April 9: U.S. soldiers enter Baghdad and topple a statue of Saddam Hussein. Saddam's top officials all go into hiding.
April 10: Kurdish forces rush into Kirkuk despite American requests and Turkish threats against their entry. KDP and U.S. Special Operations Forces enter Mosul.
July 13: American proconsul Paul Bremer appoints a governing council in Baghdad, including Talabani and Barzani among its rotating presidents.
July 23: Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, are killed in a firefight with U.S. troops in Mosul.
August: Car bombs in Baghdad target the Jordanian embassy, the U.N. headquarters, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
December: Saddam is discovered in a dingy underground hideout near Tikrit by U.S. troops.
2004 February: At least one hundred people die and more than two hundred are wounded in simultaneous suicide bombings of KDP and PUK offices in Erbil during a Muslim holiday party.
March: Bombs at Shi'ite festivals kill at least 140 people.
In Syria A March 12 riot at a soccer stadium sets off weeks of protests by Kurdish nationalists, as many as two thousand are arrested by the government and at least two die in custody.
April-May: U.S. Marines assault the city of Fallujah after four U.S. contractors are lynched there. Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army engages coalition forces in Najaf.
November: American forces attack Fallujah again, this time destroying large sections of the city and retaking it for the Iraqi government.
2005 January: A combined list of Kurdish parties comes second to the Shi'ite Arab Alliance in a national election. Sunni Arabs boycott.
In Turkey In April the PKK resumes attacks in the southeast after a six-year cease-fire. They use northern Iraq as a base to launch attacks into Turkey.
May: After months of haggling, an interim government is sworn in for a one-year term. Jalal Talabani is president; Ibrahim al-Ja'fari is prime minister. Approximately 672 civilians are killed in May (up from 364 in April), according to the Iraqi government. At least 50 people are killed by a suicide bomber in Erbil.
June: Masoud Barzani inaugurates the first session of Kurdistan's reunified parliament as president of the autonomous region.
In Iran The July 9 murder and mutilation of a popular young Kurdish activist, "Shwana" Qadir, sets off weeks of protests in Mahabad region; at least nineteen Kurds are killed by Iranian security forces
August: A stampede on a Baghdad bridge, caused by rumors of a suicide bomb, kills up to thousand people during a Shi'ite holiday.
October: Iraqis vote by a large majority to ratify a new constitution creating a federal democracy with Islam as a main source of law. Sunni Arab opposition to the constitution falls just short of the three-province margin needed to block ratification. Saddam Hussein and seven codefendants go on trial for crimes against humanity.
December: A Norwegian firm begins drilling for oil in Iraqi Kurdistan with cooperation from the Kurdistan Regional Government.
December 6: Kurdish rioters in Dohuk attack the headquarters of the Kurdish Islamic Union after the party withdraws support for the joint KDP-PUK legislative slate.
December 15: Iraqis vote again, this time for a four-year government. Sunni Arabs participate this time, but the elected government is still dominated by a coalition of Shi'ites and Kurds.
2006 February 22: A bomb destroys the Shi'ite Askaria mosque in the city of Samarra, marking for many the clear beginning of a civil war between Iraq's Sunni and Shi'ite Arabs.
March 16: Kurdish protesters in the town of Halabja clash with Kurdish security forces and destroy the memorial to victims of the 1988 gas attack.
April 22: After months of bargaining, the permanent government is selected, with Jalal Talabani again as president and Nuri al-Maliki as prime minister.
May-June: The U.N. reports that as many as one hundred civilians per day are dying in Iraq's violence.
September: Masoud Barzani orders that the Iraqi national flag not be flown in Kurdistan Regional Government buildings. One suicide truck bomb and four car bombs kill twenty-three people in Kirkuk.
December 30: Saddam Hussein is hanged in Baghdad.
2007 January: President Bush announces a plan to "surge" U.S. troop levels in order to pacify Baghdad.
April: A bomb blast in Iraq's parliament inside Baghdad's American-protected Green Zone kills one Iraqi member of parliament.
August: Truck and car bombs kill at least 250 people in a Yazidi village just outside the Kurdish region, near the Syrian border.
October: PKK clashes with the Turkish army bring tens of thousands of Turkish troops to the border. Turkey threatens invasion unless KRG and U.S. forces rein in the PICK. Turkish prime minister Erdo?an meets President Bush at the White House on November 5, apparently diffusing the standoff, at least until spring.
December: Turks mount minor cross-border action and air strikes.
December 31: The constitutional deadline passes for a referendum to determine whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk will become part of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Kurdish officials continue to push for the referendum in 2008.
Sources: BBC and author's notes
Notes
1: The Stolen Sheath
1. McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, p. 22.
2. James Reston Jr.'s Warriors of God is an enjoyable account of the Third Crusade. I relied on his book as well as Beha ed-Dm's contemporary account, The Life of Saladin. Tariq Ali also wrote a fictional biography, The Book of Saladin.
3. Jwaideh, Kurdish National Movement, pp. 19, 33.
4. McDowall, p. 4.
5. The book was penned by Douglas Layton, who is accomplished in the realms of building emergency shelters in disaster areas, securing U.S. government reconstruction contracts, and extreme-sport missionary organizations, like Shelter Now International (now called Shelter for Life International), which seems to specialize in sending Christians into modern-day lions' dens like Afghanistan under the Taliban. Layton has lobbied Washington in favor of Kurdish interests and also pushed for a genocide case against Saddam Hussein in the 1990s.
6. Jwaideh, p. 12.
7. McDowall, pp. 105-8.
8. Jwaideh, p. 126.
9. McDowall, pp. 117, 125.
10. Observed by David Fromkin in A Peace to End All Peace, among others.
11. McDowall, p. 137.
12. Fromkin, p. 450.
13. Ibid., p. 451.
14. Jwaideh, p. 175.
15. Ibid., p. 180.
16. Ibid., p. 176.
17. Ibid., p. 183.
18. McDowall, p. 161.
19. Jwaideh, p. 198.
20. Ibid., p. 187.
21. Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 183.
22. Barzani, Mustafa Barzani, p. 1.
23. Nijyar Shemdin, KRG representative in Washington, presented in an address to commemorate Barzani on March 1, 2000, in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
24. Jwaideh, p. 219.
25. Shemdin address on March 1, 2000, in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
26. Jwaideh, p. 230.
27. Ibid., pp. 232, 239.
28. Shemdin address on March 1, 2000, in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
29. McDowall, p. 243.
30. Ibid., p. 252.
31. Interview with Najmaldin Karim, June 1, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
32. Jwaideh, p. 123.
33. Barzani said that his enemies in Iraq and Iran always tried to blame their failures on some foreign training, when in fact he learned to fight so well by making war all his life. As recounted in Schmidt, Journey Among Brave Men, p. 111.
34. McDowall, p. 303.
35. Ibid.
36. Jwaideh, p. 283.
37. McDowall, p. 307.
38. Baghdad has been at many times in the past century the Iraqi city with the largest Kurdish population; especially the elites would send their children to be educated there. In the absence of any reliable census, people often spoke of a million Kurds in
Baghdad, mirroring their roughly 20 percent size in Iraq's general population. But the elections in 2005, assuming that Kurds voted for the Kurdish candidates, revealed only about fifty thousand to a hundred thousand. Baghdad once had a huge population of Fayli (Shi'ite) Kurds, until Saddam Hussein began deporting and exterminating them. The surviving Fayli Kurds may have voted with the Shi'ite religious parties—this analysis thanks to Brendan O'Leary of the University of Pennsylvania.
39. Schmidt, pp. 123, 254.
40. Interview with Najmaldin Karim, June 1, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
41. McDowall, p. 320.
42. Ibid., p. 325.
43. Interview with Fuad Hussein, September 21, 2006, in Salahudin.
44. Interview with Mahmoud Othman, October 31, 2006, in London.
45. Randal, p. 156.
2: Betrayal and Holocaust
1. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq, p. 201.
2. Kissinger, Years of Renewal, p. 583.
3. Ibid., p. 591.
4. Interview with Brent Scowcroft, July 25, 2006. It should be noted that realists like Scowcroft and Kissinger were feeling smug around the time of the interview, after having warned George W. Bush not to invade Iraq and being told to go away. I spoke with Scowcroft in Washington's pork-packing district; in his corner office you can just about see the old executive building of his former fellow realist, Dick Cheney. Scowcroft and other members of George H. W. Bush's war room had long been criticized for not "going all the way to Baghdad" in the 1991 Gulf War. By 2004, with 140,000 U.S. troops bogged down in Iraq, no one was handing them that line anymore.
5. Saleem, My Fathers Rifle, p. 45. Saleem describes how just a few years earlier, in perfect Orwellian style, the broadcasts were exactly the opposite, with Moscow calling Barzani a liberator and the Voice of America calling the Kurds "rebels and bandits."
6. McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, p. 331.
7. Ibid., p. 333.
8. Ibid., p. 336.
9. Kissinger, p. 592.
10. McDowall, p. 338.
11. Kissinger, p. 594.
12. Interview with Najmaldin Karim, June 1, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
13. Saleem, p. 49.
14. McDowall, p. 338.
15. Ibid., p. 331.
16. Nijyar Shemdin, KRG representative in Washington, presented in an address to commemorate Barzani on March 1, 2000, in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
17. Interview with Najmaldin Karim, June 1, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
18. Interviews with Fuad Hussein and Masoud Barzani, September 21, 2006, in Salahudin.
19. Interview with Salah al-Sheikly, December 2002, in London.
20. Interview with Sa'id Aburish, March 2000, in London. Aburish was an arms negotiator for Saddam and later wrote a biography, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge. Aburish says Saddam got his penchant for documentation by studying the East German secret police.
21. Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq, a Middle East Watch Report, 1993.
22. Interview with Jalal Talabani, March 2000, in Qalaat Chowlan.
23. Interview with Nawshirwan Mustafa, September 29, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
24. Mahmoud Othman, "The Kurdish Internal Conflict, Peace Process and Its Prospects," Kurdistan Observer, March 14, 2001.
25. McDowall, p. 343.
26. Tripp, p. 233.
27. McDowall, p. 347.
28. Interview with FayekMahmud Golpi, October 3, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
29. Interview with Aluhammad Ihsan, October 23, 2006, in Erbil; Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq.
30. McDowall, p. 350; interview with Fayek Mahmud Golpi, October 3, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
31. Interview with Sandra Charles, National Security Council staff member during Ronald Reagan's second term, July 18, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
32. "Shaking Hands with Saddam." Declassified documents compiled by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
33. McDowall, p. 353.
34. Interview with Mahmoud Tofiq, September 2006, in Sulimaniya.
35. Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq.
36. This account of Taimour's story is drawn from interviews by Human Rights Watch, Kanan Makiya's cross-examination of the boy in his book Cruelty and Silence, and Taimour's appearance at the Foreign Press Club in Washington, D.C, in 2004, as an adult and English speaker.
37. Dozens of interviews in Halabja; Human Rights Watch reports.
38. Interview with Mike Amitay, July 14, 2006, at the Open Society Institute, Washington, D.C.
39. Interview with Sandra Charles, July 18, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
40. Interview with Peter Galbraith, September 2006, in Salahudin.
41. McDowall, p. 359.
42. Galbraith, End of Iraq, p. 19.
3: Shame and Comfort
1. Michael R. Gordon, "The Iraqi Invasion: Iraq's Advantage Limits U.S. Options," New York Times, August 3, 1990.
2. Information about Hoshyar Zebari's life comes from a dozen interviews between March 2000 and October 2006. This story is from interviews in Salahudin and Dukan, October 24-25, 2006.
3. McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, p. 370.
4. George H. W Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 472.
5. Gates was interviewed by phone from Texas A&M University, August 18, 2006, just weeks before the younger president Bush would ask him to take over the helm of what was looking like a disastrous Iraq policy.
6. Interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, October 25, 2006, in Dukan.
7. Interview with Morton Abramowitz, July 24, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
8. Interview with several history professors at Sulimaniya University, February 10, 2003.
9. Faleh Abd al-Jabbar, "Why the Intifada Failed," Middle East Report, May-June 1992.
10. Schwarzkopf, It Doesn't Take a Hero, p. 470.
11. Abd al-Jabbar, "Why the Intifada Failed."
12. Schwarzkopf, p. 489.
13. Interview with Fuad Hussein, September 21, 2006, in Salahudin.
14. Interview with Frank Smyth, December 22, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C.
15. Interview with Jim Muir, October 16, 2006, in Baghdad.
16. Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 1 o 1.
17. Galbraith, End of Iraq, p. 54.
18. Interview with Marc Grossman, July 17, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
19. As quoted by George Church, "Saddam Crushes Iraq's Rebels Making His People's Tragedy Complete," Time magazine, April 15, 1991.
20. Independent journalist Frank Smyth and photographer Gad Gross went south with the pesh merga to Kirkuk and never made it out of the city. Gross was executed by Iraqi troops, and Smyth was captured and taken to Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Smyth was later released, shaken but unharmed. The Kurds built a statue of Gad Gross, with a camera around his neck, at a roundabout in Erbil.
21. The aggressive French position was thanks to two old friends of the Kurds. The first lady, Danielle Mitterrand, had been active in Kurdish causes since the early 1980s. President Mitterrand had also appointed Dr. Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, to the curious position of "Minister for Humanitarian Action." Kouchner had deep knowledge of the Kurds from his work with nongovernmental organizations. Between the two, they pushed Paris to take a hard line in the U.N. on behalf of the Kurds. Paul Berman wrote about Kouchner in his book Power and the Idealists, serialized in the New Republic in June 2007, after Kouchner was named French foreign minister.
22. Notably this included many of the men who would later direct U.S. military operations in the Gulf. General James Jones would become NATO's supreme Allied commander. General Anthony Zinni would become head of U.S. Central Command and a U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. General Jay Garner would become President George W. Bush's first pick to supervise the reconstruction of Iraq in 2003. Then Colonel John Abizaid was the most senior Arabic speaker in the U.S. military u
ntil he retired as a general in 2007, after a record four years at the head of Central Command.
23. Interview with Jalal Talabani, October 24, 2006, in Dukan.
24. Interview with Mahmoud Othman, October 31, 2006, in London.
25. Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, p. 28.
26. Rudd, Humanitarian Intervention, p. 117.
27. Interview with Jay Garner, September 6, 2006, in Crystal City, Virginia. Fred Cuny didn't really fit in with the peace-and-love crowd—he was from Texas, very American, and knew he was too good at his work to care about what people thought of him. He worked in more than seventy disaster areas, from Biafra to Chechnya, where he disappeared in 1995. A great source of information about him is the PBS Frontline program "The Lost American" (www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cuny/.
28. Graham-Brown, p. 29.
29. Rudd, p. 211.
30. Interview with Nawshirwan Mustafa, September 29, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
31. Interview with Robert Gates, August 18, 2006, by telephone from Texas A&M University.
4: Burning Down the House
1. This information comes from dozens of conversations with Qubad Talabani over several years, including one all-day interview on July 31, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
2. Interview with Omar Sheikhmus, December 10, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C.
3. Interview with Nawshirwan Mustafa, September 29, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
4. Interview with Qubad Talabani, July 31, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
5. Interview with a former Department of State official with knowledge of the daily operations of Operation Provide Comfort, December 12, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C.
6. McDowrall, Mordern History of the Kurds, p. 381.
7. Fred Cuny, "Northern Iraq: One Year Later, A Special Report to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace," undated (approximately July 1992).
8. McDowall, p. 382.
9. Cockburn and Cockburn, Saddam Hussein, p. 165.
10. Interview with Fuad Hussein, September 21, 2006, in Salahudin.
11. Interview with Ghanim Jawad, November 1, 2006, in London.
12. Hussein Tahiti, in Lennox, ed., Fire, Snow a fid Honey, p. 383.
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