A Precarious Peace in Northern Iraq
Quil Lawrence
October 1, 2009
(Quil Lawrence is Baghdad bureau chief for NPR. His book Invisible
Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and
the Middle East [Bloomsbury, 2008] is now out in paperback.)
On a stifling August afternoon in 2008, just as Iraq was recovering
from the worst of its sectarian civil war, the Arab and Kurdish
parties allied with the United States came to the edge of an ethnic
bloodbath whose consequences for Iraq and the region would have
been every bit as frightening. The trouble started when the mayor
of Khanaqin, a predominantly Kurdish city in the Diyala province
along the Iranian border, received a frantic call from a police
station beyond the Alwand River on the west side of town. “They
told me that the Iraqi army was on its way,” said the mayor, Muhammad
Mula Hassan. “No one had informed me. A minute later we heard that
the Iraqi army was surrounding Khanaqin. They said, ‘We’re going
to control the area.’ That means we are the enemy?”
Khanaqin had been patrolled by peshmerga, the fighters
loyal to Iraq’s two major Kurdish parties, since 2003, when the
US military invited them to fill the security vacuum there and
elsewhere in the provinces of Diyala, Kirkuk, Nineveh and Salah
al-Din, all of which have “mixed” populations of Arabs, Kurds and
other ethnic groups. The peshmerga’s redeployment is widely
seen as an attempt to extend to the south and west the boundaries
of the region federated under the twin parties’ Kurdistan Regional
Government (KRG). The territories that the fighters police outside
the KRG’s domain are claimed by the Kurds, who point to provisions
in the 2005 Iraqi constitution for referenda to decide the disposition
of such “disputed areas.” Baghdad frowns upon the Kurdish claims
of additional territory, and earlier in the summer of 2008, Iraqi
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had told the peshmerga to
go home to the three northern provinces that are majority-Kurdish.
The prime minister had further implied that the peshmerga were
an illegal militia that the Iraqi state would bring to heel. For
the Kurds, this language prompted memories of the era before the
fall of Saddam Hussein.
“This is disputed area,” said Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to
the KRG’s president, Masoud Barzani, remembering the events. “I
am from Khanaqin. I have seen the Iraqi army killing Kurds as a
child. I have seen the Iraqi army destroying everything. The Iraqi
army, the old one, was an army against our people. And you send
an army that speaks the same slogans?”
According to Gen. Mun‘im Hashim Fahd, the commander of the army
unit that ringed Khanaqin that day, he had no orders to uproot
the peshmerga. His mission, rather, was to chase insurgents
along the shores of Lake Hamrin to the west. There had been deadly
bombings attributed to the insurgency in Diyala over the summer.
“I had clear orders from the Ministry of Defense not to go into
Khanaqin city,” said the bullet-headed general. “I asked, ‘Can
I visit the mayor?’ They said, ‘No, it will only cause problems.’”
Instead of talking, both sides hunkered down. Politicians in the
KRG’s seat of Erbil sounded the alarm of “ethnic cleansing” and
vowed open war to prevent it. The Kurds mobilized the rocket-launching
trucks and tanks they had looted from Saddam’s army. Baghdad began
to route its own heaviest artillery toward Khanaqin, and Iraq waited,
a cannonball away from civil war on another front.
Caught in the middle was Gen. Mark Hertling, then leader of the
US forces in the north. As the governments in Baghdad and Erbil
hurled threats at each other, the American issued a rather novel
threat of his own: If the Kurds and the Iraqi army did not stand
down, the US would do nothing. “If there were indicators
that there would be a clash between pesh and Iraqi army,
I would pull back all my advisers. I would tell all my other forces
to return to their [bases]. I wasn’t going to take sides on this,
and [they] would be responsible for any bloodshed,” Hertling said
he told all concerned. Hertling credited cool-headed commanders
on the ground for averting physical clashes. Eventually, a deal
was struck allowing Kurdish police to remain in control of Khanaqin,
with the peshmerga withdrawing north of the city, where
they still sit, glowering southward, just like in the old days.
Inflammatory language from the Kurds accusing Maliki of dictatorial
ambitions would become the norm for the next year. Gen. Hertling,
for his part, wondered why Khanaqin should be such a high priority
for Maliki. Even more curious was Maliki’s refusal to answer his
phone throughout the crisis. “We tried to call Prime Minister Maliki,”
recalled then KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani, Masoud’s nephew.
“In the morning they said he’s sleeping. In the afternoon they
said he’s fasting. In the evening they said he’s resting.” The
younger Barzani finally got an appointment and traveled to Baghdad.
But as he approached Maliki’s office inside the Green Zone, one
of the guards stiff-armed him at the door. Barzani grabbed the
man’s hand and threw him to the floor. A shoving match ensued between
the two teams of bodyguards, and the Kurds’ five-year honeymoon
with the new Iraq officially ended.
So began a full year of mutual provocations -- troop rotations,
ethnically targeted bombings and even a Kurdish order to shoot
the Arab governor of Mosul on sight. As US diplomats ground their
teeth, the elder Barzani and Maliki stubbornly refused to talk
directly, in a terrifying game of diplomatic chicken. The game
ended, or at least took a timeout, when the two men finally sat
down together in August 2009. But both sides are keeping their
powder dry in kegs all along what the US military has labeled the
“trigger line” -- the ever shifting border running through the
lands that both the Kurds and Maliki’s government plan will be
theirs.
Talking Past One Another
By the fall of 2008, Nouri al-Maliki was ascendant. Though he
was originally the compromise candidate of Kurdish and Shi‘i Islamist
power brokers, and was thus regarded as feeble, he was now in a
position to pose as post-Saddam Iraq’s first nationalist hero.
Indeed, he had made aggressive decisions. He had cracked down on
sectarian militias in Basra and Baghdad, depending on American
soldiers to do so even as he played to Iraqi anger at the US occupation.
He had toughened his stance on a timetable for US withdrawal in
the talks with the Bush administration about a security framework
agreement. The calm spreading across the country surely resulted
from a number of factors -- Gen. David Petraeus’ counter-insurgency
strategy, the Sunni Arab “awakening” that rejected al-Qaeda and
Muqtada al-Sadr’s withdrawal to religious study in Iran. But Maliki
wanted to take credit for it all. As with past would-be consolidators
of power in Baghdad, he thought the winning formula would be to
play the Arabs against the Kurds.
Maliki aimed to bolster his Da‘wa Party, then the weaker of the
two Shi‘i Islamist groupings in government, in the provincial elections
of January 2009, and then carry on to reelection himself in 2010.
His timing was perfect. Sectarian violence had subsided, and Iraq’s
most urgent dilemmas -- the oil law, revenue sharing and disputed
internal boundaries -- now clearly revolved around the disagreements
between Erbil and Baghdad.
In mid-November 2008, Arabs across the country protested against
what they called Kurdish expansionism. “Kirkuk is Iraqi!” they
shouted, in reference to the “mixed” northern city at the top of
the Kurds’ wish list, and so were the rest of the disputed territories.
By Article 140 of the 2005 constitution, the final status of these
lands -- would they be “Kurdish” or “Iraqi”? -- was to be decided
by referendum. No referendum had been held, and the deadlines for
holding one had passed, so officials of the UN Assistance Mission
in Iraq were laboring to devise a formula for multi-ethnic power
sharing in Kirkuk and other areas. For the Kurds, conditioned by
history to distrust Arab rulers in Baghdad, it was only reasonable
to station peshmerga in these places in the meantime, not
just to fight al-Qaeda and associated terrorists and to protect
the local (Kurdish) population, but also to embody the Kurdish
territorial claims. The Arab demonstrators’ proposed solution,
removing peshmerga from the disputed territories and replacing
them with tribal “support councils” loyal to Maliki, would have
knocked down what the Kurds considered pillars of the Iraqi constitution.
Such, indeed, seemed to be Maliki’s agenda.
“A strong federal government must be built which has full responsibility
over security, sovereignty and other issues,” Maliki told a Baghdad
news conference. “We have in the constitution exclusive federal
responsibilities, exclusive provincial responsibilities and common
responsibilities, and all other responsibilities are for the provinces.
I think this is not right.” Masoud Barzani replied at his own press
conference three days later. “The majority of the Iraqi people
voted for this constitution. All the Iraqi officials in Baghdad
have sworn an oath to uphold this constitution.” The language was
anodyne, but the message was troubling: The bargain holding the
country together was at risk, and instead of conversing the two
most important leaders in Iraq were communicating by smoke signals
in the press.
It suited the political needs of both men to talk past one another.
Barzani’s promises to defend Kurdish rights played well in the
north, but helped Maliki to unite a cross-sectarian bloc behind
him in central and southern Iraq. One of the largest pro-“support
council” demonstrations was held in the Sunni Arab bastion of Tikrit.
Kurdish rhetoric also pushed an important ally in Maliki’s direction:
The US increasingly looked to the prime minister, rather than the
Kurds, as its ticket out of Iraq. The KRG advertised itself as
“the other Iraq,” the place where the Bush administration’s vision
for a peaceful and democratic Iraq had actually come true. In reality,
Kurdish security forces engaged in as many dirty dealings as anyone
else in the disputed territories. Worse, there would be no provincial
elections in the KRG provinces in January 2009. The Kurds said
they had plans for their own elections later in the year, but,
for the White House, the atmospherics were bad: Everyone in Iraq
was going to the polls except the people in the three Kurdish provinces
and Kirkuk.
Stoking the Coals
For those seeking to tip Iraq back toward Armageddon, the “trigger
line” was the logical fulcrum. On December 11, 2008, during the
Feast of the Sacrifice, one of the holiest days of the Muslim calendar,
dozens of Arabs from the Hawija district met with representatives
of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the party of Jalal Talabani.
Afterwards they went to break bread together at ‘Abdallah Kebab,
a popular roadhouse along the highway from Kirkuk to Erbil. A suicide
bomber walked into the cafeteria and exploded, killing scores,
including several from the peace talks, and wounding about 100
others. The pattern would continue through the next year, with
mass-casualty bombings directed at smaller ethnic groups living
in the north, such as Turkmen, Shabaks, Yazidis and Shi‘i Kurds.
As if on cue, Kurdish politicians denounced their Arab counterparts,
and the Arabs denounced the Kurds, after each of the mass murders.
The Kurds blamed Arabs for carrying out the attacks, while Arabs
blamed the Kurdish parties for failing to provide adequate security.
Suicide bombers were not the only ones stoking the coals. The
Twelfth Division of the Iraqi army redeployed further and further
north into disputed territory that had been under de facto Kurdish
control since the US invasion, in effect remapping the trigger
line. On the day of the provincial elections, January 31, 2009,
Iraqi soldiers rolled into the disputed town of Altun Kopri, halfway
between Kirkuk and Erbil, announcing that they had come to secure
a polling station. As in the Khanaqin standoff, there was no prior
warning to the Kurdish police, and guns were loaded and leveled.
Again, the US military credited commanders on the ground with keeping
their cool, particularly an Arab officer who refused an order from
higher-ups to shoot. (The officer was subsequently relieved of
his command.)
The US implored both sides to start talking. “That isolation is
just not useful. To telegraph your moves is not bad -- you know,
no sudden, jerky movements?” said Maj. Chris Norrie, a US military
spokesman in Kirkuk. After the incident, Norrie continued, the
US pushed to place Kurdish liaison officers with the Arab units
and vice versa. But Baghdad resisted the idea for months, raising
questions for the US about the motives behind the trip into Altun
Kopri.
Payback
The turnout in the 2009 provincial elections was lower than in
the previous rounds of polling after the fall of Saddam, but it
may have been the most effective exercise in democracy. Voters
in the south of the country punished the sectarian Islamic Supreme
Council of Iraq, which had controlled several municipalities. Maliki
and the Da‘wa Party were the primary beneficiaries, but the balloting
proved that, at least at the local level, power in post-Saddam
Iraq could change hands peacefully.
Many Kurdish observers felt these results
put the Kurdish parties to shame. “In Suleimaniya it’s a single-party
system of the PUK, and in Erbil it’s a single-party system of the
KDP [the Kurdish Democratic Party, headed by Barzani],” said Nawshirwan
Mustafa, for years the second-in-command to Jalal Talabani, and
increasingly an agitator inside the PUK. Mustafa blasted the Kurdish
parties’ plan for rubber-stamp elections, after which they would
divide seats in the KRG’s legislative assembly neatly between the
two of them. As Talabani’s long-time lieutenant, the notoriously
cantankerous Mustafa hardly qualified as the perfect messenger
for reform. But his critique struck a chord with thousands of frustrated
young Kurds who had bumped against the glass ceiling of nepotism
and corruption in the Kurdistan region. Mustafa soon announced
his intention to run on an independent slate in the Kurdistan elections
scheduled for July.
The KDP and PUK stuck to the notion that Kurdish parties had no
time for internal reform with Arab nationalists massing at the
gates -- particularly the gates to the west in Nineveh province,
where the Kurds had been trounced in the January contests. It was
a natural readjustment for the majority-Arab province; Kurds had
dominated the government there since 2005 thanks only to the widespread
Sunni Arab boycott of the elections that year. But the results
looked like a backlash. Campaigning on an unapologetically anti-Kurdish
platform, an Arab nationalist coalition called al-Hadba won 19
of the seats in the provincial council, leaving the Kurds with
only 12.
The Kurds expected they would nevertheless retain a few of the
key administrative positions in Nineveh. The al-Hadba coalition
thought differently. “They need to respect that the people voted
for al-Hadba. Al-Hadba has the majority,” said Sheikh ‘Abdallah
‘Ajil al-Yawir, the leader of the largest faction in the coalition.
In flowing robes and tassels, Yawir led the tribal component of
al-Hadba from his palatial estate south of Mosul near the Syrian
border, while Athil al-Nujayfi, al-Hadba’s pick for governor, represented
Mosul’s former Baathist elites. Yawir rejected the notion of power
sharing. “How many states in the United States did not vote for
Obama?” he asked in his near perfect English. “They voted for McCain.
Can they say, ‘We will not listen to Obama because we have not
elected him?’” Yawir said he was happy to accept Kurds into the
new Nineveh government -- just none of the 12 who had been elected.
Yawir called them KDP operatives, intent on chopping the disputed
territories off of Nineveh. “There is no future if they keep pushing,
‘This land for me! This land for me!’ It is not a piece of cake!
All of Iraq for all the Iraqis,” he said.
On April 12, al-Hadba announced the names of the officers of the
new provincial government. They had made no concessions. A Kurd,
Dildar Zebari, was named deputy head of the provincial council,
but the KDP considered him a long-time collaborator with the central
government. His appointment was likely payback, since the previous
Nineveh government had been led by an Arab figurehead under the
thumb of the KDP’s Khasro Goran, a man loathed by Nineveh’s Arab
majority. Goran accepted that he had been voted out, but insisted
that the Kurdish parties needed to be included in the government.
“That’s the only way we can solve the problems,” said Goran, sitting
in the fortified KDP headquarters in Mosul. “If we are not there,
how will they solve the problems -- by force?”
Again, the “dialogue” proceeded via statements in the press and
publicity stunts. Days after announcement of the new government,
the Kurdish bloc in the Nineveh provincial council walked out in
protest of al-Hadba’s winner-take-all approach. At a news conference
in the disputed town of Bashiqa, mayors of majority-Kurdish towns
in the province, from Sinjar in the far west to Makhmour in the
east, declared their unilateral secession from Nineveh. For most
of the towns, this move meant little change in practice; they had
already been relying on the KRG for security and most essential
services.
On May 8, Gov. Nujayfi of al-Hadba tried his hand at political
theater by announcing that he was on his way to a kite flying festival
in Bashiqa. Orders came down from Masrour Barzani, the KDP counter-terrorism
chief, to the effect that Nujayfi was to be shot on sight if he
entered the town. As the governor’s motorcade approached Bashiqa,
US Army Col. Gary Volesky choppered in to find it halted amidst
yet another standoff between the Iraqi army and the peshmerga,
next to a checkpoint that the Americans refer to as “the farmhouse.”
Volesky introduced himself to the generals in charge on both sides.
As it happened, they knew one another and bore no ill will. The
problem was that each was in receipt of orders from his superiors
to face down the other. Volesky pointed out that it seemed reasonable
for Nujayfi to roam freely around the province he governed, but
the KRG orders stood. The US Army again went for broke.
“I said really clearly, ‘What’s your name, and what’s your name?’”
Volesky recounted. Why did he want to know? “Because I’m going
to go to my headquarters and mention you two generals by name as
the ones who instigated this.” Volesky pulled his men out and drove
away to watch from a safe distance. Shortly, the governor’s convoy
turned around and went home to Mosul. The peshmerga had
won the staring contest, but drawing the death threat from the
KDP was a propaganda victory for al-Hadba loftier than any kite
Nujayfi might have flown in the disputed territories. To the US,
the leaders of the Kurds’ “other Iraq” looked like just another
gang of warlords.
In May the guns were drawn again when Maliki sent an urgent mission
to secure the aging Mosul Dam, which was one car bomb away from
unleashing a torrent that would drown the city. He chose to ignore
that the peshmerga had been guarding the dam for nearly
six years to forestall just such a disaster. US military observers
again smoothed things over, and arranged for joint protection of
the dam (the ice was broken nicely when the army realized they
had set up no supply lines, and the peshmerga began providing
them with food and water). In June there was a 24-hour confrontation
in the disputed district of Makhmour, which began when an Arab
unit of the Iraqi army entered in the middle of the night. This
time it was not the peshmerga that turned them around, but
an all-Kurdish unit of the same Iraqi army. The Iraqi government
declined to comment, and it was left to the US military to explain
clumsily that the unit had simply taken a wrong turn on its way
to Mosul.
Antagonism in Abeyance
US commanders had for months highlighted ethnic fault lines as
the greatest threat to Iraq’s relative calm, but the White House
was slow to take action. The new ambassador did not even arrive
in Baghdad until four months into President Barack Obama’s term.
On Obama’s first visit to Iraq after taking office, dust storms
confined him to the US base near the Baghdad airport. That, in
any case, was the official story. Sources at the base implied the
complication was manmade, coming in part from Maliki’s initial
demurral when Obama asked to meet him at the US Embassy instead
of the presidential palace.
When the usual meetings were finally arranged at the US Army’s
Camp Victory, on the airport road, only Maliki sat with Obama for
the full time he had been allotted. The White House team, perhaps
ill at ease atop the three-way seesaw that is the Iraqi government,
left President Jalal Talabani, a 200-pounder with a bad knee and
a heart bypass, waiting outside the room on a stool for more than
half an hour. Masoud Barzani fared little better. The KRG president
was led to an antechamber that turned out to be a small bedroom
strewn with dirty laundry. The White House failed to announce the
meeting with Barzani, who had to release a photograph of himself
sitting with Obama to prove that he had done so.
It took a full six months for the White House to put a public
hand on the tiller. Over the July 4 weekend, Vice President Joe
Biden flew to Iraq to symbolize that he had been tasked with oversight
of Iraq policy. The news at first encouraged the Kurds, who remembered
Biden best for his support of “soft partition,” the idea that Iraq
be divided administratively into three regions, one Kurdish, one
“Sunni” and one “Shi‘i.” That notion had vanished conspicuously
from Biden’s repertoire after he became Obama’s running mate, and
now he bore a message of tough love: There would be no second “surge”
in Iraq if sectarian or ethnic violence returned to its former
levels. The American visitor was again plagued by bad weather,
this time a truly vicious dust storm that prevented Biden from
making a scheduled trip to meet with Barzani in Erbil. Still, he
implied that he understood the dynamics of the north. “I’ve known
the Kurdish leaders…for as long as six years and the bottom line
is that I think that they know I know them,” the vice president
said as his plane left Baghdad.
When Biden phoned Barzani to apologize for missing the meeting,
there were new provocations to discuss. Barzani had railroaded
the KRG assembly into approving a regional constitution substantially
different from the draft that had been in circulation for years.
The document angered nearly everyone. Not only did it stake claims
to the absolute maximum area of disputed territory, but it also
expanded Barzani’s presidential powers considerably beyond those
of genuinely republican systems. Barzani had scheduled a region-wide
vote to ratify the document on July 25, on the same day as the
Kurdish parliamentary elections. With outrage building in Baghdad,
as well as among Kurds opposed to the KRG constitution, Biden asked
Barzani to delay the ratification. Barzani acquiesced in his patron’s
wishes, but too late to stave off a challenge to the rule of the
twin Kurdish parties. On July 25, the KDP-PUK coalition lost several
of its seats in the assembly to the new opposition movement.
Soon afterward, the swords were sheathed in Erbil and Baghdad.
Only weeks after declaring the two sides closer than ever to open
war, Barzani hosted Maliki at Lake Dukan on August 2. The two men
agreed to end the year of mutual silent treatment and to appoint
high-level envoys to continue discussions in the Iraqi capital.
Maliki casually explained away the 12 months of tension. “Differences
of opinion are very normal because we are building a state on the
ruins of dictatorship,” he said, next to a smiling Barzani. “I
think we largely agree, and if there are disputes, they are small.”
As if to underscore his words, Maliki next made a high-profile
visit to Halabja, a town synonymous with Saddam Hussein’s poison
gas campaign against Kurdistan in the late 1980s. For the time
being, the prime minister’s strategy of uniting Iraqi Arabs by
antagonizing the Kurds is in abeyance. But the two sides are no
closer to resolution of the political conflicts that brought them
to the brink of a shooting war, and the elections coming up in
January could just as easily pit them against one another as bring
them into alliance. In the interim, an obvious way to avoid deadly
misunderstandings is creeping forward. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander
of US forces in the Iraq theater, has proposed that combined units
of peshmerga, Iraqi soldiers and US facilitators jointly
patrol the disputed territories. Tellingly, Prime Minister al-Maliki
felt compelled to reject the proposal at first, perhaps since the
idea came from the US and because it was so quickly embraced by
the Kurds. A top Maliki adviser now says the patrols may start
soon.
Still, it is hard to escape the feeling that neither side’s heart
is in the truce. At the jointly guarded Mosul Dam on September
24, the US Army orchestrated a ceremony thanking the peshmerga for
keeping watch since 2004. But very few of the Arab soldiers cared
to attend, and the Iraqi army commander in Nineveh, Gen. Hasan
Karim ‘Abbas, found an excuse to be out of town. His counterpart,
Gen. Aziz Waysi of the Zerivan peshmerga brigade, summed
up the sentiments that may endure when, in ten months’ time, US
combat troops depart. “They think all Kurds want to take part of
Iraq and separate,” said Waysi, “and I think they want to kill
all of us.”
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