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Second in a three-part series
This article focuses on the trials of Bekas Garmiany,
a Kurdish soldier who endured torture in Iraq and
Iran before immigrating to his current home in
Alberta, Canada. The writer and Bekas have
corresponded in a series of interviews for almost a
year.
Most of the incidents related by Garmiany cannot be
corroborated. In many cases the only witnesses are
dead.
The writer spoke to experts on the Middle East,
Amnesty International and other Kurdish soldiers who
reported witnessing or enduring experiences similar
to those related by Garmiany.
By Eric Fleischauer
DAILY Staff Writer
eric@decaturdaily.com · 340-2435
Squeezing under a farmhouse, praying without hope
that his 35 friends would survive the encounter with
Iraqi soldiers he had escaped, 15-year-old Bekas
Garmiany might well have wondered why his childhood
ended so abruptly.
Pain and patriotism come early in Kurdistan. For
Bekas, a citizen of that non-country, they began at
11. It was then that Bekas, son of a former Kurdish
warrior, refused to join Saddam Hussein's Baathist
party. Because of that refusal, he was expelled from
Kawa Junior High School in 1978.
The expulsion ushered him into the bloody cause of
Kurdish autonomy, a cause that remains elusive to
its battle-weary advocates.
Bekas became the leader of a small group of teenage
Kurds involved in the resistance movement against
Iraq. He frequently entered Kirkuk to conduct
undercover operations, but he now lived in the
mountainous region north of Kirkuk with other
members of the army of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan.
Because he was a go-between, Bekas was an attractive
target for Saddam's intelligence forces. Bekas knew
the identities and locations of both the young men
he led and the Peshmarga — Kurdish warriors — that
made up the PUK's military leadership.
Bekas had instructed his group members to meet him
at 1 a.m. at a farm in the Sorija neighborhood of
Kirkuk. Because he returned to Kirkuk through a
checkpoint, he had buried his weapons — an AK-47
with six magazines, four grenades and a pistol —
outside the city limits. He waited in the shadows as
the group congregated. What he saw next chilled him.
Ambush
"I see cars are coming to the neighborhood. As soon
as they came in, they turned their lights off. They
had tinted windows, and only Iraqi intelligence was
allowed to have tinted windows. There was a little
farmhouse," Bekas said. "I jumped under there and
started crawling on my belly to the middle, where
nobody could find me. I was looking from there with
my binoculars."
The Iraqis captured all 35 of the surprised and
unorganized youths.
"I was the 36th one. They didn't get me. I was just
lucky. They were all my friends and about my age,"
Bekas recalled. "Ten of them were my best friends."
Bekas ran hard to the house of an army colleague's
mother.
"You have to hide me or I'm dead," he told her. She
hid him.
Before sunrise, the woman drove Bekas to the
checkpoint and sneaked him into Chiman, a village
just outside the Kirkuk limits. After collecting his
weapons, he returned to the mountains.
Kurds and their ancestors have inhabited the
mountains north of Kirkuk for 8,000 years. The
mountains, not religion, define a homeland that
bleeds into Iraq, Iran, Syria, the former Soviet
Union and Turkey. Both Shia and Sunni Islam have
Kurdish followers, along with other Islamic splinter
groups. A small number of Kurds are even Christian
and Jewish.
Aware that Iraqi intelligence by now knew of his
role in the resistance, Bekas hid in mountains that
had served as a Kurdish sanctuary from warring
Hittites thousands of years before.
Iraqi intelligence could not find Bekas, but it did
not need to. It settled for capturing his
14-year-old sister and his girlfriend of the same
age. They were beautiful and innocent. They had no
involvement in Bekas' secret life, but that did not
matter to their captors. He still remembers the
letter delivered to him by a neutral messenger.
"We have your sister, and we have your girlfriend.
Either we're going to kill them, or you are going to
come in and surrender," said the letter that would
change his life.
Bekas' superiors cautioned him to remain in hiding.
"They sat me down and said, 'Even if you surrender,
they are not going to let them go. They're going to
kill you, and they are going to kill them. We know
this trick.' "
But in the tradition of Peshmarga, they let him
decide.
"OK, I'm going in," he told them. And he did.
Back to Kirkuk
Bekas tried to convince the Iraqis at the Kirkuk
jail that he was not a part of the resistance, but
they already knew he was the leader of the group. "I
said, 'No, I am just a student. I was threatened and
afraid, and I took off (from his family's home in
Kirkuk). I run out.' I pretended I was illiterate,
that I didn't know anything."
As his superiors predicted, Bekas' efforts failed.
Seven Iraqi guards raped his sister and girlfriend
while he was forced to watch. They killed the girls
and tortured Bekas for months. Saddam's hold on
Kirkuk, however, was never as complete as his hold
on southern Iraq. At least half of the city's
population was Kurdish. Many of those Kurds, like
Bekas, saw Saddam's Iraq as an evil barrier to
Kurdish autonomy.
Bekas was one of about 30 Kurds in the jail, many of
whom were far above Bekas in rank. He and the others
wore prison-issue red suits, a fact that those who
lived through Saddam's rule understand. A red suit
meant death. The cloth identifier was the brutal
equivalent of America's death row, but without the
niceties of a trial.
"They killed 16 in front of us. They put them
against the wall and shot them in front of us. We
still had our red suits on. They were just waiting
for Saddam's signature to kill the rest of us,"
Bekas recalled.
Escape from jail
Unbeknownst to the others, one of the guards was a
Kurd. After the execution of 16, the guard got word
to the PUK that a jailbreak was in order. In 1983,
the guard and the Peshmarga developed a plan.
The guard managed to get assigned to the jail gate
on a day when many guards were off duty.
"He snuck some (Peshmarga) in with weapons. They
killed the other guards, maybe captured them, I
didn't know," said Bekas. "Whatever they did, there
were two cars waiting for us about a half block from
the jail. Fourteen of us snuck out of Kirkuk."
The escape from torture and imminent death may have
brought happiness to the others, but young Bekas
could not shake the memories of rape and murder.
"I wanted to die," Bekas remembers. "I went crazy."
What he went through killed his faith in God, just
as it did for many of his generation. "Where was God
when I was crying for him to take me, not my
sister?" Bekas said. "Where was God when Saddam
killed my people?"
The death of his sister did not affect just Bekas.
His two brothers became Peshmarga in 1984, hoping to
avenge their sister's death. One died in 1984. The
other died Jan. 20, 1985, when a stray
rocket-propelled grenade blew him apart. Bekas and
his mother watched the youngest Garmiany die.
A bitter young man, trained to kill, makes for an
undisciplined but deadly soldier.
"I lost control. I became the kind of person who
walks toward a bullet. I would not hide during
attacks. When we set a trap for the enemy, as soon
as the first bullet comes out of any gun, I would
stand up and fight," Bekas said.
Hero, savior, shadow
It was during these dark days that Bekas met a PUK
general, called Mama Risha by his men, but born in
1957 with the name Nujmadin Shukur Rauf. His enemies
called the general "Rajul al Hadidi," which means
"man of iron." In Kurdish, the term "Mama Risha"
means "bearded uncle." The name stuck because the
warrior swore he would not shave his beard until
Kurdistan was free.
"He was a savior," said Bekas, his voice harsh and
loud, "a hero, a living prophet to the Kurds much
like Jesus to the Christians."
To young Bekas, Mama Risha was more than a superior.
"He was my role model," Bekas said. "He was like a
father and older brother all in one."
Mama Risha's military exploits were many, his
Baathist victims legion. But the story Bekas relates
gives a glimpse of why Peshmarga rallied around
their leader.
"He was feared and respected by his enemies, and he
liked to let them know he was close by. Many times,"
Bekas chuckled, "he would go into the same cafe or
restaurant they were in and pay their tab. He would
leave a calling card saying, 'I am your shadow.'
Just to let them know he was right under their
noses."
Bekas is not proud of his death wish, in part
because Mama Risha condemned it.
"Mama Risha got mad at me. He said I was absolutely
stupid and was going to get myself killed, and
others killed with myself. He swore that the next
time I stand up, he would shoot me in the foot just
to drop me down," Bekas said.
Mama Risha's death
The immortal Mama Risha died not from Baathist
bullets, but from Kurdish ones.
Summoned by a powerful Kurd, Tahsin Shahwais, Mama
Risha saw the opportunity for an alliance that could
overwhelm Saddam's hold on Kurdistan.
"We all warned him not to go," Bekas said, "but he
believed that Tahsin would keep his word. He said
Tahsin had finally come to his senses."
Paid handsomely by Saddam, Shahwais and his group
ambushed Mama Risha. They pumped so many bullets
into the hero that his body — captured in
photographs by his frantic troops — was barely
recognizable. The same ambush, on Jan. 25, 1985,
also took the lives of two more of Bekas' Peshmarga
mentors.
"As we were waiting, someone came to us with the
news of their deaths. I was speechless, in shock. I
felt very vulnerable all of a sudden. Our group
became wrought with anger. We attacked everyone and
everything symbolizing the Baathists in the area. We
exploded with anger.
"To this day," Bekas said, "we feel we did not do
enough to avenge his death."
Elusive vengeance
Bekas' mania flowed in part from the nightmares of
rape and murder, so he hoped revenge would heal him.
He crept into Kirkuk and headed to the jail. The
20-year-old's only desire that night, his only
ambition for life, was to kill the seven Iraqi
guards who had raped his sister and girlfriend.
Even now the regret in his voice is clear. The
guards were already dead, killed by his colleagues.
Crazed and despondent, he saw a man he knew to be a
high-ranking member of Iraqi intelligence. A man who
had, at least tacitly, been responsible for his
sister's agony.
"I snuck up behind him and I had a grenade in my
hand. I told him I am looking for death. 'If you are
looking for death, just start talking or raise your
voice. But I am looking for death. I don't care if I
die,' " Bekas recited. Bekas was now a sergeant in
the PUK.
The officer knew Bekas well, and knew all that he
had endured. The officer believed his threat.
"I showed him the grenade. My hand was in the ring
of the grenade. I said, 'As soon as you talk, I pull
it. If I pull it, we die together. We are going to
the checkpoint. You are taking your car out. You
will show your card at the checkpoint and you are
going to say I am with you. You say more than that —
body language, anything — and we die together.' "
The officer believed. He drove Bekas through the
Kirkuk checkpoint and, following instructions,
through the Sulaimaniya checkpoint, to a place near
Kurdish Halabja. Bekas turned the officer and his
car over to PUK troops near the Kurdish city that,
not many years after, would be devastated by
Saddam's chemical bombs.
Then, reason clouded with raw hatred, Bekas turned
around and walked back to his Kirkuk-based platoon,
100 miles away.
"I was so crazy because of my sister. I had all this
fire inside of me," Bekas explained.
During his long trek, he came to the Kurdish village
of Sangaw. At the Iraqi checkpoint Bekas saw a tank,
an armored vehicle, machine guns both on the
building and on the vehicle, and at least 20 Iraqi
troops.
Like Halabja, Sangaw was attacked by Saddam in the
late 1980s, after the Iran-Iraq war and shortly
after Bekas plotted a solo assault on its
checkpoint. Saddam's attacks killed thousands of
Kurds. Many thousands more — Kurds say 180,000 —
were massacred in Kirkuk in 1991, after U.S. troops
stalled at the Kuwait border after the first Gulf
war. Many Kurds blame the United States for
encouraging them to revolt, then leaving them to
Saddam's fury.
The Kirkuk slaughter also explains why Iraqi Kurds
have petitioned Iraq's transitional government to
delay elections scheduled for Jan. 30. Saddam's
genocide, they believe, will prevent them from being
a majority until dispersed Kurds return.
As Bekas squinted at the Sangaw checkpoint, it was
blood lust, not politics, that pushed him toward a
suicidal assault.
"Temptation made me shoot at them. I had four
grenades with me and I thought, if I get close
enough, I can capture the whole base."
The solo attack was, of course, unsuccessful. The
only noticeable result, besides the ensuing manhunt,
was that he got shot in the foot. He escaped his
pursuers by hiding under bushes, listening as
helicopters flew above him. When night came he
managed to hop and limp for a while, but he could
not stop the bleeding. He passed out.
When he awoke, he found himself in a Kurdish home.
They had already contacted his platoon, which soon
retrieved him.
But injuries from torture and battle, plus a bout
with polio, accumulated for Bekas. He needed medical
attention. In pursuit of help, the hardened renegade
crossed the border into Iran.
It was a trek he soon came to regret.
Tuesday: Torture and freedom; the painful road to
Canada.
Grim
poetry
Bekas Garmiany, a former Kurdish soldier from Kirkuk,
Iraq, was raised in an Islamic home. He had already
moved to Canada when he heard a television report of
an al-Qaida offshoot's massacre of 47 Kurdish
Peshmarga. The camera caught the cries of a
6-year-old girl who witnessed the ambush, which took
place in the Kurdish village of Xely Hama. The
massacre took place in 2001.
Garmiany wrote a poem in Kurdish, but agreed to
translate it into English. Excerpts are below.
The Shower of Blood
It's raining, it's storming. I hear the rumble of
thunder from guns.
Blood flows like rain; I see the river of blood. ...
Come sit beside me. Look and see the mothers
screaming, reaching out for their children,
hopelessly.
Look at the Sheiks and the Mullahs: They are hanging
the daddies with their turbans.
Mothers, sisters, wives, all screaming, crying,
begging, pleading.
With the sword of Islam the men were maimed and
butchered, their eyes cut out.
I cry to the world, "Tragedy! Tragedy! Tragedy! Come
see, world, what the Vampires have done."
— Bekas Garmiany
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