To Bremer's annoyance, the Barzani clan would keep themselves mostly in the north, openly disdaining trips to their nominal new capital, Baghdad. Masoud in particular told Bremer that he hated Baghdad and delighted in pointing out how much more pleasant were his Kurdish mountains. But there was one power broker Barzani was willing to make a longer drive to see.
EARLY ON JUNE 5, Hoshyar Zebari sat waiting in the lobby of the Hayat Tower hotel in Baghdad, looking no more out of place than he had in London or Salahudin, chain-smoking and sipping Arabic coffee in his brown suit. Zebari had made the lobby his court and delighted in seeing all the journalists he had cultivated over the years as they called on him in Baghdad. He also gladly explained the situation to newcomers, at the price of an occasional prank—at least once he told correspondents from a major newspaper that he was the concierge. Today he was all business, as a swarm of white Land Cruisers filled the street outside at seven A.M. The convoy paused just long enough in Baghdad, on its route from Salahudin, to pick up Zebari, a few other KDP dignitaries, and three journalists.13 About twenty cars long, the Kurdish caravan tore south out of the city, crossing the Tigris at stunt-driver speed, scaring the taxis and private jalopies off the road with blaring horns. Their destination was a tiny alleyway in the city of Najaf, home to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, perhaps the most powerful man in Iraq. Sistani sat at the head of the Najaf's marja'iya (literally, "sources of emulation")—for Shi'ites, a sort of informal Vatican. In the post-invasion power vacuum, Iraq's 60 percent majority Shi'ites were turning to Sistani for guidance, and hanging on his every word. As the cars slowed to navigate the crowded streets inside Najaf's ancient old city, passersby and shopkeepers asked each other, "Barzani? Is it Barzani?"
Masoud Barzani had last traveled to Najaf as an emissary of his father in 1967, bringing a letter of thanks to the previous leader of Shi'ite Iraq, Ayatollah Muhsin al-LIakim. When the Iraqi state began to suppress Mulla Mustafa Barzani's rebellion in the early 1960s, Hakim had lent his support to Barzani by issuing a fatwa against the killing of Kurdish civilians. It was a courageous move that sapped the strength of the Iraqi army, populated with many poor Shi'ite conscripts who suddenly began wasting ammunition by firing over the Kurds' heads. This solidarity formed a bond between Iraq's two victimized peoples, though they were usually separated geographically by the Sunni-dominated region in the center of Iraq and the Sunni-controlled government in Baghdad. On June 5, 2003, Barzani would visit Sistani and also greet Hakim's son, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, who had just returned to Najaf from a long exile in Iran.
At first blush the Kurdish warrior and the two Shi'ite imams didn't have much in common. Barzani was a man of action, a Muslim but not a preacher. Fie mostly wanted to secure his beloved mountain home, and perhaps south to Kirkuk, but nowhere near so far as the desert around Najaf. Hakim, also a resistance leader of sorts, was the spiritual guide of the Badr Brigades, which had been trained in exile by the Iranian military. A lean man with a long face and a bushy beard that was equal parts gray and brown, Hakim tried to retain some of the distance from politics that Shi'ite leaders often profess. But in that regard he would never equal the Grand Ayatollah. Sistani truly kept to the quietist school of Shi'ism, aloof from politics, allowing him to weigh in simply on matters of what is permissible or forbidden behavior. Born in northeastern Iran, Sistani never accepted offers of Iraqi citizenship after decades living in a tiny house down a quiet alley in Najaf. His reaction to Saddam Hussein's rule had been passive and nearly pacifist—after an assassination attempt in the early 1990s, Sistani simply stopped leaving his house. Since the American invasion, he had made only one related fatwa—a prohibition on looting, which greatly reduced the disorder in Shi'ite areas.
Barzani first paid his respects to Sistani, sitting on a simple floor mat and drinking a single cup of tea with the seventy-four-year-old cleric. "He was a respectful man, very humble. We did not talk about politics," Barzani said later. "He said we can solve all the issues in a democratic way, and he said he will bless anything that the majority of the people in Iraq agree upon. These were our guidelines. We didn't go into specific issues."
The room was too small for many of Barzani's entourage to enter, and they milled about in the narrow passage outside with an equal number of Shi'ite functionaries. They chatted in Arabic and Kurdish, many of them hoping to be let in the door to peek at the historic spectacle. Sistani never appeared on television, and most had seen his face only on the placards that sprouted up all over Shi'ite Iraq after the invasion. The meeting lasted merely half an hour, and then Barzani's group sped across town to meet with Hakim. Afterward Barzani and Hakim, along with Hakim's younger brother Abdul Aziz, answered a few questions about their meeting. Hakim mostly deferred to Barzani, and for once the reticent Kurdish leader was the most talkative man in the room.
"We are in agreement that Iraq should be governed by Iraqis," Barzani said, looking bemused. "The important thing is how to achieve that, how to move forward together."
Barzani must have wondered at his own words on the long drive back to Kurdistan. His presence in Najaf had built a bridge between Iraq's two wounded peoples, yet all they had in common was a vanquished enemy. Barzani desired only to preserve the nationalist, secular freedom in the north that had flowed from cutting ties with the rest of Iraq twelve years prior. Hakim and Sistani saw Baghdad and Iraq's holy places as finally theirs, and felt their numbers would inevitably bring about their rule—not an Iranian-style rule of mullahs, their spokesmen assured, but certainly a system based more on the Koran than any other source. As for moving forward together, the Kurd and the clerics could only agree that the north and the south would have such drastically different systems as to be virtually separate states, presided over by a weak government in the center.
Barzani considered that an excellent foundation for cooperation, and making the personal trip south was just the kind of respectful diplomacy that would keep the Kurds and Shi'ites unified where they could agree—as in their opposition to Bremer's control over their government and their new constitution. A few weeks later Sistani announced another fatwa, this time prohibiting any constitution written by outsiders. Bremer would lose almost every fight he tried to pick with Sistani, who refused to meet with the U.S. viceroy. When the CPA tried to bargain with Sistani over the ruling, he famously replied to Bremer in a letter, "You are an American, I am an Iranian. Let's leave the constitution to the Iraqis." Where the Kurds could line up with the Shi'ites, it would be hard for anyone else to stand against them.
The Shi'ites and Kurds had one more thing in common: between them they sat atop almost all of Iraq's proven oil reserves. For the Shi'ite Arabs in the south it was a simple fact; the wells dotted the southern deserts and the country's only port lay in Basra, Iraq's second largest city and the Shi'ite economic capital. The Kurds' claim was a bit more complicated. The 20 percent or so of Iraq's oil coming out of the north was at the crux of Kurdistan and Iraq's biggest pressure point—Kirkuk.
THE KIRKUK POWDER keg would turn out to have a very long fuse. In the weeks after the regime fell, members of the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne, led by Colonel William Mayville, did their best to bone up on the history of the city and its competing ethnic groups, who all seemed to be girding themselves for a showdown. Mayville, a boyish-looking forty-two-year-old with a master's degree in aerospace engineering, had a similar demeanor to Petraeus's, embracing the role of soldier-diplomat and not shying away from the complexity of Kirkuk, a city full of legitimate but contradictory claims. Mayville had enough troops, alongside all the Kurdish police who had come to town, to hold the city together. But there were nowhere near enough soldiers to cover hundreds of villages in the countryside, where claims were being settled, as I discovered during a quick tour around Kirkuk province a month after it fell.
In a long arc, from Khanaqin by the Iranian border southeast of Kirkuk all the way north of Mosul and west to the town of Sinjar, Kurdish forces and eager Kurdish civ
ilians pushed into their former lands. While there was clearly intimidation, remarkably no revenge killings or massacres were reported, perhaps because the Arab settlers, motivated by fear or a guilty conscience, pulled up stakes and fled for the main cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. The Kurds had achieved a fact on the ground and essentially picked up their green line and moved it a few dozen miles to the south, squatting on huge areas they considered Kurdish land. In many cases, Arab families with roots in the community predating 1975 and the first wave of Arabization stayed on, undisturbed by the pesh merga, who were acting with the blessing of both the KDP and PUK. Many of the Arabs who fled to the cities complained that the Kurds wouldn't allow them to return even to collect their belongings, and others said the pesh merga beat them or arrested them when they came back. The Kurds used force in a deliberate and controlled manner, confident that nothing could stop them, and even defied the occasional intervention by U.S. forces, who clearly didn't have the manpower to enforce the orders they gave.14 Along the highway between Kirkuk and Altun Kopri, a Kurdish farmer in a hamlet called Nabiyawa prepared to make a trip to town, where he planned to rent a combine harvester.
"This is my house. I just haven't been able to see it for twelve years," said Sabah Haji Ali, a middle-age Kurd who had been living in Erbil. He allowed that the house was much bigger than he had left it—in fact it had two tall pillars in front of the door and several new rooms. As far as Sabah cared, the additions served as minimal interest on the debt owed to him by Saddam, who had given his house to Arabs. Sabah also had a clear conscience about harvesting the winter wheat crop that stood ready in the fields like a housewarming present. He had never seen the Arabs who had lived in his house and planted the wheat; they had apparently fled on the day Saddam fell.
Next to the Kurds, the most aggrieved party in Kirkuk was the Turcomans. By most accounts Turcomans had dominated the city, if not the countryside around it, until the 1950s. Saddam Hussein's ethnic cleansing had hit them as well, especially because many were Shi'ite and had been sympathetic to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. In some of the outlying communities, they too intended to take back their homes. On the road to Hawijah I met a large group of Turcomans in a meeting hall painted with the blue flags of the Iraqi Turcoman Front. They were egging each other on to evict the Arabs down the road in the village of Bishar, who had been awarded all the Turcoman farms and houses in the late 1980s. The Turcomans claimed to have deeds for the property going back to the British occupation of Iraq. The Arabs, they said, had appealed years ago to the vice president of Saddam's revolutionary council, Izzat al-Douri, to give them official documents to the land.
One of the Turcomans told the story with a triumphant smile: "Douri told them, 'I am your papers. When I'm gone, you have no papers.' And now Izzat al-Douri is gone!"
The Turcoman said that he intended to take back the land, but representatives from the Shi'ite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) had appealed to him to wait. This was the far edge of the new Kurdish green line, with no U.S. troops anywhere to be seen. Bidding farewell to the Turcomans, I proceeded down the road to talk with the Arabs they meant to evict and discovered in Bishar something completely unexpected—Saddam nostalgia.
"Saddam only did bad things to people for a reason," Yasir Hassan said, sitting in a sort of meeting hall in Bishar. All the other Arab farmers nodded their assent. Yasir freely admitted that the building he was sitting in had belonged to Turcomans, but claimed they had been in league with Iran. Perhaps several weeks of hearing Iraqis joyful at Saddam's downfall had made me naive, but I could hardly believe my ears. "We didn't like Saddam before," Hassan continued, and it suddenly seemed so obvious, "but we do now. At least then we had security."
Hassan's chief concern was not the Americans but that the Kurds or Turcomans would come and take back their houses. He admitted that the Arab farmers around Hawijah had already formed defense groups to protect themselves against marauding Kurds, whom they accused of coming south to steal cars. A few days before my visit they had fired on a convoy in the middle of the night only to discover that it was not Kurds but Americans. Hassan and his friends retreated under withering gunfire from the U.S. Army patrol. His small group wasn't alone.
On May 17 about five hundred Arab tribesmen from Hawijah marched into Kirkuk, meeting at the gates of the city, where they distributed assault rifles. They poured into the city, attacking Kurdish neighborhoods in retaliation for the raids they claimed pesh merga had been making on their farms. Kirkuk became a war zone again for about thirty-six hours, and the Arabs attacked American troops as much as they did Kurdish civilians. At least five people died and dozens more suffered bullet wounds before troops from the 173rd Airborne managed to shut down the violence. Then, despite all the dire predictions, the trouble seemed to stop. Colonel Mayville credited the creation of a multiethnic city council that gave none of the ethnic groups a majority; it was led by a Kurd with an Arab deputy and three assistants—a Turcoman, a Christian Assyrian, and another Kurd.
"The different ethnic factions are starting to be a strength now. You have powers checking powers. No one group has a majority sufficiently large, [so] they have to work with each other. That's become a strength," Mayville said on the first day the council met at the end of May.15
Kirkuk's political parties did seem interested in promoting a peaceful resolution, but another factor played heavily into the equation. The CPAs representatives in Kirkuk put out the word that America was opening up a property claims commission that would soon adjudicate all disputes arising from Saddam's Arabization campaign. Word spread quickly that evicted Kurds and Turcomans would be able to return to their houses soon, but the Arabs placed there by the regime would receive money to relocate. The "house-jackings," as the U.S. soldiers started calling them, came to a halt, and streams of people started lining up outside the civil affairs battalion in Kirkuk to register their complaints. But the major effect of the compensation program was unintended.
"People started mentioning the big c-word," said Colonel Harry Schute, a reservist who had come into Iraq with the Special Forces as part of their civil affairs team. "As soon as compensation got mentioned, people didn't have an incentive to move out."16
Schute rapidly became enamored with the Kurds, as many of the U.S. military working closely with them did. He was glad to start registering property claims, and no one realized until more than a year later the major flaw: the CPA never properly funded the property claims commission. It might have been a fine plan, but as with many other CPA ideas, it was set adrift. Everyone in Kirkuk dug in their heels waiting for a settlement that would never come. Colonel Mayville even negotiated a fifty-fifty split of the grain harvest that was coming in, between Kurds and Arabs. But the deal was a nightmare to enforce for soldiers trained as infantrymen, not agronomists or lawyers. What Mayville hoped was the beginning of a beautiful new friendship between the Kurds and Arabs was more like a final divorce settlement from the Kurds' perspective. Suddenly the onus was on America to sort it all out.
"We end up ticking everyone off because we hadn't made a decision," said Schute. "I think sometimes we, as Americans, are so concerned about offending someone that we end up offending everyone."
THE AMERICANS WERE not the only ones trying to influence the outcome in the city of Kirkuk. Iran had agents there, and the young thuggish Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr had sent a deputy up to Kirkuk to organize Shi'ite Turcomans and Arabs against what he assumed would be the Kurdish attempt to take over the city. But the keenest interest of all came from Iraq's northern neighbor.
Turkey had several unofficial observers with the U.S. forces, but the Americans soon began to notice the link between the Turkish forces and the Iraqi Turcoman Front. The ITF quickly annoyed the Americans when it tried to monopolize all the seats allocated for Turcomans on the city council. The ITF's demands were always maximalist; according to Mayville, it claimed that 1.2 million Turcomans lived in Kirkuk when, by Mayville's b
est estimate, the entire city was home to only 750,000 people. The ITF often eclipsed other Turcoman groups, which didn't help the cause of regular, moderate Turcomans in Iraq when Turkish-American relations started a tailspin.
In early May, Mayville's soldiers caught a dozen Turkish Special Forces troops, disguised as aid workers, bringing weapons into Kirkuk. The subterfuge alone was enough for the Americans to conclude that the Turks were up to no good—and besides, the Americans were not in the mood to cut the Turks any slack. Some of the U.S. soldiers now in northern Iraq had packed and unpacked their bags endlessly while floating off the Turkish coast in March; many in the U.S. Army even believed that the Turkish refusal to allow a northern front had prolonged the war and cost American lives. Mayville held the Turks overnight and returned them to the border. The colonel said he thought the Turkish Special Forces had come to link up with the ITF, intending to destabilize the city and give Ankara an excuse to intervene. Such actions by an ally weren't encouraging. What happened next, however, would scar Turkish-American relations for years, and delight the Kurds.
The news arrived on July 4, as American diplomats in Ankara sipped beer and grilled burgers at the embassy's Independence Day barbecue. The Turkish foreign minister was ripping mad and needed to see the American ambassador, Robert Pearson, immediately. Out of deference to the Fourth of July, the Turks downgraded the demand to the embassy's number two, an old Iraq hand, Bob Deutsch, who rushed home from the party to change and then sped over to the foreign ministry, where they all but set his tie on fire. Why was the U.S. Army suddenly treating Turks like their worst enemy? the foreign minister wanted to know.17
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