Violence and
suffering disfigure Iraq on a daily basis. But not everywhere is
blighted. The Kurdish region is largely peaceful, and cities are
beginning to thrive. So after decades of bloodshed, could its
people's goal of self-determination finally be realised? Patrick
Cockburn reports on an unexpected consequence of the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein
Published: 22 June 2006
In northern Iraq, stretching in a crescent from Iran to Syria, is
one the strangest states to emerge in the world over the past half
century. In theory, Iraqi Kurdistan is not independent but it is
more powerful than most members of the United Nations. It has an
efficient army. It remains part of Iraq but Baghdad has little
influence on its actions. An old saying in the region claimed
bitterly that "the Kurds have no friends but the mountains". But
today its leaders make and break Iraqi governments. Once the White
House and Downing Street ignored their existence, but now they are
received with acclaim as important allies by George Bush and Tony
Blair.
The struggle of the Iraqi Kurds for self-determination has been
longer and bloodier than that of any nationalist movement outside
Vietnam. It began under the British in the 1920s when "Bomber"
Harris, later the commander of the air offensive against Germany,
practised his art against Kurdish villages. Setting the tone for
Baghdad's treatment of the Kurds over the rest of the century, he
wrote with approval in 1924: "They now know that within 45 minutes,
a full-size village can be practically wiped and a third of its
inhabitants killed or injured."
Saddam Hussein proved an apt pupil. He imprisoned or forced hundreds
of thousands of Kurds to flee when their independence movement
collapsed in 1975 after being treacherously abandoned by the Shah of
Iran and the US. Repression of the four or five million Iraqi Kurds
reached a peak of cruelty and violence in the late 1980s: Saddam
Hussein's forces slaughtered 182,000 of them and destroyed 3,800 of
their villages as he crushed another uprising during the Iran-Iraq
war.
To this day a frequent sight in the Kurdish countryside are the
sinister mounds of earth covering the remains of towns and villages
whose inhabitants were deported or killed. What Saddam Hussein did
in Kurdistan was not total extermination, like Hitler against the
Jews, but the scale of butchery and destruction came close to that
inflicted by the Nazis in Russia and Poland.
At first glance, all this has changed. The Iraqi Kurds were the
somewhat accidental beneficiaries of George Bush's determination to
overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003. This could have been a disaster
for them. They had enjoyed quasi-independence under American air
protection after the failed uprising of 1991. Then, to their horror,
Kurdish leaders suddenly found 12 years later that the US army was
about to invade Iraq from the north accompanied by 40,000 Turkish
troops. This would have ended their de facto autonomy. They were
only saved when the Turkish parliament astonished American diplomats
by rejecting the invasion plan. Overnight the Kurds became America's
only reliable allies inside Iraq and this has remained true.
Today, as war rages though the rest of Iraq, the only peaceful parts
of the country are the three Kurdish provinces of Arbil,
Sulaimaniyah and Dohuk. Kurdistan's hotels are packed with well-off
refugees from Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, who have fled there to
escape kidnappers and murderers. In the Iraqi capital, despite the
billions of dollars supposedly spent on reconstruction, there is
scarcely a crane to be seen on the skyline. In the cities of Arbil
and Sulaimaniyah, in sharp contrast, the cranes rise above
construction sites in almost every street. Doctors who dare not work
elsewhere in Iraq are opening smart new clinics. Even prostitutes
from Baghdad have moved to Kurdistan, complaining that it is too
dangerous to ply their trade in the capital.
The Kurdish gains are not just within the three northern provinces
that they have ruled for 15 years. The Kurdish area of control is
now much bigger. As the Iraqi army collapsed in April 2003, the
peshmerga - Kurdish soldiers - advanced into cities, towns and
villages from which their people had been driven long before. In the
space of a few days they were able to occupy Kirkuk city and the
nearby oilfields.
Suddenly there were peshmerga in the streets of Mosul, a mostly
Sunni Arab city of 1.7 million people but with a large Kurdish
minority. Kurdish forces were able to extend control to towns like
Khanaqin, north-east of Baghdad, which Saddam Hussein had given to
Arab settlers.
The power of the Kurds has not just increased geographically. The
President of Iraq, chosen by parliament in Baghdad last year, is
Jalal Talabani, for many years the leader of the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK), which is in control of eastern Kurdistan. The very
able foreign minister of Iraq since 2003 has been Hoshyar Zebari,
the former spokesman of the other main Kurdish party, the Kurdistan
Democratic Party (KDP). Paradoxically, the most effective members of
the Iraqi government in Baghdad are Kurds who at heart would like to
have a legally independent state of their own. The best units in the
new Iraqi army and security forces consist of Kurdish soldiers.
But for all their outward show of self-confidence, many Kurds worry
about their future. Could this be the high tide of their fortunes?
For the moment their position is strong, though this could change.
They are firmly allied to the US, but Washington has shown no qualms
about letting them down in the past. As it withdraws its troops from
Iraq it may once again look to its old ally Turkey, with its large
Kurdish community and visceral suspicion of the Iraqi Kurds.
Again, the Kurds are strong because the Arabs of Iraq, the Sunni and
Shia communities, together making up 80 per cent of the population,
are effectively fighting a civil war in and around Baghdad. But what
would happen if they came together in future? Would not one of their
first priorities be to rein in the Kurds, who are now so powerful?
Of course, the opposite might happen and Iraq might break up. But
this would not necessarily be good news for the Kurds. Already they
are being forced to flee Baghdad and Sunni Arab provinces where they
are a small minority vulnerable to assassins and death squads.
I first encountered the Kurds at the nadir of their fortunes in
1975, when Saddam Hussein had taken over Kurdistan after Iran, in
return for Iraqi territorial concessions, withdrew support for the
Kurdish national movement. His act of betrayal did not do the Shah
much good. Three years later I was in Tehran where Ayatollah
Khomeini had just overthrown him. I drove two days to the Iranian
border with Iraq to meet Massoud Barzani, today president of the
Kurdistan Regional Government. He was holding a meeting to try to
reorganise the Kurdish forces.
Their prospects looked bleak enough to me. They were fighting a
wholly ruthless leader, Saddam Hussein, with a powerful army and
ever-increasing oil wealth. The Iraqi leader had yet to reveal that
he had an infinite ability to shoot himself in the foot by
exaggerating his own strength and underestimating that of his
opponents. Having convinced himself that Ayatollah Khomeini's regime
would be a soft target, he attacked Iran in 1980 and the Iranians
retaliated by giving support to the Iraqi Kurds.
The Iran-Iraq war ended with an even more terrible defeat for the
Kurds. Those who were not killed saw their country devastated. The
uprising of 1991, in the wake of Saddam Hussein's defeat in Kuwait,
swept away Saddam's rule in a few days. Kurdish soldiers captured
Kirkuk. But as the Iraqi army counter-offensive gathered strength,
the entire Kurdish population fled to the borders of Turkey and
Iran. A wave of sympathy provoked by their flight forced the US to
provide air cover, allowing a de facto Kurdish state to begin to
come into being.
Saddam Hussein believed he could leave Kurdistan alone because it
was isolated, war-torn and impoverished. In this he was not wrong.
In 1996 I visited a village called Penjwin, not far from Iraq's
border with Iran. The Kurdish villagers, living on the verge of
starvation, had taken up the world's most dangerous occupation to
feed their families.
Around Penjwin were some of the largest minefields in the world,
laid by the Iraqi army at the height of the Iran-Iraq war. One of
these mines was called the Valmara, an Italian jumping mine which
looks like a miniature Dalek with horns on its head. Touch one of
these prongs and a small charge makes it hop into the air before
exploding at waist height, sending hundreds of lethal ball-bearings
in all directions.
Such was the poverty in Penjwin, however, that villagers would
defuse the Valmara to earn a few dollars by selling the explosives
it contained and the aluminium in which they were wrapped. The local
cemetery was full of the newly dug graves of men who had made some
small slip while dismantling the mine; others had somehow survived
with the loss of a hand or a leg and could be seen limping down the
village street.
I always thought of Penjwin as the epitome of the misery to which
the Kurds had been reduced by decades of war. But the courage and
ingenuity needed to harvest the minefields was also a sign that they
would survive the disasters inflicted on them. When I went back to
Penjwin in 2005, parts of the village were being rebuilt. Minefields
were still visible beside the road, their presence indicated by
metal sticks with red triangles on top, but many had been cleared.
The villagers said they were no longer so poor that they had to
defuse the Valmaras to make money. They lived instead on the
government ration, herding sheep and, when night fell, on the
flourishing smuggling trade with Iran a few miles down the road.
Kurdistan was for decades the most dangerous part of Iraq. Getting
there was always a challenge. When I went a few weeks before the
invasion in 2003, I had to cross the Tigris from Syria secretly in a
tin boat with an outboard motor.
Three years later it is far less nerve-racking to travel to Arbil,
the Kurdish capital, than Baghdad. Its newly built airport is
already overstretched, with 60 to 70 flights a week to and from
Europe and the rest of the Middle East. When I flew there from
Amsterdam last month my main anxiety was loss of my luggage as the
small airport tried to cope with the influx of passengers. It was
all very different from Baghdad, where the burnt-out cars used by
suicide bombers lie beside the airport road.
At first, Arbil, the world's oldest inhabited city with a population
of about a million, appears normal compared with the rest of Iraq.
New houses and apartment blocks are being built across the city.
People drive late at night without worrying about curfews. The lawn
of the main International Hotel, invariably called the Sheraton, is
covered with tables crowded with diners listening to live music.
It takes a little time to realise that not everything is quite as
seems. My hotel, for instance, had more than a dozen flags,
including those of Brazil and Morocco, fluttering from poles outside
its main door. Few visitors noticed that the only flag missing was
that of Iraq, the country in which the hotel is standing.
In theory, the administration of Kurdistan, once deeply divided
between the warring mini-states of the KDP and PUK, has united since
8 May 2006 into a single integrated government, the Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG). There is a joint 32-member cabinet. The
degree of unity is difficult to judge, but at least the Kurds have
presented a united front to the rest of Iraq and the world.
Kurdistan is not wholly sealed off from the problems of the rest of
Iraq. It is still connected to the Iraqi electrical grid, and
electricity is in permanently short supply. Every few hundred yards
along the road are young men selling petrol in clear plastic
containers. The fuel smuggled in from Iran, considered to be of
premium quality, is coloured pink, and that from Iraqi refineries
has a clear colour. Substitution of inferior fuel is frequent.
Drivers suspiciously smell and rub a sample of petrol through their
hands to see if it has been watered down and colour added with a
spoonful of red paint before sale.
I may have too rosy a view of Kurdistan because I have too vivid a
memory of the bloodiness of its recent past. I half-unconsciously
compare every city and town with the way they looked after the the
wars of the recent past. My hotel in Arbil, for instance, was fought
for by the KDP and PUK during the civil wars between them in the
1990s. Its walls were scarred by machine gun and rocket fire. Arbil
was a city that lived with fear. At the start of the war to
overthrow Saddam Hussein, most of the city's population fled into
the country because they thought he would fire chemical weapons into
Arbil.
Set in a green plain surrounded by snow-streaked mountains,
Sulaimaniyah in eastern Kurdistan was always a prettier city than
Arbil. For months now the centre of town has been blocked by a
half-built flyover on which work is proceeding at a snail's pace.
Local people speak witheringly of the high-level official
corruption. Possibly they are right. But the present is at least
better than the past. The mountains overlooking Sulaimaniyah are
impressive, but I remember, after the Iraqi army recaptured the city
in 1991, standing in their foothills beside an excavator that was
unearthing a mass grave filled with the bodies of Iraqi security
men. They had been slaughtered by the peshmerga.
Whenever I forget the violence of the recent past in Kurdistan,
something happens to remind me. I was driving earlier this summer to
a resort called Shaqlawa in the mountains above Arbil. The driver of
the car had been pointing out various points of interest on the road
when he added, without changing his tone of voice, "over there my
father and elder brother were shot dead by the Iraqi army during the
uprising".
The great majority of Iraqi Kurds would like to be independent, but
most are probably resignedly aware of the great dangers involved.
They have also become ever more different from other Iraqis. Fewer
and fewer speak Arabic. When I asked a hundred peshmerga how many
spoke the language as well as Kurdish, only three men put up their
hands. Kurdistan also stands out as being broadly secular in a
country that is becoming more Islamic. Nevertheless, the Kurdish
leaders know that they must have an alliance with the Shia religious
parties inside Iraq and the support of the US outside it. Even if
Iraq becomes more and more of a geographical expression, the Kurds
need to be part of it.
Most Iraqi Arabs accept that the three northern, wholly Kurdish
provinces should enjoy autonomy close to independence. The real
differences arise in defining Kurdistan. The Kurds intend to roll
back half a century of ethnic cleansing, above all in the oil
province of Kirkuk, over which they have de facto military and
political control. They want Arab settlers to return to their homes
elsewhere in Iraq and Kurdish refugees to replace them. By 31
December 2007 there should be a referendum under which Kirkuk can
vote to join the Kurdistan Regional Government.
The fate of Kirkuk province has traditionally been the single issue
on which agreements between past governments in Baghdad and the
Kurds have always broken. At the moment the Kurds have the strength
to get most of what they want, though they might have to cede
control of the heavily Arab western part of the province. But their
determination to include Kirkuk in their Kurdish super-region
convinces Arabs that, whatever the Kurds say, they are bent on
practical independence.
In the meantime, violence in Kirkuk is escalating. On 13 June, four
suicide bombs killed at least 16 people in the city. Arab militiamen
are establishing a presence. When I visited Kirkuk earlier in the
year Kurdish security had arrested a doctor called Luay al-Tai at
the local Republican hospital, who confessed to murdering 43
patients, mostly wounded security men and soldiers. The member of an
insurgent cell, Dr Luay had injected them with lethal drugs or
switched off their oxygen supply over a five-month period up to
February 2006.
Economically, Kurdistan is still tied to Baghdad, from which it
receives 17 per cent of Iraq's oil revenues. Under the new
constitution, oilfields developed in future will be managed by the
regional government. The KRG has already signed agreements with
several foreign oil companies to explore for oil inside the three
northern provinces, and some oil has been discovered. Old oilfields,
mostly in desperate need of repair and maintenance, will be managed
by the oil ministry in Baghdad.
For the Kurds, it is all the most delicate of balancing acts. They
want an Iraqi state to prevent their becoming too vulnerable to
Turkey or Iran. Iranian artillery recently fired 2,000 shells across
the border with Iraqi Kurdistan to drive this point home. Within
Iraq the Kurds need an agreement with the Shia, who make up 60 per
cent of the country's population. Kurdish leaders are intent on
keeping close to the US as foreign guarantor against the Iranians
and Turks.
So far the Kurdish leaders have been astute in dealing with the
myriad threats facing them and, thanks to a certain amount of luck,
successful. They also know that failure would once again exact a
terrible price from their people.
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