13. Interview with Nawshirwan Mustafa, September 29, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
14. These details come from an excellent, if inconclusive, "he said, she said" between the KDP's Haval Dasko Aziz and the PUK's Sarbast Fatah in Lennox, pp. 385-96.
15. Interview with Najmaldin Karim, November 30, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
16. These recollections are from Ayub Nuri, January 20, 2007, by phone from New York City.
17. Human Rights Abuses in Iraqi Kurdistan Since 1991, Amnesty International, February 1995. Neither party has ever held anyone to account for the alleged war crimes during this period, which seem to have disappeared today in some kind of unwritten amnesty for participants in the war. When Saddam Hussein and his gang went on trial in Baghdad for crimes against humanity, a Kurdish Web site circulated a picture of the courtroom with Talabani's and Barzani's heads pasted in over those of Saddam and Ali Hassan al-Majid.
18. Cockburn and Cockburn, p. 180.
19. Baer, See No Evil, p. 183.
20. Interview with Warren Marik, December 7, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C.
21. Cockburn and Cockburn, p. 178.
22. Interview with Warren Marik, December 7, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C, and with Jalal Talabani, October 24, 2006, in Dukan.
23. Interview with Tony Lake, July 18, 2006, in Washington, D.C. Though he has always kept good relations with Tehran, Chalabi might not have been alone in encouraging Iranian participation. One former INC source maintains that Bob Baer made overtures to the Iranians. Baer couldn't talk directly to the Iranian agents who were visiting Salahudin, the source says, but arranged to appear in the lobby of their hotel at an appointed time as a sign that the Americans wanted them in on the plot. This is not the normal INC spinning, but a source who no longer has a good relationship with Chalabi and has no clear motive to implicate Baer.
24. Baer, p. 173, and confirmed by Lake.
25. Interview with Warren Marik, December 7, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C. Marik couldn't disguise his distaste for the KDP, which sat out the attack and even obstructed it. He described Zebari's checking with Washington about the reality of American support as "snitching." This was years later, but it implies that he and Baer knew they were off the reservation, and shows their frustration with the do-nothing CIA of the Clinton years.
26. Interview with Jalal Talabani, October 24, 2006, in Dukan.
27. Cockburn and Cockburn, p. 184.
28. Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, p. 227.
29. Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 297.
30. Interview with Muhammad Ihsan, October 23, 2006, in Erbil, and then November 16, 2006, by phone from Baghdad.
31. Cockburn and Cockburn, p. 229.
32. Interview with Muhammad Ihsan, November 16, 2006, by phone from Baghdad. Shahwani returned to Baghdad after Saddam fell to head the new Iraqi Mukhabarat, but in 2007 his mostly Sunni organization, again aided by the CIA, was put on the run in Baghdad by rival Shi'ite organizations with Iranian backing.
33. Human Rights Watch; Cockburn and Cockburn, Saddam Hussein, p. 233. The Surchis had been jahsh until 1991, but then joined the uprising. When Operation Provide Comfort began, they were considered important enough to be represented in meetings with the coalition; General Jay Garner remembers working with Omar al-Surchi, a hulking sheikh with huge hands, whom he nicknamed "JR" after the character on Dallas. When I met Omar Surchi many years later, he was a broken man, the leader of a tribe still subservient to the KDP. He hinted at the story of the 1996 raid, but I suspect he was under some sort of gag order, living in a very comfortable home in Erbil at the pleasure of the KDP. A few KDP officials arrived to see him about twenty minutes into our meeting, I think by coincidence.
34. Dasko and Fatah, in Lennox, p. 390. This is the same group that Mulla Mustafa Barzani sold out in 1967.
35. Interview with Jalal Talabani, October 24, 2006, in Dukan.
36. Dasko and Fatah in Lennox, p. 390.
37. McDowall, p. 338.
38. Graham-Brown, p. 232.
39. Interview with Ghanim Jawad, November 1, 2006, in London.
40. Interview with Kosrat Rasul, September 18, 2006, in Erbil.
41. Hero Talabani told me the story of her escape from Erbil on October 26, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
42. Graham-Brown, p. 233.
43. Cockburn and Cockburn, p. 245.
44. Interview with Marc Grossman, July 17, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
45. Among the seven thousand, the FBI and INS discovered six suspicious characters, whom they put into detention. Two years later the men still sat in jail, deemed security threats by secret evidence their defense lawyers couldn't see. They were all Ahmed Chalabi's men. Chalabi finally enlisted former CIA chief James Woolsey to help them out—Woolsey took the case pro bono. What he discovered enraged him: the secret evidence was hearsay and conjecture by FBI agents with no background on Iraq. After a scorched-earth campaign through his own Washington Rolodex, Woolsey got a plea deal for five of the men, whereby they could settle in Nebraska with their families while awaiting a charge of entering the United States without a visa—even though the U.S. government had flown them in. One of the men refused to accept the deal on principle—Ali Habib Karim. His offense apparently consisted of being a cousin to Arras Habib Karim, the INC's intelligence chief. Woolsey and Warren Marik both went to bat for Karim, who was finally released after four years in detention. Most of this story was well told by Andrew Cockburn in his article "The Radicalization of James Woolsey" in the New York Times Magazine, July 23, 2000. James Woolsey spoke to me about it in an interview on August 15, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C. But it gets a little worse. A few other of the 1996 evacuees, after living happily for ten years in Flarrisonburg, Virginia, got nabbed by the FBI for violating the 2001 USA Patriot Act for running an informal money wiring service, which they used to get money back to their families in Kurdistan.
46. Interview with Qubad Talabani, July 31, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
47. Interview with Clinton National Security Council official, July 20, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
48. Interview with Bruce Riedel, January 10, 2007, by phone from Washington, D.C.
49. Interview with Wayne White, January 7, 2007, by e-mail.
5: Carnival in Limbo
1. Kenneth Katzman, "Iraq: US Regime Change Efforts," Congressional Research Service report for Congress, October 22, 2004.
2. Associated Press, "Turks Say Offensive Killed 1300 Kurds," May 21, 1997.
3. Interview with Stafford Clarry, October 24, 2006, in Erbil.
4. Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, p. 83.
5. Interviews with Kosrat Rasul and with Bafel Talabani, October 21, 2006, in Sulimaniya. And Kosrat wasn't wrong. He didn't see Erbil again until 2003.
6. Mahmoud Othman, "The Washington Agreement," Kurdish Media (www.kurdmedia.com), May 1, 2001.
7. Interview with Najmaldin Karim, June 1, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
8. The International Reporting Project Fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies helped me with my first trip to Iraq, providing a travel stipend, but it burned up very quickly. Freelance assignments from the Christian Science Monitor, NPR, the Boston Globe, and the Chronicle of Higher Education helped pay off the trip.
9. There's an old joke told in my native Maine, about a tourist who asks a farmer for directions back to the highway. The tourist follows the directions perfectly and finds himself right back at the old Yankee farmer's porch. "I wanted to see if you knew how to folia' directions before I waste my time giving 'em to you," the farmer explains. I sometimes wonder if the Kurds wanted to see if I could make it in on my own steam before they helped me out.
10. Wolfowitz spoke with me and seven other International Reporting Project fellows at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in January 2000. The Sunni from the INC who opposed his plan was Mudhar Shawkat, with whom I spoke on February 7, 2003, in Sulimaniya.
12. Albright was responding to a loaded question on 60 Minutes on May 12,1996. The interviewer, Lesley Stahl, brought out the figure of half a million Iraqi children dying in one year because of the sanctions, and Albright didn't dispute the figure, saying only, "The price is worth it." Albright later regretted the remark, and the number was probably inflated. It came from a letter to the British medical journal the Lancet by researchers with the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) that was subsequently challenged. A good summary of the controversy is "A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions" by David Cortright in the Nation, December 3, 2001.
13. After the fall of the regime investigators concluded that Saddam Hussein made about $1.7 billion in cash kickbacks and had bribed some U.N. officials and foreign politicians with illegal oil vouchers. The Council on Foreign Relations printed a good primer on Oil-for-Food in the New York Times, October 15, 2004, compiled by Sharon Otterman.
14. It's strange how the obvious can be controversial. When I wrote stories about this trip for various newspapers and radio programs, the term "ethnic cleansing" was still fresh and charged from the massacres of Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. Some editors thought it was hyperbolic. Iraq in those days, incomprehensibly, was a nonstory. I was used to yelling at editors about the importance of my pieces about unpronounceable far-off places, and they were used to freelancers like me trying to pump up stories that no one back home cared about. Notably Loren Jenkins from NPR was happy to use the term "ethnic cleansing" for Kirkuk on the air. I had the same problem a few years later trying to call the American presence in Iraq an "occupation," until it became painfully (and legally) obvious.
15. Interview with Qubad Talabani, February 2000, in Washington, D.C. Washington claimed they had had help from Tehran and vice versa.
16. Interview with PUK security official, October 21, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
6: A Most Convenient Foe
1. James Bennet, "Seeing Arafat Hurt by Attack on U.S., Sharon Cancels Plan for Peace Talks," New York Times, September 15, 2001.
2. PUK document, September 3, 2001; interview with Qubad Talabani, July 31, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
3. Ayub Nuri, with whom I had the pleasure to collaborate in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, provided me with information and analysis about Kurdish Islamism. Nuri is a reporter and interpreter from Halabja, and he lived through all the events of this book. Specifically his late father formed part of the early IMK and received training in Iran.
4. Interview with Ali Bapir, October 6, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
5. Interview with PUK intelligence official, October 2006, in Sulimaniya.
6. Burke, Al-Qaeda, p. 225.
7. Interview with Ali Bapir, October 6, 2006, in Sulimaniya; and PUK documents.
8. Interview with Ayub Nuri, January 20, 2007, by phone from New York City.
9. Interview with PUK intelligence official, October 2006, in Sulimaniya; and Burke, p. 226.
10. PUK document, October 16, 2001.
11. Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 72.
12. Ibid., p. 116.
13. Interview with Barham Salih, October 6, 2006, in Baghdad.
14. Interviews with intelligence officials, January 2003 and October 2006, in Sulimaniya. Also Scott Peterson, "How a Young Iraqi Grew into a Terrorist," Christian Science Monitor, November 27, 2002.
15. Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 21.
16. Patrick Tyler, "Kurd Chief Shuns Talks on Ousting Saddam," New York Times, August 15, 2002.
17. Interview with Frank Riccardone, then Iraq transition coordinator, U.S. State Department, April 27, 2000, in Washington, D.C; and with Hamid al-Bayati, SCIRI spokesman, December 9, 2002, in London.
18. This account is from Qubad Talabani, July 31, 2006, in Washington, D.C.
19. Interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, October 25, 2006, in Dukan.
20. Patrick Tyler, "Kurd Chief Shuns Talks on Ousting Saddam."
21. Interview with Dr. Lezgine Ahmed, November 14, 2002, in Washington, D.C.
22. Interview with Najmaldin Karim, November 14, 2002, in Washington, D.C.
23. Ibid.
24. Interview with opposition member, November 6, 2002, in Washington, D.C.
25. George Packer details the process in chapter 3 of his excellent book the The Assassins' Gate. I used his book as well as Charles Glass's The Northern Front to compare with my own notes and recollections from the London conference.
26. Interview with Zalmay Khalilzad, October 25, 2006, in Dukan.
7: The Northern Front
1. Gerry J. Gilmore, "Disappointed Wolfowitz Still Supports US-Turkish Defense Ties," Armed Services Press Service, May 7, 2003.
2. Packer, The Assassins' Gate, p. 96; Galbraith, The End of Iraq, p. 83; Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 258.
3. Interview with Hania Mufti of Human Rights Watch, January 10, 2007, by phone from New York City.
4. Abu Wa'el's real name is some variation of Satbun Mahmud Abdul Latif al-Aiai or Saadan Mahmoud Abdul Latif al-Aani, according to Jason Burke and Jonathan Schanzer, respectively.
5. Hassan gave me a rundown of the returning jihadis that was consistent with documents later made available to me in 2006 and detailed in chapter 6.
6. The "Wood Green Ricin Plot" never really became operational, a fact only revealed several years after the tabloid frenzy at the time. Only one of the men was charged—for possession of instructions on how to make the poison. By the time of his trial he was already serving a life sentence for stabbing a policeman. See BBC, "The Ricin Case Timeline," April 13, 2005.
7. Later, when the Iraqi insurgency ramped up, there were at least two incidents of chemical weapons use I am aware of in roadside bombs. The insurgents probably didn't even know the rounds they had daisy-chained together had chemicals in them. When I tried to follow it up with the Pentagon, a spokesperson refused to confirm or deny any cases of unconventional improvised explosive devices (IEDs). I wondered why the Pentagon didn't want to publicize the cases, which, after all, confirmed the existence of chemical weapons. But a few stray rounds would never be a solid ex post facto justification for the invasion, and I think at that point the military was probably more concerned about the issues with morale if soldiers had to worry about getting gassed by the IEDs. It also wouldn't flatter them that the insurgents had found these weapons by raiding all the munitions dumps left unguarded in the immediate postwar period.
8. Krekar made his most extensive explanations in a February 2003 documentary, Mullah Krekar, by Jonathan Miller of Insight News Television. Ali Bapir told me in a 2006 interview in Sulimaniya that Abu Wa'el was a refugee from the Mukhabarat and wanted by Saddam. Bapir said Abu Wa'el had joined Ansar al-Islam because he felt there was no place else he could go.
9. This was slide number 39 of his presentation.
10. Interview with Paul Pillar, August 23, 2006, by phone from Washington, D.C.
11. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would become the bogeyman of post-invasion Iraq, with every car bomb and suicide attack added to his name. CIA reports and the 9/11 commission eventually decided he had no working relationship with Saddam Hussein, but Vice President Dick Cheney continued to cite the link during the 2004 elections and beyond, still using the wrong town, Khurmal. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld clung to the notion as well, mentioning it to reporters as late as May 2006 as the enduring justification for invading Iraq. That spring the Washington Post reported that the U.S. military had deliberately pumped up Zarqawi's image, hoping to activate Iraqi xenophobia against him and other foreign fighters. When Zarqawi died during a U.S. air strike in June 2006, his removal had no discernible impact on the operational capacity of the insurgency.
12. I missed the bus on that trip—my BBC colleague Jim Muir filmed the visit.
13. I cross-referenced my notes with "Threats and Responses: Northern Iraq; Kurdish Leader Is Assassinated in Militant Raid," the February 10, 2003, New
York Times article by C. J. Chivers, with whom I shared interviews of survivors at Sulimaniya's main hospital on February 9.
14. Interview with Sami Abd-al-Rahman, February 13, 2003, in Erbil.
15. Interview with Nechirvan Barzani, September 24, 2006, in Erbil.
16. Sedat Ergin, "US Made Concession in Stormy Pre-war Talks," Hurriyet, September 23, 2003; and interview with member of the American negotiating team, April 2007, in Washington, D.C.
17. When he made that remark at a press conference, I asked him if the United States might not be guilty of "best-casing." He disagreed.
18. Zebari made these remarks at a press conference on February 15, 2003, in Salahudin.
19. My colleague Ivan Watson reported this story for NPR and got a deluge of angry mail accusing him of supporting the war by villainizing the Iraqi police.
20. Kate Brooks had taken the iconic photo of Karzai, the face of the new, free Afghanistan.
21. Interview with Faruk Lo?o?lu, September 11, 2006, in Ankara; and Glenn Kessler and Phillip P. Pan, "Missteps with Turkey Prove Costly," Washington Post, March 28, 2003.
22. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 112.
8: No Friends but the Kurds
1. Interview with Bafel Talabani, October 21 and 22, 2006, in Sulimaniya.
2. Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 144.
3. Ibid., p. 208.
4. Interviews with PUK officials, October 2006, in Sulimaniya. Also Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 302. The Kasnazanis have refused all my interview requests over the years.
5. "Kurdish Government Says Its Soldiers Killed Five in a Mistaken Attack," by Borzou Daragahi, AP, March 4, 2003. Daragahi happened on the scene, as did several other journalists (I got there almost an hour later). That evening Daragahi summed up the incident as a case of "driving while bearded."
6. Glenn Kessler and Phillip P. Pan, "Powell Warns of 'Difficulties' if Turkey Remains Noncompliant," Washington Post, April 2, 2003.
7. Information of the "Rockstars" comes from Woodward's Plan of Attack, with many missing details filled in by interviews with PUK officials. The information about the results of those strikes comes from a 2004 Frontline documentary "The Invasion of Iraq," by British journalist Richard Sanders, and an interview with Marc Garlasco, July 6, 2007, by phone from New York City. Garlasco was at the Defense Intelligence Agency until April 11, 2003. He quit the DIA in part because he realized that the targets he helped hit with perfect accuracy were all based on faulty intelligence. The United States made fifty precision air strikes aimed at high-value individuals during the war and killed none of them.
Invisible Nation Page 44
