Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  "There is no one who wants to make a power grab. There are elements within the Bush administration who want to control the process in Iraq entirely. I think it will lead to problems. It's not the best way to save American lives or Iraqi lives," Chalabi said, relaxing in his hotel suite.

  Chalabi stressed that his INC was an ally, not an agent, of the Americans. He said there would be no government declared at the upcoming meeting, but that the opposition would elect a leadership—which he allowed could decide to declare a government at any time—and that everyone in the opposition was on the same page. I asked if there wasn't a problem being an exile so long out of the country, compared to the Kurds who had a standing army inside Iraq.

  "This distinction is rather artificial," he bristled. "Many people who have been under Saddam will support those who have been outside, because they've been in contact. This problem of inside and outside is not a reflection of the reality." He said anyone but Ba'ath Party leadership would be welcome in the new government, and that those who had not split from the regime would be judged on a case-by-case basis. Asked if he thought Iraq's tribes might help keep order in the post-Saddam chaos, he practically spat: "What tribes!? Iraq is an urban society. Seventy percent of Iraqis live in cities. There are six million people living in Baghdad alone."

  In any case, Chalabi said, there wouldn't be chaos post-Saddam; the Iraqi opposition would be able to control the country. At this point my interview ended. One of Chalabi's aides came in saying that a photographer had arrived, the same one who had shot the famous photo of Afghanistan's new president, Hamid Karzai, and she was ready to take Chalabi's portrait.20

  At the end of February all the opposition figures took over the hotels around Erbil and Salahudin. The sixty-five members selected at the London opposition conference filled Erbil's comfortable Chwar Chra Hotel. The leader of SCIRI, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, had arrived from Iran with an honor guard of his Badr Brigade militia. Everyone from the communists to Detroit exiles had a delegation and the city buzzed with the latest gossip—General Tommy Franks would be installed as the leader of an American military occupation post-Saddam. U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad entered town late one evening in a convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers.* Khalilzad's State Department security guards took over the KDP's politburo building in Salahudin, wearing wraparound shades, baseball caps, and webbed fishing vests with their carbines on a string across their chests. At one end of the building's driveway they rigged a nest with a long black .50-caliber sniper rifle pointing down the gullet of the road, powerful enough to shoot a driver through the engine block of his car. They ran several stringent security checks on everyone entering, provoking some muttering about a preview of American occupation. And in addition to hosting the conference, Salahudin sat right along the route to Baghdad for the Fourth Infantry.

  If the soldiers came. The Turkish government was making the wait agony for Washington. The Bush administration had raised its offer up to two billion dollars in grants plus two billion dollars in military credits.21 The leader of a Turkish delegation to Washington had even asked for assurances—in writing—that Congress would honor the budget. Turkish ambassador Faruk Lo?o?lu had to break it to him that a verbal commitment from House Speaker Dennis Hastert was the best he would get. Some Turkish officials later admitted they had been trying to delay until it was too late for the United States to go to war. They asked for a sum greater than the entire U.S. foreign budget—twenty-two billion dollars all at once or ninety-two billion dollars over live years. The American offer went up to six billion dollars, with a warning that the United States could do without Turkey if need be, but the military wanted time to turn the fleet through the Suez Canal and land it in Kuwait. The scheduled Turkish parliamentary vote for February 18 came and went with the boats still in the harbor. By the time the Iraq opposition gathered in Salahudin, the arrangement had been written up in three different diplomatic contracts involving two different U.S. ambassadors. Negotiations had been long and unpleasant, but the deal was done. The vote in parliament, a formality at this point, would take place on March 1.

  The Salahudin conference lasted days, but there was one clear keynote speaker: Khalilzad spoke on February 26, introduced by Jalal Talabani as a friend to free Iraqis. The U.S. envoy used the barest minimum of conditional phrases—"should military action be necessary"—but everyone knew he had just come from sealing the bargain with the Turks. Heated discussions went on with the Kurds, who were still dead set against a Turkish intervention. The United States wanted them to sign off on letting Turkish troops in as part of the coalition. Khalilzad offered to make a statement against any unilateral intervention by "the neighboring countries" and promised that everyone who came in with the Americans would leave with them.

  "We said no, you have to mention Turkey by name," Nechirvan Barzani recalls, "because they are the only ones who want to intervene." But the Kurds could see their concerns had been swept aside again, as sure as there were thirty U.S. warships waiting in Turkish waters to unload enough tanks and trucks to carry sixty thousand American soldiers across Turkey into Iraq.

  In Salahudin, the audience of about one hundred opposition figures and advisors interrupted Khalilzad with applause several times—not least when he complimented his hosts. "The claim that Iraq cannot become a democracy is belied by the experience of northern Iraq," said Khalilzad, who also mentioned the right of Iraqis to choose federalism, a word he knew would upset the Turkish observers. He repeated his promise that there would be no "Saddamism without Saddam," but he implied that the Iraqi army would remain in place and encouraged its soldiers not to fight. He asked the Iraqi opposition leaders to form task forces to help the coalition forces when they arrived—should military action be necessary.

  "The Iraqi people will never forget those who helped them in the difficult days, those who supported us," said Jalal Talabani, after Khalilzad spoke. Nonetheless, Khalilzad hadn't even been able to say the word "Kurdistan" after he had praised it as a democracy, for fear of offending the Turks.

  Journalists, Kurds, and opposition figures alike started to speculate as to when U.S. forces would arrive, taking into consideration the phase of the moon and how it might affect U.S. night-vision goggles, the coming of warm weather, the time it would take for troops to drive across Turkey, the readiness and length of the Kurdish airstrips. Fuel and food hoarding drove up prices, and rumors flew about the Americans' deal to shut down all satellite phones and Internet connections—and even that missiles would home in on satellite phones and that electromagnetic pulses would fry them. As the opposition leaders met on February 26, Ansar al-Islam sent a suicide bomber hitchhiking toward Sulimaniya. The bomber detonated at a checkpoint outside Halabja, killing himself, two Kurdish soldiers, and the unsuspecting driver who had picked him up.

  For the enemy to the south, the Salahudin conference was the greatest provocation yet—U.S. officials plotting with Saddam's archenemies on his own soil. Talabani closed the meeting with a call for the Iraqi people to rise up, but the real question was whether he and Barzani could keep their own people in line should Turkish forces enter Kurdistan—and if they even wanted to. If the Kurds started fighting against Turkish troops, would they also start to fight against the Americans? Turkey was America's NATO ally; wouldn't the United States have to side with the Turks against the Kurds?

  On the afternoon of March 1, all eyes in Kurdistan watched live coverage of the Turkish parliament. Finally the ayes had it, 264 yes votes and 251 against. The American troops would be coming through on their way to Baghdad, and the Turks would be coming with them in equal numbers. But then there was confusion. Nineteen Turkish lawmakers had abstained, and passage of the measure required a majority of those present. The abstentions made it 264 in favor out of 534 total—less than a majority. Washington requested a clarification and got it—according to the rules of Turkish democracy, the measure was defeated.

  Kurdistan's most important battle for independence had been foug
ht and won, in the Turkish parliament, without a drop of blood spilled. There would be no northern front.

  IT WOULD TAKE years to realize, but failure to win Turkish assistance in March 2003 may go down in history as the luckiest thing that happened to America regarding Iraq, since it averted a guerrilla war between Kurds and Turks. At the time, however, the Americans in Salahudin hardly felt like celebrating. The Kurds, on the other hand, couldn't contain their glee. The greatest threat to the twelve-year-old enclave was neutralized.

  "It was like a party," Nechirvan Barzani recalled, still unable to suppress a giggle years later. "For the Americans, you cannot imagine how disappointed they were. We smiled anyway! We said alhamdulallah [praise the lord]."

  The American diplomats may not actually have been as upset as they were supposed to be. Neither side in the Ankara negotiations had come away endeared, revealing that decades of friendship had come down to a quid pro quo, measured out to the penny. "Khalilzad is a diplomat. Lie had instructions from Washington; he was unable to go beyond that," said Nechirvan. "I believe his heart was with us." Indeed, it was the considered opinion of many of the U.S. government's regional experts that America dodged a bullet when it didn't go through Turkey—most important, because it kept Turkish troops out of a quagmire in Kurdistan.

  "We worked as hard as we could to get the Fourth I.D. through Turkey. That's what our military commanders wanted. We failed, and I don't like to fail," said Marc Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs. "But I knew at the time, and I am convinced now, that moving ninety thousand Americans through Turkey would have been no small job. And our military had agreed to take fifteen thousand Turkish troops along with them. Getting them back out would have been a pretty big struggle."

  The Kurds had plain guaranteed a fight, and in retrospect, Kurdistan could have ended up looking as bad as the Arab Sunni province of Anbar, with Kurds fighting the Turkish troops and the United States caught in the middle. "It's too horrible to contemplate," said Grossman. "America would have had little leverage to pull the Turks out with, especially if they were under attack—the United States would have been obliged to defend them under NATO article five."

  The inexperienced Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) delivered the blow to the Bush war plan without seeming to realize what had been done. In fact party officials may not even have been aware of the intricacies of their own parliamentary procedure. A straw poll earlier in the day told them they had the votes to win passage, but the party leadership didn't go to sit in parliament and enforce the result. Many parliamentarians may have thought the AK Party had the votes already and felt the pressure was off. Without a watchful eye, voting no was much more attractive, since Turkish popular opinion ran 9 to 1 against the war. Weeks later, at a second vote, to allow U.S. over-flight rights, the new prime minister of the AK Party, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, went to the parliament and looked each member in the face as the ballots went into the box. That measure passed.

  Washington, which had considered Turkish support a slam dunk, made some mutterings about wishing the Turkish military had taken a stronger role, but the Bush administration was forced for the most part to keep its mouth shut—it was about to go to war in part to bring democracy to the region, so criticizing the voting results of the region's only Muslim democracy wasn't going to fly.

  "God and Turkish democracy saved us," said Qubad Talabani in Washington. The decision veered the Kurds away from a collision course with the U.S.-led coalition, but better still from the Kurds' perspective, it crippled Turkish-American relations for years to come.

  "Fuck Turkey. Fuck their families. Fuck their dogs," was the attitude of General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command.22 In Kurdistan sixty thousand pesh merga dearly wanted to be his new best friends.

  * Though they wouldn't make a point of self-identifying as such, Makiya is from a Shi'ite family, Mukhlis is Sunni, and Rahim is mixed.

  * The Kurds closed off all public access to the area, and naturally that made it an obsession for journalists. At one point I snuck from the back side of the village of Bakrajo with binoculars and ran into a few high-level PUK officials doing the same thing. They chuckled and claimed to be out for a walk, and wouldn't talk about the airstrip being built by a government with no airplanes in an area where the United Nations still prohibited flights.

  * The New Yorkers Jeffrey Goldberg did one of the earliest interviews with Kadhim in the March 25, 2002, issue. He transliterated the first name as "Qassem." Filmmaker Gwynne Roberts also did early interviews, translated by the ubiquitous Ayub Nuri. In a bizarre coincidence, Nuri recognized Kadhim as his neighbor in a Sulimaniya apartment building in 2001 and recalled puzzling over why Kadhim said he was moving out to go live in Khurmal. A Shi'ite Arab moving to a Kurdish region dominated by Sunni extremists was enough for local authorities to raise an eyebrow.

  * Thomas F. Gimble, the Pentagon's acting inspector general, told the Senate Armed Sendees Committee as much on February 9, 2007. This was Doug Feith's shop, which mined the raw data, desperate to find the links he and the vice president were sure the CIA had missed.

  * After 9/11 Krekar told Asharq al-Awsat newspaper that he had met bin Laden once in 1988 in Peshawar. In subsequent interviews he began to deny it.

  * On September 9, 2005, Powell told ABC News, "I'm the one who presented [it] on behalf of the United States to the world and it will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It's painful now."

  * Both Kurdish parties tried their hand at controlling the foreign press, but their tiny English-speaking staff was soon overwhelmed by the growing number of reporters, especially after several busloads of journalists arrived from Turkey. There was a tussle at the border when the KDP wouldn't let the Turkish minders accompany the journalists, claiming they were spies from Ankara. The Turks had agreed to let the journalists in to cover the Iraqi opposition conference if they promised to leave immediately afterward, and ultimately they all stayed.

  * Ankara provided money to fund the ITF in 1995, as part of the governments strategy to influence events in northern Iraq, according to the International Crisis Group, among others. The ITF held an International Turcoman conference in Erbil in November 2002 and brought some other groups under its banner.

  * The Land Cruiser is a favorite model in Kurdistan, with its bulbous fenders. In the mid-1990s the Kurds started to call them "Monicas" oat of affection for the car's curvaceousness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  No Friends but the Kurds

  GUERRILLAS KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT contingency plans, the double-crossed Kurds more than most. The Kurds are fond of repeating that they have no friends but the mountains. Jalal Talabani always looked beyond those mountains to the day he might represent a Kurdish nation to the world, attending global summits and riding in a bulletproof limousine. Talabani's fast talking in four languages, his networking skills across cultures, and his charming sense of humor were meant for the world of political deals after the fighting ended. But the odds were long, and Talabani knew he might end his days practicing the trade of a warlord, not a president. Like a good guerrilla, he hedged his bets, and Talabani had one son for each outcome.

  Qubad Talabani, his younger son, went to soak up the culture of Washington, D.C., and before he turned thirty, Qubad was briefing U.S. congressmen and taking calls from the White House asking for advice on Iraq. He married a young American woman he met through her work on Iraq for the U.S. State Department. If everything went well, Qubad Talabani would be just the kind of talent Kurdistan needed. If not, there was his brother, Bafel.

  As a young boy, Bafel spent much time in the care of his father's pesh merga—so much that after his first day of kindergarten he came home angry, demanding to know why he had been sent to a place for children, instead of staying with the grizzled bodyguards his "own age." In adolescence, Bafel was sent by his father to live in London with his grandfather Ibrahim Ahmad. When Hero Talabani decided to join her husband in the mountains
in 1979, she had the toddler Qubad with her, but she sent him back to London as well, reasoning that such a difference in experience could drive a rift between the boys. The brothers grew up as friends in the U.K., and while neither one felt any pressure to join the family trade, each discovered different interests. When his British schoolteachers asked him what he aspired to be when he grew up, Bafel answered incomprehensibly, "pesh merga." Bafel studied judo and became a bodybuilder. He completed a degree in graphic design, but then floated between different odd jobs, including some work in London restaurants and nightclubs.

  After the uprising in 1991, Bafel made trips to Kurdistan every year, missing only the tumultuous summer of 1996. The following year he saw a small piece of the action, catching the very end of the Kurdish civil war. The KDP and Turkish army fought the PUK and PKK, and Bafel traveled with a cousin to see Kosrat Rasul at the front. The Turks used helicopter gunships and tanks, but the PUK held its own, clinging to the Kurds' friends, the mountains. Kosrat Rasul received the young visitors warmly in a blown-out shelter. As they drank tea, a small tapping noise kept interrupting, and Bafel noticed something small bouncing across the floor nearby.1

  "Oh, those are snipers," Kosrat said nonchalantly of the spent bullets skipping by. "They've been at it all day. Don't worry—they're well out of range."

  Bafel returned to London tantalized by the taste of war. When his grandfather died in 2000, he accompanied the casket back to Kurdistan and decided to stay for good. He briefly experimented with setting up a Kurdish weapons factory, but it produced guns as dangerous to the shooter as the target. When that venture fell through, Bafel became an unofficial liaison and interpreter and also took courses in intelligence gathering and close protection offered by the governments of several friendly countries. While Bafel studied interrogation and security, Qubad shadowed Dr. Barham Salih in Washington, D.C. The people of Sulimaniya, known for a vicious sense of humor, nicknamed the brothers "Uday and Qusay," after the sinister sons of Saddam Hussein.