Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  Shawkat met alone with Ali Tezhia, one of the Ansar fighters. The meeting lasted about forty-five minutes. Then, as Shawkat began writing a letter containing the details of the agreement, Tezhia picked up a rifle and blew a hole in his head. On that signal the Ansar fighters outside opened fire on the unsuspecting PUK guards. Tezhia rushed outside and lobbed a grenade in behind him, and then joined the others in emptying his rifle clip through the windows of the house. In the back room, Salih Flassan and his family scrambled in vain to find shelter from the bullets and shrapnel flying everywhere. Hassan felt a round hit his calf and went down. A bullet hit his daughter-in-law in the neck and another hit his son. When the firing stopped, both were dead, and their eight-year-old daughter, Daroon Fazil, was bleeding from a bullet wound to the forehead. She died at the hospital the following day. The Ansar hit-team went overland to the nearby village of Girdi Go—inside Ali Bapir's Komala territory—where a car waited for them and they made a clean escape. The PUK hostages were never heard from again.

  Following Muslim custom the funeral took place the next morning, and a drummer led thousands of mourners behind a truck bearing Shawkat's body. The procession snaked out of Sulimaniya to the hilltop cemetery above the city. Hundreds of Shawkat's comrades wept openly as they lowered his casket into the ground, and a few threw themselves on the burial mound. The next morning the PUK commanders let their rage overcome their restraint and raced up to Shinerwe Mountain, personally touching off some of the artillery rounds they had been husbanding for the war. But knowing the mountains as they did, the PUK understood that rooting Ansar out of the caves would be a long and bloody fight. They waited for the help America had promised.

  As THE PUK worried about the seven hundred or so Islamic radicals to the east, the KDP focused more on seventy thousand Turkish troops to the north—that was one of the numbers the Turks were reportedly asking to escort any Americans through the border into Kurdistan. The U.S. military made no secret about the importance of the northern front, and as the time grew short, high-ranking officials shuttled between Ankara and Washington trying to seal an agreement. The Turks said they needed troops in Iraq to forestall a humanitarian disaster and wanted to create a cordon fifteen miles deep. The explanation infuriated the KDP—in their minds Turkish troops would have only one goal: to destroy the fledgling Kurdish state.

  "We refuse it," Sami Abd-al-Rahman told a small group of journalists at his home in Erbil. "If Turkish troops enter, it is a provocation. No patriot would welcome occupying forces. There is no rationale—nothing good would come out of it. Where is the humanitarian reason for it? Send us the International Red Cross; don't send us military forces."

  Ankara cited the exodus in 1991 as an example, but Turkish troops then had mostly been involved in preventing freezing refugees from coming down from the mountains. In the dozen years since, Turkish-American relations had pivoted on American access to patrol the no-fly zone. Every six months, Washington had to come to Ankara with hat in hand and ask to renew the use of Incirlik air base. Hardly a household word in the United States, Incirlik, along with Iraq, dominated the relationship in the minds of the Turks. The isolation of Iraq denied Turkey access to a country that had previously been its second-largest trading partner. Opposition parties in every election made an issue of the U.S. operation and hinted about canceling it; every winning party then changed its mind in the face of the daunting prospect of denying Uncle Sam.

  A tiny window of change had opened and closed in the early days of the no-fly zone, when President Turgut Özal began to test the limits of Turkish society. Özal started to publicly discuss that he had a Kurdish grandmother and mused privately that the new situation in Iraq might not be so bad for Turkey.

  "Think of it this way," Özal said, according to a source he spoke with often during his presidency. "Let's say there's a Kurdish state in northern Iraq. It might have a little oil. It would be totally dependent on Turkey, because how else would they export or import their goods? The Iraqis would surely be pretty mad at them, so they'd be dependent on Turkey. For Kurds in Turkey, the government would be able to say, 'If you'd like to live in a Kurdish state, there's one—and please [go]. And if you'd like to live here, there are rules.'"

  However, Özal died in 1993 of a heart attack, and any hope of a new attitude in Turkey died with him. Turkey returned to viewing Kurdish Iraq and their federalist idea as an existential threat. On the same day Colin Powell addressed the U.N., making war seem unavoidable, Turkish prime minister Abdullah Gül laid out his government's red lines. "Turkey is going to position herself in that region in order to prevent any possible massacres, or the establishment of a new state," he said at a news conference.

  Turkish officials wanted their troops to outnumber the American army that came through, and made clear they would take the opportunity to hit PKK bases in northern Iraq and defend themselves robustly. Sami Abd-al-Rahman shot back at the United States, saying American troops were welcome as liberators, but not a single Turk should cross the border. "If the U.S. goes ahead, it would be the third betrayal in a generation. We will not allow ourselves to be sacrificed. The people will resist [the Turks]," he said.14

  As usual the situation in Kurdistan wasn't black and white, since about five thousand Turkish troops were already inside Iraqi Kurdistan. They had chased the PKK across the border in 1997 and never gone home. The morning after speaking with Abd-al-Rahman, on February 13, 2003, I crammed into a Land Cruiser with a few colleagues and took a bone-jarring ride from Erbil up toward the town of Bamarni, along the border east of Zakho, to investigate the rumor that Turkey had massed troops on the border and maybe even sent some more across.

  We drove the long way toward Dohuk, skirting Iraqi government territory. The February sky kept threatening snow but instead drizzled down a constant chilly rain. After several hours we reached the hillside base of Bamarni, where fourteen Turkish tanks were parked, their crews adjusting the oilcloths they had thrown over the artillery against the rain. A few helicopters with their blades tied down sat parked at the end of a long airstrip. We drove past the base slowly, not wanting to announce ourselves yet.

  Over the hill in the tiny hamlet of Zewa, a few Kurdish villagers invited us in out of the damp, and soon a town meeting materialized. A young man named Azad Haj Shokri said he and the other villagers feared to get too close to the Turkish base. "They'll shoot us for PKK," he said. Shokri's wife served us a tray full of small teacups, in Kurdish fashion, with a finger's width of sugar sitting at the bottom of the glasses. It wasn't going to take much pushing to get these men to oppose a Turkish incursion.

  "We are all pesh merga," Shokri said. He and his friends went on to list the horrible behavior of the Turkish government toward Kurds. "There a Kurd can't speak his own language or even give his son a Kurdish name. If we're told to fight the Turks, we will," Shokri said. At some point his older brother Barhan cut in through the young man's bravado.

  "The Turks will do whatever they want," he said. "They're strong and we are powerless. Only the British and the Americans can protect us." Eventually we drove back toward Dohuk and stopped in at the main gate of the Bamarni base. Naturally no one would talk—the Turkish government still wouldn't officially admit any of its troops were in Kurdistan. That seemed to be a fiction the KDP wanted to help the Turks support, because as we entered the city of Dohuk, the pesh merga stopped us at a checkpoint and claimed we weren't authorized to be in this zone for our own safety. In the end the only punishment was a chill that took hours to shake.*

  On February 6 the Turkish parliament had voted to give the United States a green light to upgrade bases in the country, an obvious precursor to landing troops and moving them into Iraq. In a particular insult to the Kurds, America promised to help revise Turkey's defenses against chemical attack. The final vote on letting the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division through to Iraq was scheduled for February 18—before the Iraqi opposition would be able to meet in Salahudin. Some Kurdish officials maintai
ned that wasn't a coincidence—the Americans wanted to prevent the "free Iraqis" from forming a government in exile. But Turkey took its time, haggling as if George W. Bush were a tourist buying rugs in Istanbul's grand bazaar. Dick Cheney contacted the Turkish foreign minister to push for a speedy resolution, but Turkey kept playing hard-to-get. Zalmay Khalilzad eventually arrived in Ankara at the head of a team designed to seal the bargain. Along with him were several other diplomats as well as a U.S. Treasury official to sign the checks—the Turks' asking price had soared into the tens of billions of dollars.

  Concerned and in the dark, the Kurds sent a joint delegation to meet Khalilzad in Ankara. Jalal Talabani represented his PUK along with Adnan Mufti; the perennial "bad cop" Nechirvan Barzani led the KDP side along with Hoshyar Zebari. The Turkish military officials could barely stand to meet with the Kurds, much less treat them as representatives of a governing entity. In one meeting a Turkish general told the Kurds they couldn't possibly make assessments the way a real government did, and that the war would cause another exodus of six hundred thousand people. Nechirvan Barzani seethed.15

  "I told him no, we are a government too!" Barzani recalled. "I said, I am a prime minister! Six hundred thousand will not come—not six people will cross the border!"

  He went on to lecture the Turks about all the progress Kurdistan had made in reconstruction as well as command and control since 1991, but his words fell on deaf ears, and Turkish officials began telling the press that they would not consent to American supremacy of command when their troops entered Iraq. Though Khalilzad kept trying to reassure them things were fine, the Kurds came home believing that America had sold them cheap to the Turks. Likewise the Turks accused the Americans of pushing a secret agenda to create an independent Kurdish state. The Turkish negotiator, Ambassador Deniz Bolukba?i, had a visceral reaction to the i£-word. At one point America's "pro-Kurdish bias" became too much for him.

  "If Barzani was sitting in your place, he might have contemplated saying what you just said, but he would not be able to say it. In view of your remarks there is no point of continuing the negotiations," Bolukba?i said as he gathered his things and left Ambassador Marisa Lino, the U.S. delegate, sitting in an empty room in the Turkish foreign ministry.16 Negotiations continued, but not pleasantly.

  Not surprisingly, Khalilzad complained that all the sides in the region were "worst-casing" their neighbors' intentions.17 When Hoshyar Zebari returned to Kurdistan, he laid out the Kurdish position as a warning to the Americans as much as the Turks.18

  "No one should see us as bluffing on this issue. Any intervention under whatever pretext will lead to clashes," Zebari said. "No one wants another fight, of course, but if there's a forced incursion, done under the pretext of Tm going to give you forced aid,' then believe me, there will be uncontrolled clashes. And it will be bad for the image of the United States, Britain, and other countries who want to help Iraq, to see two of their allies, Turkey and Kurdistan, at each other's throats."

  Zebari tried to broaden the warning, claiming that Turkish intervention would only lead to other regional powers like Iran sending troops, but the Kurds' focus remained on the northern front. The Turks also obfuscated, stressing their concern for the Turcoman minority living in northern Iraq. The Turcomans claimed to be descendants of the Seljuks, left behind as the Turkic world shrank and fragmented. Saddam Hussein had ethnically cleansed Turcomans with his Arabization program, and Turkey hadn't made much fuss. Now the Turks started to claim the Kurds planned to do their own cleansing against Turcomans once they got to Kirkuk. The KDP response was to announce the arrest of the security chief of the Iraqi Turcoman Front (ITF), who was charged with hoarding dynamite. The ITF continued to operate its radio and television station in Erbil, but it claimed the arrest was a bad sign for the Turcomans' future. A KDP official responded, "When it rains in Ankara, the ITF opens their umbrellas."*

  As negotiations continued in Turkey, the KDP decided to flaunt a little democracy. On the eve of the opposition conference, now set for February 25, Kurds in Erbil planned to "spontaneously" demonstrate their freedom of expression by protesting in favor of American intervention and against Turkish interference.

  They had gotten the idea from popular protests worldwide on February 15, rallies against the American invasion, when hundreds of thousands of protesters voiced their frustration at the Bush administration's juggernaut. But the peace marches in Manhattan or London or Buenos Aires didn't fit the mood in Kurdistan. Kurds displaced from Kirkuk by the regime looked in worse straits than ever. The winter rains had turned their dirt roads into cake batter and weighed down their feet as they carried water from the well back to their tents. One of the Kirkukees said he wanted to stick a needle into Saddam Hussein and drink his blood dry. Around the same time a Kurdish woman showed up at the hospital in Sulimaniya with burns covering her body—the Iraqi police had caught her trying to smuggle fuel to the north and had set her alight.19 The Kurds had trouble understanding why no one in the world's capitals had ever taken to the streets to protest the gassing of Halabja, or ethnic cleansing in Kurdistan, but now hundreds of thousands took to the streets to stop America from removing Saddam.

  "These [antiwar protesters] are well intentioned; they care for peace and they care for the Iraqi people. But I have to say, as an Iraqi living here, that their understanding of the situation is not adequate," Barham Salih said in the upstairs living room of his house in Sulimaniya one evening, a few days before the opposition conference. "Peace requires a commitment of the world outside to help the people of Iraq overcome tyranny. If they want to be morally consistent, they should focus on the plight of twenty-two million Iraqis who are suffering terribly at the hands of this tyranny."

  Dr. Barham already had his "Iraqi" hat on—few Kurds knew the American line as well as he did, and only he and Hoshyar Zebari ever went so far as to call themselves Iraqis in public. For most Kurds, Iraq was that frightening country to the south, but Salih genuinely believed he could make it in Baghdad and everything would be better for Kurds and Arabs. Next he offered an excellent rendition of the idea that Paul Wolfowitz had been promoting for years: America needed to foster democracy in the Middle East because it would bring more stability than dictatorships.

  "American policy in the last fifty years has been a failure, depending on unaccountable, corrupt elites throughout the Arab world. Not only did it not contain their problems; they managed to export their problems to the United States and convince their populations that it's all the fault of the U.S." As usual, Salih multitasked, giving a spotless radio interview over tea while watching satellite TV at the same time. Then his Iraqi hat fell off for a moment.

  "She's playing right into the Turks' hands!" he said sharply as a close shot of Kurdish villagers hiding in caves played out on the screen. A large number of Kurds had been finding relatives to stay with outside the major cities, fearing that Saddam might bomb the north as his dying act. An American television journalist had discovered a single family of Kurds sheltering in a cave, and suddenly all of Kurdistan looked like it was filled with desperate troglodytes in need of Turkish humanitarian intervention. Salih quickly regained his composure: The Turks wouldn't defy the Americans, and the Kurds were in the loop.

  "I'm not going to tell you what the plan is," he said. "But we are partners to the U.S. We are part of the coalition. We want to be partners in the campaign to liberate Iraq. We are freedom fighters. The way we look at it, others are coming to help us. Not that we are guns for hire—we are the ones who have been here, consistently. We welcome help, and we are going to do it together."

  Kanan Makiya had just written a scathing op-ed upon hearing that the United States planned a military government post-Saddam, and not an immediate hand-over to the Iraqis. Salih exuded serenity.

  "Removing Saddam will be easy, but governing Iraq will be difficult. Everything I know about the U.S. says it's not a colonial power. They don't want to run countries. I was asking a very senior offi
cial, would they want to be blamed for outages in electricity in Iraq? Do they want to be seen as liberators or as colonialists?"

  Still, Salih admitted there were too many unknowns. Anyone who claimed to know what would happen was a liar. Of all the factors, he said, Kurdistan was the most predictable. In the rest of Iraq we would have to wait until Iraqis could speak freely for themselves. Unlike the Kurds, the rest of the opposition still had to prove it had support inside Iraq.

  "Many will want to ride an American tank into Baghdad to be shown as the liberator. I think the key is to focus on a system of government, a proper system, with checks and balances—and not to let egos of Iraqi opposition run the show," he said.

  He didn't need to mention names. After a chilly reception from Barzani, Ahmed Chalabi's INC delegation, including his nephew Sam and his daughter Tamara, had taken up residence in the Sulimaniya Palace hotel. Kanan Makiya traveled with them, as did Mudhar Shawkat, a Sunni exile who led the Iraqi National Movement, which had on and off supported the INC. Chalabi would occasionally sweep through the lobby in the middle of a huge posse, with his imposing bodyguard Hussein ready to stiff-arm anyone who tried to get close enough to ask a question. All the others could be seen sipping cappuccinos in the hotel lobby and were quite approachable. Shawkat opined that Iraq was a turnkey job, just waiting to become a modern, secular Arab state. And he said only one man could lead it.

  "Ahmed Chalabi will be the next president of Iraq," he said.

  Chalabi and his entourage soon moved out of the hotel to a guesthouse on Lake Dukan that Talabani had prepared for him, but not before several brief audiences with reporters. Chalabi knew he was the man the media loved to hate, constantly painted as a Pentagon puppet, but he used it to his advantage, letting people believe that Washington had anointed him. Yet time was short. Many of his rivals claimed Chalabi was at the peak of his power now—with the White House behind him and his true popular support inside Iraq untested. Chalabi had been giving the classic politician's line that he wasn't interested in any particular position in the post-Saddam government.