The video footage shocked Jalal Talabani's men into action. PUK fighters launched a major assault during the first week of October and drove Ansar out of the valley around Halabja. They retook Shinerwe Mountain, a frigid peak along the Iranian border with a commanding view of the city. Ansar defended Shinerwe fiercely; some of its militants even chained themselves to their machine gun nests to ensure they would fight to the death. When the dust settled, the PUK discovered a major piece of evidence: a dead Syrian known as Abu Abd-al-Rahman, a known associate of Osama bin Laden. Abu Abd-al-Rahman had come as al-Qa'ida's envoy to Kurdistan, with hundreds of thousands of dollars to help bind the fractious Kurdish Islamists together, and stayed on as a leadership figure. Some days after the fight on Shinerwe Mountain, a PUK informer overheard Ansar al-Islam leaders lamenting Abu Abd-al-Rahman's death in the battle.10 Between the videotaped massacre and the death of a major al-Qa'ida figure, the Americans finally woke to the Kurds' al-Qa'ida problem.
Small groups of Americans arrived in Kurdistan, asking to interview detainees from Ansar al-Islam. The Americans pointed to two enemies they had in common with the Kurds: Ansar al-Islam and the dictator in Baghdad, whom the White House keenly wanted to peg as an international terrorist. The KDP, still bearing the memory of Barzani's betrayal, especially didn't trust the visitors. Agents reported back to CIA headquarters that the United States, and particularly the CIA, had a major credibility problem.11 The Kurds had outgrown their habit of believing that every foreigner who trekked into Kurdistan was a secret envoy from the great powers.
"Before we didn't know how the decision making worked," said Masoud Barzani. "We didn't know where the centers of power were. For instance, we thought that when a CIA officer says something, it represents the president or the administration or the Pentagon." Barzani wasn't going to be taken on faith again, and the Bush administration realized it needed the Kurds solidly on board to support and protect any team it might send into the north. To settle their doubts, in March 2002 Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani secretly traveled to the United States. Avoiding nosy Washington, the administration hustled them out to the CIAs training base near Williamsburg, Virginia, known as "the Farm." George Tenet hosted them along with some familiar faces: Zalmay Khalilzad, now on the National Security Council staff, and Ryan Crocker, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs.* The act of bringing them to "the Farm" almost made the rest of the message unnecessary, but Tenet drove it home anyhow: this time the United States wanted Saddam gone.
"It was then we realized they were serious," Barzani said. "I was convinced from April 2002 that the Americans were coming."
Tenet may have bluffed through it a bit, overstating his resolve with the Kurdish leaders in order to protect the men he sent into Iraq,12 and of course the Bush administration busily denied any intention to go to war, even as military resources started to shift from Afghanistan toward Iraq. When Talabani and Barzani returned to Kurdistan, the CIA set up a permanent base near the town of Sa'id Sadiq, between Sulimaniya and Halabja. The location made sense for the agency's stated purpose—gathering intelligence on Ansar al-Islam—but its real mission involved prospecting for human intelligence inside Iraq. The trip to Washington finally convinced both Kurdish leaders that the Iraqi dictator would be taken down. They only worried how many Kurds Saddam might be able to take with him.
The United States upped the ante during the first week of April, with a public visit to the Kurdish region. Ryan Crocker swung through Salahudin and Sulimaniya. While his visit officially reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to the Washington Agreement, it meant more as a follow-up from the CIA meeting and as a shot across Saddam's bow. On the eve of Crocker's meeting with Barzani and Talabani, however, Ansar al-Islam aimed its own cannon ball.
Barham Salih had returned from Washington the previous year to serve as prime minister of the PUK's section of Kurdistan. Fie earned a good reputation in Sulimaniya as the next generation of Kurdish leadership, educated men in suits who would settle disputes around a boardroom table, not Kalashnikov-toting guerrillas. Dr. Barham embodied America's hopes for democracy in the Muslim world, and he could speak Washington's language perfectly. There was a flip side: no one better fit Ansar al-Islam's description of an apostate worthy of assassination. A three-man suicide team set out from Khurmal to ambush him on April 2, 2002.
The men staked out Salih's office in a red Volkswagen disguised as a taxi. On his home turf, and generally well liked in the city, Dr. Barham had fallen into a predictable routine of moving from his house to his office, but that Tuesday morning was an exception. A family friend, Thu-raya Khan, had called from London the night before to tell him her brother had died. Dr. Barham promised to leave early in the morning for the funeral in Koi Sanjaq.
"I usually go to the office around eight o'clock, and that morning the Ansar team was waiting for me. [Instead] I left at six to go to Koi Sanjaq; I didn't go to the office. So they missed me in the morning," he said.13
Completely unaware, Salih drove an hour and a half to the west and paid his respects. Fie returned by way of Talabani's guesthouse at Dukan dam, where the Crocker delegation had arrived and were settling in for meetings with the PUK. The assassins picked him up again as he returned to his home, a block behind Sulimaniya's Ashti Hotel. At four o'clock they saw his driver ready the Land Cruiser again, and the jihadis stepped down from their car and drew their weapons.
"As I was stepping out, I was called back for a phone call," Salih recalled. It was Thuraya Kahn again. "This lady saved me twice. At four P.M. she called me, and she was crying for the death of her brother. It kept me from going out. Then I heard the bullets," he said.
With grenades and assault rifles, Ansar agents killed five of Salih's lightly armed bodyguards before two of the gunmen fell in a hail of bullets. A third assailant lost his suicidal fervor and fled with two bullets in his leg. The PUK authorities tracked him to a safehouse in Sulimaniya about fourteen hours after the attack. Qais Ibrahim Khadir, the twenty-six-year-old surviving attacker, had been a member of the original Tawheed faction from Erbil—which Talabani had allowed to cross over into his territory. The PUK at first put out word that he had been killed, perhaps trying to maximize his intelligence value. But what the wispy-bearded young man would say he said willingly. Khadir showed no remorse and only regretted failing in the attempt to kill Salih. He said he would try it again if they ever released him. When the PUK interrogators came to see him even months later, he tried to convert them into good fundamentalist Muslims.14
The narrow escape of Washington's favorite Kurd from an Islamist suicide team added leverage to those in the Bush administration talking about Ansar al-Islam, especially since the attack took place while Ryan Crocker made his official visit. The Americans had a great deal of work to do on the case for invasion, but at the time they felt quite pleased with their "War on Terror." As spring turned to summer, the Afghanistan war looked a total success. The Taliban had crumbled under air assaults with only a few Americans on the ground egging on the indigenous Northern Alliance. A meeting of Afghan exiles in Bonn, Germany, had selected a new Afghan government, and international donors pledged billions to rebuild the country. In June Afghanistan's bickering warlords had all come under the same tent to endorse America's handpicked president, Hamid Karzai (the huge air-conditioned tent near Kabul University had been built by the Americans). Even the optimistic neocons had thought Afghanistan might give them some trouble; in the early days after 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz opined that instead of Afghanistan, Iraq was the low-hanging fruit.15 After Afghanistan had been such a pushover, taking Baghdad looked like a cinch. For act 2, the Kurds could play the part of the Northern Alliance, the indigenous force on the ground. The State Department commissioned the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, to convene an Iraqi version of the Bonn meeting. Only the Iraqi opposition had a different script.
The Kurds, bloodhounds when it came to a whiff of betrayal, started to harass Washington about
promises made at the secret 2002 meeting with Barzani and Talabani in Virginia. They expected Saddam to lash out if cornered. He might save his dying curse for Israel, but the Kurds sat within reach even for the short-range missiles that the U.N. embargo allowed Baghdad to keep. All of the world's intelligence services believed at the time that Saddam still had chemical weapons; the Kurds wanted to know what sort of protection came with allowing Americans in. At the CIA meeting, the Americans had promised to protect the Kurds, but when asked about it over the summer, Vice President Dick Cheney had resorted to the old Clintonian language. He promised that any aggression by Saddam against the Kurdish safe zone would be met with retaliation "at a time and place of our choosing."16 That same line had brought air strikes in southern Iraq while Saddam's tanks rolled through Erbil in 1996. Despite a constant chatter from the administration about Baghdad's chemical and nerve agents, the Kurds couldn't get any gas masks from the United States, which noted that delivering them would have violated the U.N. embargo on Iraq, an excuse that made the Kurds apoplectic.
"When they came and offered, there were around two or three thousand masks," said Masoud Barzani. The number implied that they were for the friends and family of the Kurdish leaders. "We said that if they didn't have enough for all the people, we don't accept."
The Americans first had four groups in mind for Iraq's "Bonn meeting," with a goal of uniting the fractious Iraqi opposition, to be held in Washington, D.C.: Ahmed Chalabi's INC, Ayad Allawi's INA, Barzani's KDP, and Talabani's PUK. The Clinton administration had started reaching out to Shi'ite groups as well, but the location of their leadership in Tehran bogged down the process, and by 2002, U.S. officials barely knew the names of the key Shi'ite figures.17 Yet Washington couldn't afford to ignore them. Democracy in Iraq would of course mean Shi'ite majority rule, and the Shi'ite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) boasted a ten-thousand-man militia, trained by Iran. SCIRI's leader, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, remained aloof, but he sent his brother Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, then a virtual unknown, to the talks in Washington. At the urging of Chalabi's INC, another group was added, the Constitutional Monarchist Movement, led by Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, a London exile and would-be king of Iraq. But when the meeting convened in Washington during the sweltering first week of August, they were one man short.
Masoud Barzani snubbed the White House, even though he had been promised a face-to-face meeting with President Bush if he came along with Talabani. The latter went to Washington happily—he loved international travel, cameras, microphones, and meetings. The fact that the promises made in these meetings never panned out didn't seem to bother Mam Jalal, who had his own habit of letting his words run away with him and then backing off. While he was in D.C., for example, he told CNN that the Kurdish region would make an excellent base for U.S. attacks on Saddam. He "clarified" the remark the next day to say that the Kurdish region would not be an excellent base for U.S. attacks.
On August 8 and 9, members of the "group of six" held meetings at the White House and State Department, with the KDP represented by Hoshyar Zebari. At the State Department they met with Marc Grossman, now undersecretary of state for political affairs, and Douglas Feith, Wol-fowitz's deputy from the Pentagon, and Secretary of State Colin Powell "stopped in" to visit. Barzani's absence made high-level decisions impossible, and the White House rescinded the offer of face time with Bush. Instead the group met at the National Security Council and spoke with Vice President Dick Cheney by video link from Wyoming. Khalilzad, Rumsfeld, and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Meyers sat in on the meeting, asking specific questions about war planning. Talabani was his usual garrulous self, and he assured the vice president that the Iraq war would last only three weeks. The war would not be the issue, he told Cheney. It would be—and then Talabani leaned over to Barham Salih.18
"What is farhud ?" he asked Salih, who whispered him the translation.
"Looting," said Talabani. "The problem will be looting."
Zalmay Khalilzad smiled and later told Talabani he should be Iraq's next president.19
It was the strongest sign to date that the Bush administration planned to take action in Iraq, but Barzani was having none of this Washington love fest. Besides the undelivered aid and security guarantees for the Kurds, he had found other reasons not to go. The black market oil business between the regime and Turkey still filled the KDP coffers, and every week the war didn't happen made them that much richer. But Barzani could see this wouldn't last much longer. In fact he may have intended to go to Washington until a logistical problem gave him pause. At the last moment Turkey had, unusually, denied Barzani permission to travel across its borders (both he and Talabani held Turkish diplomatic passports, among several other travel documents). Barzani still could have headed out through Syria, but since Washington did nothing to protest, the Turkish snub showed him something important.20 In a conflict between pleasing Turkey and keeping a promise with a Kurd, America was going to choose Ankara every time.
As it happened, Barzani wasn't the only one put on display as Turkey showed off its influence with Washington. On October 18, 2002, a group of medical doctors from Sulimaniya and Erbil left Iraqi Kurdistan at the invitation of East Tennessee State University. Traveling from an invisible state across a militarized border toward an international flight would have been a tall order, but the Kurds felt relaxed, as the U.S. State Department had arranged the seminar in Tennessee as part of a program to improve Kurdistan's health care system. The Appalachian communities had some similarities with the Kurdish ones, and perhaps for that reason Tennessee hosted America's largest Kurdish exile population. Like most Iraqi Kurds, the doctors carried black market forged passports—as Kurdish government employees, they could hardly apply at the passport offices in Baghdad or Mosul. Still, inside their fake passports were real Turkish transit visas that got them to Ankara, and there the U.S. embassy knowingly stamped in bona fide American visas. Thus the doctors were stunned when the Turkish police arrested them at Istanbul Atatürk Airport. Though such travel had been common, the Turkish government acted shocked to discover Kurdish doctors traveling with fake passports. They threw them in jail and pondered whether to deport them back to Iraqi Kurdistan—which the Turks officially said didn't exist—or to Baghdad, where Saddam might have a few questions for them.
In the end, after threatening them with being returned to Baghdad, the Turks took away the Kurds' passports and kept them in jail for two nights in Istanbul. The U.S. embassy finally interceded to gain their release, but the Turks wouldn't let the doctors carry on to attend the seminar in America, and by that time they felt lucky just to make it back home in decent health. Turkey had made its point. The Bush administration needed Turkish airspace and perhaps access to Iraq's northern border. As long as that was true, the Kurds were going to lose every round, and Turkey wanted to flaunt it.
In fact, though, one of the Kurdish doctors had made it to Washington, D.C., where Dr. Najmaldin Karim, the president of the Washington Kurdish Institute, arranged for him to meet with me. Before the interview I called the Turkish embassy, which said it had no knowledge of the case. Eventually embassy officials gave a simple confirmation: they had arrested thirteen Kurds in Istanbul traveling on false documents. A State Department spokesman was a bit less coy—he asked me to stop by Foggy Bottom the next day and he would give me the details on the Kurdish doctors.
Dr. Lezgine Ahmed, an internist from Salahudin, had avoided the trap in Turkey by leaving earlier for another conference in Vienna, where he picked up his visa for the trip to Tennessee. Now Lezgine was stranded in Washington, D.C., and the experience had reinforced his Kurdish sense of fatalism. He told a joke about a previous trip to Appalachia, when the airport shuttle driver had taken the mountain curves so fast that all the Kurdish visitors feared for their lives. Eventually one of them got up his courage to ask the driver to slow down.
"Please, sir, you don't understand," the visitor pleaded with the driver. "We ca
n't die here—Saddam Hussein has important plans to kill us back in Kurdistan."21
Like many Kurds Lezgine was more of a cultural than religious Muslim—he fasted for Ramadan because he always had. He was also intensely nationalistic, considering Turkish history with the Kurds to be just as bad as what Saddam had done.
"To me genocide is not only killing people physically; you can also assimilate them. You can hardly find any Kurds in Iraq who can't speak Kurdish, but there are so many Kurds in Turkey who can't speak their mother tongue. The Turks want to eliminate the Kurds," he said.
Lezgine wasn't overly fond of the Talabanis or the Barzanis, who seemed to be settling into the role of dynastic rulers in Iraqi Kurdistan, but he shrugged off their many shifting alliances, as well as the behavior of the Americans, with a Kurdish proverb. "Everybody eats meat," he said. "Why do only the wolves get blamed?"
Lezgine had been e-mailing the other doctors, who all said they felt humiliated by their treatment in Istanbul, where the police have a terrible reputation for their treatment of Turkish Kurds. But Lezgine was just as stuck—he was afraid to travel through Turkey on his own fake passport and wasn't sure how to go home, where his wife was expecting to give birth within weeks. Somewhere back in history his family had become the victims of a map, and now he had no official nationality, no country to give him a passport.
Hoping for a reasonable explanation, I followed up the invitation to stop by the State Department, but my source had gone dry. I waited in the same lobby where Hoshyar Zebari had been stood up a decade earlier; when the receptionist called up to the office, no one answered the extension. I called several times on my cell phone and left voice mails, but apparently permission to tell me the State Department's side of the story had been rescinded. Najmaldin Karim, with uncharacteristic vehemence, explained the entire incident of the stranded doctors as another message from the Turks.
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