After a five-month tour of South Korea,Vietnam and Indonesia, peace activist and reporter for Pacifica radio, and author of the book described in last week’s article, How America Lost Iraq, Aaron Glantz returned to Iraq through Turkey in order to investigate how things were going in Iraqi Kurdistan.

While Iraq’s western border with Jordan was manned by U.S. troops, the northern border with Turkey was protected by Kurdish militia loyal to the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

At a cheap hotel in the regional capital of Arbil, Aaron met his filmmaker friend, James Langley.

“So, how is the situation?” Aaron inquired.

“Things are pretty good. As you can see, it’s quite different up here than in the south,” James informed him.

However, over sandwiches, James cautioned, “Kurdistan is not so free. The western half, which includes Arbil, was ruled by Masoud Barzani and his Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), while the eastern half was ruled by Jalal Talabani and his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Both organizations were controlled by their own leaders with their own armies.”

The next morning, Aaron went to register with the Assayeeshk, the security police, a necessary step to remain at the Fareed Hotel, without being arrested. On the way back to the hotel, he passed by juice stations, kebab restaurants, barbershops and clothing-and-produce bazaars. There wasn’t an American soldier in sight.

This kind of independence was the result of Kurdistan’s working diligently with the U.S. ”The Kurds were a strong player in the game. They sacrificed for that purpose. The U.S. has to recognize that our people sacrificed, and they should pay more attention to our concerns,” Shukr Piro Sinjo told Aaron the following day.

“We were in the middle of renovating the sewer system when the United Nations left,” Phillip Petrus, a reconstruction worker told Aaron, “but then when the United States took over, we had to stop. Since the end of the United Nations Food-for-Oil program, we have not gotten a single dollar for reconstruction. We try to talk to Bremer and his associates, but they don’t talk to us. We are waiting. We have gained so much with the end of the Saddam regime, so we are patient, but we will not wait forever.”

Aaron goes on to tell us that at the negotiating table in Baghdad, Washington was demanding that Massoud Barbani and Jalal Talibank disband their groups, which had for 80 years fought successive Arab Iraqi governments. But so far, Barzani and Talbani have refused. They demanded that Kurdistan be responsible for its own defense and they wanted a share of Iraq’s oil revenue to pay for it. They also demanded that the oil-rich city of Kirkuk be included in their jurisdiction.

“Maybe they don’t want a strong Kurdistan,” Phillip Petrus said. “That is not for me to speculate or question. I say only that we are waiting and that we would like to fix our sewer system.”

Here we have a situation where the people have worked hard to establish order in their country, and all they are asking for is a sewer system...no U.S. troops to guard their streets, no hand-outs for food or other goods – just a sewer system to provide sanitary conditions and to raise the morale of the people. Most Americans would shake their heads and say to our authorities, “Give it to them, already!”

Life in Kurdistan, Aaron wrote, was relatively comfortable for many, except for the broken sewer system. New cars could be seen: Mercedes, BMW, and other high-end European brands, which had flooded across the mountainous Turkish border in trucks. The cars cost no more that $3,000 for a used luxury car that would have gone for $20,000 back in the States. According to rumor, the cars were so cheap because they had been stolen from the streets of Europe and stripped of all identifying marks before being sold in Iraq.

Yet, Aaron hastens to tell us that electricity is available only three hours a day, and telephone service rarely works, unemployment and poverty remained high, and most of the hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees who lost their homes under Saddam continued to languish in camps.

At the Benslawa Camp, located just outside of Arbil, more than 50,000 Kurds lived; most were refugees from al-Anfal, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing Saddam launched in the late 1980s.

“I was a peshmerga (Kurdish guerrilla) at that time,” explained Benslawa’s mayor. “During the daytime we would fight for the Iraqi army. Then in the evening when the army was sleeping we would sneak away to the mountains and shell their positions. We wouldn’t let them sleep. Our goal was to liberate Kurdistan and get our freedom.” In response, Saddam unleashed a reign of terror in the Kurdish countryside against thousands of Kurdish villages, which is how the mayor lost his home.

Aaron was particularly anxious to find the refugees from Hallabja, where Saddam’s chemical weapons had been used. An elderly woman spoke to him:

“My name is Aftow Khafood,” she said, clad in a black head scarf, and a long black dress with long sleeves. “I’m from Hallabja.”

Her home had no door, but simply a gap in the cinderbloks that allowed people to enter and exit. A canvas top provided a roof. Before the war, her husband worked for the Kurdistan Government Party to guard against Saddam Hussein, but now he had no job, and the family had no money.

Since the wind was blowing in the right way, they were not killed with the other 5,000 civilians. They ran, and eventually, traveled on foot for seven days and seven nights through the mountains covered with snow to Iran, where they lived for four years, before returning to find refuge in the camp. There has never been either money or help given to the people to replace their homes destroyed by Saddam.

Since 1.7 million Kurds had signed a petition for independence, and presented it to Paul Bremer in Iraq, Aaron decided to get out among the common folk and learn what they thought of the move toward independence.

There he learned not much hope could be seen for the future of such freedom, that Turkey would never step aside and allow it to happen, especially considering the presence of two Turkey army bases in Kurdistan. Earlier in the year, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayip Erdogan, had declared that his government would oppose Kurdish autonomy “ even if it was in Argentina.”

Because most of the foreign press resided in Baghdad, the oil fields of Kirkuk were rarely visited, though they held much of the wealth of the country.

With his interpreter, Istifan Braymook, Aaron set out by bus to Kirkuk, where the Americans were in control of the Iraqi Northern Oil Company. The Iraqi Kurds, with Kalashnikove s gun power, and wearing shoulder patches for the Erinys-Iraq Company, had received a contract from the Americans for $80 million to provide protection for Iraq’s vital oil infrastructure.

According to Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Knut Royce, in an article he wrote for Newsday, Erinys recruited many of its guards from Ahmed Chalabi, who, according to another reporter for Newsday, received two-million dollars for arranging the contract.

There were disagreements regarding salaries. Kurdish guerrillas made up the major part of the guards, and earned $120 a month. Their supervisors, many from South Africa, earned an average salary of $5,000 a month.

A Kurdish guard explained: “They said they had to teach us how to fight. They taught us hand-to-hand fighting and how to use more advanced weapons than just the Kalashnikov. We already knew how to fight. Saddam’s regime taught us how to fight Saddam Hussein. The KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root) taught us how to fight for the Americans.”

Aaron Glantz set out to write a book that would take us out of our comfortable lives and help us to see the little people in Iraq, what we have missed by our ignorance, and how they have suffered and continue to suffer because of that ignorance.

Perhaps, in quiet moments, his words will take us to our knees, as we stop to think of bombs and fear and deaths in families in Iraq and Lebanon, not Chicago, New York, or Peoria, Illinois.

Lord, help us to see and hear our brothers and sisters
suffering the ravages of war,
and grant peace to this beautiful world,
broken in too many places,
because our pride tells us this is our world, not yours,
to do with as we will.

Forgive us, Lord, for we have sinned,
and comfort those we have harmed
beyond all imagining.

Amen

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