I'm fortunate to have the opportunity to work in Iraq, and occasionally post diaries on Daily Kos. These diaries are an effort to provide more context to the current conflict, from a little closer and in a quieter tone of voice. The media primarily concentrates on Baghdad, and Iraq's peripheral regions do not get much attention. This journal entry covers two taxi rides, one with a taciturn driver across SE Turkey, and the other with a talkative driver across Iraqi Kurdistan.
We left the city of Diyarbakir in Turkey and drove to the Iraqi border in a taxi, through arid limestone hills clothed with scrub oaks and small grape vineyards. We passed occasional small stone villages, many of which were destroyed during the last couple decades of conflict between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish government. This is a forgotten war, one that draws little press attention but which has caused huge suffering in this region.
I was groggy from lack of sleep and woke up briefly to notice some parked cars and several men standing around beside the road, one of them holding a Kalashnikov. The driver said "Asaysh" which means "Security" in Kurdish. They were Turkish plain clothes security forces, perhaps preparing to arrest someone in the nearby village. At any rate, it was clear that they were involved in some sort of action related to the conflict with the PKK.
The PKK is on the US government list of terrorist organizations, and with that one label, the Bush Administration disengages from any discussion with Turkey about finding solutions to the underlying political problems fueling the war. The insurgency has already cost 30,000 lives and lasted at least three decades. I avoid discussing politics with the driver, but he is from Silope, and like nearly everyone else in the Kurdish towns and cities in this part of Turkey, he is at least somewhat sympathetic to the PKK. His wife's uncle is serving 15 years for alleged association with the PKK. Just as in southern Lebanon, the US has mistaken a sub-national political movement with considerable local legitimacy for a "terrorist" group, with no understanding of the conflict or the range of individuals associated with the movement, be they members of the local economic elite or idealistic youth, fighters who target Turkish military or violent sociopaths who target civilians. Lumping all PKK sympathizers into this meaningless "terrorist" rubric masks a wider political problem that requires a political solution. Clinton and Blair managed this in nothern Ireland, but the sort of pragmatic thinking that slowed the violence there is no longer popular in Washington or in the Middle East.
I know this driver well, and although we only talk obliquely about politics, I know he is not in favor of PKK attacks on civilians. He doesn't want to see young Turkish soldiers die. He knows from his entire lifetime's experience that Turkey has serious unresolved human and civil rights problems that will fuel this conflict for many years to come. His perspective is much more subtle and reasonable than the US government's position on "terrorism", not that this should be a surprise to anyone reading DailyKos.
Turkish actions have a direct and noticeable effect on popular support for the PKK. Over the last five years or so, the Turkish government has maintained a relatively lighter security profile and in general, human rights conditions improved. Many people sympathetic to the PKK began to see more of a future for themselves in Turkey. Then, just as is the case with Lebanon, overreaction to events has started radicalizing people again. With the Iraqi Kurdish forces fighting the insurgency, the PKK saw an opportunity to renew attacks - primarily against the Turkish military. They blew up a truck and allegedly poisoned some officers. Turkey responded by cracking down on pro-Kurdish politicians and mounted an aggressive military campaign in the rural southeast. Turkey sent large numbers of troops to the border region, and collaborated with Iran in shelling Iraqi Kurdish villages. There were fears last month that Turkey might even invade Iraqi Kurdistan, echoing Israel's actions in Lebanon. The Turks have done so before, and like the Israelis, they also deliberately targeted civilians.
The difference between Turkish actions in Iraqi Kurdistan and Israeli actions in Lebanon is one of scale. The Turkish leadership has more sense and less of the Masada complex that afflicts the Israeli leadership, so they don't see every action as a life-or-death moment. They have not engaged in anything remotely similar to the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure occurring now in Lebanon. However, the Turkish press specifically drew the parallel with Lebanon as a precedent for aggressive handling of the PKK problem.
Although the Turks seem both more measured and more realistic than the Israelis, a slow, violent, quiet war continues. Security men in Fiats and Toyotas pull up in small villages and arrest people. Teenage boys grow up angry, selling polyester socks and other cheap imports in the street. When they reach adulthood, they "go to the mountains" and blow people up. The cycle goes on.
I fell back asleep, and slept most of the way to the border.
The Turkish border with Iraqi Kurdistan has been extensively re-built and designed for vehicles, with nice modern buildings replacing the blue cinder-block units with bars on the windows. Despite all the modern buildings, the border is just as it was before - chaotic. The cars funnel in like cows in a stockyard to a single customs booth. The more aggressive drivers, unafraid of additional dents or scratches, force their way toward the front of the queue by sheer dint of will. The drivers get out of their cars, crowd the customs office window, and push each other. Incredibly dusty young boys sell cold water bottles from ragged coolers. A fat contractor sweats profusely. Occasionally one driver will administer a dope slap to another. Usually, this is accepted in good humor, but tempers can spiral out of control in the 105 degree heat. The customs officers are called "Gumruk" in Turkish, which encapsulates their reptilian demeanor - long periods of lethargy punctuated by occasional outbursts of anger. There were two of them in the booth. The Gumruk officer at the computer was new and did not know how to type, so he hunted and pecked at the keyboard to enter passport numbers and names. The fat contractor rolled his eyes and said "ya Allah". The other Gumruk man sat motionless in front of the fan, smoking and avoiding eye contact with the agitated drivers jostling on the other side of the thick plexiglass window. Periodically, he would reach over, take one of the completed passports, read the name aloud, and toss it through a gap in the window.
Most people on both sides of the border prefer business to fighting - there is a huge amount of Turkish investment in Iraqi Kurdistan, and there is a strong constituency in SE Turkey for keeping the border open and not rocking the boat. We all hope this continues. Commerce, lethargy, corruption, sweat - all of these things are better than fighting.
In the taxi park on the Kurdish side of the border, I meet up with Ahmed, a driver hired for the day to take me to my destination. I'm a little more awake now and eager to get caught up on news and opinion. Ahmed's a perfect driver in this regard.
We pass a shiny new gas station with uniformed attendants, and later, a brand new box store called "Saving City" or some such name. This is the Kurdish ideal of modernity. I ask Ahmed "Who owns these?" He just laughs. We both know who owns them: the KDP, one of the two main political parties, which is run by the Barzani family and most closely resembles a small kingship. The licensees who run these shiny new establishments are invariably Barzanis or other tribal leaders who make up the core of the KDP. Some call it corruption, others call it business, but whatever it is, there is no separating politics from business here. The continued existence of Iraqi Kurdistan as a landlocked entity depends first and foremost on economic relations with neighboring countries, and both Kurdish political parties have pursued as much trade and investment as possible with Turkey and to a lesser extent, Iran. As the war gets worse in the center of Iraq, the Kurdish region gets wealthier. New businesses and poorly constructed glass-and marble fronted office complexes pop up in weeks or months, and the area hums with activity. The wealth flows through elaborate patronage networks, and funds not only the politically connected, but also supplements those budget lines that the Kurdish authorities do not wish to negotiate with Baghdad. These expenses include a 100,000 strong peshmergha army and the Kurdish reoccupation of the lands around Kirkuk from which they were evicted in the 1970's and 80's. All of this is controversial - while the Kurds have a legitimate claim to some of the lands and arguably to Kirkuk itself, the Arab and Turkmen communities also have rights that must be protected. The ethnic tensions over Kirkuk are increasing. The Kurds are militarily capable of occupying the city at any time, but doing so could spark large scale violence. The future of Kurdistan and of Iraq depends on Kurdish restraint, and in particular, on protecting minority rights.
Ahmed has Baghdad plates, so I ask him about the current situation there. We communicate in a mixture of Arabic, Kurdish and English. He's pessimistic and thinks that there will be serious violence for at least another couple years. I ask him about Sadr and his growing influence in Baghdad.
"Sadr's movement is like an ant nest, they react immediately to any provocation. Except ants have a system. An ant has an assigned task and coordinates what it is doing. Ants are annoying, but they are orderly. Sadr's people are worse than ants. They are violent and uncontrollable." He laughs. "They are much more dangerous. Sadr can get his people into the street, but he cannot do anything to control them ...really, I prefer ants."
I ask him if he would move back to Baghdad if there is peace. He says in English "I am Kurdish man, I hate Arab." This is a jarring and unpleasant statement that I hear way too often. However, almost immediately after expressing this racist attitude toward Arabs, he pops in a CD of music by Um Kulthum, the famous Egyptian diva, and starts to sing along with the band. "ohhhh my heart..."
"I thought you didn't like Arabs"
"No. I love everyone"
This, too, is typical. The enmity is often superficial, and Kurds and Arabs do get along on an individual basis. Um Kulthum fades. Ahmed has very eclectic tastes in music, and soon we're listening to an odd, possibly Iranian, version of John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High".
Ahmed talks about being forced to spend 15 years in the military (he is 50 now). This is an utterly typical story for a man his age. "I have seen four wars, all of them bad." The first was when he was sent to Syria in the 1970's to fight Israel. Ahmed was a truck diver transporting explosives from Saudi Arabia and Jordan into Iraq during the war with Iran. Then he was sent to Kuwait. "Saddam was crazy so I just run away!" We talk about the stupidity of the US targeting the "jesh ash-shabi", the popular army, which consisted of old men and boys forced to the front lines, none of whom wanted to fight. His fourth war was the Kurdish uprising in 1991, and that was the only one in which he voluntarily participated. The gains of that revolution are bittersweet. He is financially secure, one son is a lawyer and the other is in college, and like most people here he wants outright independence. But he resents the corruption, and he fears that civil war will engulf the Kurds once the conflict between Iraq's Sunni and Shia' Arab communities is resolved. It is curious that he does not count this war - the current Iraqi civil war - as the fifth war of his lifetime. Perhaps it hasn't started yet for him, in the relative safety of the north, or perhaps we neglect it because it is so close, and because the situation has come to seem almost normal.
Ahmed worked for Asia Cell as a driver. Cell phones are as popular here as anywhere in the world. Unlike Bechtel and Haliburton, the Chinese cell phone companies actually complete their projects. Ahmed's contact with people outside of Iraq has mostly been with the foreign telecom engineers who erected the system. The first was a Canadian with a long beard and lots of tattoos. He had a "wolf" at home, possibly a husky, and used to call his wife and ask her to put the dog on the phone. The two would howl at each other. Kurds, like most Muslims, consider dogs unclean. Although they accept them as necessary for protecting sheep, they never keep them as pets. Ahmed could hear the howls over the receiver and considered this behavior incomprehensible. The second engineer was Franz, a South African. He dressed like an Arab and Ahmed drove him every morning to Mosul, which was (and remains) tremendously dangerous. Franz was bad about communicating with his wife, so she would call Ahmed instead and tell him she was worried. She wanted reassurance. As always, Ahmed was glad to help.
"Look up in the sky - what do you see?"
"Nothing - blue sky"
"Look again. You have to see The God. Only the God can protect us!"
She stopped calling Ahmed.
We stop at a roadside restaurant in the small village of Kani Watman for dinner. A drunk driver hit a "stupid man" and killed him a few minutes before we arrived. The villagers had already removed the body but people were still clustered around the car, and police took the driver away just as we arrived. The car must have hit him at high speed, because the hood, radiator and front end of the car were severely damaged. "He was a stupid man and too fat. Look at the damage to that car. I know him." Not for the first time, I am amazed at the extent of social networks in this society and realize how the Kurdish checkpoints manage to interdict insurgents, even though they usually just wave people through. The checkpoint officers know all the drivers, and the drivers know them, and they also seem to know just about every individual who either runs a tea shop or restaurant, or might possibly be a traffic hazard. "He was cowboy for sheep - he was not talking and could not watch where he was going." From this I gather that he was developmentally disabled, perhaps autistic, and survived as a shepherd for the village's sheep. He was middle-aged and had no family.
Ahmed has the only cell phone in the restaurant, so he calls the driver's family. He's not a subtle man and makes no attempt to break the news gently. "Your son killed a man and now he's in jail in Kani Watman." I hear loud, concerned voices on the other end of the line. "This is what you get for letting him drink."
I realize that even though Ahmed is from Halabja, at least 60 kilometers away, he also apparently knows the driver's family. Everyone seems to know everyone else. An anthropologist studying rural China before the isolating influence of modern media determined that the average person was more or less acquainted with about 10,000 other persons. In Kurdistan, the number has got to be at least twice that many. I think back about the Asaysh man with the Kalashnakov along the side of the road in Turkey and wonder about the distortions to social networks that occur in insurgencies, when members of communities are pitted against each other. Surely the Asaysh man in Turkey was a Kurd, as the Turkish military are as isolated from the population of the southeast as the US military are in Iraq and depend on local muscle to enforce their rule. I think about how lost US forces are in a conflict in which they do not even speak the language, let alone have the intimate social knowledge required to know who is connected to whom, who owes a debt or feels a sense of loyalty to whom. Someone has a grudge to settle, and if they are clever and connected, they can use the huge power of the US military to settle it for them. Ahmed tells me that the US raided some houses in Kalar, a small Kurdish city in Diyala governorate. Who knows who informed on whom, but the full might of the US army came down on one small adobe house. The soldiers beat their prisoners and hooded them. Of course, they were innocent of any association with the insurgents, and even the Kurdish newspapers started comparing the US forces to Saddam.
The Kurds remain very pro-American, in large part because there are virtually no US forces here and therefore no "accidental" shooting of civilian vehicles, savage outrages against civilians, sexual assaults, etc. Most American soldiers want to do the right thing and are not by nature cruel or sadistic, but the US command has utterly failed in training or enforcing discipline, and the risk and constant tension creates conditions in which army units seem unable to operate with anything less than poorly directed, deadly force. The aggressive rules of engagement never take into consideration local conditions or culture, and invariably result in many unnecessary civilian deaths. Worse, the winking and snickering about human rights abuses starts with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and filters though Maj Gen Miller right on down to violent and unstable individuals in lower levels of command. This outright hostility toward basic human rights norms, right from the very top of our government, has created a situation where sociopaths can flourish and we have incidents like Haditha and the rape/murder of the girl in Mahmudiyyah. The US footprint is much lighter in the Kurdish region and abuses are correspondingly rare. People are outraged by the raid in Kalar, but if this occurred on a daily basis and women were raped as well, the Kurds would likely grow as hostile to the US military as the rest of the country. By staying out of this one part of the country, we have maintained some degree of support and cooperation, and there remains residual gratitude for getting rid of Saddam. But even here, the goodwill is fragile.
We drive on. Circumstances kept Ahmed from formal education, but he is an autodidact who reads whatever he can get his hands on. Most recently, he borrowed a biography of Ghandi, translated into Kurdish. He tells me how the young Ghandi once stole his sister's bracelets in order to purchase meat. Ahmed devoured a quarter of a chicken just 10 minutes earlier and apparently food was still on his mind. "He wanted to try meat but he ate it raw, and he felt too much guilt for stealing his sister's bracelets. So he was disgusted with meat and with himself and he never ate meat again." I'm intrigued that he is reading Ghandi, both for his anti-colonial history and because of his philosophy of non-violence. I ask him if non-violence would have worked in Iraq. He laughed. "Saddam would have tortured and killed him, and the Americans would have shot him by accident." He then asked me my opinion of Castro. I said "Castro is half-half - bad on political freedoms but good on health and literacy. It's impossible to condemn him totally or support him totally". This answer satisfies Ahmed, so I ask him if he wanted to hear some Cuban music. We put on Beny More, and the beautiful music of Cuba in the 1950's filled the car. Night falls.
"You see this animal?" I look ahead in the road to see if there is a hedgehog or a fox. A backhoe is driving along the street without adequate lighting, just one small white light bulb high on the back, but no tail lights or other warning. Ahmed is disgusted. "Fack" he says, the English curse word sounding strange and unfamiliar to both of us. He swerved around the backhoe and we moved on through the night. He turned down the music as we approached each checkpoint, and soon enough we arrived in Suleymaniya.
Our doctor was there to meet me and among the various updates, he shared two small, easily forgotten stories of the breakup of Iraq. Both involve the Ministry of Health. It seems one of the general directors from one of the provinces went to Baghdad to meet with the minister. Some uniformed guards came by while he was in the waiting room and said, "come with us for a minute". The next morning, the general director turned up barely alive at the side of the road, with holes drilled through arms and legs, through which nylon cords had been passed, tying his limbs together. He was admitted to one of the Ministry of Health's hospitals as a patient. The Ministry of Health is run by Sadr's movement, and although I don't know which province the general director came from, he may well have been a Sunni. Several ministries, including health, are experiencing purges. Persons not of the same political party or sectarian identity as the leadership in each ministry are leaving their jobs, just as people are moving out from their neighborhoods. Usually threats are sufficient.
Some MOH employees left their jobs and converted their assets into a new car, with Baghdad plates, to re-sell once they moved back north to Kurdistan. They left during the middle of the day, but were stopped about an hour north of Baghdad by Sunni insurgents. The insurgents looked at the car's documents, and realized it had recently been purchased. They asked if the owners had sacrificed yet. In rural Iraq it is a tradition to sacrifice a sheep after making a major purchase like a car or tractor, as a way of invoking a blessing. The Kurds were too frightened to answer since they expected that one of them would be the sacrifice. The insurgents said, "Well, if it is no trouble, we will sacrifice for you". They went into a nearby building, and dragged out a tied-up, captive Shia' man. They hauled him to the front of the car, said "in the name of God" and slit his throat, soaking the front of the vehicle with his blood. Then they let the car pass.
The taxi rides were over; it was late, and further conversation could wait until morning.