for the meeting.
* Years later the Oil-for-Food program became a huge scandal, and it might have ruined more careers had it not been overshadowed so quickly by the mismanagement of the U.S. occupation in Iraq. It's no surprise that the program allowed Saddam Hussein to steal millions—he was able to punish any would-be whistle-blowers inside the U.N. office by simply denying a visa to anyone who pointed out the corruption.
* UNESCO took on a project to restore the citadel in 2005.
CHAPTER SIX
A Most Convenient Foe
FOR A DECADE AFTER THE COLD WAR, presidents and prime ministers routinely announced the dawning of a new era, but that new age truly arrived on September 11, 2001. Only hours after the attacks on New York and Washington, America's friends and foes around the world hastened to figure out where they fit in the terrifying new paradigm. Despite their revulsion at the massacre, possessing a terrorist threat suddenly counted like money in the bank in terms of U.S. aid. Afghans tempered their horror with hope that the world's attention would zero in on the Taliban government. In Israel, Ariel Sharon canceled peace talks and began referring to Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat as "our bin Laden." He sent tanks into the West Bank, counting on America to empathize with Israel's situation. Arafat charged him with exploiting the attacks and desperately tried to control the damage caused by some Palestinians caught on camera cheering on al-Qa'ida.1 Countries from Central America to Central Asia scrambled their policies to fit with the fear and rage emanating from the wounded superpower. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz appeared on CNN from Baghdad, disclaiming any connection with bin Laden. Everyone with a scrap of information about al-Qa'ida—real, fabricated, or fantastical—airbrushed it for presentation.
Except the Kurds. A block from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., Qubad Talabani sat at his desk in the PUK office and didn't pick up the phone. "All the people were saying, 'Oh, focus on me? Various countries popped up and said, 'Hey, we've got terrorists!' We just didn't want to appear to be jumping on the bandwagon," said Talabani. He had another reason not to hurry. The PUK had already provided the White House a dossier on Kurdistan's own al-Qa'ida-inspired group, Ansar al-Islam, exactly one week before September 11.2 This small gang of fanatics would do as much to bring about a Kurdish state as years of struggling in the mountains.
Al-Qa'ida connections would eventually draw the Americans' attention, but Ansar al-Islam was home-grown in Kurdistan. The Islamists in northern Iraq trace their roots back to Halabja in 1986. A popular preacher, Sheikh Othman Abdulaziz, and his brother Ali, led protests against the regime in one of Halabja's town squares, and the Ba'athists reacted by reducing the plaza to rubble. The Shi'ite Islamic republic next door in Iran took an interest. Kurdish Islamists are all Sunni, but their enmity with Saddam Hussein apparently trumped the sectarian
difference, and elements of the Iranian government helped recruit and train volunteers from Halabja. In the cross fire of the Iran-Iraq war, the Kurds happily accepted help. On their return to Halabja, the Abdulaziz family founded the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK). The LMK drew equal measures of inspiration from Khomeini's revolutionary tactics in Iran and the religious teachings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Sunni fundamentalist thinker—an odd mix, but somehow fitting the Kurds' history and geography3 The LMK fought against the Ba'athists in the 1991 uprising, though they never joined the Kurdistan Front. Othman Abdulaziz ran for the leadership of the Kurdish region, one of the four faces appearing on the ballot. But his IMK got only 5 percent in the 1992 elections, short of the minimum of 7 percent needed for seats in parliament. The ruling parties sidelined them completely.4
During those same formative years, global jihad concentrated on the Soviet conquest of Afghanistan, and American money and weapons flowed through Pakistan to the Afghan mujahideen. Thousands of Muslims from across the world traveled to base camps in Peshawar, Pakistan, and then crossed the border to fight a holy war against the Soviets. Many Kurds made the journey, and they found a friendly safe house along the way run by an LMK member called Mullah Krekar (whose real name is Najmaldin Faraj Ahmad). Until 1991 Krekar taught at the Islamic University in Islamabad, and he became close with Abdullah Azzam, a mentor to Osama bin Laden. Krekar may have fought alongside bin Laden in the 1980s.5 The jihadis who returned home wore the experience in Afghanistan as a badge of honor, and for the Kurdish Islamists it was ideal. They returned to northern Iraq, where the terrain and conditions looked nearly identical to Afghanistan's Hindu Kush Mountains, and they had a big fat target in the Kurdish secular government and its Western visitors.
The desperate times of the early 1990s in Kurdistan, combined with the senseless conflict between the KDP and PUK, made fertile ground for the Islamists. Religious foundations from Saudi Arabia offered an unveiled, blatant exchange: food and medicine in return for Koranic students and fundamentalist behavior. As in many other poor Muslim countries around the world, the Saudis built hundreds of mosques, schools, and branch offices across northern Iraq. But the fundamentalists chafed against secular traditions in Kurdistan—and that friction often spiked to violence when a prominent "Afghan" Kurd returned. When Mullah Krekar came back from Pakistan in time for the 1991 uprising, he led a push to install a conservative version of shari'a, Islamic law, in Halabja. Attacks on immodest women and simple turf issues led the PUK to crack down on the IMK. Naturally the KDP exploited the situation and made some ties with the Islamists. Again in 1997, with the return of a fighter called "Mullah Aso," the IMK fought with the secular parties.6
Halabja and the surrounding region had always nurtured conservative religious traditions, but even there the extremists stood out, especially those preaching takfir—the idea that anyone practicing an alternative to their radical Islam was an infidel, and fair game for slaughter. Internal divisions broke the IMK into factions during the late 1990s. Officially, Ali Abdulaziz led the group, but members complained he had started to take personal control of the movement's funds—acting a bit too much like the secular party bosses. At a congress in August 2000, a significant portion of the IMK leadership split away from Abdulaziz. The splinter group, led by a charismatic young preacher named Ali Bapir, called itself the Islamic Group, or Komala Islami. He presented himself as more responsible than Abdulaziz and less radical than the "Afghanis" like Mulla Krekar.7 Bapir's youthful looks and serene gaze belie a hard-as-nails reputation; he is rumored to have personally executed his own brother as a Ba'athist spy8 He and his followers set up shop outside Halabja in the town of Khurmal. But even deeper divisions remained.
While giving the impression of being unified, two factions within the IMK secretly arranged separate trips to Afghanistan in early 2001. Mullah Krekar used his connections with the mujahideen to help send his delegation to al-Qa'ida training camps. Coming straight from years of battle in Kurdistan, they skipped the basic training and started right in on advanced tactics for bombs and suicide vests. Another internal faction, Kurdish Hamas, had joined with the Erbil-based faction Tawheed. They arranged their own trip to meet with bin Laden through Abu Qatada al-Filistini, a London-based cleric. Over several months bin Laden and his associate Ayman al-Zawahiri pressured the Kurds to unify and form a training camp of their own in Kurdistan.9 Events in Kurdistan took a hand in pushing the factions together.
The IMK showed no ability to control radicals inside the movement—the leadership eventually disavowed Tawheed after members started throwing acid on the faces of unveiled women in Erbil. KDP authorities swept up all the radicals they could find and forced them and their families out of the city. Tawheed moved to the Iranian border town of Haj Omran, where they clashed with the KDP again, losing several men. But a sleeper cell remained in Erbil. On February 18, 2001, its members took revenge, assassinating Franso Hariri, a prominent KDP leader and a Christian. The Islamists claimed afterward that Hariri had ties with the Israeli Mossad, their stand-by conspiracy justification for murder.
Hariri's death became another marker in the rivalry between Talabani and Barzani. The PUK allowed Tawheed to relocate around the city of Khurmal and possibly allowed Hariri's assassins to make their escape. Talabani may have been trying to placate the Islamists in his backyard or trying to curry favor with Iran. But allowing the Islamists to concentrate around Khurmal soon blew back on the PUK. Osama bin Laden sent a personal envoy to tell them he wanted an al-Qa'ida base in the mountains of Kurdistan, and the radical factions began to galvanize. The plan hit a small bump when three Kurdish mujahideen slipped up, crossing back from Afghanistan through Iran. The Iranians arrested them and discovered CD-ROMs full of al-Qa'ida training videos, but the IMK still had enough connections in the Iranian government to get the men released. On September 1, 2001, the Islamist factions created Jund al-Islam, or "Soldiers of Islam." Two days later the PUK briefed the White House that they had a new Islamist threat on their hands with connections to an obscure Saudi named Osama bin Laden. For their trouble they received a collective blank stare from the Bush administration.*
Interest in al-Qa'ida links to Iraq revived quickly after September 11, but Saddam hawks in Washington wanted more than evidence of a few guerrillas plotting in Kurdistan, outside Baghdad's control. Their opening premise was that the 9/11 attacks were simply too complex for a nonstate actor; only a government like Saddam's could have organized it. The White House desperately sought something large to punish, and Saddam Hussein's capital city looked much more satisfying than the caves of Tora Bora or Halabja. By the first week of October the hawks seized on a rumored meeting between one of the hijackers and an Iraqi Mukhabarat agent in Prague, but that turned out to be a red herring. Most of Washington's intelligence analysts decided that Saddam Hussein, at best a Muslim of convenience, was exactly the kind of Middle East despot bin Laden had railed against. The Kurds never claimed Baghdad had helped with 9/11. They had learned not to overplay their cards, but they maintained that Saddam Hussein had at least opened channels with the militants in the north.
"It was murky. It wasn't hands-on," Qubad Talabani admitted. Saddam had good intelligence about the formation of Islamist groups in Kurdistan, including a significant number of Arab military officers from Mosul who had joined the Islamists after deserting during the uprising in 1991. Some of them may have reopened ties with the regime. Saddam's first contact with the group may have involved catching them trying to operate in Iraq. "Saddam was arresting some of these guys in Baghdad," said Qubad. "But they were saying, look, we can help you; we're not here to harm you. We've got another problem—these Kurds in the north are way too secular, way too pro-American. We need to deal with this. So Saddam started releasing some of these guys."
In retrospect the Kurds saw a rush of al-Qa'ida operatives moving toward Iraqi Kurdistan in the first week of September 2001, just after the assassination of Ahmed Shah Masoud, the leader of the
Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Killing Masoud was bin Laden's preemptive strike against the most important rival to the Taliban government that was giving him shelter. It looked to the Kurds like many radicals might have left Afghanistan in advance of September 11, when they expected things to heat up there. Soon things heated up in Kurdistan as well.
MULLAH KREKAR TOOK the leadership of Jund al-Islam just weeks after 9/11, and the group changed its name to Ansar al-Islam (supporters of Islam). They inaugurated the change by stepping up attacks on PUK positions in the Halabja region, taking strategic peaks around the city. On September 23 they defeated a large number of PUK pesh merga in the town of Kheli Hama, and took the conflict a step further. Ansar's fighters executed forty-three prisoners, torturing many and beheading some. In what would become a familiar al-Qa'ida tactic, they put video of the entire gory massacre on the Internet.
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