Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  During the long wait for the war to begin, Bafel and some of his men attempted to sequester the entire American press corps in January 2003. Acting on a tip from the CIA that Saddam had marked us for assassination, Bafel called an urgent meeting in the dingy restaurant at the Ashti Hotel and announced that the PUK had to take protective measures. Bafel had been put in charge of the PUK's new counterterrorism force. He was a spitting image of his brother, Qubad, with the same sculpted black goatee, but the lines in Bafel's face cut longer down the sides of his mouth, and he spoke with great ceremony as he told us our lives were in danger.

  All of the press bristled at the PUK's attempt to control us; a few of the journalists who had been in town the longest refused to go along to the PUK safe house, clearly annoying Bafel. A bit disoriented, the rest of us went. I got into the backseat of Bafel's SUV and nearly sat on an assault carbine. It's as easy to distinguish American weapons from Kalashnikovs as it is to tell Nikes from Birkenstocks, and I had never seen a Kurd carrying an M-4, the compact weapon carried by most U.S. officers. Bafel smiled sheepishly as he put the American gun behind the seat. He had been seen escorting a long convoy of white Toyotas between Halabja and Dukan dam, sometimes stopping to inspect the airstrip at Bakrajo. Everyone in the country knew it was CIA agents, but photographers who too obviously took a picture of the cars had their film or memory chip confiscated, sometimes by Bafel himself.

  The cantonment of the press lasted less than twenty-four hours, then fell apart without ceremony—either the attempt to rein in the press had failed or the threat had disappeared. Several of us had called the CIA headquarters in Langley to make sure we weren't being wantonly jerked around, and the CIA confirmed the assassination threat. It didn't make much sense to anyone at the time, since Saddam Hussein was still trying to avoid any provocation of the West, and killing an American journalist would have done nicely in that regard. But Bafel shouldn't have been surprised if the CIA's tips were a little shaky—the agents had been meeting with some very strange people.

  America's espionage agency had returned to northern Iraq after September 11, but it relied on approval from the Turks, who actually yanked the whole CIA operation out briefly in the summer of 2002.2 Washington had sold the effort as a mission to gather information about Ansar al-Islam, which indeed its agents were. But the primary purpose had been to develop a campaign of sabotage and misinformation in Saddam Hussein's territory to the south. The CIA also desperately wanted human sources for intelligence on Saddam's WMDs—they hadn't found a reliable source since the disasters of 1996 had cleaned out their database and ruined their credibility in Iraq. While they set up liaisons with their Kurdish hosts, the CIA operatives naturally gathered information about them as well—Kurdish troop strength, command and control, the chance of conflict between the KDP and PUK. By the end of 2002 the team of about a dozen men had returned for good and set up headquarters at Qalaat Chowlan, Jalal Talabani's favorite old hideout. They brought thirty-two million dollars in Benjamin Franklins, enough for a considerable information shopping spree.3 As soon as the new crisp bills started trickling out, would-be informants sprouted like desert flowers after a rainstorm.

  Most of the information didn't withstand the tiniest scrutiny, but the Kurdish intelligence services helped to vet it. Early on, the leadership of both the KDP and PUK made separate decisions against trying to hype up the intelligence, not wanting to burn the latest bridge to America. The CIA team stayed in their headquarters and let the Kurds bring up potential informants. Some sources didn't get past the waiting room, with tales of James Bond caves and mechanical rotating garden walls that hid Iraq's nuclear weapons. Like most of the world's intelligence agencies, the CIA sincerely believed that Saddam Hussein still had forbidden weapons, judging by the agents' reaction when one reliable informant brought a cylindrical canister to the team. None of the CIA men spoke Kurdish but when they heard the word "uranium," they knocked over a table and shouted, "Get it out! Get it out!"

  Their translator explained that the informant was warning about a scam involving phony uranium and had brought an example he had purchased. Another time, a layer of dust in the air had the agents searching for their anti-nerve-gas atropine injectors, only to have their hosts explain it was pollen.

  The information wasn't all junk. In the summer of 2002, just before the CIA got pulled out, agents had been approached with access to an unbelievable source. A former friend of Saddam Hussein had fallen out with the dictator and fled to Sulimaniya, where he now lived in a razor-wire-encircled fort near Bakrajo. The man himself had no useful information, but he happened to be the head of the Kasnazani Qaderi Sufi order, commanding more than a million followers across Iraq. Sufism is the mystical side of Islam, and runs parallel to the Sunni-Shi'ite schism. The strictest Muslims consider it superstition (it's banned in Saudi Arabia), but Sufi groups remain popular throughout the Islamic world, allowing followers to reach religious ecstasy through singing, dancing, or in some extreme cases, performing rites of mutilation.

  Sheikh Muhammad Abdul Karim al-Kasnazani, a Kurd, had enjoyed roaring good relations with Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and '80s, and had even used his influence to raise an army of jahsh against Talabani's PUK rebellion. In later years he became an important middleman in the Iraqi state oil business and became close with Izzat al-Douri, one of Saddam's vice presidents. The sheikh's power grew so great that in the mid-1990s one of his sons felt brazen enough to forge Saddam Hussein's signature on a contract. All three sons found themselves thrown in jail, sentenced to death. The sheikh managed to use his connections to get the boys out, and the family fled to the north. Ever malleable, Talabani offered the family his protection.

  Now a disgruntled PUK member suggested the CIA start using Kasnazani's followers against Saddam, claiming they were placed in all the dictator's security services. At first the agents didn't know what to make of the Sufi order, which, after all, sometimes involved the practice of sticking knives through the faces of followers to prove how insensitive religious fervor can make them. What's more, the sheikh himself, paranoid that Saddam had assassins looking for him, refused to meet with the Americans at first. Instead his son Nahro, a smarmy mountain of a man weighing around four hundred pounds, coordinated the meetings. Nahro also happily accepted the cash.

  The scheme hadn't looked promising, but the agents decided to give it a try and asked Nahro to produce a specific officer from the list of followers he claimed. The Kasnazanis smuggled the man into the north and brought him before Sheikh Muhammad. The CIA agents watched as the Iraqi officer dissolved, trembling in front of the Sufi leader. The officer produced a CD-ROM with the personnel files of thousands of Saddam's security agents. Before long the Sufis had a steady flow of informants shuttling up to Qalaat Chowlan, and the CIA was mapping out troop movements and security schematics. One follower even purloined a mobile phone belonging to Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, which the CIA managed to bug. The intelligence checked out with aerial surveillance, and the myth of an impenetrable regime began to crumble. Information about troop rotations revealed an encouraging fact: The Iraqi military worried that any soldiers left near the Kurdish lines for too long would have a chance to contact the other side and arrange to surrender. In Langley, Virginia, the Iraq desk couldn't believe its good fortune and code-named the Sufis "Rockstars." The CIA started paying Nahro a million dollars a month for the information that scores of faithful Sufis risked their lives to give the Americans. By the end of February the agency's human intelligence network inside Iraq had grown larger than ever, including eighty-seven men with Thuraya handheld satellite phones that could send GPS coordinates.4

  Kurdish officials noticed both the string of informants slinking up to Qalaat Chowlan and, even more so, the flood of U.S. hundred-dollar bills into Sulimaniya. There was no way to replenish or reprint the local currency, the "Swiss" Iraqi dinar, and as the Kurdish bills became tattered, they surged in value against the dollar simply because of their scarcity—no one
in Kurdistan seemed to have anything smaller than a C-note. The PUK leaders welcomed the cash (which the CIA also shelled out to them directly for protection), but they had a more pressing concern: Ansar al-Islam had also reportedly noticed the Americans.

  Informants told the PUK that the Islamists had car-bomb squads on the roads, and the pesh merga at checkpoints around the city worked themselves up on to a hair trigger. The Islamists wanted to hit the CIA's convoy of white Land Cruisers, but northern Iraq was target-rich with infidels, between all the Western journalists and the Kurdish party leaders themselves. On the afternoon of March 4 an SUV full of bearded men pulled up to the pesh merga checkpoint on the main route leaving Sulimaniya to the west. Suddenly a shot rang out and then a cascade of bullets. Pandemonium followed, with jumpy pesh merga shooting everywhere, shouting that they had stopped an Ansar car bomb.

  The men weren't with Ansar, but rather were members of Ali Bapir's neutral Komala Islami. All five lay dead inside the car, so riddled with bullets that blood leaked onto the highway. It wasn't even clear the men had gotten off any shots before the pesh merga opened up, but stray rounds wounded several bystanders, including a nine-year-old girl.5 Bafel Talabani's counterterrorism team appeared immediately afterward, looking for the Ansar bombers but instead finding that the dead included Abdullah Qasri, a thirty-six-year-old Komala leader from the city of Ranya. Bafel began advising the pesh merga in a loud voice that there was nothing wrong with shooting since they had been fired upon. A few of the Western journalists on the scene couldn't help but wonder why Bafel was giving the instruction to the pesh merga in English—it seemed aimed more at the observers than the Kurds. The PUK issued an apology as soon as the dust cleared, assuring Ali Bapir that they still considered him an ally. But only a month had passed since Komala's questionable role in the death of General Shawkat Haji Mushir. Sulimaniya's rumor mill soon claimed that the PUK—specifically Bafel—had hit Komala at the checkpoint in revenge for Shawkat's killing. The PUK denied it, but in Khurmal, Ali Bapir and his men started to feel the heat between the PUK down the road and Ansar up the hill, preparing for a fight to the death. They didn't know the worst: the Americans still had Khurmal on their target list.

  AS THE KURDISH New Year, Newroz, approached, Kurds left the major cities fearing the war might start, and once-jammed streets looked deserted. The universities and high schools closed for vacation over the holiday and didn't reopen, suspending classes until the war was over. On the world stage Europeans and some of America's Arab allies clung to the hope that President Bush wanted a second resolution from the United Nations before attacking Iraq, and they tried to push it off until the summer heat might dissuade the Americans for the season. But their delaying tactics backfired, and on March 17, Bush announced in a speech that he wouldn't wait any longer for the U.N. He ended with an ultimatum: "Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours."

  Even to the ardently pro-war Kurds watching the speech, this sounded Wild West. One of them turned with his face screwed up and asked, "Who does he think he is?"

  As Bush's deadline ticked closer, Khalilzad went to Ankara, accompanied by Talabani and Nechirvan Barzani, seeking to forestall any rash action by the Turks. The Turkish government seemed to be coming to terms with the two edges of standing up to the United States. Defying a global bully played wonderfully to the gallery of Turkish public opinion, but now that Bush had announced he was going to war anyway, Ankara seemed to have gotten the worst of both worlds: The government hadn't prevented anything, they now had no say in northern Iraq, and America had started to rethink even the one billion dollars in aid promised for Turkey's struggling economy. The Turks had thought they could politely agree to disagree with Washington, but to the Americans, all bets were now off—even Turkish demands that Washington never partition Iraq.

  "U.S. policy had always been unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Iraq," said one LJ.S. diplomat involved in the negotiations. "With Turkey we had a document that enshrined that, which obviously, when they voted no on March i, was totally irrelevant as a document."

  Washington still pushed for Turkey to grant over-flight rights, but now in a more menacing tone. Both Kurdish leaders promised that pesh merga forces wouldn't enter Kirkuk or Mosul during the war, but the Turks didn't believe them and wanted a written guarantee from the United States that Turkey could send in troops if the Kurds broke their promise. After twelve years of tiptoeing around the Turks, Washington was sick of them and gave nothing but strongly worded letters about letting U.S. planes through. Turkey's promise to intervene for humanitarian reasons looked even more transparent as some of the Turkish troops at the border caused delays for humanitarian aid shipments heading into the north.6 The Kurds came back from Ankara reveling in the Turks' misery.

  "Thanks to our friends in the U.S. and friends in Europe, Turkey was convinced not to come in," said Talabani, ever the politician. "And we want to assure our Turkish brothers we will do nothing against them, and the day there is need, we will ask them."

  It was Talabani's favorite joke—his American friends and Turkish brothers. In private he would explain: your friends you get to choose; your brothers you have to live with. Talabani's closest American friends at the moment were the CIA agents living near his Qalaat Chowlan headquarters, and they thought they were about to win the war before it began.

  On March 18, the morning after Bush delivered his ultimatum, one of the "Rockstars" reported the strongest-ever tip regarding Saddam's whereabouts. A Kasnazani follower called in from Saddam's wife's complex in Dora, south across the Tigris River from Baghdad, where he worked as head of security. He said Saddam had arrived on the premises, and the CIA picked up the GPS coordinates from his Thuraya phone. Back in Washington, satellite surveillance watched three dozen vehicles pull up to the compound, and it looked like there was a chance to decapitate the regime before the war even started. The "Rockstar" at Dora was understandably nervous and hard to keep on the phone. Thirty of the spies had been caught, and one of them was tortured into confessing on Iraqi television. Owning a Thuraya now carried a death sentence, but the spy ring still functioned through the cajoling of the Sufi leaders. Nahro screamed down the phone to the spy at Dora that he should keep calling in.7

  The White House weighed the pros and cons as reports kept coming in that Saddam had arrived at Dora, that he had left, that his sons, Uday and Qusay, had come for the night, expecting their father. Finally President Bush decided the chance couldn't be wasted and ordered General Franks to ready the bombers—something big enough to penetrate the bunker that the CIA believed Saddam had constructed in Dora. This meant starting the war a few days early—after Bush's deadline, but before his planned start on Friday, March 21. As the bombs fell, Bush announced that the invasion was in the early stages. The Dora complex exploded under a barrage of forty Tomahawk missiles and two bunker-busting bombs from an American F-117 bomber. But in the end the most important person the CIA killed was its own source. A similar "decapitation" tip called in two weeks later near Baghdad's al-Saa restaurant also failed, killing only bystanders.

  "It came to bugger-all. They destroyed a perfectly nice restaurant," was the assessment of one Kurdish official. America was discovering that all its precision technology amounted to nothing without good human intelligence to select the bull's-eye. The most elaborate infiltration of Saddam's networks in history amounted to tens of millions of CIA dollars in the hands of a cynical cult leader who gladly cashed in the lives of dozens of his followers. His sons prepared themselves to enter politics in the new Iraq.

  The Dora assault didn't impress the Kurds, who were hoping to see the entire Iraqi army disappear in a cloud of pink dust the moment war began. Two days later they got some of what they were waiting for. The war began in Kurdistan on March 21, the first day of spring and of the Kurdish New Year. The Kurds christened it the "Newroz war" as America bombed targets along the green line to the south and specific locations within Kirkuk a
nd Mosul. Late the same night the PUK's pesh merga cheered as Tomahawk missiles slammed into the hills from which Ansar al-Islam had fired mortars at them for months. The following day more bombs fell, but not just on Ansar.

  In the predawn hours of March 2 2 an American precision strike incinerated Komala's base near Khurmal. Ali Bapir's men frantically pulled back to Khurmal's town center, and the PUK took over all Komala's forts and checkpoints on the Halabja road in a clearly preplanned action. Bapir could read the writing on the wall. Some of Ansar al-Islam's fighters were trying to flee down through his territory, and he suspected the Americans would soon be marching up it. He contacted the PUK and desperately sued for negotiations.

  The newly opened road to Halabja bustled with traffic the morning of the air strike, as PUK pesh merga swept into their new positions, many civilians used the road for the first time in a year, and seemingly the entire stranded press corps raced in to cover the first development of the war. The PUK now held the ground up to the Khurmal turnoff from the Halabja road, and by late afternoon a mob of journalists congregated at the new line, cautioned back by a small group of PUK soldiers. Amid the chaos a white sedan pulled up and suddenly exploded in fire and shrapnel.

  One of the Ansar car bombs had finally found a target. The blast rattled the windows of the Halabja police headquarters, a mile away, and sent the cops running outdoors to see a plume of black smoke push up against the mountains. Moments later, cars with blown-out windows raced toward hospitals in Halabja and Sa'id Sadiq carrying people wounded by flames, flying glass, and metal. Three PUK pesh merga died, as well as an Australian cameraman.* Twenty minutes after the explosion, the crowd at the intersection had cleared out in fear of more killers on the road. The skeleton of the bomber's car, now black, burned like a furnace beside a kiosk at the crossroads.