While the KDP had always been a family affair, channeling the spirit of Mulla Mustafa Barzani, Talabani's PUK still billed itself as a more modern coalition of parties. In the dawn of the new Iraq, however, the PUK was, if anything, looking slightly more like its neighbor. Jalal Talabani still ruled the party and his sons seemed to be taking a more active role. But strong personalities remained inside the PUK politburo, and they had delivered Talabani a stinging rebuke a year earlier on October 17, 2004, in a private letter signed by eight of his comrades.
"We survived the gas attacks; why should we be afraid of Mam Jalal?" said Mam Rostam, riding high in Kirkuk. He proudly supported the "signers," as the group came to be known. "We saw a diversion from the PUK's main principles and lost our patience. We are not winning a revolution to remove a dictator and bring another one. Everybody, even in your own house, has to be democratic," said Rostam, still using the d-word a bit loosely.
The signers, including Talabani's top two deputies, Nawshirwan Mustafa and Kosrat Rasul, knew they were staging something of a mutiny, but while the letter demanded elections within the PUK, it was more of a call to share the spoils. Talabani quickly demonstrated why he had been able to stay ahead of the pack for so many years, deftly playing his old friends against one another, and their demands were soon watered down. Sulimaniya's rumor mill took up the story that Talabani had paid each of the signers a million U.S. dollars as well, which did plenty to clam them up. When the story of their protest leaked to the press in the following months, Talabani dismissed it with confidence.9
"There was no challenge of my leadership in the PUK. Some comrades, a minority of the PUK politburo, wrote a letter asking some kind of demands, but even when they asked for reform, they asked for reform under the leadership of Talabani. There is no danger of any coup d'etat inside PUK at all," Talabani said.
Mam Jalal insisted that he had made no concessions but willingly sent out a sort of suggestion box across the PUK's middle ranks. The signers settled for a promise of some kind of primary election to be held in 2006—by that time Talabani would be seventy-three years old and most likely reelected to a four-year term as Iraq's president. It would probably be Talabani's last public post, and the primary would be more about succession than power sharing.
Barzani had no pesky lieutenants considering him a mere first among equals, but the KDP also felt tremors of discontent. Just weeks before the December 15 vote to choose a four-year government, Kurdistan's Islamist parties withdrew from the Kurdish alliance, complaining that they had been given no power inside it. This second election already threatened to diminish Kurdish power in Baghdad; since Sunni Arabs had pledged to participate this time, there would be much more competition for seats in parliament. The desertion by the Kurdish Islamists was a threat, and not one to leave unanswered, especially since it came with divisive rhetoric about the Kurdish list being in the pocket of the Americans and the Israelis (the latter a gibe at Barzani, whose father had enjoyed good relations with the Mossad). In response, on December 6, a crowd of protesters gathered outside five Islamic Union offices in towns around the usually quiet province of Dohuk. In the city of Dohuk the crowd soon swelled to thousands. KDP-dominated police arrived at the scene to find the demonstrators had painted the walls outside of the Islamic Union's office with the Kurdish list's election number, and were pelting the four-story building with rocks, demanding that the Islamists take down the enormous Kurdistan flag hanging outside.
The crowd got angry as a few members of the Islamic Union taunted them from the roof of the building, swinging Islamist election posters. A large number of Kurdish security personnel stood by, unwilling or unable to prevent what happened next. The first gunshot reportedly hit a policeman, and the crowd attacked the office with more than rocks. The Islamic Union partisans took cover inside as bullets suddenly ricocheted off the concrete walls. Two Islamists died of gunshots to the head; another three were wounded. The crowd surged into the building, producing cans of gasoline, which they poured on the floor. When the day was over, the destroyed building still smoldered, as did four other Islamic Union centers across the province. The action had every appearance of an orchestrated retaliation by the only real organization in Dohuk—the KDP.10 However, Masoud Barzani's son Masrour, the head of internal security for the KDP side of Kurdistan, said the protests had been spontaneous.
"They were provoking people from different parties, baselessly accusing them of corruption. The people wouldn't tolerate that and burned their office," Masrour explained, about a year after the attacks. Then he quickly remembered his talking points. "Oh, and of course it was an unfortunate incident. It wasn't planned," said Masrour. "We investigated the incident. It wasn't the KDP—just some loyalist students." The Islamists were using the incident as a preemptive excuse to explain their poor showing in the December elections, Masrour said. The Kurdish Islamist parties had indeed lost support by aligning themselves with Sunni Arabs, but the KDP had a little bit of explaining to do in that regard as well. Even if Barzani had no apparent problems with public protests or private putsches within his party, at the polls Kurds in northern Iraq demonstrated frustration with the KDP's monolithic style.
On another blissfully quiet Election Day, the Kurdistan list did well again nationally, losing; a few seats as expected, but keeping their influential position alongside the Shi'ite majority. Talabani remained president, and the Kurds actually increased their number of ministries to eight, with Hoshyar Zebari staying on as foreign minister and Barham Salih becoming deputy prime minister. Inside the Kurdistan Regional Government, the parties retained their usual fifty-fifty split in government from deputy ministers to tea boys, but popular support didn't fall along such neat lines. The PUK still clearly dominated Sulimaniya, and the KDP controlled the much smaller province of Dohuk. But Erbil, a province under KDP domination since 1996, was becoming the functioning seat of Kurdistan's two-party government, and the PUK was growing in popularity there. Even with several smaller local parties throwing in behind the KDP, Talabani's party was drawing even with Barzani's. If there were a popular election across the north, the PUK would win—especially if Kirkuk, with a clear majority of PUK voters, were to someday become part of the Kurdish region.
The KDP's conservatism did have a flip slide: most international businesspeople and consultants preferred dealing with the Barzanis. With Talabani's PUK, everything always seemed negotiable, postponable, and downright unreliable. In the KDP's hemisphere, only one family mattered, and once they made you a deal, you could take it to the bank in Kurdistan—Barzani was the bank. Sitting as he did at the head of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Nechirvan Barzani admitted that his party needed to adapt.
"There will be lots of changes in the KDP, maybe within ten years. I don't think we are that far from having independent candidates," he said, meaning candidates not blessed by the Barzani family.
"Kurds have an insurgent mentality," Nechirvan continued, allowing that neither party had managed to energize a new generation of Kurds. But he added that despite the criticism, all across Iraq people were looking for protection, and in their fear, they had come home to the traditional parties. "It's not exaggerated. People support KDP and PUK. Some criticize, but in the end they will vote for the parties."
FOR ALL ITS troubles, Kurdistan looked like paradise to some of its neighbors. The Turks had long worried that an independent Kurdistan would encourage Kurds around the region to rise up, and their assumption proved correct. But the first signs came from a surprising direction: "little Kurdistan," in Syria.
A bit less than 10 percent of Syria's eighteen million people are Kurds, but the Syrian government blocks several hundred thousand of them from their most basic rights by denying them passports. Their identity cards label them as foreigners, but they have no home country to return to, and no document to travel with. The solidifying Kurdistan next door in Iraq began to beckon as far back as the mid-1990s, and Syrian Kurds across the border watched in envy. While
the young ruler of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, had made some overtures toward Kurdish groups, the music stopped after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, especially since the Bush administration loudly implied that Syria might be next.
On March 12, 2004 the issue came to a head at a soccer stadium in the Syrian Kurdish town of Qamishli. Kurdish leaders allege that the Syrian government had been arming Arab settlers in the Kurdish corner of northeast Syria for days before the game. Fans of the visiting Arab soccer team poured into the stadium armed with knives and sticks. They began taunting the Kurdish side, praising Saddam Hussein and shouting racial slurs. The Kurdish fans responded by chanting Kurdish nationalist slogans and singing the praises of the great regime changer, George W. Bush. The game dissolved in violence, and Syrian security forces quickly came down on the crowd, firing live rounds into the mass of unarmed civilians. Eleven Kurds and four Arabs died.
"The soccer match was an excuse—the Syrian government used it to attack us," said Lawki Haji,* a member of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party. Haji, a writer and activist, said that the Syrian government—and all the neighboring governments—were terrified by what was transpiring in Iraq. "It happened because of the success in Iraqi Kurdistan," said Haji, "and because we Kurds in Syria showed them that we understood what was happening."
The soccer match only kicked off the killing. At a funeral the following day, security forces again attacked mourners using live ammunition. Riots over several days in half a dozen Kurdish towns cost millions of dollars in damage and left more than thirty people dead. When the March 16 Halabja anniversary came around four days after the game, Kurdish groups in Syria tried again to stand up and be counted, demonstrating in larger cities, and again security forces met the peaceful marches with force. By March 21, 2004, the Newroz holiday, Kurdish groups reported about two thousand of their number were in detention. Interrogators in Syria lived up to their reputation, and at least two Kurds were beaten to death while in custody.11 Haji and many others chose the holiday to protest again, in any public forum they could find.
"I gave a speech in Arabic and praised successes and achievements of Iraqi Kurds," said Haji. "I wanted to give some legitimacy to our martyrs. The Syrians were saying it was outside interference, and I wanted to say no, this was legitimate."
Haji had spoken out on an Arabic satellite channel, and government harassment began immediately. He paid smugglers to get him, his wife, and their six children across the border to Zakho, in Iraqi Kurdistan. If he was going to live without documents, he reckoned, it would be better to be illegal in a country that spoke his language and respected his culture. The government of Syria soon shut the border, though it probably worried less about dissidents escaping than about help coming in from the uppity Kurds next door in Iraq. The fledgling government of Iraq sent its foreign minister to Damascus as the crisis swelled, but again the message got mixed with the messenger—it was, of course, Hoshyar Zebari, who assured Assad that the Iraqi Kurds had nothing to do with the unrest. But the old Kurdish guerrilla's very presence in Damascus, now as an Iraqi minister, probably did its own bit to embolden Syrian Kurds.12
Lawki Haji found his way to Dohuk, and the KDP sent him to live in an empty refugee camp nearby called Bakisli—once the home to Arabs fleeing Saddam Hussein. About a thousand Syrian Kurds found their way there in the spring 2004, and they selected Haji as their spokesman. Haji and his family filled up their new one-room tent but tried to make it a home and office—with a desk, musical instruments, some papers, and a portrait of Mulla Mustafa Barzani he had hung from a post along with a large Kurdistan flag.
For two years, Haji and the hundred families living in Bakisli waited for America to follow through with its implied threats against Syria, but their hope began to fade. The KDP stationed a pesh merga office at the site, to observe the refugees as much as protect them. Haji was lucky to find employment at a radio station in Dohuk, but most others worked as day laborers. As much as Haji would have liked to see more assistance from the Kurdistan government, he was proud of Iraqi Kurdistan's achievements.
"It's a success for all the Kurdish nation. It's created a big fear in the hearts of the enemies of the Kurds. We hope it will improve and become an independent country soon," Haji said, adding that of course he would like the same invasion and liberation of Kurdish land to happen in Syria next.
Instead the situation in Syrian Kurdistan only seemed to grow worse. In May 2005, an important Kurdish religious scholar, Sheikli Mohammad Mashouq al-Khaznawi disappeared. Kliaznawi had long been a moderate voice, and sometimes the Assad government even promoted his sermons to compete with Islamic extremism. But the sheikh also preached in favor of Kurdish rights, and following the American invasion of Iraq, he became an outspoken critic of Damascus. Khaznawi was found in a shallow grave three weeks after his disappearance, and his body showed signs of torture.13
Two years after fleeing Syria, Haji said he and the other refugees had little hope of returning home soon. The refugees sent their children to school in Dohuk if they could, which was about a dozen miles away and not an easy commute, but at least the education was in Kurdish. And for those of college age, something was available they had never dreamed of: a college degree, in Kurdish, for free. Both Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani had let it be known that any Kurd who showed up to study at Kurdistan's public universities would be welcome. And the students who came weren't shy about why they wanted to study.
"I need an education so I can go home and fight for change in my country," said Ahmad,* a college student from Mahabad, the capital of Iranian Kurdistan.
AHMAD SIPPED TEA in the smoky student café at Sulimaniya University. He sported a young man's thin mustache and wore traditional Kurdish baggy trousers, even though most of the students in Sulimaniya preferred Western clothes, including the women, who would have given an Iranian mullah fits with their makeup and loose flowing hair.
Ahmad had taken part in a peaceful demonstration at Mahabad University, also commemorating the Halabja massacre. The Islamic Republic's paramilitary student thugs, the basijis, had broken up the demonstration, delivering Ahmad a nasty crack to the skull. His best friend had joined up with the clandestine Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran, but Ahmad wanted to complete his education, so he slipped across the porous border to Iraqi Kurdistan.
"We have to keep struggling, and the first step is to define an ideology," Ahmad said earnestly.
About four hundred of these revolutionary exchange students attended Sulimaniya University in 2006, two thirds of them from nearby Iran (more Syrians would logically have gone to Dohuk or Erbil). The PUK-appointed dean at Sulimaniya estimated that in Iranian fashion, a good number of the students were probably government spies. It didn't seem to bother the visiting students that their degrees would not likely be recognized in their home countries, nor that Iraqi Kurdistan's colleges were among the weakest in the region. Many of the students had been expelled from their home universities for political activity, and figured Iraqi Kurdistan was their last chance. The Kurdish professors didn't mind their guests either.
"They will definitely go back and try to implement the same thing in their own country. That's how education should be—something that brings freedom and opportunity," said Kaywan Anwar, a history professor at Sulimaniya, who felt it appropriate to be training agitators to send home to neighboring countries. He also thought it was a good time to export the Kurds' attitude about America. "These students should see that the Americans are no longer the occupiers—that Europe and America want to make a change in Iraq," he said, before beginning a lecture on Kurdish history to about twenty young men and women.
Again, the success of Kurds in Iraq had emboldened the residents of Mahabad and the rest of Iran's 4.5 million Kurds. As with their cousins in Turkey and Syria, Iran's Kurds suffered from chronic economic depression and saw little investment from Tehran. While the Iranian government never denied the existence of their Kurds, neither did they tolerate dissent. The flashp
oint in Mahabad came on July 9, 2005, when Iranian security forces surrounded three known Kurdish activists in a poor neighborhood of the city. One of the youths, "Shwana" Qadir, had a reputation as something of a Kurdish Robin Hood, and a smile that said rascal loud and clear. He had most recently used his popularity to push a Kurdish boycott of Iranian elections, and the authorities concluded that Shwana's nonviolent activism must stop.
The three young men tried to escape the cordon in a taxi, but government agents pursued them, shooting. Their taxi overturned and a round hit Shwana in the knee. At some point in the mêlée his two companions died of bullet wounds, but Shwana managed to limp into a crowd that had gathered. Undeterred by the large number of bystanders, the agents shot at Shwana again, and a bullet brought him down. But Shwana wasn't dead, not yet, when the agents proceeded to tie him to the back of their jeep and drag him bleeding through Mahabad. When his body was returned to the family, his head was swollen, his arms broken, and lit cigarettes had been applied to the bullet holes in his flesh.14
Photos of Shwana's barely recognizable corpse set off a wave of riots across ten Iranian Kurdish towns and the government called out helicopters to put them down. Kurdish sources—no one from outside was able to report events firsthand—claimed at least nineteen deaths over the following weeks. Those who spoke too loudly about the incident found themselves fleeing—to Iraqi Kurdistan. One prominent Kurdish doctor and writer on women's issues, Roya Toloui, took up the case of Shwana in her magazine, Rasan, demanding the killers be arrested.
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