The Loom of Time, page 33
*5 Robert D. Kaplan, “A Post-Saddam Scenario,” The Atlantic, November 2002. In many other essays over the years prior to the Iraq War, I was openly skeptical about installing democracy anywhere, especially in the Middle East. For example, see this essay, published in the aftermath of 9/11: Robert D. Kaplan, “Don’t Try to Impose Our Values,” Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.
*6 See for example two of the biographies of her: Gertrude Bell by H.V.F. Winstone (1978) and Desert Queen by Janet Wallach (1996).
*7 I borrow the phrase from Frances G. Hutchins’s The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967).
*8 The Iraq Family Health survey has the lower number; the Lancet survey the higher one. See “Casualties of the Iraq War” in Wikipedia.
*9 See the note on page 253 in this chapter.
*10 The Second Battle of Fallujah, which was even bloodier, took place in November and December 2004.
*11 As a journalist in 1993, in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire, I experienced incipient anarchy. But it wasn’t on the scale of post-Saddam Iraq.
*12 Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” Another excellent analysis on the problems of intervention was provided by George Washington University professor Marc Lynch in “What’s Really at Stake in the Syria Debate,” WarOnTheRocks, October 10, 2016.
Chapter
9
FERTILE CRESCENT
PART III
“For mapmakers—if not for international lawyers—there is such a place as Kurdistan,” wrote the CIA area specialist Stephen C. Pelletiere in 1984.[1] Kurdistan is an ellipse of mountainous territory, rich in oil and water, that constitutes the northern rim of the Fertile Crescent, overlapping as it does Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. The Kurds now number between 30 and 45 million: counting them is hard due to remote terrain and intermarriage with other groups. In political terms they were a relatively stable element in an age of cosmopolitan empires, notably the Ottoman Turkish and Safavid Persian. But with the collapse of the imperial world following World War I came the suppression of minority peoples under the straitjacket of new nation-states, in which one group often sought to eliminate the rights of others. The stateless Kurds, who were natural to the Ottoman world, henceforth, by virtue of their very existence and demand for equal rights, became a principal disrupting force in the politics of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. This struggle was quickened in the cases of Iraq and Iran, which, having nationalized their oil industries in the mid-twentieth century, suddenly had the financial wherewithal to militarily confront their own Kurdish populations. If any group holds the key to the anarchy of the Fertile Crescent in the modern and postmodern eras, it is the Kurds. In 1999, I wrote in The New York Times: “As states in the Middle East become weaker, the stateless Kurds become comparatively more important. This is especially true of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s demise could break Iraq into Kurdish and Arab parts, tempting Turkey’s military into an occupation of oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan.”[2] The Kurds are a tribal people, and as Gertrude Bell wrote in 1920 in reference to the new state of Iraq, which comprised both Arabs and Kurds: “The tribes don’t want to form part of a unified state; the towns can’t do without it.”[3] Because the Kurds were generally in the mountains and the Arabs lived in the towns, the state advanced the latter.
* * *
—
The story might as well begin in the winter of 401 B.C., when a tired and defeated army of Greek mercenaries was slowly making its way home from Mesopotamia, after failing to topple the Persian king Artaxerxes II. Crossing the Taurus Mountains in what is today southeastern Turkey, the mercenaries were set upon by bands of Carduchi, a fierce group of bowmen, who caused more harm to the Greeks in seven days of hit-and-run raids than had the Persians during the entire Mesopotamian campaign. An account of the harrowing retreat was provided by Xenophon, one of the Greek commanding officers. Xenophon wrote that the Carduchi lived in the mountains and were not subject to outside authority: “Indeed, a royal army of a hundred and twenty thousand had once invaded their country, and not a man of them had got back.”[4]
Xenophon’s account remains relevant today. The Carduchi may well have been Kurds, an Indo-European people speaking a language akin to Persian, who first occupied the Zagros and Taurus ranges in the second millennium B.C. The Kurds are among history’s greatest warriors. Saladin, the Muslim general who repossessed Jerusalem and much of the Holy Land from the Crusaders, was a Kurd. Their bows and slings have long since been replaced by the likes of Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Perched on isolated slopes, amid oak and mountain ash, as I saw during my first visit with them in the late 1980s in northern Iraq and northwestern Iran, Kurdish guerrillas known as peshmerga (“those who are prepared to die”) have wiped out whole units of Turkish, Iraqi, and Syrian forces.
Kurds occupy one of the most tantalizing bits of real estate on earth. The deserts of the Middle East and the plateaus of Central Asia and Anatolia all ram up against the 10,000-foot massifs of Kurdistan. Kurdish areas of Iraq are home to some of the Middle East’s biggest oil fields, while a Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey is home to one of the world’s biggest hydroelectric projects, since the mountains of Kurdistan sit astride the headwaters of both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Nevertheless, despite this geographical bounty, modern statehood eluded the Kurds. Worse, the Kurds as a tribal people have been divided among themselves, so that they have always been hostage to the strategies of others, with one Kurdish guerrilla group often fighting at cross-purposes with another. For decades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane), armed by regimes over the border in Syria and Iraq, constituted Turkey’s chief internal security problem. Even under Saddam Hussein’s totalitarianism, Kurdish guerrilla groups, supported at times by Syria and Iran, occupied parts of northern Iraq; while other Kurdish fighters supported by Saddam were among the most potent irregular forces deployed against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. This, of course, was all prologue to the explosion of Kurdish military and diplomatic power across the region following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Syrian civil war. Lacking a state of their own, the Kurds thrive when existing states are in turmoil.
To be sure, although Kurdistan never officially existed as a state, a lesson in geopolitics could easily begin with the Kurds. For decades, even before the cataclysms of the early twenty-first century in the Fertile Crescent, Kurdish fortunes have served as a barometer of the strength or weakness of every state in the region.
Perhaps because Kurds were a distinct people, with their own language and culture, for at least 1,500 years before converting to Islam in the seventh century A.D., their religious affinity with Turks, Arabs, and Persians has counted for relatively little. If anything, religion has helped to estrange the predominantly Sunni Kurds from their neighbors. Kurds from Iran flaunt their secular values as a way of demonstrating their opposition to the Shi‘ite theocracy in Tehran. In Turkey, however, a state founded on Atatürk’s fiercely secular principles, Kurdish revolts—even prior to Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan’s Islamic counterrevolution—combined fundamentalism with nationalism.
Religion, race, and language aside, what seems to make a Kurd a Kurd is an almost spiritual affinity with the beloved moors and snow-streaked mountains of Kurdistan. As the first row of domed, yellowy hills appeared on the horizon, rippling upwards from the desert floor in northeastern Iraq, my Kurdish driver in 1986 glanced back at the desert, sucked his tongue in disdain, and said, “Arabistan.” Then, looking toward the hills, he murmured, “Kurdistan,” and his eyes lit up. But if geography helps to define the Kurds, it also helps to divide them. The ranks of jagged peaks, with their walled-in valleys and forbidding chasms, seal the Kurds off from one another as much as from the outside world. Kurdish tribalism, which makes the Kurds an assemblage of clans and competing families and political movements, is in significant measure a function of geography.
In the aftermath of the First World War the Kurds actually came close to winning a state of their own. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, whose purpose was to carve up and distribute the Ottoman Empire, provided for a Kurdish homeland in eastern Turkey. The following year, however, Kemal Atatürk defeated an invading Greek army and, by laying the groundwork for a new, cohesive Turkish state in Anatolia, was able to demand the treaty’s revision. His new state brutally repressed the Kurds in the 1920s and 1930s. But after the Second World War the Soviets, who had occupied northern Iran, allowed for the establishment of a small pro-Moscow Kurdish republic around the city of Mahabad. Yet as a result of Anglo-American pressure and an increasing preoccupation with Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Stalin abandoned his Iranian holdings at the end of 1946, leaving the Kurds at the mercy of the Iranian shah, who crushed the fledgling regime and executed its leader, Ghazi Mohammed. For decades afterwards, as I personally witnessed, photos of Ghazi Mohammed occupied a prominent place in Kurdish redoubts in Iraq and Iran.
Another influential figure in Mahabad was Mulla Mustafa Barzani, who afterwards fled to the Soviet Union, where he lived for a decade in exile. He later returned to lead several rebellions in northern Iraq—supported this time covertly by the United States, Israel, and Iran, all of which wanted to undermine the Ba‘athist regime that had replaced the Hashemite king in Baghdad. It was an old Kurdish story: without a state of their own, Kurdish leaders had to periodically switch paymasters, according to the politics of the moment. The most serious of these Barzani-led rebellions broke out in March 1974, when the Iraqi regime of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein had to use tanks and planes to repel Barzani’s forces. But after an agreement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, the shah withdrew his support from the Kurds and the revolt collapsed. The peshmerga retreated to their caves in the mountains and Barzani went into exile in the United States, where he died in 1979.
The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980 provided the Kurds with another opportunity. As Iraqi troops were diverted to the war front in the center and south of the country, fewer were available to confront resurgent peshmerga. Northern Iraq henceforth became a cauldron of Kurdish separatism. Heading north into the mountains from the city of Sulaymaniyah in 1986, I came to a point where the hitherto ubiquitous billboard pictures of President Saddam Hussein suddenly vanished. So did Iraqi soldiers. Replacing them were peshmerga with bandoliers, wearing turbans, baggy trousers, vests, and cummerbunds. According to the world map I was still in Iraq. But Baghdad’s writ was now hardly law.
I found northern Iraq at the time home to no fewer than five Kurdish guerrilla armies. In the Turkish border area Mustafa Barzani’s son, Masoud Barzani, led the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). The Ayatollah Khomeini was backing the Barzani clan, as the shah had done for a time in the early 1970s. Thus, Barzani’s KDP, which had been supported by the United States and Israel, as well as by the shah, was in the following decade a tool of anti-American forces. Barzani’s troops were at the time threatening Iraq’s international highway and oil pipeline to Turkey. Over to the east, near Iraq’s border with Iran, I came across Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), also backed by Iran and Syria. The Barzani and Talabani clans alternated over the years and decades between estrangement and reconciliation. To complicate matters further, at the time of my visit Talabani was hosting on his territory another peshmerga force, Abdel Rahman Qassemlu’s Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), which was cooperating with Saddam against Khomeini’s regime. There were also other, smaller peshmerga forces with their own cross-cutting alliances. At one point, five miles from the Iranian border, I actually looked out over a deforested valley and beheld several different Kurdish armies.
This interlude of Kurdish power would be followed by another, but with great tragedy in the interim. In the final stages of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, as Saddam began to recover his freedom of military maneuver, he launched the infamous Anfal campaign, a full-scale assault on Iraqi Kurdistan in which 100,000 civilians, including many women and children, were murdered by Iraqi forces, sometimes employing poison gas. Then in 1990, following the end of the Cold War and only two years after the conclusion of the stalemated Iran-Iraq War, Saddam invaded Kuwait. The aftermath of the American-led liberation of Kuwait in 1991 saw Saddam’s forces take revenge on the Iraqi Kurds in the north as well as the Iraqi Shi‘ites in the south. This, in turn, led to Provide Comfort, a massive American-run military operation that protected almost 2.5 million Kurdish refugees on both sides of the Iraqi-Turkish border, and which culminated in a no-fly zone over northern Iraq, thereby preventing Saddam’s forces from attacking the Kurds by air.[5] The no-fly zone was the principal factor in the emergence of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Thus, after mass suffering, the Kurds had received a measure of real freedom.
The Cold War’s conclusion had unlocked a Pandora’s box: unleashing the Kurds, with American help, as a geopolitical force in the Fertile Crescent and beyond. That is to say, the end of the Cold War had created America’s unipolar moment, which in turn led to the invasion of Iraq, followed some years later by the Arab Spring in Syria: thus undoing the post–World War I peace agreements that had created the artificial states of Syria and Iraq in the first place, as well as creating Atatürk’s uniethnic Turkish Republic. Put another way, both world wars and the Cold War that followed constituted one singular period in European history: the Long European War of 1914–1989. And its expiration has had momentous consequences for the Middle East.
The Kurdish story continued in all its tumultuousness. America’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, followed by its equally abrupt and ill-thought-out withdrawal, created a vacuum filled in 2014 by ISIS, the Islamic State. The peshmerga subsequently emerged as the most potent indigenous military force against those extremists. In fact, the peshmerga’s war against ISIS, supported by the United States and a global coalition, permitted the Kurds to consolidate de facto control over northern Iraq, including for a time the oil-rich region of Kirkuk, located between Mesopotamia and the Kurdish mountains. Consequently, the Kurdish Regional Government under President Masoud Barzani (Mulla Mustafa’s son) believed that now the time was finally ripe for an independent Kurdistan, given that the Iraqi state was on the verge of collapse. The referendum conducted in Kurdistan in 2017 by the regional government resulted in 93 percent of votes cast in favor of independence. Alas, the regional government had miscalculated what the international effect would be. Baghdad and Tehran immediately imposed a flight ban on all points inside Kurdistan and sealed the borders against trade as well. The Barzanis of the KDP and the Talabanis of the PUK traded accusations for the debacle. Subsequently, the Kurds backed down, withdrawing their threats to declare independence, and entered into a confused dialogue with Baghdad and its own various factions instead.[6]
Kurdistan now exists inside a murky realm of virtual independence and organic links to the Baghdad government. It is stable and prosperous only by comparison with the abysmal political and economic conditions that prevail in Arab Iraq to the south. Meanwhile, its young population, which has no living memory of the armed struggle against Saddam’s Ba‘athist regime, demands reform, an end to massive corruption, and improved governance.[7]
* * *
—
Meanwhile, in northern Syria, the principal Kurdish group is the Democratic Union Party or PYD (Partiya Yekitiya Demokrat), whose military arm is the People’s Protection Units or YPG (Yekineyen Parastina Gel). The PYD and its People’s Protection Units grew out of Abdullah Öcalan’s Marxist Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. Öcalan, a Turkish Kurd, had built up the PKK when he was based in northern Syria in the 1980s and 1990s, causing the Turkish government to field well over 100,000 troops in southeastern Turkey to fight there against Öcalan’s northern-Syria-based insurgency. Soon after the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011–12, the YPG and its People’s Protection Units quickly filled the vacuum left by the withdrawal of Syrian government troops and administrative staff. The Kurdish majority centers of northern Syria—Afrin, Kobani, and the Jazirah—were now all self-governing. Truly, it was the cataclysms of the early twenty-first century in Syria and Iraq that let the Kurdish genie out of the bottle—the one big group that was left stateless following the First World War was getting its revenge across the northern Fertile Crescent.
Crucially, it was the multiyear struggle of Öcalan’s PKK inside the Turkish border in the last decades of the twentieth century that had intensified Kurdish identity on the other side of the border in both Syria and Iraq. Northern Syria proved to be a hub of this phenomenon, as the withdrawal of the Syrian government from the region coincided with a migration of ethnic Kurds from central and southern Syria northward into the PYD zone, just as Kurds from southern Turkey and northern Iraq were also drifting into northern Syria to assist in the struggle against both the Islamic State (ISIS) and Bashar al-Assad.[8]
That struggle was particularly bloody. Between September 2014 and March 2015, the Islamic State laid siege to the Kurdish-majority town of Kobani, just inside Syria, close to the Turkish border. Seventy percent of the town was destroyed and Kobani and its environs lost two-thirds of their population, many of whom became refugees and displaced persons.[9] In the end, U.S. airpower and Kurdish ground forces drove out ISIS. This collaboration led to the creation of the American-supported Syrian Democratic Forces, a combined land army of Kurds and Sunni Arabs, numbering in the tens of thousands.[10]
