Rostam had been a member of the Kurdish parliament but never quite learned political correctness—he hated Arabs and had no time for religion. While his comrades in the PUK repeated the mantra that any action on Kirkuk would be under American supervision, Rostam told anyone who asked that when Kirkuk fell, he intended to be there, taking back his old house, his old neighborhood, and probably the rest of the city, walking on the heads of Ba'athists all the way.
Rostam stepped down off the roof and announced that the Iraqi troops appeared to be pulling back in a ring around Kirkuk. A few hundred pesh merga would be sent to inspect the Iraqi trenches. Everyone looked at Rostam, waiting for the battle cry that would start a mad rush to Kirkuk. As if on cue, a convoy of Toyota 4Runners drove down the main road by the police station and quickly turned around; the Americans had taken a wrong turn in Chamchamal on their way to meet with the PUK leadership. Mam Rostam disappeared and didn't give any further statements that day. Thousands of Kirkukees in the camps around Chamchamal wrapped up their paltry possessions and arranged for a car, donkey, or long walk back to their city.
Still, the Americans forbade any attack on Kirkuk and everyone knew why. In the three months before the war, I don't think I once heard a Kirkukee say the word nawt—oil. Neither did the more discreet Kurdish politicians ever mention the oil pumping out of Kirkuk that could have turned their tiny landlocked enclave into another Middle East petro-kingdom. They didn't have to say it, because the Turks said it for them. Ankara had been telling Washington its nightmare scenario for years: the Kurds take Kirkuk, use the oil revenues to buy an air force, and in short order start stealing swaths of southeastern Turkey.
The Turkish paranoia had some truthful foundation. The oil factor in the Kurdish claim to Kirkuk was conspicuous in its absence—the Kurds never talked about their right to Kirkuk's oil fields; they only spoke of history and geography. Similarly, the Kurdish claim to several towns arcing northwest around the city of Mosul didn't mention the economic interests. As it stood, Kurdistan had only a tiny bit of borderline shared with Syria, and the key pipelines from Iraqi refineries skirted south of Kurdish territory. For the Kurdish state to be viable, the Kurds needed to redraw some lines.
Those western cities of Sinjar and Tal Afar were the preoccupation of Masoud Barzani's KDP. Barzani had no less interest in Kirkuk, but as the American war carried on, his forces also stayed clear. The parties made a show of unity, forming a joint military command, with all action to be authorized by the Americans. Talabani's PUK would command all Kurdish forces in the theater of Kirkuk, and the KDP would supervise all pesh merga fighting in and around Mosul. Geographically the KDP was just as close to Kirkuk's oil fields as the PUK, but Talabani's men had a stronger base inside the city. Mosul's several hundred thousand Kurds leaned more toward the KDP, but the city, Iraq's third largest, wasn't a place the Kurds felt they could own—it was the Sunni Arab heartland.
Astride the Tigris River, Mosul is the pride of Iraq's military. Since the creation of the country, the Sunni officer corps of the national army has always hailed from Mosul, a tradition that even Saddam had to accept. Sunni Arabs dominate the western half of the city, which Iraqis refer to as the "right bank." The smaller "left bank" of the Tigris is heavily Kurdish, as are many surrounding towns like Makluob, Makhmur, and Debaga. Even if they didn't think they should absorb the city, as they did with Kirkuk, the Kurds felt they should be there to help liberate Mosul—especially those who had family connections there.
"Mosul is my town, so I'm going there. I have a house there, land in the downtown. Whoever tells you, 'Don't go,' I'm going," Hoshyar Zebari explained in his office at the KDP's Salahudin headquarters. The Zebari clan came from farther north, but the KDP chancellor had spent his youth in the city and Zebari spoke nostalgically about Mosul's green riverbanks. Then he snapped out of it.
"This has to be done in an organized way," he said. "People already are edgy. Some of the inhabitants of Makluob—they are dying to go. They say this is the moment. We say no, don't go."
It was the first week of April, and "edgy" didn't come close. The U.S. Special Forces Second Battalion, along with thousands of KDP pesh merga under the command of General Babakir Zebari, had skirmished with the Iraqi army along the Great Zab River midway between Mosul and Erbil for a grueling seven days. Iraqi tanks and artillery clung to a high ridge just beyond a key bridge at the town of Kalak. Forces also laid siege to Debaga, on the highway between Mosul and Kirkuk. The pesh merga fired their antiquated artillery to little effect; even the American bombers seemed only to brush the Iraqis back temporarily.
Who had pinned down whom remained unclear. The Iraqis held the high ground for the week, but according to the Kurds, the Arab soldiers kept fighting only because Ba'athist officers were shooting deserters. The Americans—again numbering only about a hundred—began blowing up tanks with their fancy new shoulder-fired "javelin" missiles, but they needed a hundred times more troops before they could think about controlling Mosul. General Babakir would have delighted in providing those numbers, but the Turks had made it clear to Washington that Mosul, just like Kirkuk, was a red line, and Turkey would consider it a military provocation should the Kurds take either city. The White House had even signed off on a rule limiting the number of pesh merga in any given attack to 150, which the Special Forces on the ground mostly ignored.2 Yet Hoshyar Zebari believed that the northern front, hollow as it was, had succeeded. Saddam devoted nearly half his regular army to protect against an American invasion through Turkey that never came, Zebari said.
"The Fifth Corps, the First Corps, and half of the Second are all tied down," said Zebari. "And the regular divisions have really fought very hard. The Republican Guard has melted away—he put them around Baghdad like sitting ducks, to be pounded day and night."
Zebari may have overstated the importance of the north—in fact Baghdad had moved the elite Republican Guard south after realizing that there was no major American assault coming through Turkey.3 Still, the Iraqi regular army units in the north were giving a real fight over the key entry points to the city of Mosul. The lightly armed pesh merga and American Special Forces had engaged Iraqi tanks all week, and not without cost. On the morning of April 6, Masoud Barzani's brother Waji had taken a caravan of high-ranking pesh merga and a BBC team to see the frontline near Debaga, acting on false news that the city had fallen. They stopped a safe distance back, at a crossroads next to an Iraqi tank the Special Forces had rocketed earlier. The Kurdish troops poured out of their trucks to watch as an American F-14 thundered toward their enemies on the ridge. They could not have known that the pilot had instructions to hit a large mass of troops and trucks, standing next to a tank, at a crossroads. From thousands of feet above, he planted his bomb squarely in the middle of the Kurds.4
Red hot blades of shrapnel flew out for a quarter mile, killing a dozen of the pesh merga instantly and inexplicably sparing others who stood only meters away from the crater. Many of the vehicles burst into flames, and in the heat the Kurds' ammunition and rocket-propelled grenades started exploding, adding to the fiery mayhem. The Special Forces soldiers who had called in the strike rushed to the scene and started hauling the wounded to a low spot where they had some cover. In dispassionate but essential combat triage, the Americans left a few grievously wounded men to die, trying to save others. They might have left one Kurd with an ugly shrapnel wound to the head, but one of his comrades pointed to the crumpled man and shouted, "Barzani!" It was Waji. The soldiers quickly wrapped his wounds before the pesh merga rushed him back toward Erbil. Another American wrapped tourniquets around the severed legs of Kamran Abdul-razaq Muhamed, a young Kurd working as an interpreter with John Simpson's BBC television crew. Kamran succumbed to his wounds before he could be evacuated, making him the fourth member of the press to die in the Kurdish front of the invasion.* The U.S. military spirited Waji Barzani away to a hospital in Germany, but he never fully recovered from the brain injury. The KDP and Barzani kept
remarkably quiet about the American error—Masoud toed the line of his agreement with the United States and kept his troops behind the tiny contingent of U.S. Special Forces. On April 7, the day after the "friendly fire," Debaga fell.
ON THE FATEFUL morning of April 9, Hoshyar Zebari traced out the other key cities around Mosul on a wall map in his office: Makluob to the north, then Gwer to the east, and Debaga on the road to Kirkuk. The Kurds had Mosul surrounded and had seized the oil fields on the road from Debaga to Kirkuk. The KDP ordered civilians to wait before reclaiming their old homes and lands. To the south, only the hilltop town of Altun Kopri remained to be captured between Kirkuk and Erbil.
Zebari sat back down at his desk and turned to glance at the television news. Footage had been coming in for a few days of disorder in Basra and Um Qasr, of U.S. forces bogged down near Nasiriya and Kut. "Baghdad Bob," Iraqi information minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf, had defiantly claimed to the media that no U.S. troops had entered the capital and then gloated at the scene of a destroyed American tank on the city's edge.5 Suddenly Zebari reached over to turn up the volume—live footage was coming in from Baghdad. U.S. troops hitched up an armored tow truck to a statue of Saddam in Firdus Square, in the heart of Baghdad, and pulled it down. Zebari watched in silence and then nodded his approval.
"Wow," he said.
The Americans' strategy of demoralizing the Iraqi army had finally worked, after several rough starts. On April 5 and then again on April 8, the Third Infantry Division staged "thunder runs" into Baghdad, brazen assaults through the city's main traffic arteries designed to show that defense of the city had failed. The tactic looked daring to the point of madness, but on April 9 it paid off when U.S. Marines hauled down the statue and won the symbolic victory they had been hoping for. Baghdad fell the next day after a pitched battle around the Abu Hanifa mosque on the west bank of the Tigris.6 Iraqis flooded the streets, but the outpouring of joy at the fall of Saddam soon took a backseat to a looting frenzy. The American military, expecting a much longer siege, had only a tiny fraction of its forces in the city, and they did nothing to stop Baghdadis from stripping down government buildings to the steel wire inside the concrete. The Americans did secure the oil ministry building, but other government institutions as well as the Baghdad Museum soon sat empty of their valuables, their furniture, and the copper wire from their electrical outlets. Even suspected WMD sites fell prey to the looters; short of shooting the civilians, the American soldiers felt they could do nothing but watch.
IN THE NORTH, the Kurds took to the streets as well, and a flood of celebrants completely shut down traffic in Erbil. The sun was shining and the entire city poured out of doors, complete with marching bands, portraits of Mulla Mustafa Barzani, and Kurdish flags sporting their own yellow sun. A few soldiers from the 173rd Airborne had been passing through town and found themselves utterly immobilized by well-wishers.
"Here, a flower," said one old man, handing over a limp daisy. "You take to Mr. George Bush and Mr. Tony Blair. I love you, George Bush! I love you, Tony Blair!"
On the road to Kirkuk KDP pesh merga stood stoically at their new checkpoint—just below the Iraqi-held town of Altun Kopri. They had turned away hundreds of Kurds that morning, in keeping their bargain with the Americans. Along the PUK border that deal began to fray.
Leadership from both parties had met almost continuously since the war began, to coordinate as well as keep an eye on each other. April 10 found them meeting at Koya, halfway between Sulimaniya and Erbil. The KDP sent General Roj Shaways; Kosrat Rasul represented the PUK. Colonel Charlie Cleveland, at that point commanding the entire U.S. contingent in the north, brought along both his battalion commanders, representing essentially the KDP and PUK sections of the Special Forces. Everyone knew the meeting would probably decide the fate of Kirkuk, and the Americans felt caught again. They didn't have the numbers to take Kirkuk or Mosul, never mind both. But the Turks had stated plainly that they would intervene if the Americans used Kurdish forces to take either city, especially oil-rich Kirkuk. Turkish military observers had insisted on coming from the north, secretly, with the Americans to police the agreement—the Special Forces called them "Canadians."
The complications might have already cost them a crucial opportunity The day before, as the Saddam statue fell in Baghdad, the Americans had watched Kirkuk by satellite and seen a large convoy fleeing to the south. Without any confirmation on the ground they held their fire, but the Pentagon suspected it was Kirkuk's Ba'athist leadership evacuating. Inside the city Ramadan Rashid could have easily confirmed their suspicions.
"By the time we came out into the streets on April 9, there were not many left," said Rashid. He convened a meeting of the six top resistance leaders, and they decided it was time to come out in the open. The next morning, when the resistance put its plan into action, they found no enemies left in town to oppose them. Rashid sent his men out to protect important public buildings, but discovered he was also too late for that.
"We realized that the looters were much better organized. We didn't have enough power to secure these sites, and unfortunately the Americans didn't help us," he said. Many in Kirkuk had hidden televisions that could pick up the Kurdish channels from the north; they had seen footage of Americans allowing the chaos in Baghdad. Some even concluded that the United States wanted the looting to happen. "At the time the Americans had so much influence," Rashid recalled. "If there had been one American soldier in front of each building, no one would have looted."
The PUK forces had tried everything they could to get into Kirkuk, with Mam Rostam's pesh merga lining up at the border on racing blocks. Bafel Talabani, still high from his first combat experience alongside the Americans, even tried the ridiculous scheme of calling up the Americans on his satellite phone, pretending to be a U.S. unit on the edge of the city, and shouting in a poor American accent that it was time to go in. But when Rashid made contact with the PUK to tell them the looting had begun and a power vacuum was consuming Kirkuk, Talabani couldn't wait any longer. He called U.S. General Pete Osman and told him Kirkuk was now a humanitarian issue and he needed to send in the pesh merga.7 About two thousand men, led by Mam Rostam and Omar Fattah, crossed the front lines, and the levy burst.8 Thousands more Kurdish soldiers, refugees, and freelance looters inundated the city. The Kurdish troops at the PUK checkpoints had neither the means nor the will to hold them back. They would later claim that the pesh merga and Special Forces had intended only to tighten circles around Kirkuk but encountered such little resistance that they accidentally liberated the city.
The green line separating Kurdistan from Iraq vanished in the morning sunlight. Journalists' cars had been decked out with big "TV" symbols painted on the side in a language we hoped would be universally understood. Expecting a long war and shortages, we had packed our SUVs with canned goods, sleeping bags, flashlights, and extra car batteries with DC converters for our equipment, with jerricans full of gasoline tied precariously to the roof. Almost all the preparations turned out to be unnecessary.
Looking for the next Kurdish checkpoint, I suddenly found myself inside the town of Altun Kopri, which had fallen peacefully hours before. Any doubts fell away at the sight of a ruddy-faced U.S. soldier thronged by Kurdish children. The Special Forces had changed out of their pesh merga costumes and shaved off their mustaches—they no longer wanted to blend but instead to be recognized as part of the invading American army. I assumed the soldier was Special Forces, but he had no markings other than the American flag hanging off his mud-smeared jeep.
"It's good to be here," he said with a sigh. "I've been working with the Kurds. They love us; we love them. I think everybody's happy that it's over with," he said. I couldn't tell if he was giving me the party line or his own opinion, but then he went much further. "[Operation] Provide Comfort when we came in after the Gulf War really paved the way. The whole north of this country was Kurdish at one time, and Kirkuk too. And then Saddam did his ethnic cleansing. And this
is a Kurdish town," he said, pointing to the kids from Altun Kopri who had swarmed around him.
The American said he had started to pick up some of the Kurdish language, but he wouldn't say when he had arrived. Perhaps he was part of the CIA contingent; he seemed to have gone a bit more native than even the Special Forces soldiers I had met. Some of the locals started singing and ululating for him.
"We're going to get this all the way to Baghdad," he said, and then drove away.
The Iraqi army had abandoned the military barracks at Altun Kopri and several truckloads of surrendering soldiers called out to the foreigners they saw. The Arabs—most of them from cities in the south—said they had been restricted to the base for fifty days and had heard occasional bits of news from hidden radios. They were a ragged bunch, with worn civilian clothes, packed into the beds of cattle trucks. They claimed not to be afraid of being taken into Kurdish custody.
"We've been waiting since the first day in the war," said an officer from Baquba, just an hour south of Kirkuk. "We're not afraid. We and the Kurdish people are the same: we are Muslims; we are brothers. Justice was done today."
A hint of doubt, or perhaps hope, trailed off in his voice as the transport powered up to leave. The Red Cross already had several hundred Iraqi soldiers under observation in tents north of Erbil. The Kurds weren't even calling them prisoners, insisting on the term "guests." But the civilians in Kirkuk were not as tranquil as the surrendering soldiers.
My first sight of the city Kurds describe as their Jerusalem was the smoke coming from a gas flare in the oil fields. The second was a Kurdish woman carrying a freshly looted porcelain sink out of a Pepsi bottling plant as men, women, and children ran into the gates of the building and stole everything they could carry—desks, tables, chairs, and case upon case of empty Pepsi bottles. Seeing a foreigner, some of the looters—all Kurds—paused to tell me what I would be hearing all day, often in broken English.
Invisible Nation Page 25
