"I love you, George Bush! Bush! Tony Blair! Thank you very much! Kurdistan! Kurdistan!" shouted a Kurd who gave his name as "Ali." Ali said he had seen pesh merga inside the city in the early morning and knew the Ba'athists' reign had ended. "Today we are born again!" he said. "But we're afraid that U.S. make with us another 1991! The Iraqi helicopters and airplanes bomb us and U.S. do nothing."
The entire neighborhood had been built for Arab employees of the bottling plant in the 1980s, pushing the Kurdish residents into a ghetto alongside.9 Ali said he hadn't seen any of the Arabs around that day; they must have fled. A man came out of the plant with a canvas portrait of Saddam Hussein, which he tore into strips. No one paused for too long—they would have missed the best looting.
Across town on the eastern bank of the river, the Arab neighborhood of Askari was as quiet as a funeral, but I could still hear the crashing sounds of looting and the occasional gunshot from a few blocks away, where Kurds busily ransacked the local high school. Some of the better houses in Askari had belonged to military officers, but they were long gone. The people remaining here were Shi'ites—what the locals called "10,000s." In the mid-eighties Saddam started paying poor Arabs from the southern slums to come north, promising them housing and even a 10,000-dinar stipend, which was more than 30,000 U.S. dollars at the time. Most knew that Kurds and Turcomans had been pushed out of the houses, but it was an offer they couldn't refuse.
Just such a family of Shi'ites in Askari invited me into their living room. They offered me tea, but I declined, knowing they probably had no running water or even tea bags to spare. Suddenly it was Saddam's Iraq again, with everyone in the room clearly petrified to speak with me. I asked what they were so afraid of.
"La, la," everyone answered—no, they had no fear. There was no difference between Kurds and Arabs, all brothers. Then cautiously one young man said, "We are not afraid. But it would be better if the Americans were here."
An older man erupted over the denials: "Yes, we are all afraid! Why not say it? They're looting the high school—the Kurds. We have children in that school. Do you accept this? We need a government here! There is no government."
Gunshots punctuated his comments from not far away. I asked what they thought would happen now. "It's best if you stay," an older woman dressed in a black abaya responded. "We'd like you to stay here."
In front of Kirkuk's city hall, a group of Kurds assaulted a twenty-foot statue of Saddam with a sledgehammer, tying ropes around the statue's neck so they could climb up and bust its head in. In a repeat performance of the previous day's celebration in Baghdad, the Kurds toppled the dictator—but they did it without American soldiers' help. They did spray-paint "USA" all over the pedestal and into the statue's eyes, and someone bashed a hole between Saddam's legs. Shots rang out in the distance, but no one paused, confident that they had been fired in celebration. Then the crowd turned to see a long convoy of white Land Cruisers swing around the traffic circle heading to the mayor's office—the PUK had come to town.
The leaders still sitting around the table at Koya had intended to design the best course for entering Kirkuk, with small numbers of Kurds from each side, Special Forces, and perhaps even paratroopers from the 173rd. But news that PUK pesh merga had entered the city unopposed made the planning moot. Kosrat Rasul and his men started to cheer and celebrate: Kirkuk had been liberated—this time, they hoped, for good. The Americans at the table watched in frustration as the PUK gloated, and the KDP's Roj Shaways flew into a rage, stood up, and stormed out. Colonel Bob Waltemeyer, the commander of the Special Forces battalion working with the KDP, followed suit, angry for his own reasons. If the PUK had taken Kirkuk, he feared the KDP soldiers helping him hold down the Mosul front might abandon their posts and make a rush for the oil-rich city as well.10 No one knew how the Turks would react to the coalition breaking its biggest promise: that the Kurds wouldn't take Kirkuk.
Not one to let a few ruffled feathers interfere with his celebration, Kosrat Rasul grabbed a bunch of his old comrades and sped to Chamchamal, where they joined up with Barham Salih, also steaming toward the city of Kirkuk. As they entered the city, they made a phone call to Washington—they just wanted to wake an old friend. Dr. Najmaldin Karim, up early to perform surgery, answered his cell phone to discover that his hometown had finally been liberated.
When I saw Dr. Barham walking toward city hall, I didn't even think to ask him a question. Three years earlier I had met him, a dissident in his Washington, D.C., office, and he now stood in Kirkuk. The war must be over. I and most of my friends had survived and the Kurds hadn't been victims of another chemical genocide. He smiled, and I gave him a big American hug.
INSIDE CITY HALL, the PUK leadership toured a shattered facility—windows were broken, toilets fouled. At some point the electricity for Kirkuk had been cut. Citizens had no running water for several days before the city fell, and the sewers were backing up. Several PUK senior officials took over the mayor's outer office, a long room lined with couches. They said they were almost positive that the pesh merga invasion of Kirkuk had been done with American approval, but no Americans were to be seen.
Kurds began flowing into the city from the north, and all movable assets started flowing out. On the road to Erbil, a Kurd mounted on a thirty-foot-long yellow road-grading tractor bounced in the seat as he rumbled by KDP soldiers at a checkpoint, and he grinned in disbelief when they didn't stop him. By afternoon of the second day policemen from Sulimaniya came to town and started to confiscate stolen goods—at one rotary a traffic cop stood directing cars next to a dozen bags of grain he had taken from the looters.
One group was ready to play politics from the moment Saddam's statue fell. Just up the street from the fallen statue several storefronts had decorated their windows with the blue flags of the Iraqi Turcoman Front. A large group of Turcomans drove a pickup into the square that evening—next to the hotel where many journalists had taken rooms. In the bed of the truck was a boy whose skull had been crushed. The crowd told anyone who would listen that the pesh merga had killed the boy while attacking an ITF base. They broke into chants of "Atatürk!" and alleged that the Kurds were evicting Turcomans all over the city. Asked if they had brought their concerns to the Americans, they said they had no idea where to find them.
Soldiers from the 173rd also arrived in Kirkuk on April 10, but just like the U.S. troops in Baghdad, they only protected one facility: the Kirkuk oil fields. A few Americans had pulled razor wire across the entrance gates of the Northern Oil Company. A sergeant stood watch at the gate, his surname, "Hope," printed on the breast of his uniform. The paratroopers looked barely old enough to shave, compared with the weathered Special Forces the Kurds had seen around the north. Late in the day a gray-haired Kurd rushed up to the gate flailing his arms at Sergeant Hope, motioning at one of the buildings down the street. Smoke billowed out of the windows and flames began to flicker out the sides.
"Naw, we don't have a fire truck," he said, almost chuckling, and then, embarrassed, he tried to explain to the Kurd that he couldn't help. "If we had the resources to put out fires, we'd put out the fire."
Even if the Americans couldn't secure Kirkuk, they didn't want the PUK to do it. On the afternoon of April 11, Jalal Talabani arrived and tried to conduct a sort of town meeting at city hall. The building wasn't quite secure yet, and one young American soldier, looking scared and confused, stood outside the door of the conference room as the crowd pressed to get in. When Kosrat Rasul and his translator tried to get into the meeting, the soldier had no idea who he was but was finally convinced to squeeze the men past. By the end of the day, the Americans had convinced Talabani's pesh merga to leave the city as soon as GIs relieved them in place. Many did go, though a large number simply took off their uniform and stayed. The Americans found it much easier to accept Talabani's policemen than his soldiers. The residents of Kirkuk—Kurd, Arab, and Turcoman alike—started a backlash against the looting as well—as I discovered while trying
to leave the city that day.
I was writing my day's dispatch on a laptop computer while being driven out of the city, sitting in the backseat of an SUV, a Thuraya satellite phone sticking out the window with its earpiece trailing back inside. The car stopped abruptly. Staring in my open window was a Kurdish Kirkukee with a sort of machete in his hand. An angry mob surrounded the car, armed with cleavers, sticks, and pipes. I glanced quickly around the vehicle, with its mess of blankets, provisions, and bags scattered in such disorder that they might have been freshly looted and thrown in the back. To my relief, Hamid Agha, the driver I had been working with for three months, convinced the mob that I was just a journalist, not a thief. They let us pass.
IT ONLY TOOK a look north to Mosul to conclude that Talabani's breaking of the deal regarding Kirkuk was for the best. The KDP pesh merga under General Babakir had been making forays into Mosul as early as April 9, but after Saddam's statues fell in Baghdad and then Kirkuk, nothing could hold them back. Colonel Waltemeyer raced headlong from the tempestuous meeting at Koya into an even bigger mess. The Iraqi Fifth Corps wanted to negotiate surrender, but the Kurds were already flowing past their lines into the city. Waltemeyer met with regional factions and invited them to enter the city with him, but no one came to his aid. With only a few dozen soldiers, Waltemeyer felt no other option but to go with the KDP into Mosul; but no hero's welcome awaited in the Arab city.11
While Kirkuk fell with only a handful of casualties, street fighting killed a dozen of Babakir's pesh merga before they even reached the center of Mosul.12 No one there blessed, hugged, or thanked U.S. troops, and snipers started shooting at the American flags on their Humvees, probably from the irregular Saddam Fedayeen forces who had proven a hinderance to the Americans in the south. With Mosul as the heartland of Iraq's Sunni Arab military elite, its residents' animosity came partly from a loyalty to the Ba'ath Party and equally from a fear of the probable rise of the Shi'ites and Kurds after the regime's fall. Despite reinforcement by some marines flown into the north from the Mediterranean, Waltemeyer and his soldiers hung on in the city center for only a few days. Simply arriving at city hall wasn't enough in Mosul; the Iraqis wanted to know who would be in charge and what was coming next. Waltemeyer and the marines didn't really have an answer, but they thought it might be a good idea to present an Iraqi face to the crowd gathering around them. On April 14 they allowed a member of the Jibour tribe to address the crowd from the steps of city hall, hoping to calm things down. Unfortunately they picked the wrong Iraqi: Mishan al-Jibouri, a recently returned exile with a long and shady reputation. When they saw al-Jibouri looking like he was about to crown himself mayor with American backing, the mob rioted and burned several cars, and suddenly the Americans seemed to be caught in the city they meant to conquer.
The situation in Mosul teetered on the edge, as shots were exchanged between the Americans holed up in city hall and the increasingly emboldened crowd. The marines killed seven Iraqis whom they saw rushing the gate, and shortly afterward American fighter planes flew low over the city trying to spook the mob. It worked, but it was hardly a lasting solution. Waltemeyer held on one more night and then made a fighting retreat to the main airport, where his small contingent camped out for a week, awaiting reinforcements. Still concerned about how the Turks would react, he didn't want to ask for help from the Kurdish troops. The pesh merga left Mosul, but on their own terms—they looted the Iraqi Fifth Corps' base, taking munitions and every usable piece of artillery they could carry in their trucks. In a move that may have seemed like pure vandalism at the time, but later proved sensible, the Kurds detonated the Fifth Corps ammunition dump when they left, leaving less materiel to fall into the hands of insurgents. The base echoed with explosions and burned for days after the KDP troops pulled back outside the city limits. Finally, on April 22, the 101st Airborne and General David Petraeus arrived. Petraeus and his troops had been clearing up the rear of the American force in the south, around the Shi'ite cities of Karbala and Najaf, and they had little knowledge of the north, as the Kurds would later complain.
I DROVE BACK into Kirkuk on April 12, its third day of freedom from Ba'athist rule, past the still-smoking supermarket, the crowded hospital, and the Kurdish checkpoints now7 adorned with towers of loot, confiscated from Kurds who hadn't done their pillaging early enough. I wanted to visit the Kurdish neighborhood of Shorja, or whatever had been built on its remains after Ali Hassan al-Majid ordered it destroyed in 1991. On the way across the bridge in the southeastern quadrant of the city, we picked up a hitchhiker—Mustafa Fattah Mushir, a forty-eight-year-old man in a ragged gray coat, was walking along the side of the highway.
"I've been wandering the city like I was drunk since yesterday," he said. Mushir had walked to Kirkuk from his refugee camp near Chamchamal, looking for his old house in Shorja. I gave him a ride for the last mile. At the sight of an empty lot the size of a stadium, he asked Hamid Agha to stop the car. Mushir oriented himself by looking up at a nearby water tower and the apartment buildings across the road. Then he paced out a line into the empty dirt and turned around.
"This is my house," he said, drawing imaginary walls and a garden gate with his hand. "Three rooms from the side and one room there. This is where our house was."
Mushir told a now-familiar story of fleeing Kirkuk in 1991. He had never been a pesh merga, but half a dozen of his cousins had fought in rebellions going back to the 1970s. When the 1991 uprising failed, the Iraq army entered his neighborhood, killing Kurds at random.13 Mushir and his family fled with only the clothes they wore and watched as the Arabs across the street looted their furniture. In the past twelve years he had worked when he could as a construction laborer in Sulimaniya, where he lived in a tent with his wife and three children. Mushir heard the rumors that the neighborhood had been flattened, but he hadn't seen it until now. The combination of joy at returning and grief at seeing the empty lot seemed to paralyze Mushir, and he stuttered answers to questions.
"My children told me they also wanted to see our house, but you see I am also sad here; they would also be sad. If I don't bring them, it's better," he said, but then contradicted himself. "I tell you, though, if you let me put a little tent on this empty land, I would be happy."
Mushir said Jalal Talabani had ordered returning Kirkukees not to use violence to take back their homes. Anyhow, Mushir just wanted the cycle to end. "If I kill him, maybe his children are going to kill my children, and it's going to be a big problem." He couldn't help glancing across the road to the apartment buildings, still standing next to the ghost of his house. A few kids were milling about the entryway to the apartment block. I could feel eyes watching us from behind the curtains and walked toward their door.
They were waiting for me inside, where the family of eight Arabs all began talking at once. On the wall hung a stylized picture of Imam Hussein, one of the founding martyrs of Shi'ite Islam. Next to it hung a black-and-white portrait of a young man, the kind seen all over Iraq of a family member killed in one war or another. Without asking who I was, the family unloaded a litany of complaints.
"Maku karabah! Mai maku! Maku aman"—there's no electricity; there's no water; there's no security. It would be the first phrase in nearly every conversation I had for the next three years. After decades under Saddam, the prospect of speaking to a foreigner was no less terrifying. In the past, the mandatory script was to complain about conditions because of American sanctions and to never criticize the government. Now confusion seized them—should they tell me the truth or try to figure out what I wanted to hear? Perhaps I could help them, but just as easily I might report them to the new boss, whoever that was going to be.
The family made no brave front—they were too scared to give me their names. When I asked what frightened them, they immediately answered, "Pesh merga," and a woman with a babe in her arms made a "Ta! Ta! Ta!" shooting noise, holding the baby like a machine gun. They had their own displacement story to tell. They were Baghdadis, from th
e poor Shi'ite slum of Thawra.
"There was a dictator in Baghdad, and he told us go to Kirkuk and then brought Tikritis to stay in our homes," said the woman, speaking over her husband, who was telling the same story simultaneously. "We came here in 1990, only because they gave us a new home and money. They said we could stay here twenty years. But these were new buildings, not Kurdish homes." She rushed into the next explanation: "In 1991 the Kurds came and took everything from us. They killed all the Arabs. When we returned to the house, there was nothing but the floor."
I asked if the Kurds killed anyone she knew, and her brother spoke up. "They killed only the Ba'athists," he said, but then he pointed to the photograph on the wall. "When we came back, he was gone. We don't know if he is dead." They had looked for their youngest brother, even going to the prisons when Saddam announced an amnesty, but there was no sign of him. I asked them if they saw what happened to the neighbors across the street.
"Yes," said the older man. "They killed a lot of people. Ali Hassan Majid exploded their houses with dynamite. We were friends with the Kurds there." He went on, "Ali Hassan Majid and the regime planted the hate between us. They made us afraid of the Kurds and the Kurdish people afraid of us. We are still afraid, and we don't know what will happen to us."
He said he trusted Barzani more than Talabani, because Masoud Barzani was the leader of a tribe and knew how to deal with other tribes. Cautiously, I asked if they would like to see the Kurds from Shorja again, but they had already noticed Mushir, pacing outside on his empty land. They came out and greeted their old neighbor, looking at each other like survivors of a head-on collision, neither one sure who was at fault.
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