Boomtown, U.S. Oil Plans in Kurdistan 19.2.2008
By Denis Johnson March 2008 Issue | |
|
| February 19, 2008
Imagine a country where Americans are beloved, mini-mansions are springing up, and oil bubbles forth unaided. Denis Johnson reports from the new wheeler-dealer capital of the Middle East and asks, Is this the future of Iraq or just a desert mirage?
When Ward VanLerberg left Kansas and headed off to the Middle Eastern city of Erbil to build 50 schools, he was careful to tell his family that he was going to the capital of “Kurdistan,” and all was well until his daughter googled his destination and announced to the family that Kurdistan is in Iraq. His wife wept, bidding him goodbye, and commenced waiting for him to return home in a coffin.
Three days following Mrs. Van’s last farewell, I run into Ward on the elevator at the International Hotel in Erbil, and he asks me if I’d care to join him at the buffet, and what I say is no. Did I fly 7,000 miles from Chicago to talk to a guy from Kansas City? I’m here to get a look at the 1,000-kilometer oil pipeline running from Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, to Ceyhan, Turkey, and this friendly construction contractor is not a pipeline. But then I feel sorry and ask if I can join him after all, and I tell him that when I left home, I bet my wife cried more than his.
This morning, the two deceased husbands sit in the Atrium Coffee Shop at the Erbil International Hotel (known locally as the Sheraton though it isn’t one), a 10-story establishment with three additional restaurants, a nightclub, and a buffet to rival any on earth. We eat cornflakes with yogurt and omelets to order. Fresh-squeezed O.J. on request. “My family just didn’t get it,” Ward says. “This place is happening. There’s no war here in Kurdistan. No war whatsoever.”
To be sure, security at the “Sheraton” is tight—first a baggage search at the checkpoint before the gated parking lot, next a metal detector and pat-down at the lobby’s entrance, where patrons absolutely have to check their weapons. Since a number of private security contractors stop in for the buffet or take meetings here or even live here in posh quarters—with 24-hour room service and a view, perhaps, of the excavation site from which will rise the future Nishtiman Shopping Mall,www.ekurd.net one of the largest in the Middle East, or of the American or Italian Villages (little-box, lawnless developments for future foreign residents) or a distant view of the yet-unnamed airport’s colossal terminal, also under construction—at any given time the desk drawer at the security station rattles with loaded handguns, and here and there in the lobby bulky, physically formidable young Euros sport empty holsters on their hips.
Bloody insurgency and sectarian strife tear at the country of Iraq, but Iraqi Kurdistan—three northern “governorates’’ under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government, with its own language, flag, and national anthem, its own Parliament and its own army—prospers relatively free of violence. | 
Luxury houses are being built on the main road north of Shaqlawa, Kurdistan
The metering station at the pipeline in Zakho
In Tawke, Safar Mohammed Omer stands beside a 40-foot-deep pool of oil. The land is leased to a Norwegian company for $300 an acre, but villagers get just a fraction of that | The Kurdistan region is open for business. With the buzz of dealmaking and the ringing cell phones and the smell of oil literally in the air, you get a sense, sitting in the Atrium, of being caught up in this planet’s biggest game, of touching the skirts of power and intrigue and life-changing wealth.
The Kurdistan region is Paul Wolfowitz’s wet dream: maybe not a beacon of democracy, but certainly a red-hot ember—peaceful, orderly, secular, democratic, wildly capitalist, and sentimentally pro-American—afloat on an ocean of oil.
Very well: We tend to overlook good news because it’s generally followed by bad news, and another month from my happy breakfast with Ward VanLerberg, Turkish bombers will run forays in this region’s empty northeast corner against the P.K.K., fugitive Kurd rebels who are at war with neighboring Turkey—little damage, but much booming. And before it gets better, the news will get even worse: by the end of January, the northern Iraqi city of Mosul will see plenty of violence, and U.S. commanders will declare it “Al Qaeda’s last urban stronghold.” Good news, bad news.
They call it “The Other Iraq,” and all of them—the Kurdish representative Qubad Talabani in Washington; Kurdish Regional Government president Massoud Barzani and his nephew, Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani; head of Foreign Relations Falah Mustafa Bakir; oil minister Ashti Hawrami; the man in a shop who won’t accept money from Americans in exchange for a kilo of apricots—want the news out: This is what Cheney-Bush wanted. That’s the news from here. This is free enterprise blooming—not “booming,” our driver Hameed insists carefully—in the mountains and desert of northern Iraq.
Hameed is a mustachioed Kurd with a bandit’s face who presents himself each morning in well-pressed sports apparel and drives us around in his Land Cruiser, listening to Persian pop tunes on his tape deck. His business card identifies him as a freelance “fixer,’’ but he may also get a paycheck from the Ministry of Foreign Relations and may have some connection with Intelligence. Or maybe not. Susan Meiselas thinks he does. Susan is my photographer on this assignment. Usually I’m half-broke and deliriously off-course from the first day of these journalistic ventures, but this time I get an expense account and a world-class “shooter’’—that’s what I get to call her. I requested Susan specifically. My impression was that she’d seen a bit of Kurdistan and might know a few folks who could point us to a pipeline.
Our purpose in engaging fixer Hameed is to get us out to look at oil operations of one kind or another. Whichever way we go, we’ll find them.
And that’s what we do every other day or so, passing first through the relentless checkpoints manned by camo-garbed recruits and then along nicely paved highways among a lot of vehicles going as fast as their drivers can push them, which varies from 30 k.p.h. to, let’s guess, 150 or maybe more. This calls for some fancy maneuvering on the part of Hameed, who keeps us well in the higher end of that range, leaving behind Erbil, believed by some historians to be the longest continuously inhabited city on earth, then entering the massive plain irrigated from the Tigris River and known as “Iraq’s Breadbasket,” the very farmland where, archaeologists believe, mankind first practiced agriculture.
On off days we get around Erbil meeting friendly folks and shooting them, and Susan asks about the “situation on the ground” and “future prospects” and shoots the whole city, while I take notes and wonder what happened to the war.
“It’s safe here, you can go anywhere”—by which they mean wherever you find yourself in this region the size of Maryland, you’ll be safe. But whether you can actually get through the checkpoints without papers from the Ministry of Security, that’s quite another matter. With its zealous and largely successful antiterrorist measures and its capitalist fever and as-yet-incomplete system of laws, the country serves up a blend of Orwellian,www.ekurd.net penitentiary-style security and Wild West laissez-faire: no speed limits, no driver’s insurance, no D.U.I. traps—there’s very little drinking and apparently zero drug abuse—loose regulations for firearms, and homesteaders’ rights to rural land; also—at least while the parliament wrestles with the question of government revenue—no taxes. Of any kind. But to board a plane leaving Erbil, passengers must pass two vehicle checkpoints, four electronic screenings and pat-downs, and a final bag-and-body search planeside. Among the ads on the airport terminal’s walls:
Khanzad American Village
“Welcome to Luxury”
American Village
The Most Exclusive Villas in Kurdistan
You can go anywhere if you have the right credentials. Stafford Clarry, a dapper American from Hawaii, formerly a United Nations worker and now the humanitarian-affairs adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government, spends his every free moment exploring the countryside in his Land Cruiser, sometimes with his 30-year-old son, Arjun. “In Kurdistan, the American effort is a success,” he says, then adds, “All right, yes, at least 50,000 have died in central Iraq. Yes, untold destruction, unbelievable mistakes, yes, all of that is true. But what you see around you in Kurdistan is also true. It doesn’t justify the destruction, but it has to be recognized as a fact.”
And the Kurds love Americans. Love, love. Investors swarm in from all over the globe, and foreigners are common in Erbil, but if you mention tentatively and apologetically that you’re American, a shopkeeper or café owner is likely to take you aside and grip your arm and address you with the passionate sincerity of a drunken uncle: “I speak not just for me but all of Kurdish people. Please bring your United States Army here forever. You are welcome, welcome. No, I will not accept your money today, please take these goods as my gift to America.”
On Monday, we talk to business folks and some of the government’s innumerable ministers. (Actually, the ministers number 43, and five of them are women.) The Kurdish Regional Government is secular, and neither the Kurdish Democratic Party nor its counterpart, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, pledge formal allegiance to Islam. The Kurds themselves are overwhelmingly Muslim, however. Younger Kurdish women dress like Europeans, but in smaller towns they retain their scarves, often only covering their shoulders, but also handy for ducking under when a bare head might seem disrespectful to the Prophet. At Erbil’s public recreation center, women use the pool at separate hours from men, and unmarried females have nowhere to go to amuse themselves, but that’s only until a private 90,000-square-foot women’s center that’s now under construction opens with its steam bath, Turkish bath, aerobics room, yoga room, workout room, and internet center.
At Zagros TV, one of Erbil’s five television stations, a news producer tells us that he’s free to be critical, but only of the government. “If we stray too far politically, we get a phone call. If we decided to criticize the Prophet Muhammad, we’d get a rocket through the roof.”
The Board of Investment offers free lots to investors who are ready to build for their businesses. Get it while you can. “I offer it now,’’ says Herish Muhamad, the board chairman, “but in a while, no more.’’
Twenty miles from town stands a power plant that’s expected to be sending 500 megawatts to Erbil by early spring. The project’s assistant director, Dliwer Arif, stands atop a 4.5-million-liter diesel tank, 55 feet in the air, and looks over the generators and turbines. A year ago, this was empty desert. Dliwer smiles with one tooth missing and says, “Yes. Because we are in a hurry. All of Kurdistan is in a hurry.’’ The diesel tank is being tested for leaks, the whole thing trembling. Susan points her camera over the 20 acres of buildings and men and machines, I embrace the railing, and Dliwer tests his cell phone. He’s very impressed with the reception this high up.
On Tuesday, we head southeast to the town of Taq Taq to watch men grinding and welding 10-meter-deep tanks for Topco, a Turkish oil company, at a field from which they expect to pump 70,000 barrels a day. Afterward, we drive three miles to the site of a future refining facility owned by the Kurdish government and a British oil concern: a stretch of ground leveled and graded in the midst of a vast natural expanse, with a handful of guards who live in trailers and keep it safe and who don’t know who the hell these Land Cruising visitors are supposed to be.
The commissioner in charge of the outpost makes it his business to pin down the source of our authority. We tell him the mayor is behind us. He flips his cell phone open, and a round of calls consumes the next hour or so. Between every two calls, the commissioner takes time to address his squad of 13 men, his eyes on fire. Susan prods Hameed to eavesdrop and translate: We’ve wandered into some kind of political drama here among the mayor, the police chief, and the local head of security, and its climax has arrived. Its climax, in fact, is us.
The commissioner grows so wildly exasperated that he can ultimately find no expression for his disgust other than to gather up his squad and their equipment, and they resign en masse, quitting their windswept, lonely, pointless outpost—nothing’s built here yet anyway—and trudging together toward the town around 15 kilometers across the desert, their faces toward the wind.
We watch them shrink into the distance, and I think, Yes, the magazine will want plenty of that, or a couple of paragraphs anyway, the entertaining Kurds with their fiery eyes—and they’re very entertaining—but I don’t think I like it. I think I’ve stumbled onto some news, not entertainment. The war in Iraq is an hour’s drive away, and for four years these comical Kurds have actually managed to keep it from coming any closer. Isn’t that news?
While Turks and Europeans hopped up on petroleum roll into Erbil to build a new city and become rich, the American Village waits to be filled with teachers, executives, and engineers. The U.S. is waiting for the word from somebody that it’s safe, maybe from the same people who told us Saddam Hussein was dangerous. There are Americans around but “fewer than 200 U.S. troops,” according to a K.R.G. fact sheet, and if that number is a fact, their whereabouts are only a guess. A few in Mosul, a few in Erbil. Not a one in sight.
Most Americans in Erbil work for the U.S. government, and most governments keep their people here under Baghdad-level security, behind high walls and concertina wire. The U.N. compound looks like a prison, as does both the Blackwater compound on Sabhat Street and the tiny enclosure, not many blocks away, where workers from the U.S. Agency for International Development live. The British diplomats hole up at the high-security Khanzad Hotel with a fleet of armored S.U.V.’s, and all these people venture out only under guard.
Even Ross Milosevic, an Australian, one of this city’s ample population of high-paid bodyguards, has to sign an insurance waiver just to get out of his hotel and sneak over to the Deutscher Hof Barbecue, which serves really terrible food but also imported beer, for dinner with a friend in the same line. Ross works for Tacforce International, a private outfit, and looks like an ad for bodyguards, clean-cut and earnest, while his friend runs security for the prime minister of Kurdistan and looks like a homeless Rambo with stringy hair to his shoulders but the same sleeve-busting musculature, and he’s American—17 years in the Green Berets, a stint training SWAT teams in New Jersey, and a résumé that grows vague as it approaches the present and from which he himself sort of disappears for a while before materializing at the right hand of the prime minister of Kurdistan with 500 troops to do his bidding. At the public level, he prefers to use an alias and doesn’t mind at all if it’s Rambo. He’s here on an open-ended contract with the K.R.G. to train the prime minister’s bodyguards.
This evening, Rambo orders beef Stroganoff, therefore so do I, to my considerable regret, and he sips a German beer I should get the name of, but I’m more interested in clocking his consumption, because I wonder if it’s possible for this specimen to chug down the calories and still look capable of pinning an elephant in four moves at the age of 47. He drinks only two of them while he and Ross—just one beer for Ross—discuss the world situation. “According to my contacts,” Rambo says, “the Israelis have six nuclear-tipped missiles raised from the silos and pointed at Iran and Syria. They launch before Bush leaves office.” Who are his contacts? “My brother-in-law.”
Ross and Rambo check out a table full of similar-looking men across the candlelit room. “Special ops team,” Rambo guesses. “They sound like Yanks, and their hair is short.” Ross isn’t so sure. You get the feeling that these guys are in their own movie and will suddenly challenge you to some humiliating physical contest. In his spare time, Rambo has been working to track down a young American girl kidnapped six years ago from a cruise liner off the coast of Venezuela. He’s trying to get Ross involved. Ross has spent time in Venezuela, and his wife is Venezuelan, but he says he can’t go back there because he’s been accused—falsely, he says—of working for the C.I.A.
Rambo himself seems just the sort to have some connection to the paratrooper-ninja wing of that very organization. “If a guy like me still worked for the U.S., like, for the C.I.A., he’d only be doing a little kite work now and then,” he says.
Kite work? “That’s where they can cut the string, and you float away and disappear.”
Rambo loves his job. He loves the Kurds as much as the Kurds love Americans, and he feels at home among them in what he calls the Wild West of the Middle East, but he thinks they’re pushing too hard to get rich while letting the basics—agriculture, infrastructure, education—fall behind. Here in Erbil, even the head of the prime minister’s bodyguards gets electric power from the city only four hours out of 24, and Rambo is missing his daily allotment while he eliminates every morsel from his plate. The rationing should end when the new power plant comes on line, but he still thinks the country’s leaping ahead with both feet in the air and no feet on the ground. The shopping center downtown represents three times the investment in the power plant. With their labor force heavily subsidized by make-work government jobs and their agricultural base and infrastructure wiped away by years of Saddam, the Kurds have plenty to do if they want a truly self-sufficient nation.
It’s a land definitely on its way, but to what? “Basically,’’ Rambo says, “the model is Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates: oil-rich, almost entirely dependent on imported expertise, imported goods, imported workers. I wish I had a hand clicker to count the number of times each day I heard someone mention that place. That’s all you hear about. Dubai, Dubai, Dubai.’’
Today, mainly security and government workers constitute the American presence in Erbil, but the others will get here. Hunt Oil of Dallas now conducts seismic tests around Kurdistan, and it won’t be long before other U.S. oil interests turn up. The oil is here, and we’ve known it for a long time. Britain knew it in the 1920s, when they drew boundaries on a map that created a British-administered Iraq, making sure it included this region and its petroleum. Kurdistan had actually been promised independence, but no way. “Oil,” a Kurdish saying runs, “made Kurdistan Iraqi.”
How much oil? Depending on who’s counting, Iraq as a whole has anywhere from 115 billion barrels of “proven” reserves down to half that much, which would indicate nothing’s really proven. A fifth of that or more lies in the Kurdish region. That puts Kurdistan’s reserves well ahead of the U.S.’s total reserves and equal to all of Asia’s. George Yacu, a Chaldean Christian Kurd who served as a technical adviser for Iraq’s national oil company for nearly 30 years, seems to find the question “how much” technically interesting but scientifically unanswerable, beyond his saying, “But nobody knows until they drill.”
On Wednesday, Susan and I have dinner with George. Since his retirement, he has run his own corporation, Sumer Petroleum Services. His family lives in Chicago these days, and he’s applying for U.S. citizenship. They all lived in Baghdad until life there became impossible, and he still has a house in the city, with a library of rare books and manuscripts, “if it still exists.” When things calm down, he’ll move the collection to his childhood village of Fishkabour, which is here in Kurdistan, just across the Tigris River from Syria.
It’s hard to imagine George as some kind of villager. He’s in his seventies now, tall and well-dressed, with a large, sad, historic face; formal and gracious in his manner, generous in his conversation, not to say voluble; and with a true kindness emanating from his depths. In 1975, Saddam gave the largely Christian population of George’s village 12 hours to clear out and then let his pilots use it “for bombing practice,” George says.
Who are these people? Who goes through this madness and comes out—not exactly laughing; George is certainly no rib-poking joker—but kindly, open, unafraid? And I actually ask him the question, but he only shrugs as if the answer’s obvious, or so utterly beyond the experience of anyone who has to ask that he wouldn’t even try to respond. His village has been rebuilt, and George keeps a new home there now, but he speaks of its former days as of a paradise: the orchards and the vineyards and the Tigris River going by, all of it gone now but the river and the ruins and the new buildings, and it’s hard, without risking rudeness, to steer him back to the subject of petroleum, which is, after all, what makes Kurdistan interesting to America.
We’ve been involved in the Middle East since 1945, exclusively because it’s where the oil is. Although the rhetoric, starting with Truman’s in 1946 down to Bush’s in today’s paper, has been rendered in apocalyptic terms—war between good and evil, the clash of civilizations—if the oil were to move miraculously someday to another point on the globe, so would our involvement. But the oil’s under Iraq, and according to George Yacu, 38 percent of it lies in the Kurdish region in natural reservoirs less than 3,000 meters below the surface, some as shallow as 600 meters down—easy to get to and easy to refine, compared with, say, the recent strike off the Brazilian coastline, which is under a mile of ocean and another mile of rock, or most of Canada’s reserves, which are mixed with sand.
The Norwegian company DNO recently started three rigs drilling in its new fields near the Turkish border and has been pumping out great gobs of the stuff. DNO and Adox/Genel (a one-rig consortium of Swedes, Turks, and Canadians) have been the first to draw petroleum from Kurdish ground. Plenty of others expect to follow. When I arrived on Sunday, the K.R.G. had so far signed seven foreign companies, Hunt Oil included, to exploration contracts. By the middle of the week, another five had signed on, and by the end of the month, the total was up to 20.
Whatever they’ve found or expect to find, they’re not telling. Before DNO’s drill shafts went down, the company listed a public relations person on its website; by November the name had disappeared, and Magne Normann, DNO’s vice president, made it clear they weren’t entertaining visitors without a lot of vetting first.
So how much oil? For 17 years under Saddam and through one uprising and war after another, Iraq has pumped out only a quarter of its proven petroleum capacity while Saudi Arabia, at full capacity, is now suspected to have peaked and entered the declining phase of its oil-producing history. In any case, commentators as disparate as leftist Noam Chomsky and defense-and-resource expert Michael Klare have called what’s under the ground in the Middle East—including Kurdistan—the biggest material prize in human history.
On Thursday, we pay four bucks a gallon for gasoline. Although service stations in recent months started pumping again, the streetside vendors still sell gas and pink diesel from 20-liter jugs stacked by the highways in barricades they can scarcely see over. Hameed prefers to fill his Land Cruiser’s tank from a legitimate pump. Whoever you buy it from, it’s cash only. The Kurds accept Iraqi money, but they deeply cherish those U.S. Ben Franklin hundreds.
We go north and approach the city of Mosul under a linty-looking haze from its cement plants and brick factories, but we drive around it. “Too many Arabs there,” Hameed explains. “They kill you just for fun.” We’re making excellent time. Susan’s a little irked that we didn’t give Mosul an even wider berth. “We were told not to go through the Mosul checkpoint,” she says.
“No,” Hameed answers, “in the morning it’s safe.”
“But we agreed we’d take the other one. Why did you take this one?”
“Susan, don’t you trust me? I’m never going to endanger you, because I’m never going to endanger myself.”
“But, Hameed, when we discuss these things, let’s stick to the plan.”
“Susan, please, I’m sticking to the plan. The plan is to get you to the pipeline.” Their delivery is very amiable.
Today, we’ll actually reach the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. There’s a metering station in the northwest corner of Kurdish territory, near the Turkish and Syrian borders and also near DNO’s new drilling site.
On Friday, a gallon of gas is down 40 cents from the day before. Hameed is philosophical: good news, bad news. Tomorrow could see a rise.
In our two days up near the Turkish border, we hear only two explosions. A Kurdish army recruit says it’s just Americans blowing up dud ordnance from previous campaigns. He hasn’t actually seen any U.S. soldiers; he’s only heard they’re around somewhere.
At this metering facility two miles from the Turkish border and three miles from Syria, engineers keep track of the oil flowing north through the 1,000-kilometer Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline. In my uninformed imagination, I’d conjured one monstrous, mythic steel artery dominating the desert and shrinking in its journey toward the horizon, but this is all that’s visible: a chain-link-fenced enclosure no more colossal than your average Texaco service station, and inside it a 40-inch pipe and a second one 46 inches in diameter, coming up from underground for a distance of 80 feet at a height of maybe six inches, and then diving back under the dirt. There’s a checkpoint, a barracks for the guards, and a distant view of Turkish mountains.
Two hundred yards from the facility, DNO supervises two 4.5-million-liter tanks, to which it pumps oil from its strike a few kilometers east. A half-million barrels a day coming from farther south, outside the Kurdish region, pass through the pipelines just a shout across the road, but DNO is forced to send its oil into Turkey on tanker trucks. The pipeline is administered by the central Iraqi government, and they’re not ready to recognize the legitimacy of DNO’s Kurdish-sanctioned operation. Its pipes are off-limits to DNO and all Kurdish oil. A DNO electrical engineer who won’t give his name, a young Frenchman here to look after the big tanks, says the bickering parties will work it all out; the parties always do when there’s money to be made. He speaks about the richness of the strike as if it’s something to inspire worship; there’s that kind of tone in his voice: “I’ve been around, and I’ve only seen one bigger.” He can’t let us visit the drilling site. “You want to see Kurdish oil? Just go a few kilometers to the village of Tawke. You’ll see oil.”
Safar Mohammed Omer, son of the former mayor and cousin of the current mayor of Tawke, takes us to a region of dun-colored crags and flats to show us black petroleum seeping out of the rocks and trickling down the hillside, and even a small creek that bubbles out of a black spring, two feet across at its widest, but it amounts to an actual slowly trickling black creek of oil. He points to another, and another, and those over there—for a thousand years, Safar says, villagers have been using this oil to start their fires.
He shows us a hand-dug well—a pond, really—about a dozen feet across, bubbling in a desultory fashion. When he was a boy, the villagers had a small distillery set up here and manufactured their own diesel. Thirteen such hand-dug wells, he says, surround the neighborhood, going between 12 and 40 meters into the earth, and on hot summer days an aqua-blue smoke rises from these reservoirs. This morning, the breeze carries a stench like that of an urban roofing operation.
Safar Mohammed dresses in the traditional style known as Kurmancî, in a loose oversuit, turban, and wide sash, exactly as he might have if he’d lived hundreds of years ago. The village in which his family is prominent consists of a few dirt streets and concrete buildings, skinny chickens wandering around. Sewage trickling along hand-gouged gutters. Oil bubbling up 100 yards from the place.
What does Safar see coming from all this? Is he going to live in a mansion with his chickens and mess with the heads of all the cultured folks, like the Clampetts on The Beverly Hillbillies?
Hameed seems to have trouble translating the question. “These villagers,” Hameed says, “they don’t think like that. He just thinks about today.”
But come on, this man is the Jed Clampett of Kurdistan. How does he think the DNO oil strike will change his future?
“It won’t.”
Safar may be the Jed Clampett of Kurdistan, but the fortunes of the village don’t quite compare. Safar says that the farmers hereabouts agreed to rent their land to DNO for roughly $300 an acre annually, but the tenant is casual about payment, and when all is said and done, the locals get about $13 a month. This oil may buy a mansion, but somebody else will live in it.
On the way back to Erbil, we pass the Harir Flats and the runway built for Saddam’s air force—the first runway used by the coalition forces in the latest war. Money from the new Kurdish construction projects has found its way out into the desert: Already the heights overlooking the old runway bristle with the castles of the newly rich, the tender beginnings of a Middle Eastern Beverly Hills.
Susan has kept it something of a secret, but here in Kurdistan she’s famous, thanks to her book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, a compendium of documents and photos weighing in at five pounds, and we’ve been invited to rendezvous with some of her admiring friends. We’re going to be “guested,” is the term Susan uses, and I detect a kind of apology in the way she says it, and a tiny hint of hopelessness I don’t understand any more than a child understands when the nurse says it’s time for “a little hypodermic.”
In the town of Zakhu, on the Turkish border, at a compound of impressive stone buildings called K.D.P. location No. 8, the Kurdish Democratic Party is giving away 80 red-and-black wheelchairs manufactured in Port Washington, New York, brand-new and shining in the afternoon sun. These gifts from Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish president, are conveyed one at a time by the president’s second cousin Karwan Barzani, who sits in the courtyard in an easy chair behind a big desk, among a number of officials seated on couches. A man with a microphone calls out names, and through the course of the afternoon recipients with every manner of paralysis, incompleteness, or demobilizing disfiguration of their frames come forward with great ceremony: little children and old ladies and legless war veterans, each carried by two or three relatives toward the shiny new conveyances and each putting an ink thumbprint on a registry page and another on a large certificate, which is theirs to keep as proof of ownership.
Zakhu is a Turkish border crossing. Beside its main highway, cargo trucks wait in a line four kilometers long to pass back empty into Turkey, having unloaded everything from chicken feed, fresh produce, and canned goods to appliances, construction materials, and machines—almost everything, in fact, that the Kurds spend their money on. With $5 billion a year in goods and construction contracts coming south into Kurdistan, nobody’s worried that the Turkish army massed on the other side will actually invade this country and put a glitch in all that commerce just to spank a few rebels. Even when the bombing raids against the P.K.K. begin, the pilots steer clear of the highways and the pipeline.
After the ceremony, we adjourn with a couple dozen of Karwan Barzani’s friends and relatives to a big hall, where we sit in chairs against the walls and sip chai, a double shot glass of tea with an inch of sugar at the bottom, and I’m introduced to the smooth young Karwan and his jolly uncle Dara, both of them great friends of Susan’s and now, I gather, great friends of mine too. We have the tea and some fruit and some talk, and mainly we talk about dinner, where it’s going to be, what are the alternatives—these guys are Barzanis, members of the family currently in power, and dinner can be whatever we want wherever in Kurdistan we want it—and that takes a while, and no decision is made, but we’re all starving, so let’s go, man, and we and an entourage of a dozen or more people form our vehicles into a convoy, and we go.
These, I repeat, are Barzanis, family to the legendary leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani, who fought for Kurdish independence for decades against the British and then against Saddam and whose portrait hangs on the wall of every Kurdish government office. These are the cousins of the current Kurdish president, Massoud Barzani, who in 1991 held off a division of Saddam’s troops, helicopters, and tanks in the Kore Valley with just 150 of his bodyguards, known as peshmerga (“those who face death”). Three days ago, Rambo, the prime minister’s security man, asked me, “Have you ever dealt with the Barzanis?” and did not expect an answer. In the 1980s, in order to deal with these Barzanis once and for all, Saddam Hussein began construction of a power dam intended to flood the entire Barzan Valley and all its villages, submerging and erasing, in a biblical style of retribution, the very origins of his enemies.
We are dealing with the Barzanis, which right now means traveling at homicidal speed behind their big, black Hummer (pronounced “Hammer” hereabouts) from Zakhu to the mountain city of Dahuk, still discussing the dinner possibilities by cell phone. I can hear Karwan’s stereo through Susan’s earpiece playing something with a lot of bass. “The Hammer will never lose me,” Hameed promises, and in his voice I hear the tribal Kurd beneath the city Kurd, and I know he means not even death, not all our bloody deaths, will separate him from the Hummer.
We have dinner at the Shandakha Hotel in Dahuk, in a private room with a 23-inch TV playing. As we enter, we find the owner and entire staff lined up to greet us. The place has an opulent five-star atmosphere. The johns have automatic-sensor towel dispensers.
I’m too busy with dinner to take notes, chomping resolutely, anxious to make a good showing in what feels more than a little like a pie-eating contest because I’m sitting next to portly, ravenous Uncle Dara, who preaches gluttony: more of these olives, more hummus and baba ghanoush, one more hubcap-size piece of the best flat bread in all of Kurdistan, and now some beef kebab—never pork—and turkey and chicken in a large bowl of broth with an equally large bowl of rice. Dara cries, “Free-range turkey! And the chicken is free-range!” I’ve seen chickens ranging free in some alarmingly squalid corners the past few days, but this is delicious. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of discussion about what to watch on the satellite TV. Hameed wants Tom and Jerry cartoons, but he’s only a fixer, so we watch the news in Arabic. For these Kurds, the news is good. The times are good.
Today’s a lucky day, and these Kurds know what to do with it. We go to Dream City, once the site of a military barracks under Saddam, now a 25-acre amusement park with all the usual attractions: the Crazy Disco tilt-a-whirl and the bumper cars and the Ferris wheel, but also billiards and bowling, a swimming pool, an arcade, and a “4-D” movie theater. That means a 3-D establishment with extra effects, a floor that tilts and lurches and a wind that blows past as the film rushes you along tracks through a spooky labyrinth called The Tomb of the Mummy and a mist that wets your face as you come out beside a cataract, never actually moving except as the platform shifts the seats. Our hosts and their friends and bodyguards, in their expensive suits, with their holstered sidearms and yellow 3-D glasses, can’t get enough of this one. Karwan buys everyone tickets to a second show, The Death Mine of Solomon.
Followed by billiards, followed by bowling. The billiards don’t quite amuse: The balls won’t go in the holes. It turns out we’re mainly here for the bowling anyway; it’s catching on all over the Kurdish region, and in this early phase, if you care to, you can witness its practitioners using familiar equipment in the development of an entirely new sport, keeping no score, nobody caring whose turn it is, whirling and grabbing the very next ball on the server—no need to wait for your own, any ball will do—and then an approach best called “the charge of the Kurds” and a kind of almost baseball-mound-worthy windup and a delivery somewhere between that of discus and shot put, the evident objective being to keep the ball airborne for as far as possible in its journey, its lonely flight, downlane.
And then to the Dream City “supermarket,” the first department store in Kurdistan, erected in 2003, about half the size of a Wal-Mart and offering a little of everything. The two escalators are running tonight, both the up and the down. In the daytime they’re switched off, to save power. The Barzanis and friends move around the place languidly, handling and discussing every item for sale and buying presents for everyone they’ve ever known. Then we all gather out front for the loading of the many purchases and for a small conference. They’ve had us now for about 10 hours, but the discussion seems to center on our plans for tomorrow, the people we must meet, the beautiful mountains we must visit, our breakfast, our lunch, our dinner.
And I’m thinking, Yes, this is the climax of the piece right here, affluent Kurds clowning around, the magazine’s going to love this entertaining stuff, so why does that make me feel like a pimp in a burgundy velvet suit? Who are these people who keep Al Qaeda from infiltrating their homeland while the U.S. Army scratches its head and watches the rest of Iraq fall to pieces? And why haven’t the New York Times and CNN taken notice? Here’s a guess, just one possibility: because journalists are pimps for war, my friends, in burgundy velvet suits. And that’s the news from here.
We all stay at the Dilshad Palace Hotel, the most wonderful hotel in Dahuk, surely five-star, with plastic trees out front covered with plastic blossoms; newly built, and open tonight for the first time in history. We sit together in the lobby for chai and chai and animated small talk and chai before I resolve to commit the rudeness of saying good night. Good night takes a while. You have to circle in slowly on the concept—about 30 minutes.
The bellboy assures me that we’re the first customers of the Dilshad Palace. I have to teach him how to operate my door’s card lock. The next day, Dara tells me that after I left, I missed some fun: An elevator jammed and caught him between floors. “I was just about to fire my pistol a few times when it started to move again. They have to work these things out!” He seems disappointed, but I can’t tell whether it’s because the hotel’s equipment failed him or because he didn’t get to fire his gun in an elevator.
portfolio.com Top |
Kurd Net does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news information on this page |
® 