"Kirkuk is a time bomb," said Zhala Nafwachi, a Turcoman councilwoman, after the elections. "The Kurds are always pretending they make the majority, but in reality Kirkuk is 70 percent Turcoman. They are sneaking into the city. We reject all elections and what they say. And there is no Turcoman house without its gun. If it continues like this, we will have no choice but to use them."
While some Turcomans had radicalized, many of them did so along religious lines, joining with the growing base of the Mahdi Army, led by Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr had become as much the voice of the urban poor as a Shi'ite religious leader, and he knew he would find willing recruits in Kirkuk. Sunni Arabs also tried to hold on to their turf, and complained that Kurds were staging pogroms in the countryside. In the farthest southern reach of the old safe zone, the Arab governor of Diyala province tried to respond in kind and reassert control over the town of Kifri. Officially, Kifri had been carved off of Kirkuk province and added to Diyala during Saddam's Arabization. But as a Kurdish majority town, it had easily been taken in as part of the Kurdish safe zone in 1991. Kifri had been part of the safe haven under Kurdish administration for thirteen years, but the Diyala governor took advantage of the ignorance of American troops and almost convinced them to start shooting up the pesh merga guarding Kifri as if they were an insurgent group occupying the city.
When I spoke with residents of Kifri after the 2005 elections, they predominately wanted to stay within the safety of Kurdish region. The town had always felt a bit different from the rest of Kurdistan, being part of what the Kurds called "hot country," but for people in Kifri, the hot country was the rest of Iraq. Even Arabs preferred to stay in the northern Kurdish region rather than be reattached to Diyala, whose capital, Baquba, had become a byword for insurgency. "I've never been to Baghdad, but all I hear about there are bombs," one teenage Arab girl told me, summing up the opinion of most of the people I interviewed.
With car bombs exploding daily in the rest of Iraq, it should have been easy for the Kurds to convince minorities in the city of Kirkuk that their best interest lay in joining the stability and prosperity flowing from the north. The numbers also argued for joining the north. Turcomans and Christians, a tiny minority in Iraq, would make a proportionally larger minority in tiny Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdish authorities could have flooded Kirkuk with reconstruction funds and technical assistance to win over the population without resorting to strong-arm tactics. Instead the old rivalry between the KDP and PUK reared its head again, and the Kurds seemed intent on stacking Kirkuk's government with party loyalists (an equal number from each party, of course) and shoving their demands down the city's throat. While there were Kurdish proponents for a charm offensive to win Kirkuk, voices like Mam Rostam's drowned them out. The United States also played a schizophrenic role.
While dire predictions of a civil war sparking in Kirkuk proved premature, Kirkuk was no longer safe for foreign-aid workers, journalists, or anyone outside their own ethnic quarter. The Iraqi National Guard in the north, nothing but reflagged pesh merga, happily cooperated with the Americans in the counterinsurgency but still took orders from the Kurdish parties. Many American units seemed to follow the same arc as the troops in the city of Mosul did—first trying to be balanced and then realizing that every faction in the country had an agenda and that the Kurds' was closest to the Americans'. When Arabs and Turcomans in Kirkuk began to report that scores of their young men had disappeared into Kurdish prisons in the north, it turned out that U.S. military intelligence was aware of the "abductions." The Americans apparently considered the Kurdish prisons a much more secure place to leave a detainee, where some of them might be held indefinitely.
"We know we can drop a guy in there and he'd be taken care of and he's safe," Major Darren Blagburn told the Washington Post. An intelligence officer from the 116th Brigade Combat Team in Kirkuk, Blagburn didn't admit to any U.S. role in the prisoner transfers, as the embassy and the U.S. military denounced it, but with Iraqi jails becoming a revolving door in the vacuum of the Iraqi judicial system, there was clear sympathy toward the idea of sending suspects north to Erbil or Sulimaniya, where they would actually be held, certainly interrogated, and perhaps even tried in a court. Barzani and Talabani were happy to provide the service, wanting to help American troops root out insurgents, and also to continue the close ties between the Kurdish and American security forces. Scores of Arabs and Turcomans who disappeared in coalition raids later wrote their families letters from Kurdish prisons through the Red Cross, and some complained of torture and poor conditions. The outsourcing of prisoners continued long after the story broke in June 2005; many prisoners sat in Kurdish jails for years, where they suffered regular mistreatment including beatings, stress positions, and solitary confinement.10 In Kirkuk and Mosul, Kurdish soldiers in the police force and the army sewed a Kurdish flag onto their uniforms and flak jackets. If Arabs and Turcomans hadn't considered joining the insurgency before, the Kurdish and American cooperation probably helped many of them decide.
"Even the Kurdish police only join [the police force] because it's good pay," Ramadan Rashid admitted. "They have no experience, no training. And the Arabs who come in were mostly former Saddam Fedayeen. And because they live in those areas, they have no choice but to collaborate with the insurgents."
AS THE SUMMER of 2005 burned away, the disputes only heated up around the keystone of the new Iraq, the constitution. Judging by the time it had taken to reach a consensus after the January elections, agreement on the constitution promised another interminable set of late-night negotiations. Bremer's CPA had left Iraq with the deadline of August 15 to draft a constitution—a good six months after the first elections. But with the Iraqi parliament still finding their chairs in early May, a constitutional drafting committee wasn't appointed until the middle of the month. Divided mostly between Shi'ites and Kurds, according to their share of the parliament, the committee in its original form contained not a single Sunni Arab among its fifty-five members. In early July, fifteen Sunni representatives were added after strong U.S. pressure. 11 When insurgents shot to death two of the Sunni framers, it became glaringly obvious that trying to write Iraq's first democratically drafted constitution in only a few weeks screamed of madness—obvious to everyone except Washington, which had just sent Zalmay Khalilzad with strict marching orders.
The deadline had builtin flexibility; by August i the committee could ask for an extension, and many outside observers suggested another six months. But after a punishing year, Washington couldn't bear the thought of letting the process slide and brought the hammer down. On the last day of July, President Jalal Talabani emerged from a meeting with Khalilzad and declared his full support for the August 15 deadline, and other leaders started to follow suit. Again, Mahmoud Othman, still a self-appointed Kurdish critic-at-large and a member of the new parliament, raised the voice of dissent.
"Iraq hasn't had a good constitution in eighty-plus years. Will it really make a difference if we wait a few more months to get it right?" he told the Guardian newspaper and the many other journalists who came to him asking for his opinions.12 Other Kurdish leaders made less of a fuss, however, since they felt they were holding all the cards.
The Kurdish delegates came to Baghdad in the very comfortable possession of a veto for the process. Article 61(c) of Bremer's TAL still stood, meaning that any three provinces that mustered a two-thirds vote against the constitution could veto the document. If the constitution was to their liking, the three Kurdish provinces would ratify it. Otherwise they would knock it back and the whole process would begin again. It was much easier to be patient in the north, where car bombs weren't taking a daily toll.
The Kurdish negotiating team kept many of the same members who had worked on the TAL, including the outside advisors. The first time, Bremer had been able to split off the leaders and personally persuade them to yield some of their demands. This time the delegation was unified under Kurdistan Regional Government president Barzani, who was det
ermined not to repeat the mistake. To that end, Barzani tied his own hands before coming to Baghdad. The Kurdish parliament passed a resolution for him to take to the committee, with a lengthy list of Kurdish minimum demands: retention of the pesh merga, control over local oil resources, a referendum over the status of Kirkuk, Kurdish representation in Iraq's foreign embassies, and the power of regional law to trump national law. With the resolution in hand, Barzani felt he could stonewall the negotiations, and with the most democratic of excuses.
"Kurdistan will never accept less. If [the constitution] fails, the next negotiations will be about independence," Barzani told one of his advisors.13
Adding to their confidence, the Kurds found a booster in SCIRI. Barzani's accord with the Shi'ite clerics in the south still held—they both wanted to be left alone by Baghdad. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim now proposed that the nine Shi'ite provinces in the south form a super-region—not just a three-province region like the KRG, but a federal state comprising all of southern Iraq. That would leave the Sunnis without any of Iraq's oil. Already feeling besieged, the Sunni representatives walked out of the constitutional talks more than once, but America kept pressing them back to the table, promising that controversial subjects in the constitution could be put off and then worked out as soon as possible, but after ratification. The Kurds, by contrast, were determined that their demands not be kicked down the road this time.
"In our experience, 'as soon as possible' means never," said Khaled Salih, one of the Kurdish delegation's advisors.14
But again, the Kurds found the Americans thrown into their arms. The Shi'ite and Sunni Arabs had found common ground on one issue: Islam. Though they prayed differently, both groups had radicalized along religious lines. Many of their suggestions regarded curtailing rights for women and letting Koranic law supersede the state. Washington was faced with the prospect of producing a new Iraq that looked an awful lot like Iran, and would probably become its satellite. The few secularists inside the Arab delegations had their voices shouted down. Of course the United States wasn't an official party to the negotiations, but it went without saying that the document had to be acceptable to America; otherwise the U.S. military might not be around to help the new government stay on its feet. America and the Kurds united in fear of the thought that Sunni and Shi'ite might find common cause in the creation of a theocracy. "Minority rights, women's rights, and a division of powers were always on the Kurds' agenda," said Salih. "We were the only force demanding it, so it was easy for the U.S. to back our demands."
With Ambassador Khalilzad shuttling between the groups, the usual all-night negotiations passed the August 15 deadline and went on on another night and then another week. After two weeks of trying to find a compromise, even Khalilzad gave up on trying to placate the Sunni delegates, who rejected the basic notion of federalism, which had become sacred to both the Kurds and the Shi'ites. On Islam the Americans and Kurds had eked out a compromise: the Koran would be considered "a main source" of inspiration for Iraqi law7 but not "the source." Equally vague was the provision that no law could contradict Islam, but it seemed enough to satisfy the Shi'ites. On August 28, forty of the constitution's framers, including only four of the Sunnis, drove across town from the parliament building inside the Green Zone to President Talabani's palace on the banks of the Tigris. They read out the document and Talabani signed it, but the ceremony was muted—the constitution still had to be ratified by a nationwide referendum, now a mere six weeks away on October 15, and they would still have to do some convincing in the streets.
The Kurds had the hardest time restraining their euphoria; they walked away from Baghdad as if they had written the constitution themselves. For the Kurdish negotiators this victory was as big as when Saddam fell—it was an Iraq they could live with, and the constitution did nothing to curtail their potential of living without Iraq. The pesh merga remained as National Guard, and no other Iraqi troops could enter Kurdistan without permission. The requirement of a referendum on whether Kirkuk should join the Kurdish region became law, to be carried out by the end of 2007, which left the Kurds plenty of time to assure they would win. Should things in Iraq start to go agley, a Kurdish attache with each Iraqi embassy in all the world's capitals would have a chance to spin the story their way.
On oil they found what looked like a working compromise. Baghdad kept control over existing oil operations with a strict revenue-sharing agreement—the KRG was entitled to 17 percent of the country's oil profits, in accordance to their estimated population. Any new operations would be managed by the regions, and the Kurds were already prospecting around Taq Taq and Zakho, with foreign investment. Oil revenue would still flow to Baghdad, but the lucrative construction and management contracts would nourish the Kurdish region, not to mention the copious opportunities for graft. The only demand the Kurdish team had sacrificed in Baghdad was for a referendum for Kurdish secession in eight years' time.
Despite the great success, the Kurdish street greeted Barzani's victory with lukewarm applause; after all, the entire region had recently voted to secede. Still, most of those openly in favor of Kurdish independence took a more pragmatic view of the new document—it would do fine until the rest of Iraq fell off. Then the Kurds could say they had been playing by the rules. "They won't have forced the issue themselves," said Najmaldin Karim. "It's the events and the others that have forced independence—if that happens."
Masoud Barzani echoed his sentiments: "God preserve us from civil war, but if others start fighting among themselves, we will have no alternative [but independence]."15
The civil war began with the New Year.
* The governor installed by Petraeus, Ghanim al-Basso, had resigned under a dark cloud in spring 2004 and had been replaced by Usama Kashmoula (whom the CPA referred to in official documents as "Oussama," in apparent distaste for the correct spelling of his name). Kashmoula, by all accounts a popular and effective public servant, died in a hail of insurgent gunfire in July 2004. His deputy, Khasro Goran, a Kurd, took over and remained prominent after Kash-moula's brother Duraid assumed the governor's office.
* When I embedded in Mosul in October 2005, I found the LLS. Army there collaborating with the pesh merga nests about the city, without any concern that they were officially illegal.
* Reliable figures about Kurdish expats in Europe and America are hard to come by, but the Kurdish Institute in Paris puts it at 850,000. The large majority are from Turkey.
* This problem dogged Rice until Donald Rumsfeld finally left office in November 2006. One clear example was the initiative to set up provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq. The "PRTs" had successfully brought civilian experts into far-flung provinces in Afghanistan. During the year that Rice tried to push the same model in Iraq, she was unable to get the Pentagon on board (it sounded way too much like nation building) even though commanders on the ground were in favor of it. After a year, only a half dozen PRTs were in place because the State Department couldn't manage to get the U.S. military to agree on how to protect them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Something That Does
Not Love a Wall
THE HALABJA MEMORIAL, WITH ITS TWO concrete hands clasped and reaching up to the mountains behind the town, was completed just a few months after the fifteenth anniversary of the infamous gas attack. Citizens of the city still suffered from the effects of the poison as it lingered in their lungs, in strange marks on their children, in the soil and water of their valley. With Saddam Hussein deposed, the inauguration of the memorial on September 15, 2003, had been triumphant, attended by the Kurdish leadership as well as then secretary of state Colin Powell and American viceroy Paul Bremer. Powell stood next to a bank of lit candles inside the museum beneath the memorial's dome and intoned: "By your actions here at this spot and by the construction of this museum, you have made sure that you will never forget; but above all, the world will never forget. And I will always remember Halabja."
The locals had watched the building
go up slowly since breaking ground in April 2000, and the structure made something of a gate to their city, stopping visitors on the road from Sulimaniya before they reached the town. The circular walls inside bore the names of the victims, and for the inauguration the Kurdish parties had adorned the graveyard outside with pro-American banners, thanking the United States for toppling the dictator. Barham Salih, still the PUK's prime minister, mused before the hundreds of cheering Kurds outside that Iraq's war criminals, especially "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid, should be tried here in Halabja, at the scene of their worst crime.*
Less than three years later, on the morning of the eighteenth anniversary of the attack, hundreds of Halabja residents came out again, the children and siblings and parents of the poison gas victims. But this time, on March 16, 2006, they carried banners denouncing corruption in their own Kurdish government. Students from Halabja attending universities in Dohuk and Erbil had organized the protest, frustrated that as other cities built and grew, their long-suffering town received only empty promises. Visitors that year had come from Hiroshima and Rome for the anniversary, making a tour of the scene and symbol of Saddam's genocide against the Kurds. In good faith and solidarity, they had no idea that such visits had begun to anger the residents of Halabja. Sitting as the memorial did at the entrance to the city, pilgrims like Colin Powell and survivors from the world's other atrocities could come to Kurdistan, visit the memorial, and promise aid and support to the Kurdish government, all without ever setting foot in the town proper. None of the international donors ever came to see that Halabja still had not one mile of well-paved road, that the town lacked basic water and sanitation—their tour guides, usually PUK, would whisk them away. The students planned to block the road and prevent any more visits that would exploit but never really help their town.
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