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The cherry blossoms and forsythia are blooming on the slopes around Lake Dukan in the middle of Iraqi Kurdistan. Despite all the experts' warnings that war couldn't wait until spring because the Iraqi desert would defeat American soldiers, springtime has arrived--ahead of American troops--and with it the anniversaries of the Kurdish uprisings twelve years ago that swept through the mountain towns down to the plains to Irbil and Sulaymaniya, the two largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan, and, finally, on March 21, when the Kurds celebrate the New Year, to Kirkuk. It's a grimy oil town under Saddam Hussein's control, but, to the Kurds, it is their Jerusalem. Just a few hours from Baghdad, and half an hour from the Kurdish front lines, oil was first discovered in Kirkuk in 1927. Today, more than one million barrels per day are pumped from its wells and ten billion barrels' worth of reserves are known to exist. As soon as the United States launches its attack on Iraq, everyone will vie for the Kirkuk prize--the Kurds, the Americans, the Turks (the Turkmen claim it was originally theirs, as does Turkey), and the Arabs. Geographically, however, it lies within the province of Kurdistan, and, if things go their way, the Kurds plan to make it the rich capital of their future.
On a sunny afternoon last week, at a decayed mountaintop fort above Chamchamal, a town five minutes from a checkpoint into Saddam-controlled Iraq and 45 minutes from Kirkuk, teenagers were kicking around a soccer ball, laughing, and climbing on the ruins. "Will you capture Kirkuk for us?" the kids began chanting to us. "We are sure we'll never see it before we die." Most of them have only heard about Kirkuk from refugees who arrive with tales of torture, from parents who fled their Kirkuk homes years before, or from oil smugglers and taxi drivers who slip between Kirkuk and Chamchamal with relative ease. Across the no-man's-land plains from the fort rises a ridge dotted with new Iraqi fortifications. A man from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of Kurdistan's two main rival political parties, told us the Iraqi soldiers spend most of their time quarreling about who has to take the next shift. Nevertheless, our presence started to spook the children. One of them shouted, "If you leave here now, Saddam won't kill us." Succinct and to the point, as children are: You--the West--are our only chance of seeing Kirkuk and a liberated Iraq, but your presence could also bring us menace and disaster.
Last Friday, the peshmerga (Kurdish fighters) invited dozens of foreign journalists in Sulaymaniya to their headquarters for the annual celebration of the town's 1991 uprising. It was raining, and there were no Kurdish civilians out for the parade. Trucks towing long-range artillery drifted by the small audience of Kurdish leaders and journalists. The cobras, a unit of special peshmerga, dressed in fatigues with black paint striping their faces and black bandanas tied tightly over their heads like rap stars, performed stylized attack skits. Two men circled each other. One grabbed the other, whacked his rifle out of his hand, wrestled him to the ground, "killed" him, and dragged away his "corpse." Then they lined up and ran one by one down the driveway, dove through a ring of burning gasoline and over a barrel, and somersaulted into a mound of sand. They rappelled along a bungee cord strung up between the headquarters and a lamppost. Snipers in stringy, swamp-monster camouflage suits slunk through the flower beds. An old British warhorse photographer from Vietnam days watched but didn't deign to photograph. We soon realized this was not a normal parade so much as a show for our benefit, or rather for the cameras'.
It was reminiscent of a war game performed by the Afghan Northern Alliance for journalists living among them just north of Kabul in October 2001. The message was the same: We're ready; what's keeping you? In Afghanistan, the neighboring nemesis, Pakistan, was making threats and predicting disaster if the Americans allowed the Northern Alliance to enter Kabul. The Northern Alliance assured the Americans they would keep their army on the outskirts of the capital, but how do you keep refugees who happen to be soldiers from running down the mountain to their liberated homes in the capital? Here, it's Turkey that's threatening turmoil and invasion if the Kurds take Kirkuk. And the official Kurdish line is that they will heed America's demand not to enrage the Turks and will leave the 101st U.S. Airborne to capture and secure their imagined capital.
At least that's what the politicians are saying. But men like Mam Rostam, one of the leaders present at the parade, are saying something else. Boisterous and bearish, Rostam is a military legend known as the Rambo of Kurdistan. He has got 83 bullets and pieces of shrapnel splintered throughout his body. He went into the mountains at the age of 17, and, 36 years later, he's still raring for war to reclaim the homeland where his parents lived and died--Kirkuk.
A few days later, I took Rostam up on his invitation to visit him at his headquarters and home in Sulaymaniya. The house isn't his, he told me. It belongs to the sister-in-law of Ali Hassan Al Majid, Saddam Hussein's cousin and the former head of the Iraqi military in Kirkuk, who was the most feared man in Kurdistan, responsible for the extermination of 100,000 Kurds in the 1980s. It was Al Majid who, in 1991, during the Kurdish uprising, had dozens of Kurds decapitated and laid down on the road to Kirkuk with their heads propped on their chests as a message to the advancing peshmerga. When the Arab owner of the house was caught importing TNT into Sulaymaniya, he fled the province, and now Rostam, whose wife and children live in Germany, runs his operations out of the place. Since 1991, the owner of the house has sent agents to plant TNT in the garbage bins outside to assassinate him. Rostam has added his own touch to the grounds, planting an enormous palm tree in the front yard that shades a green guard post where his peshmerga keep watch for any further mischief-makers. He is still wary of being poisoned or ambushed: Most of the young peshmerga at the house are his relatives.
Rostam was in a generous, optimistic mood. He plopped down on a white shag rug and said, "I am cooking you a specialty that only grows here one month of the year." And out came plates of sautéed, unadorned truffles that would have cost hundreds of dollars in a French restaurant. Then came the bottles: Dewar's Scotch and Absolut Vodka, gifts from his admirers. As he opened the Absolut, the doorbell rang--another bottle from an admirer, delivered by his nephew.
"I've been fighting for Kirkuk for thirty-five years," Rostam told me. "And so did my father. Two of my brothers were martyred for Kirkuk. And my younger brother and this nephew who brought in the whiskey grew up in Saddam's prison from 1977 to 1982 because I was a peshmerga. Every time an Iraqi soldier was killed, they punished a peshmerga's family." He went on fighting in the mountains until 1996, when he started traveling to Germany to repair his body--a war journal made of flesh, the pages of which he began flipping one by one. "1969, rocket attack," he said, lifting the fringe of hair on his forehead to show the scar. "1968," he rolled down his socks to the scar on his ankle. "1977," a scar buried in his crown. "1978," he rolled up his sleeve to his wrist and elbow scars. "1979," another elbow scar. "1982," the mangled knee, operated on twice. "1984," the neck (I could feel the wad of shrapnel still wedged inside). "1984," another one on the forehead.
In those years, the Kurds fought the Iraqis and the Iranians in obscurity. Until they decided it was time the world knew the Kurdish nation existed. One night, Rostam and a group of peshmerga hid by the side of a mountain road, stopped a car full of Italian electrical engineers, and kidnapped them, delivering them to the PUK leaders. Rostam moved them from village to village, and, wherever they arrived, villagers slaughtered a sheep in their honor. He took 16 Russians constructing a dam as hostages. They were all attacked by Iraqi helicopters; two Russians were injured and six peshmerga died. That night, he released the Russians to the elders of a village. He took three Germans who were later ransomed by the PUK for $2 million. The Kurds treated them all more like honored guests than prisoners. Years later, the Germans who had been hostages under Rostam arranged visas for several of his injured men. And, in 1996, when he went to Germany for an operation, one former hostage invited him to his home in Berlin. "We wanted to introduce ourselves to the world so when they went home they'd say, there's a nation by the name of the Kurds."
An image of Saddam Hussein sitting behind his desk flickered on the television, and Rostam broke from his story in anger. "He will be like Slobodan Milosevic, tried for war crimes," he said. "I'd prefer him to be arrested and tortured. And I know how I'd torture him. Psychologically, not physically. I'd turn him into a dustman. He'll wash my shoes and feet. It is very hard for a power like that to descend to such depths." When Rostam was 19, he was arrested by Saddam's men in Kirkuk and stuck in a room so tiny he could neither stand up nor sit down. When he was 27, he watched Saddam moving Kurdish villagers out of their homes, razing all the villages to the ground. He saw hens and cattle with no one to feed them. And he had a severe reaction. "I stopped believing. I stopped praying," and now he can hardly resist cursing his religion, Islam. An image of Israeli soldiers destroying a Palestinian house appears on Al Jazeera television, and he curses, "Fuck the Arabs. The Israelis are the only ones who know how to deal with Arabs."
"My life has been wars, sorrows, killing. The only day I liked was the day I marched freely into Kirkuk," he said. It was March 1991, when he'd come down from the mountains for the uprisings throughout Kurdistan. "It was a red-letter day for us. I went to my home. I had lived in Shorja Square, and I said to the people, `Where is Shorja?' They said, `This is it.' But all I saw were wide roads and no houses, and the people said, `They razed the Kurdish houses under the pretext of making new roads.'" His red-letter days lasted only 72 hours before he received news that Iraqi troops were massing to take back the city, and he fled to a village where he captured 180 Iraqi officers and soldiers. "They had been prisoners of war, and they told us that the Americans released them and gave them back their weapons and uniforms to fight the rebelling Kurds."
He watched as Iraqi helicopters bombed the Kurds while U.S. and British planes flew by. "It was the father of Bush who did that treason," he recalled. The first President Bush had encouraged the Kurdish and Shia uprisings when he gave his tacit blessing to the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands. As many as 20,000 Kurds and Turkmen perished in Saddam's counterattack. Hundreds were killed while fleeing on the road to Turkey, scorched to death by phosphorous bombs dropped from Saddam's helicopters. As the Kurds fled toward the borders, Iraqi helicopters dumped flour on them so they'd think it was chemical weapons. It succeeded. Panic ensued. Two million Kurds fled, mostly to the borders with Turkey and Iran.
Does Rostam trust the United States now? "Not very much, but more than in the past," he said. "Last year, an American journalist who also works for the CIA or the Pentagon came here, and I took him to the front lines, and he promised me, `The Americans will be good with the Kurds this time.'" When he heard these words, a young English teacher from Halabja, who had been glowing with admiration for Rostam, expressed his misgivings: "Hmm. History repeats itself it seems."
Rostam smiled and poured more vodka. "America betrayed us three times because of its interests. The English betrayed us and divided Kurdistan into four parts because of its interests," in the 1920s creation of the modern Middle East. "When you ask the British who is your permanent friend, they say, interests are our permanent friends." For now, he's gambling that U.S. and Kurdish interests have converged.
On the chance that they do not converge, however, the leadership of the Kurdish resistance inside Kirkuk isn't taking any chances. It's said that many of the Kurds in Kirkuk--who make up 50 percent of the city's population--are preparing for an uprising. They are armed. The two rival Kurdish parties are already vying for political dominance among the population. I've met almost as many Kurdish Democratic Party men as PUK men who are plotting to move south to Kirkuk as soon as America's bombs begin dropping. Inside Kirkuk, Saddam's Kurdish militia are plotting their side-switching. One commander told me that he has a former peshmerga now in the Iraqi army who wanted to desert. "I told him to stay. When we come to Kirkuk, we'll need him."
Last week, the startling news out of Kirkuk was that Iraqi troops were drowning the trenches around the city with crude oil and planting strings of linked mines. This week, however, the news is more encouraging: Messages fly in through couriers and spies to the Kurdish political leaders, commanders, local peshmerga, and taxi drivers from Iraqi officers saying, "We will not fight; we will surrender with the first American attack." One Kurdish leader has a white piece of paper with the names of Iraqi commanders listed in blue script who have foretold their surrender. "We know of two units that will surrender. That is 60,000 troops," said one Kurdish leader. Said another, "We have links with senior members who don't trust Saddam anymore. Their salaries are very poor. They all have to work as taxi drivers. We have daily talks with them. They have no supplies. They've lost all courage."
The Iraqis seem concerned. At the first Kurdish checkpoint along the road from Kirkuk into Chamchamal, nervous taxi drivers told us a new curfew had been imposed on Tuesday morning across the Kurdish areas of Kirkuk. Iraqi soldiers are searching houses for weapons and men for identity cards. The city is like a garrison of soldiers, he said. He was obviously desperate to get away from the cement block post and the ubiquitous ears of Iraqi agents. A few days ago, he said, a driver was seen speaking to journalists at the checkpoint here, and, when he drove back into Kirkuk, he was beaten severely. "People are especially afraid America will not finish its business completely, like 1991, when Saddam made many arrests," he said and sped off.
The Kurdish political leadership has grown savvy. Despite the betrayals, they want to forge good ties with the West, touting democracy and promising to keep their men out of Kirkuk. "America has protected us from Saddam for twelve years. Our democracy and existence are on account of Britain and America and the no-fly zone, and we'll never forget it," Kosrat Rasul, an old peshmerga commander and now leader of the PUK's political bureau, told me when we met at his home in Sulaymaniya. Rasul was the first peshmerga to enter Kirkuk during the 1991 liberation of the city, but he was severely injured; his eight- and nine-year-old sons were killed by Saddam's bombs.
But, while the politicians plot their political futures, Mam Rostam, who is too blunt to play politician, is waking up at three and four every morning to track his men and gear up for what may be the Kurds' only frontline battle in the upcoming Iraqi war, to stamp out Ansar Al Islam, a group of more than 500 Kurdish Islamists allegedly backed by dozens of Arab-Afghans who slipped in with the help of Iran, and, some say, Al Qaeda. They've been waging a low-level, mortar-lobbing war against the PUK, killing some 300 peshmerga since September 2001. One early morning, I drove out with Rostam through a landscape of rich, green pastureland spiced with yellow flowers toward the Zagros Mountains along the border with Iran. At every checkpoint and small town, men greeted him with enthusiastic smiles or invitations. "I'm like the dollar bill," he says. "Everyone knows me." Weaving madly through a chaotic market, he gesticulated at a turbaned young man with a Kalashnikov and a long Taliban-like beard: "It's like Afghanistan here!" Then he shouted out the window at a man wheeling his cart carelessly across the dirt road, "Donkey! Organize your market."
We climbed up to a grass and stone hilltop bunker overlooking the ruins of what was a Kurdish village before Saddam's 1988 chemical attack, where Rostam's former peshmerga, now under another command, were manning a Russian machine gun. The day before Ansar had gone on a mortaring spree and wounded two peshmerga and two civilians. From another position, the PUK were firing mortars at Ansar positions over a few small peaks. Given the standards of modern warfare, it was a fairly primitive arrangement--no tanks, no helicopters, no planes--and I could see why the PUK has been unable to rout the extremists. The commander, one of Rostam's old peshmerga, said the Arab-Afghans were busy training more men. "If we have airplanes or helicopters, it'll be easier for us to get them," he said. And he may soon get his wish. Rumor has it that the Americans have dropped off massive supplies of ammunition at an airstrip near here and that the prologue to the war against Saddam will begin here, at Halabja, against Ansar Al Islam.
Cradled in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, Halabja was a pastoral resort and picnic town. That was before Saddam poisoned the people with chemical weapons that many, sadly, associate with the West and the United States. "After all, the U.S. gave the chemicals to Saddam," one old man said. "It was beautiful," said Rostam. "It was known as the city of poets." After Saddam destroyed it, the Islamists stifled its spirit again--no cinema, no music, no theater. Today, with Ansar Al Islam kicked out, the theater is alive and poets are reading again, but the din of mortars is driving everyone a little mad. We stopped in for lunch at the parents of a young English teacher named Yerevan. Fifteen years ago this Saturday, Yerevan's mother, Bahar, was hiding with her husband and children in a cave in the nearby mountains. The morning after the chemical attack, she recalled that people arrived from the village blind, raving, laughing, mad, and poisoned. A month later, Bahar went back to find her father. He'd gone back to Halabja to get milk for his baby daughter. She found him in the garden of his house, dead, flat on in his stomach, still covering his mouth with his hands. Forty-five other relatives of Bahar were also killed by the chemicals--"that smelled like onions and apples," said Yerevan, who was eight at the time.
Bahar said she has watched in confusion and anger at the Europeans demonstrating against a war to topple Saddam. "They know nothing of the oppression of Saddam," she said. "If they had suffered from it, they could never march in the streets against it." The trees in Bahar's father's garden all died from the chemicals. She buried her father and set about starting life over again, planting new trees. On a quiet street, behind stone walls and a metal gate, in her father's garden, the cherry blossoms on Bahar's young tree are in bloom.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030324&s=rubin032403
On a sunny afternoon last week, at a decayed mountaintop fort above Chamchamal, a town five minutes from a checkpoint into Saddam-controlled Iraq and 45 minutes from Kirkuk, teenagers were kicking around a soccer ball, laughing, and climbing on the ruins. "Will you capture Kirkuk for us?" the kids began chanting to us. "We are sure we'll never see it before we die." Most of them have only heard about Kirkuk from refugees who arrive with tales of torture, from parents who fled their Kirkuk homes years before, or from oil smugglers and taxi drivers who slip between Kirkuk and Chamchamal with relative ease. Across the no-man's-land plains from the fort rises a ridge dotted with new Iraqi fortifications. A man from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of Kurdistan's two main rival political parties, told us the Iraqi soldiers spend most of their time quarreling about who has to take the next shift. Nevertheless, our presence started to spook the children. One of them shouted, "If you leave here now, Saddam won't kill us." Succinct and to the point, as children are: You--the West--are our only chance of seeing Kirkuk and a liberated Iraq, but your presence could also bring us menace and disaster.
Last Friday, the peshmerga (Kurdish fighters) invited dozens of foreign journalists in Sulaymaniya to their headquarters for the annual celebration of the town's 1991 uprising. It was raining, and there were no Kurdish civilians out for the parade. Trucks towing long-range artillery drifted by the small audience of Kurdish leaders and journalists. The cobras, a unit of special peshmerga, dressed in fatigues with black paint striping their faces and black bandanas tied tightly over their heads like rap stars, performed stylized attack skits. Two men circled each other. One grabbed the other, whacked his rifle out of his hand, wrestled him to the ground, "killed" him, and dragged away his "corpse." Then they lined up and ran one by one down the driveway, dove through a ring of burning gasoline and over a barrel, and somersaulted into a mound of sand. They rappelled along a bungee cord strung up between the headquarters and a lamppost. Snipers in stringy, swamp-monster camouflage suits slunk through the flower beds. An old British warhorse photographer from Vietnam days watched but didn't deign to photograph. We soon realized this was not a normal parade so much as a show for our benefit, or rather for the cameras'.
It was reminiscent of a war game performed by the Afghan Northern Alliance for journalists living among them just north of Kabul in October 2001. The message was the same: We're ready; what's keeping you? In Afghanistan, the neighboring nemesis, Pakistan, was making threats and predicting disaster if the Americans allowed the Northern Alliance to enter Kabul. The Northern Alliance assured the Americans they would keep their army on the outskirts of the capital, but how do you keep refugees who happen to be soldiers from running down the mountain to their liberated homes in the capital? Here, it's Turkey that's threatening turmoil and invasion if the Kurds take Kirkuk. And the official Kurdish line is that they will heed America's demand not to enrage the Turks and will leave the 101st U.S. Airborne to capture and secure their imagined capital.
At least that's what the politicians are saying. But men like Mam Rostam, one of the leaders present at the parade, are saying something else. Boisterous and bearish, Rostam is a military legend known as the Rambo of Kurdistan. He has got 83 bullets and pieces of shrapnel splintered throughout his body. He went into the mountains at the age of 17, and, 36 years later, he's still raring for war to reclaim the homeland where his parents lived and died--Kirkuk.
A few days later, I took Rostam up on his invitation to visit him at his headquarters and home in Sulaymaniya. The house isn't his, he told me. It belongs to the sister-in-law of Ali Hassan Al Majid, Saddam Hussein's cousin and the former head of the Iraqi military in Kirkuk, who was the most feared man in Kurdistan, responsible for the extermination of 100,000 Kurds in the 1980s. It was Al Majid who, in 1991, during the Kurdish uprising, had dozens of Kurds decapitated and laid down on the road to Kirkuk with their heads propped on their chests as a message to the advancing peshmerga. When the Arab owner of the house was caught importing TNT into Sulaymaniya, he fled the province, and now Rostam, whose wife and children live in Germany, runs his operations out of the place. Since 1991, the owner of the house has sent agents to plant TNT in the garbage bins outside to assassinate him. Rostam has added his own touch to the grounds, planting an enormous palm tree in the front yard that shades a green guard post where his peshmerga keep watch for any further mischief-makers. He is still wary of being poisoned or ambushed: Most of the young peshmerga at the house are his relatives.
Rostam was in a generous, optimistic mood. He plopped down on a white shag rug and said, "I am cooking you a specialty that only grows here one month of the year." And out came plates of sautéed, unadorned truffles that would have cost hundreds of dollars in a French restaurant. Then came the bottles: Dewar's Scotch and Absolut Vodka, gifts from his admirers. As he opened the Absolut, the doorbell rang--another bottle from an admirer, delivered by his nephew.
"I've been fighting for Kirkuk for thirty-five years," Rostam told me. "And so did my father. Two of my brothers were martyred for Kirkuk. And my younger brother and this nephew who brought in the whiskey grew up in Saddam's prison from 1977 to 1982 because I was a peshmerga. Every time an Iraqi soldier was killed, they punished a peshmerga's family." He went on fighting in the mountains until 1996, when he started traveling to Germany to repair his body--a war journal made of flesh, the pages of which he began flipping one by one. "1969, rocket attack," he said, lifting the fringe of hair on his forehead to show the scar. "1968," he rolled down his socks to the scar on his ankle. "1977," a scar buried in his crown. "1978," he rolled up his sleeve to his wrist and elbow scars. "1979," another elbow scar. "1982," the mangled knee, operated on twice. "1984," the neck (I could feel the wad of shrapnel still wedged inside). "1984," another one on the forehead.
In those years, the Kurds fought the Iraqis and the Iranians in obscurity. Until they decided it was time the world knew the Kurdish nation existed. One night, Rostam and a group of peshmerga hid by the side of a mountain road, stopped a car full of Italian electrical engineers, and kidnapped them, delivering them to the PUK leaders. Rostam moved them from village to village, and, wherever they arrived, villagers slaughtered a sheep in their honor. He took 16 Russians constructing a dam as hostages. They were all attacked by Iraqi helicopters; two Russians were injured and six peshmerga died. That night, he released the Russians to the elders of a village. He took three Germans who were later ransomed by the PUK for $2 million. The Kurds treated them all more like honored guests than prisoners. Years later, the Germans who had been hostages under Rostam arranged visas for several of his injured men. And, in 1996, when he went to Germany for an operation, one former hostage invited him to his home in Berlin. "We wanted to introduce ourselves to the world so when they went home they'd say, there's a nation by the name of the Kurds."
An image of Saddam Hussein sitting behind his desk flickered on the television, and Rostam broke from his story in anger. "He will be like Slobodan Milosevic, tried for war crimes," he said. "I'd prefer him to be arrested and tortured. And I know how I'd torture him. Psychologically, not physically. I'd turn him into a dustman. He'll wash my shoes and feet. It is very hard for a power like that to descend to such depths." When Rostam was 19, he was arrested by Saddam's men in Kirkuk and stuck in a room so tiny he could neither stand up nor sit down. When he was 27, he watched Saddam moving Kurdish villagers out of their homes, razing all the villages to the ground. He saw hens and cattle with no one to feed them. And he had a severe reaction. "I stopped believing. I stopped praying," and now he can hardly resist cursing his religion, Islam. An image of Israeli soldiers destroying a Palestinian house appears on Al Jazeera television, and he curses, "Fuck the Arabs. The Israelis are the only ones who know how to deal with Arabs."
"My life has been wars, sorrows, killing. The only day I liked was the day I marched freely into Kirkuk," he said. It was March 1991, when he'd come down from the mountains for the uprisings throughout Kurdistan. "It was a red-letter day for us. I went to my home. I had lived in Shorja Square, and I said to the people, `Where is Shorja?' They said, `This is it.' But all I saw were wide roads and no houses, and the people said, `They razed the Kurdish houses under the pretext of making new roads.'" His red-letter days lasted only 72 hours before he received news that Iraqi troops were massing to take back the city, and he fled to a village where he captured 180 Iraqi officers and soldiers. "They had been prisoners of war, and they told us that the Americans released them and gave them back their weapons and uniforms to fight the rebelling Kurds."
He watched as Iraqi helicopters bombed the Kurds while U.S. and British planes flew by. "It was the father of Bush who did that treason," he recalled. The first President Bush had encouraged the Kurdish and Shia uprisings when he gave his tacit blessing to the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands. As many as 20,000 Kurds and Turkmen perished in Saddam's counterattack. Hundreds were killed while fleeing on the road to Turkey, scorched to death by phosphorous bombs dropped from Saddam's helicopters. As the Kurds fled toward the borders, Iraqi helicopters dumped flour on them so they'd think it was chemical weapons. It succeeded. Panic ensued. Two million Kurds fled, mostly to the borders with Turkey and Iran.
Does Rostam trust the United States now? "Not very much, but more than in the past," he said. "Last year, an American journalist who also works for the CIA or the Pentagon came here, and I took him to the front lines, and he promised me, `The Americans will be good with the Kurds this time.'" When he heard these words, a young English teacher from Halabja, who had been glowing with admiration for Rostam, expressed his misgivings: "Hmm. History repeats itself it seems."
Rostam smiled and poured more vodka. "America betrayed us three times because of its interests. The English betrayed us and divided Kurdistan into four parts because of its interests," in the 1920s creation of the modern Middle East. "When you ask the British who is your permanent friend, they say, interests are our permanent friends." For now, he's gambling that U.S. and Kurdish interests have converged.
On the chance that they do not converge, however, the leadership of the Kurdish resistance inside Kirkuk isn't taking any chances. It's said that many of the Kurds in Kirkuk--who make up 50 percent of the city's population--are preparing for an uprising. They are armed. The two rival Kurdish parties are already vying for political dominance among the population. I've met almost as many Kurdish Democratic Party men as PUK men who are plotting to move south to Kirkuk as soon as America's bombs begin dropping. Inside Kirkuk, Saddam's Kurdish militia are plotting their side-switching. One commander told me that he has a former peshmerga now in the Iraqi army who wanted to desert. "I told him to stay. When we come to Kirkuk, we'll need him."
Last week, the startling news out of Kirkuk was that Iraqi troops were drowning the trenches around the city with crude oil and planting strings of linked mines. This week, however, the news is more encouraging: Messages fly in through couriers and spies to the Kurdish political leaders, commanders, local peshmerga, and taxi drivers from Iraqi officers saying, "We will not fight; we will surrender with the first American attack." One Kurdish leader has a white piece of paper with the names of Iraqi commanders listed in blue script who have foretold their surrender. "We know of two units that will surrender. That is 60,000 troops," said one Kurdish leader. Said another, "We have links with senior members who don't trust Saddam anymore. Their salaries are very poor. They all have to work as taxi drivers. We have daily talks with them. They have no supplies. They've lost all courage."
The Iraqis seem concerned. At the first Kurdish checkpoint along the road from Kirkuk into Chamchamal, nervous taxi drivers told us a new curfew had been imposed on Tuesday morning across the Kurdish areas of Kirkuk. Iraqi soldiers are searching houses for weapons and men for identity cards. The city is like a garrison of soldiers, he said. He was obviously desperate to get away from the cement block post and the ubiquitous ears of Iraqi agents. A few days ago, he said, a driver was seen speaking to journalists at the checkpoint here, and, when he drove back into Kirkuk, he was beaten severely. "People are especially afraid America will not finish its business completely, like 1991, when Saddam made many arrests," he said and sped off.
The Kurdish political leadership has grown savvy. Despite the betrayals, they want to forge good ties with the West, touting democracy and promising to keep their men out of Kirkuk. "America has protected us from Saddam for twelve years. Our democracy and existence are on account of Britain and America and the no-fly zone, and we'll never forget it," Kosrat Rasul, an old peshmerga commander and now leader of the PUK's political bureau, told me when we met at his home in Sulaymaniya. Rasul was the first peshmerga to enter Kirkuk during the 1991 liberation of the city, but he was severely injured; his eight- and nine-year-old sons were killed by Saddam's bombs.
But, while the politicians plot their political futures, Mam Rostam, who is too blunt to play politician, is waking up at three and four every morning to track his men and gear up for what may be the Kurds' only frontline battle in the upcoming Iraqi war, to stamp out Ansar Al Islam, a group of more than 500 Kurdish Islamists allegedly backed by dozens of Arab-Afghans who slipped in with the help of Iran, and, some say, Al Qaeda. They've been waging a low-level, mortar-lobbing war against the PUK, killing some 300 peshmerga since September 2001. One early morning, I drove out with Rostam through a landscape of rich, green pastureland spiced with yellow flowers toward the Zagros Mountains along the border with Iran. At every checkpoint and small town, men greeted him with enthusiastic smiles or invitations. "I'm like the dollar bill," he says. "Everyone knows me." Weaving madly through a chaotic market, he gesticulated at a turbaned young man with a Kalashnikov and a long Taliban-like beard: "It's like Afghanistan here!" Then he shouted out the window at a man wheeling his cart carelessly across the dirt road, "Donkey! Organize your market."
We climbed up to a grass and stone hilltop bunker overlooking the ruins of what was a Kurdish village before Saddam's 1988 chemical attack, where Rostam's former peshmerga, now under another command, were manning a Russian machine gun. The day before Ansar had gone on a mortaring spree and wounded two peshmerga and two civilians. From another position, the PUK were firing mortars at Ansar positions over a few small peaks. Given the standards of modern warfare, it was a fairly primitive arrangement--no tanks, no helicopters, no planes--and I could see why the PUK has been unable to rout the extremists. The commander, one of Rostam's old peshmerga, said the Arab-Afghans were busy training more men. "If we have airplanes or helicopters, it'll be easier for us to get them," he said. And he may soon get his wish. Rumor has it that the Americans have dropped off massive supplies of ammunition at an airstrip near here and that the prologue to the war against Saddam will begin here, at Halabja, against Ansar Al Islam.
Cradled in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, Halabja was a pastoral resort and picnic town. That was before Saddam poisoned the people with chemical weapons that many, sadly, associate with the West and the United States. "After all, the U.S. gave the chemicals to Saddam," one old man said. "It was beautiful," said Rostam. "It was known as the city of poets." After Saddam destroyed it, the Islamists stifled its spirit again--no cinema, no music, no theater. Today, with Ansar Al Islam kicked out, the theater is alive and poets are reading again, but the din of mortars is driving everyone a little mad. We stopped in for lunch at the parents of a young English teacher named Yerevan. Fifteen years ago this Saturday, Yerevan's mother, Bahar, was hiding with her husband and children in a cave in the nearby mountains. The morning after the chemical attack, she recalled that people arrived from the village blind, raving, laughing, mad, and poisoned. A month later, Bahar went back to find her father. He'd gone back to Halabja to get milk for his baby daughter. She found him in the garden of his house, dead, flat on in his stomach, still covering his mouth with his hands. Forty-five other relatives of Bahar were also killed by the chemicals--"that smelled like onions and apples," said Yerevan, who was eight at the time.
Bahar said she has watched in confusion and anger at the Europeans demonstrating against a war to topple Saddam. "They know nothing of the oppression of Saddam," she said. "If they had suffered from it, they could never march in the streets against it." The trees in Bahar's father's garden all died from the chemicals. She buried her father and set about starting life over again, planting new trees. On a quiet street, behind stone walls and a metal gate, in her father's garden, the cherry blossoms on Bahar's young tree are in bloom.
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030324&s=rubin032403
