Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  Almost everyone that day claimed to have a title to their land, their house, their empty lot. As the sun sank low, I went looking for the land records at the central courthouse, a low, unguarded concrete building, back across the river in the center of town. Following a path of crumbled glass, I walked through the lobby and up to the second floor. Looters had removed all the furniture, apparently by throwing some of it out the upstairs windows. I could smell smoke somewhere in the building and braced myself to the idea of finding Kirkuk's official memory destroyed. Entering the main office, I could see a pile of trash burning in the corner. The record office door was closed.

  Inside was a registry of citizens, with pictures and nationalities marked. Moishe Georgis Hann, a Christian Assyrian name for sure, marked as an Arab. Salahdin Mahmoud—probably Kurdish-—marked as Arab. Among a few dozen files—mostly Kurdish and Turcoman names—only one was not marked as Arab.

  At that moment, Moharam Mahmoud, a Kurdish clerk for the record office, came walking up the stairs. The records of landownership, he said, were safe. He and his coworkers had hidden them away before the looting, along with the office's air-conditioning units. All the evidence of who owned what, of who had been evicted, of what house had been granted to newcomers—nothing was lost.

  "Why did they always keep records?" I asked, incredulous that Saddam's people would have kept such careful track of their own crimes. Mahmoud said that for a while the Ba'athists were too confident, never believing they needed to fear anyone's judgment of their actions. In the final days, he said, orders came down to destroy the records, but some of the lawyers in the office had banded together to protect them. By that time it was the Ba'athists who were afraid.

  But why make a record in the first place, I wanted to know, if it would so clearly incriminate you later?

  "They never thought they were leaving," he said and paused. "They thought they were gods."

  * Casualties in the press corps were now greater than those of the U.S. military in the north. In addition to Paul Moran, the Australian cameraman, filmmaker Gaby Rado died when he fell from a hotel roof in Sulimaniya. The other was a BBC journalist I was lucky to call my friend for the last two months of his life. On April 2 Kaveh Golestan, a renowned photographer and cameraman, died when he and Jim Muir, along with Stuart Hughes and Rebeen Azad, were inadvertently directed into a minefield by a Kurdish soldier. Kaveh was a kind fellow with a great sense of humor, and he had been reporting from the front lines for decades, including during the Halabja massacre in 1988. Many young reporters in his native Iran saw Kaveh as a mentor and remember him today as they push the limits of journalism in the Islamic Republic.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Believers

  THE WAR TO TOPPLE SADDAM HUSSEIN, the greatest killer of Kurds in modern times, lasted twenty-two days. The fear of a last gasp of chemical revenge lifted—in fact the Kurds' side of the war cost them only dozens of casualties, was finished in two short weeks, and hardly touched Kurdish soil. They had partnered with the greatest army in the world, which had come to stay. The enemy within Iraq fled his palaces to hide in shacks and tunnels. The enemies without trembled at the proximity of the U.S. Army—Syria and Iran wondered which of them would be the next target on George Bush's crusade to remake the Gulf. To the north, Turkey had so alienated Washington that the two NATO allies seemed more like cold war enemies, with almost no communication between the American soldiers on the ground and the Turkish troops massed on the border. Ankara seethed with its two bad options: either pretend to support the U.S. program, which the Turks believed would end up creating a Kurdish state on their border, or challenge the superpower they had already perturbed by denying them access during the war. At that moment, Iraq's Kurds can be forgiven for believing that their history of struggle had ended in victory.

  The fall of Saddam opened a thousand doors to the south. For some it promised a return home, to see relatives left behind the green line, to reclaim land and livelihoods. For others it unlocked the vault of the disappeared. As the Iraqi army drained away, many soldiers simply dumping their uniforms and going home, civilians all over Iraq converged on empty spots in the desert and began to dig—with bulldozers, with shovels, many with their bare hands—in the hope of finding a scrap of recognizable clothing or hair that might let their spirits rest, and confirm that their sons or brothers were not rotting in jail but had ended their suffering long ago. Rumors flew about the locations of the communal graves, many of them open secrets to villagers who had pretended not to hear the gunshots and earth-moving machines one night so many years ago.

  For the Kurds, the secret graves were a wound on their national psyche that might finally close. Muhammad Ihsan, the Kurd from Zakho who had helped with the CIA's attempted military coup in 1996, had since been appointed by the KDP as minister for human rights. Ihsan started with the first few grave sites that became accessible in the north, but soon after the regime fell, he took a small team to Baghdad with one mission burning in his mind. Posing as a reporter, Ihsan started looking up some of Saddam's old secret policemen, names he knew from his time with the CIA, hoping that these orphans of the regime would be willing to tell him the location of Saddam's first mass grave. Twenty years before his downfall, Saddam had crossed a line and never looked back when he marched some eight thousand men from the Barzani clan through Baghdad to their doom. Ihsan suspected the bodies to be somewhere in the western desert. For him and thousands more, the new Iraq meant recovering their memory, their history, and perhaps finding some justice.

  Others raced to Baghdad looking forward. Hussein Sinjari, the flamboyant former aide to Jalal Talabani, had his democracy institute primed to go, and he began publishing an English-language weekly newspaper. The first issue of Iraq Today was dated April 9, the day Saddam's statue fell, and Sinjari moved his Arabic paper al-Ahali (the people) to Baghdad as well. Still clean-shaven and wearing his French cuffs and wire-rimmed glasses, Sinjari had never quite fit as a mountain rebel or in drab, conservative Erbil. Baghdad meant finally laying claim to a cosmopolitan city as his own capital. It didn't matter that the city's bookstores, universities, and cafés had decayed in the past twenty years—Sinjari felt Baghdad would soon see the birth of a new intelligentsia, and he aimed to be a founding member. Months before the invasion he had dared to publish a poll in the north indicating that most Kurds preferred the United Nations or America to administer postwar Iraq, instead of their old familiar Kurdish leadership. Now Sinjari's press could be the same critical voice for all Iraqis in their ancient capital.

  Members of that leadership numbered among the most fervent believers in the new Iraq, none more than Kurdistan's two ambassadors, Hoshyar Zebari and Barham Salih. Zebari, his number in every news producer's cell phone, hit the airwaves like a rock star on a moral crusade. He presented himself as a member of the new Iraqi political class, replacing the absurd spokesmen for Saddam's regime. In Baghdad, Salih offered his experience as a Kurdish prime minister up to whatever new government would be formed.

  "We have ten years of self-governing experience," Salih said, days after his arrival in Baghdad.1 He served tea in a yellow stone mansion on the western bank of the Tigris, a house soon to be subsumed by the American Green Zone. Even as he sized up the mammoth task before the former opposition, he couldn't stop smiling.

  "There is no such thing as a Kurdish position," Salih said a little cautiously, as if struggling to include himself when he spoke about Iraqis. "It is in our interest to be in Baghdad . . . In many ways the ball is in our court as Iraqis, to make the case that we Iraqis should shoulder primary responsibility. Ultimately this is our country."

  In the early days after the invasion, Salih's comments rang true—for the first time Kurds felt no fear from Iraq. To the rest of Iraqis, the coming American occupation brought frightening uncertainty, while to the Kurds it wore a familiar face. A few months before the war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had struck upon the perfect man to lead the country post-inv
asion: General Jay Garner, whose effort during Operation Provide Comfort in 1991 had become the Pentagon's textbook for humanitarian intervention. Even better, the operation had been done quickly, cheaply, and with air power backed by small teams of Special Forces—pure Rumsfeld doctrine.

  The secretary of defense couldn't have pleased the Kurds more if he had asked them to pick. Garner was an unknown in the outside world, Washington included, but the Kurds considered him a national hero. As a cherry on top, retired Special Forces Colonel Dick Naab also signed up with Garner's team. Since leading the small American ground force at the end of Operation Provide Comfort, Naab had stayed in touch with his Kurdish friends, who made him an honorary pesh merga. The Turks loathed Naab as much as the Kurds loved him.

  Alongside Garner, Zalmay Khalilzad still served as the president's special envoy. With old friends in charge of setting up the new Iraq, the Kurds started daydreaming about all the privileges of citizenship in a real country. No longer would they need to travel on forged passports across informal borders. Visiting businesspeople and diplomats might be able to come to the north on the highway from Baghdad, instead of sneaking across the river from Syria or haggling with Turkish border police. Most of all, there was the matter of more than one hundred billion barrels of oil. For the first time the Kurdish region might get its fair share of the profits from export, not to mention all the wheeling and dealing to be done around new contracts for foreign companies. Most of the Kurdish leadership had studied in cosmopolitan Baghdad during their youth, and they remembered a vibrant city with restaurants serving grilled fish under the palm trees beside the Tigris River. The capital called to them as never before.

  The Kurds didn't head for Baghdad alone. All Iraq's would-be governors converged on the capital as the desert heat mounted in the spring of 2003. As Baghdadis looted their own city, the political parties did the same thing, but on a larger and slightly more dignified scale. Ahmed Chalabi's INC seized the Baghdad Hunting Club, a huge fairground on the west bank of the Tigris. Shi'ite factions set up in some of the great unfinished mosques around the city. Even the pretender to Iraq's throne, Sharif Ali, and his Constitutional Monarchy party assumed a large estate next to the Babil hotel on the east bank of the river, which had belonged to his grandfather. Talabani and his PUK grabbed a small mansion in the upscale neighborhood of Mansur, where many politicians secured homes. The KDP took over a stubby concrete hotel in east Baghdad called the Hayat Tower.

  Joyful chaos rattled through Baghdad. In some ways the lawlessness felt like a celebration—the violence hadn't yet begun in earnest, and Iraqis found exhilaration even in making petty traffic violations, scratching the itch of anarchy after decades of staring at their shoes. Most of the political leaders hadn't visited their home country in twenty years or more, though the Kurds proudly noted they had ruled their part of Iraq for a dozen years already. That didn't carry much weight with Baghdadis, and the sight of the pesh merga inspired fear for many Arabs, who had been hearing about the unruly, treasonous Kurds from Saddam's propaganda for so many years. With the best organized force, the Kurds probably commandeered more cars, houses, and hotels than any other faction setting up in the capital, but they may also have gotten a worse rap for it because they seemed to many Arabs like a foreign force. Furthermore, the sprinkling of American soldiers in town, walking freely in the streets and stopping in shops for ice cream, offered nothing to replace the old regime. The leader of the actual foreign force hadn't reached Baghdad yet. Garner couldn't get off the ground in Kuwait.

  Garner's team of retired military personnel and diplomats started cramming for their Iraq assignment in January, expecting to find the same kind of humanitarian disaster as in 1991. The name of his organization, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (quickly shortened to "ORHA"), implied that Garner intended to use the same model and quickly hand over power. But before he even left the United States, Garner stumbled into a Washington minefield. The two most important agencies of foreign policy, the Pentagon and the State Department, weren't on speaking terms, and the White House neglected to make them cooperate. As Garner tried to pull together his team, the Pentagon blacklisted two of the most impressive Iraq experts from the State Department, apparently with Vice President Cheney's backing. When Garner briefed the White House on his plans for Iraq, including using the Iraqi army to rebuild the country, the assembled principals simply nodded and let him walk out the door without a single question or criticism. Garner took it to mean they were in agreement, and he went to Iraq believing he had the full backing of the Pentagon and the White House for his plans. Before leaving he snapped another trip wire when he gave a short briefing to the press at the Pentagon Alarch 11. Garner described his plan for a quick transfer of power with a light footprint, and he went out of his way to debunk the idea that the United States supported putting Ahmed Chalabi's INC in power. Garner didn't want America to appear as if it would be anointing the next president of Iraq, and he privately considered Chalabi nothing better than a thug.2 His faint praise for Chalabi at the press conference may have created the crack in the Pentagon's support of Garner, a crack that would soon become a chasm.

  For almost two weeks after Saddams statue fell, Garner and his team languished in Kuwait. Garner wanted to head to Baghdad immediately, but the ground force commander, Lieutenant General David McKiernan, still had combat operations going on and didn't want the postwar teams underfoot. Eventually Garner screamed loudly enough at Centcom commander Tommy Franks, who allowed him to fly into Baghdad with a small advance team. On April 21 Garner set up ORHA in some government buildings on the west bank of the Tigris. Like all the other factions in postwar Iraq, the Americans appropriated a bunch of real estate, which would later metastasize into the sprawling "Green Zone." Garner stayed only one night in the heat and the dust. The next morning he jumped on another plane and flew to Kurdistan.

  "It was like old home week," said Colonel Dick Naab, who traveled with Garner as they landed in Erbil and then flew to Sulimaniya. Men, women, and children filled the streets everywhere he went, throwing flowers. At the university hundreds of people crowded into a hall to cheer Garner, as much for his past deeds as his current mission. Garner can be a bit plain until he gets excited, and the crowds brought out some of his natural charisma.

  "What you have done here in the last twelve years is a wonderful start in self-government, and can serve as a model for the rest of Iraq," Garner said. And then he went a bit further: "I think the time has come for the Kurds. The job they've done in the north is a tribute for free men and women."3

  Garner had come up north on a specific mission. The Kurdish leaders, apparently putting their dispute over Kirkuk to the side, had started pushing for the creation of an interim government drawn from the core group selected with Zalmay Khalilzad at the London conference. Garner wanted them to allow for some U.S. consultation first, before they publically announced a government the United States might not agree with. From the adoring crowds in Sulimaniya, Garner went to the resort at Lake Dukan to meet Barzani and Talabani. Garner told each of them how happy he was to see them well and thriving in the Kurdish safe haven. Then they got down to business.4

  "I hear you're trying to put up a provisional government," Garner said. The Kurds backpedaled quickly. "What we're going to do is set up the group that Zal was working with and bring them to Baghdad, so you'll have a voice for the Iraqi people," Talabani told him.

  Just as they had at the Salahudin conference, the Arab members of the opposition still felt cut out by America's plan to install an American general, instead of quickly looking for an indigenous leader as they had done in Afghanistan. But the Kurds at least weren't so worried with Garner in the role. They listed the seven factions they thought he should accept in Baghdad: their two Kurdish parties, the two main Shi'ite parties, Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord, Ahmed Chalabi's INC, and a Sunni Arab elder statesman named Adnan Pachachi, who had been Iraq's ambassador to the U.N. before Sa
ddam.

  Garner objected that the list was mostly exiles, with the exception of the two Kurdish leaders—couldn't they include some Arabs from inside the country? The two Kurdish leaders turned his question aside, pointing to the representatives of the majority Shi'ites, Ibrahim al-Ja'fari from the Da'wa party and Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI, who was returning from Iran. Garner also raised concerns about Hakim, who would be coming straight from a long exile in winch he cooperated closely with Tehran. But Talabani knew that Garner was a pragmatist. He put his hand on Garner's knee, just as he had done at their first meeting twelve years before.

  "Jay, it's better to have Hakim inside the tent than outside the tent," said Talabani.

  Garner thought it was decent advice. He told Barzani and Talabani that he would welcome the group as an advisory council and that he planned to make them into a provisional government as quickly as possible. Garner let the two leaders know that he intended to use the former Iraqi army troops for some public works projects. He also elicited a pledge from both leaders that they weren't going to push for independence, and somehow took from that the idea that the Kurds would be open to disbanding the pesh merga. Garner asked them to send their deputies to Baghdad for a meeting at the week's end. None of the three had any inkling that Garner's entire mission was a sinking ship.

  Garner's image in Baghdad and Washington got off to a bad start and went downhill from there. Since his comments implicitly criticizing Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon had slapped a gag order on Garner, forbidding him to hold any press conferences. It wasn't a great vote of confidence for the man the White House had sent to rebuild Iraq. Garner had a veteran image-maker with him, James Baker's former spokesperson, Margaret Tutweiler, but the two of them couldn't seem to get the right message out. After Garner had arrived almost unnoticed in Baghdad, the pictures of Kurds rejoicing to greet him in the north would have made great publicity, showing just what the Bush administration had predicted: Americans greeted with sweets and flowers.