Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  By Tuesday morning, with the hotel management ushering the delegates out the door, it was clear that all the late nights had been unnecessary. The sixty-one delegates for the next opposition conference had been chosen, though by the end of the week the number had risen to sixty-five, with plenty of still-bruised feelings about the percentages from each group and not much change from the original formula. Laith Kubba, a former member of Da'wa who had transformed himself into a policy wonk at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, seemed to think the arguments would be moot pretty soon.

  "The purpose was to give common principles," he said. "As far as percentages, I think everyone knows it's irrelevant, because the next meeting is likely to be in Baghdad."

  Instead, the next meeting was in Kurdistan.

  * In 2004 NBC News reported that the U.S. government had in fact considered and then tabled a plan to take out the Ansar camp in northern Iraq, later corroborated in congressional testimony.

  * Both major players on Bush's all-star war on terror team: Khalilzad was ambassador first to the Iraqi opposition, then to Kabul, then to Baghdad. Ryan Crocker was charge d'affaires in Kabul, then ambassador to Pakistan, then took over for Khalilzad in Baghdad in 2007.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Northern Front

  FOR ALL THEIR EXPERIENCE WITH SADDAM Hussein's chemical weapons and the enclave of Afghan-trained suicide bombers in their mountains, the Kurds worried most about the one U.S. ally on their northern border. President Bush still claimed he didn't have an Iraq war plan "on my desk," but his generals had a plan, with a big left hook through Turkey.

  Unlike in his father's Iraq war, the coalition Bush assembled this time could count its major players on one hand. Another handful of allies sat on the fence, caught between popular opposition to America's invasion plans and the enormous pressure to be either with the Bush administration or against it. Turkey struggled mightily with the choice. In March 2002, as the CIA convinced Kurdish leaders they would remove Saddam, Vice President Dick Cheney traveled to Ankara to secure Turkish support. Cheney consulted not only with the government in office but also with the Turkish military—not a ringing endorsement of civilian rule in a country that has hardly seen a generation without its military coup. But Turkey's democracy had matured, as the Bush administration learned that November. The Justice and Development (AK) Party, a group with Islamist roots, won Turkey's general elections, and Washington had to start the lobbying process from scratch. In early December Paul Wolfowitz visited Ankara to meet the new leadership and feel them out about the war. He came home telling the White House it would be a hard sell.1

  Perhaps as a direct consequence, when President Bush met with Iraqis for the first time, on January 10, 2003, no Kurds were among them. Three exiles were ushered into the Oval Office: Rend Rahim, an Arab human rights activist; Hatem Mukhlis, a doctor from Tikrit; and Kanan Makiya.* Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Khalilzad sat in on the meeting, in which the exiles spent part of the time explaining to Bush that Iraq had two kinds of Arab Muslims, Shi'ite and Sunni. Bush was interested in the exiles' personal stories and also asked if Iraqis hated Israel.2 The three Iraqis gave sometimes contradictory answers to Bush's questions about how Americans should proceed post-invasion, but no one appears to have mentioned that in addition to twenty million Arabs, the country was also home to millions of Kurds as well as some Turcomans and Assyrians. A week later Vice President Cheney quietly received the PUK's Barham Salih, visiting Washington from Sulimaniya, but it didn't have the same pizzazz as a meeting with the president. As far as the Kurds could see, they had been clearly snubbed to placate the Turks, as usual.

  MY SECOND VISIT to the invisible nation of Kurdistan began in January 2003 with immigration officials in Tehran cheerfully fingerprinting me—their retaliation for the American policy that requires the same for Iranian visitors. With the Syrian and Turkish routes closed, I had lucked into an Iranian visa and arranged to get across the border with help from the PUK in Tehran. Iranian bureaucracy kept my head spinning for all of the ten days I spent there, like jet lag that never went away.

  The government office that gave me permission to travel up to the border didn't seem to have any pull with the guards deciding who would be allowed to cross; upon arrival at the gate near the northwestern city of Mariwan, the guards looked at my papers and turned me back toward town. Bright sunshine made an unseasonably warm day for January, and I struck up a pantomime conversation with some young Kurdish Iranian men playing cards in the sun by the beautiful lake below the mountains along the Iraqi border. Quite naturally they invited me home for a meal, stopping to buy a chicken along the way. The visit lasted much longer than my dozen words of Kurdish, as we waited for the women in the kitchen to boil the chicken—I wondered how often they ate anything beyond rice and white beans. I felt even worse when they walked me back to my hotel, where Iranian security was waiting. A stern man in civilian clothes took the boys aside in the manager's office. Ten minutes later they came out looking scared and bade me an anxious farewell, caught between their cultural mandate of hospitality and a terrifying government security apparatus.

  The next morning winter returned and both the mountains and lake disappeared in a blizzard. It took until noon to find a driver who would brave the snowy few miles up to the border, and this time I got through. The taxi couldn't pass though, and I walked the last hundred yards with all my gear on my back, tromping through the slush and over a plank that served as a footbridge across a running brook. Taxis waited on the Iraqi side, and I was driven down the mountain roads through the city of Penjwin toward Sulimaniya. The fresh snow gave way to bright green fields of winter wheat as we descended, and seeing how the beauty of his land impressed me, the taxi driver started to sing. He laughed as I got out my microphone to record.

  The city of Sulimaniya bustled, with the addition of a faux-five-star hotel, the Sulimaniya Palace, standing a dozen stories at the edge of the old bazaar. I checked into the hotel just in time for a press conference given by the PUK's Fuad Masum, and there I noticed another major change: cell phones. Some enterprising Kurds had put up towers all over the north, and shop windows brimmed with the latest Chinese knockoff handsets. The PUK and KDP still wouldn't let each other's cell phone networks roam across the old cease-fire line, but they had figured out a couple of dummy area codes in the U.K. that would transfer a call into the exchange in northern Iraq.

  First, Masum announced the postponement of the next round of opposition talks—blaming visa problems again. February 15 was the new target date for the talks, to be held in the KDP-administered city of Salahudin. Masum said he didn't think Saddam would attack the conference for fear of giving the Americans a clear excuse for war. At that point many of America's European and Arab allies thought the invasion could be averted, and that the Bush administration wouldn't go to war without a United Nations Security Council resolution. In response to a question, however, Masum betrayed greater concern about the possibility of chemical attack. The Kurds still had no gas masks, he said, and unlike Kuwait and Israel, the Kurdish government couldn't afford to buy them. Even if the Americans hadn't yet landed in Kurdistan, the Kurds were already traitors as far as Saddam was concerned, and they sat uncomfortably nearby. Someone then asked him if there weren't already American troops operating in the north.

  "We have no troops," Masum said, choosing his words carefully. "We have civilians who come and go. There are no permanently based Americans here."

  The "temporary" Americans had recently been spotted inspecting airstrips, one in a suburb west of Sulimaniya called Bakrajo next to what had been a secret PUK prison in the 1990s.3 Kurdish workmen started fixing up the runway that ran along the valley by the main highway toward Kirkuk. Barely visible from the road, it now measured about two miles, long enough to land the AC-130, a massive armed transport plane, as well as to accommodate an emergency landing by a U.S. fighter jet.* The KDP had a new airfield as well, and Kurdish leaders couldn't under
stand the media's impatience in confirming such an obvious, open secret. One zealous television producer had even called the KDP's Fowzi Hariri around four in the morning to confirm that American troops had finally landed at the KDP's new airstrip (they hadn't).

  The next day Hariri dressed down the press humorously with his slightly nasal British accent, saying something to the effect of "It's four o'clock in the morning. At four o'clock in the morning, I don't know if the Americans have landed, and I just want to say to you people: Get a life."

  But the war drum beat on unmistakably in Washington, gaining a momentum that seemed impossible to reverse. President Bush closed his State of the Union address in January 2003 with a warning about Iraq:

  Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qa'ida. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own . . . Imagine those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans—this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.

  Bush promised that a detailed case against Saddam would be presented at the United Nations on February 5, just a week later, by Colin Powell—somehow an admission that a world that didn't believe the president would be swayed by the gravitas of his secretary of state. Powell would rely on Kurdistan to make a large part of his case. One of the "people now in custody" that Bush had referred to in his speech was Kadhim Hussein Muhammad, then sitting in a Sulimaniya jail. An Arab from Basra, Kadhim confessed to the Kurds that he had been sent north by the Mukhabarat to make contact with Abu Wa'el,4 a key figure in Ansar al-Islam. The PUK claimed that Abu Wa'el simultaneously served Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, information they shared with the CIA, and probably again with Dick Cheney on Barham Salih's January 17 visit. Taking the link a step further, in his earliest interviews Kadhim claimed to have worked security for Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when he visited Baghdad in 1992.* Such a high-level visit was a smoking gun, even if it had happened a decade earlier, and Kadhim seemed tailor-made to support the case for war.

  By January 2003, however, Kadhim had stopped telling the Zawahiri story. Sulimaniya's chief warden, Colonel Wasta Hassan, gladly allowed journalists to visit his star inmates. The prisoner had a cordial relationship with his jailers and didn't mind the interviews either; perhaps they were a break in the monotony of prison life. He was a heavyset man and graying, unkempt and unshaven after a year in prison, though he claimed no mistreatment. The way he joked with the jailers almost suggested he was getting some sort of perk every time he outlined the al-Qa'ida-Saddam link for a foreigner—perhaps a carton of the cigarettes he chain-smoked.

  Kadhim didn't confess to having contacted Abu Wa'el; in fact he didn't seem to know the man. He only admitted trying to reach him, perhaps trying to establish the link. When asked what sort of aid Baghdad was supplying Ansar, he said weapons and cash were smuggled up to the north—not through the Kurdish region, but rather across the border into Iran near Baghdad and then back into Iraq from the Kurdish region of northwest Iran. It didn't make much sense—Iran and Iraq, archenemies, cooperating with a third party that despised both Saddam's secular depravity and Tehran's Shi'ite theocracy. Still, the Middle East often saw strange marriages of convenience, and it made some twisted sense to the Kurds that the Iraqis, Iranians, and Islamists should all gang up on them. Colonel Hassan didn't seem to dislike Kadhim, who, after all, was only a Ba'athist. Hassan saved his ire for the religious radicals, cursing with every breath the "Afghan Arabs" who had come to Kurdistan, and eventually ridiculing practicing Muslims in general, not an uncommon attitude among the PLTK's soldiery5 Even with the Kurds' history of pain at the hands of the Iraqi regime, Colonel Hassan seemed to dread the Islamists even more: they promised a new long war, just as the old one gave signs of ending. He opened his Koran to the Anfal chapter and read out the sura about smashing fingers, and a few other choice verses.

  "You see what lunatics I'm dealing with?" he said.

  A combination of U.S. government officials and unconfirmed press reports hyped Ansar even more, suggesting the group had been experimenting with the deadly toxin ricin, which is made from castor beans. The previous summer an al-Qa'ida videotape showed footage of a dog convulsing to death in a crude weapons laboratory. Ricin was one of the poisons U.N. weapons inspectors suspected that the Iraqi regime possessed, and anonymous Bush administration officials hinted that Ansar al-Islam was running the poison lab shown in the video. In early January 2003 the buzz got even louder, when British police arrested several Algerian men in London who police said had conspired to use ricin in a terror plot. Again the officials hinted at a connection to northern Iraq, though all it takes to make ricin is castor beans and know-how.6

  All the parsing of intelligence that has occurred since suggests that much of the al-Qa'ida-Ansar-Saddam link came from CIA raw data refried by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which leaked to the media and then could be cited publicly by the vice president's office.* But it nonetheless scared a lot of people at the time—especially Kurds on the front line. The PUK was also tracking a militant it believed had studied poisons and chemicals in Afghanistan. He traveled to Kurdistan under the alias "Qudama the Engineer," but his other name would soon be well known: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian.

  One of my first trips out of Sulimaniya allowed for a peek at the Islamist groups, from not quite a safe distance. As I came upon Girda Drozna, the "liar's hill," the name made perfect sense. From the Halabja road it looks like a little bump, and only from a few hundred yards reveals itself to be a towering plateau with a commanding view of the entire valley west of Halabja. The mound rises up so suddenly that older Kurdish stories call it a fake hill, put there by a fairy-tale king who wanted to please his wife by adding more features to the landscape. Another explanation comes from local farmers: the hill hides an erratic freshwater spring shepherds have always known they couldn't depend on. By now it had a military derivation as well—from the distance one can't see how many men are on the top. But the mortar man from Ansar al-Islam had decided there must be enough to warrant a few rounds every day.

  At his request, Barham Salih's workaholic press attaché Dildar Katani had loaned me her car and driver and worked as my translator and guide for several days without accepting payment. Dildar felt at home among the soldiers, and they seemed to know her. At Halabja's security office down in the valley, pesh merga commander Ramadan Dekoni began talking about Ansar's origins, but I had only one question: Why hadn't the PUK already driven the group out? The PUK estimated only about seven hundred fighters bunkered down in the hills, and the Kurdish militias numbered in the tens of thousands. Dekoni's eyes went completely lifeless, perhaps wondering how many of his men would die in such an assault. He then sketched out a map of why running up the hill to brush away Ansar al-Islam wasn't such a brilliant idea.

  Ansar controlled the towns of Sargat, Biyara, and Taweela, which make a small triangle in the high mountains overlooking Halabja and Girda Drozna. Their backs nestled comfortably to the east against the Iranian border, and Dekoni claimed that the Islamists crossed it at their leisure. Ansar must have been getting food and supplies from Iran, Dekoni said, and probably arms as well. The quantity of mortars being lobbed at his positions every night indicated frequent resupply, and Dekoni seemed to be jealous of the quality as well. "We are using old weapons we've taken from the Iraqis," he said. "The mortars they have are from Iran, and they are brand new."

  The PUK would no longer be underestimating Ansar. In December 2002, some militants had swarmed up Girda Drozna one morning before dawn, using accurate mortar fire to cover their arrival. Dozens of pesh merga died, some of them executed after surrendering. Ansar held the hill only briefly, but it proved the group's skill, or demonstrated the PUK'
s complacency. But Dekoni blamed the defeat on treachery. The two remaining splinters of Kurdish Islamism, the IMK and Ali Bapir's Komala Islami, had set up buffer zones on Ansar's flanks. IMK leader Ali Abdulaziz still lived in Halabja, but his son Tahseen had taken a large number of fighters north of the city on the mountain path to Taweela. They were officially at peace with the PUK, but they also had relations with Ansar, and the PUK didn't want to fight its way through them. Ali Bapir's men still controlled the town of Khurmal, at the foothills of Ansar's territory. Bapir claimed to be neutral as well, but the PUK said his Komala checkpoints had allowed Ansar fighters free movement. Distrust between the parties ran so high that PUK pesh merga, as well as any foreign visitors to Halabja, stopped using the main road, which passed too close to Komala territory. Instead we drove a muddy farmer's track through the fields that came out just below the PUK's military command post outside Halabja.

  With Iran at their back, and Islamists to the north and south, the only way for the PUK to attack Ansar al-Islam's positions was straight up the throat of the valley from Girda Drozna, through minefields and naked to the mortar shells from above. "We're waiting," Dekoni said, "because we want the Americans to blow them up."

  The PUK assumed the Americans would eventually take out Ansar al-Islam with air strikes, and perhaps want to comb their camps for evidence of a chemical or poison program. The CIA teams on the ground might have asked the PUK to wait, but equally Talibani s men didn't want to expend any extra force before the coming confrontation with Saddam Hussein. What's more, they wanted all their strength to compete with the KDP in the power scramble that might ensue when Saddam fell.

  Dekoni took us up the winding road to the top of Girda Drozna, where some of his soldiers were keeping warm in makeshift tents and earth berms. The camp was pocked with little craters from well-aimed mortars, which Dekoni assured me came in like clockwork—at lunchtime and at dusk. The soldiers' big gray steel water tank had been perforated by shrapnel the night before and made a steady dripping noise. In the distance Dekoni pointed out Ansar's forts in the hills several miles away. The soldiers said that they didn't have it as bad as the pesh merga on Shinerwe Mountain, where the Ansar forts in Taweela were within shouting distance and the mortar rounds came in all night. But then they mentioned something curious.