The Assassins' Gate (52 page)

The insurgency that followed the American invasion reminded some amateur historians of the 1920 revolt against the British. But there was this key difference: In 1920, it was Shiite tribal sheikhs who had first rebelled; after the invasion, very few Shia, other than the Sadr militia, took up arms against the Americans. The reason was obvious: This time, the heirs of Arnold Wilson and Gertrude Bell, the neoconservatives in Washington and the CPA officials in Baghdad, were determined to put power in Shiite hands. This had to do with more than simple majority rule; the Sunni Arabs of Iraq were regarded as one key source of the malaise of the Arab world, with its violent anti-Western ideologies. The main insurgency that began shortly after the fall of Baghdad and continues to this day was always Sunni in character.

During the first year of the war after the war, many Iraqis refused to speak in terms of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd. People told me that the term “Sunni Triangle” was an insult—that the region was an American invention. As soon as I mentioned one of the unmentionable ethnic categories, I would be told (usually by a gray-haired gentleman in a suit jacket) that these were ideas imported by Westerners and Arab extremists, no one used to ask about Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd, all Iraqis suffered equally under Saddam, and the gentleman in the suit jacket himself had numerous cousins and neighbors in mixed marriages. There could never be a civil war in Iraq, because Iraqis didn't think that way. I always found myself thinking: If only it were true.

Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down became a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims. The surge of Shiite religiosity was also a political display, deeply disquieting even to Sunnis (as well as secular Shia) who had no desire to dominate. As Shiite officials, security forces, clerics, and pilgrims increasingly became the target of attacks, the sectarian character of the insurgency and of Iraqi politics in general overwhelmed the best intentions of those who insisted that they were all Iraqis. The CPA's failure to disarm the militias, as Bremer more than once vowed to do, left almost every city in Iraq under the real control of an ethnic group rather than the government. It sometimes felt as if a civil war had already started, which only the Sunnis were fighting. The great Shiite patience in not retaliating (apart from a campaign of assassination of former Baathists) had less to do with Iraqi nationalism than with the knowledge that majority power would soon be theirs. Communal violence and occasional terror bombings also erupted along the fault lines in the north where Arabs and Kurds came together. Kurdish separatism was such an obvious force that the only question seemed to be whether the Kurds would stay in the new Iraq or not.

Some American observers, such as Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Peter Galbraith, an ex-diplomat who was an adviser to the Kurds, looked at the mess and decided that only a separation of Iraq into three autonomous regions could prevent civil war. This was in direct opposition to the official American policy that Iraq's “territorial integrity” must be preserved. To Gelb, partition was the solution to America's problems in Iraq: Cut off the Sunni center, abandon it, concentrate troops in the south and north, and support democracies among the Shia and the Kurds. The Sunnis, with no oil in their desert, could then decide whether they wanted to cooperate or fade away.

This scenario struck me as too remote from the texture of life in Iraq. The country was cobbled together almost a century ago; there are very few Iraqis alive who have any memory of the time before Iraq. The decades of living together wove innumerable personal ties and created a national consciousness that was badly damaged by Saddam, especially among the young, but was nonetheless real. There was nothing organically inevitable about Iraq's falling apart. If it fell apart, it would do so because of the folly of its leaders. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy in Iraq, who had seen terrible civil wars firsthand in Lebanon and his native Algeria, warned Iraqis, “Civil wars do not happen because a person makes a decision ‘Today I'm going to start a civil war.' Civil wars happen because people are reckless, because people are selfish, because groups think more of themselves than they do of the benefit of their country.”

As the violent year 2004 wore on, Iraqis talked more and more openly about the danger of civil war. Some people thought it was already happening; others said it could happen with a single spark. And almost everyone agreed that, if a civil war began, the place where it was most likely to begin was the ethnically mixed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

It was my favorite Iraqi city. Kirkuk was just as searing in summertime, as neglected and trash strewn and traffic choked, as any other place in Iraq. But from my first visit I found it charming, sometimes even magical, with the nostalgia of the past and the fearful complexity of the present layered like sediment in every narrow street; and at the heart of the city lay a mystery.

It was on my third and last trip to Kirkuk that I met Luna Dawood.

*   *   *

LUNA WAS TWENTY-FOUR YEARS OLD
when Saddam Hussein paid a surprise visit to her house, but she reacted like a teenager. It was an October afternoon in 1983. Two presidential helicopters landed on an open field; tanks cordoned off the tidy middle-class streets of the Arrapha neighborhood, home to employees of the oil company; and the president, flanked by an enormous security entourage, showed up at the Dawoods' back kitchen door. The Baathists' long-standing war against Iraqi Kurds was intensifying, and it appeared that Saddam wanted to secure the loyalty of those who worked in Kirkuk's valuable oil industry. Two decades later, Luna still recalled Saddam's visit a bit giddily: He was handsome in his olive-drab military uniform, and he paused to admire the house and ask friendly questions. His cologne was so overpowering that, for days afterward, Luna couldn't wash the odor off the hand that had shaken the president's, and the living room sofa smelled so strongly that it had to be given away.

Saddam refused coffee and chocolates, but a painting of a woman drawing water from a tree-shaded river caught his eye—Luna's brother, who was serving on the front in the Iran-Iraq War, had painted it—and the president claimed it as a gift. The Dawoods were Assyrian Christians, not Arabs, and when Saddam addressed Luna's mother in Arabic she replied in the English that she'd learned from the British managers of the Iraqi Petroleum Company before it was nationalized by the Baathists, in 1972. “That time is gone,” Saddam scolded her. “You must learn Arabic.”

A presidential trailer was parked in the Dawoods' garden, and neighbors lined up to go inside for a private audience with the president. Those were flush days in Iraq, and Saddam's personal secretary, Barzan al-Tikriti, presented each petitioner with three thousand dinars from a bag full of money. To her everlasting regret, Luna was too timorous to enter Saddam's trailer. Her younger sister Fula did so, and she emerged with both the cash and a job at the oil company. One of Luna's cousins entreated Saddam to release his brother, who was doing five years in prison for comparing the face of a top Baathist official to that of a monkey. Saddam replied that he couldn't interfere with the judicial system. Then he came out of the trailer to tell the assembled residents that Iraq was at war with Iran to protect the purity of Iraqi women from Ayatollah Khomeini's rampaging troops. The helicopters took off, and everyone assumed that Saddam had left Kirkuk.

But the trailer remained in the Dawoods' garden; their phone was cut off, their kitchen full of security men. Without explanation, the family was told to spend the night on the second floor. At two in the morning, unable to sleep, Luna went to the window and looked down at the garden. As if in a dream, she saw Saddam step out of the trailer wearing a white dishdasha. The next day, he was gone.

The president visited Kirkuk again in 1990. This time, his helicopter landed in the square in front of the municipal building. By then, Luna was working there as an accountant in the finance department. Saddam announced a campaign to beautify Kirkuk: The walled citadel—the oldest part of the city, situated on a plateau across the dry Khasa River bed from the modern city—was going to be cleaned up, beginning with the removal of the eight or nine hundred mostly Kurdish and Turkoman families living in its ancient houses. The next day, fifty million dinars arrived at Luna's office from Baghdad. She had forty-five days to dig through title deeds, some dating back to 1820, and pay compensation to displaced homeowners.

The process of emptying out the Kirkuk citadel had nothing to do with urban renewal. It was the climax of a forty-year campaign known to Iraqis as Arabization. Beginning in 1963, and continuing up to the eve of the American invasion, the Baathist regime in Baghdad deported tens of thousands of Kurds—some Kurdish sources put the number at three hundred thousand—from the city and the surrounding province, forced other ethnic minorities from their houses, and imported similar numbers of Arabs to Kirkuk from the south. Luna's job required her to distribute lump sums of money to families forfeiting their homes, sift through crumbling property records, and handle the traffic of deportees at the municipal building. She was a bureaucratic expediter of ethnic cleansing.

A slim, energetic forty-five-year-old when I met her in the summer of 2004, Luna was unmarried, and, unlike most Iraqi women, she wore Western clothes and carried herself with self-confidence. She had wide, startled eyes and the kind of strong nose seen on statuary from Nineveh, and when she talked about Kirkuk's history under Saddam, her anxious smile flashed a row of crooked teeth. “It was a tragedy I don't want to remember,” she told me when we met in her office. She then proceeded to remember everything. “They were poor people,” she said. “Each one who came to take the money, in his eyes you saw the tractor coming to take his house.” Crowds awaiting deportation filled the hallway outside her office; women fainted. Because Assyrian Christians comprised the smallest and therefore least threatening of Kirkuk's many ethnic groups, some of the deportees in Luna's office trusted her enough to curse Saddam. If the secret police instructed her to delay paying someone they intended to arrest, Luna would quietly urge the reluctant man to leave Kirkuk without his money.

At the end of one long day, an old Kurdish farmer approached Luna's desk. She presented him with a consent form that granted the government ownership of his family's land in exchange for several thousand dinars. The procedures were finished; all that remained was for him to sign.

“I would like some water first,” the old man said. Luna gave him a glass. He drank the water, signed the form, and fell dead in her lap.

“The things I saw,” Luna told me, “nobody saw.”

A few weeks before the American invasion, the government in Baghdad sent a secret order to officials in Kirkuk: Immediately burn all paperwork related to the Central Housing Plan—the regime's euphemism for the ethnic-cleansing campaign. The Baathists were meticulous record keepers; outside the municipal building, officials torched three large garbage containers filled with papers, and the bonfire lasted almost twenty-four hours.

Luna decided to ignore the order. “I can't burn these things,” she said. “How can we compensate these people if these documents are burned?” Her motives were not entirely altruistic. Luna was a Baathist (a requirement of the job), and she wanted to protect herself against any accusations of misappropriating funds. She was also an admitted busybody. “You know, I put my nose in everything,” she said. “I want to know everything.” So she lied to her boss, and instead of burning the files she secretly drove several carloads back to the house in Arrapha that she shared with Fula and another unmarried sister. When I met Luna, most of the documents were kept on the roof of city hall, in an airless slant-ceilinged storeroom to which only she had the key. A waist-high sea of paper and dust inside had yet to attract the interest of either Iraqi or American officials, although among the documents that Luna salvaged were secret letters that exposed the Baath Party's sustained effort to transform Kirkuk from Iraq's most diverse city into a place dominated by Arabs loyal to the regime.

Luna's files spoke about not just the past but the future. After the invasion, Kirkuk became the stage of an ethnic power struggle. Kirkuk was compared to New York and, more often, to Sarajevo. How the new Iraq corrected the historical injustices recorded in the files would reveal much about the kind of country Iraqis chose to live in—or if it would remain a country at all.

Inside the storeroom, Luna waded through the files and stooped to inspect them with a kind of wit's-end affection, like a mother with too many unruly children. “Look—look—how many people? This land—this land—how many people?” she cried. “How could I work this all? Do you know how much I have in my mind? All this! All this! I must get it out!”

*   *   *

KIRKUK SAT NEAR THE FOOTHILLS
of the Zagros Mountains, not far from the southern border of Kurdistan, the autonomous region that broke free of Baathist control in 1991. During the decades of intermittent fighting between the Iraqi army and Kurdish
peshmerga
guerrillas, the regime regarded Kirkuk, with oil fields outside the city comprising almost 9 percent of Iraq's total reserves, as strategically vulnerable. In part, the Arabization program was aimed at securing Baghdad's authority over this valuable resource. But the essence of Arabization was ideological. The history and demography of Kirkuk were an affront to the fascist dreams of the Arab Baath Socialist Party. It was a dense, cosmopolitan city along a trade route between Constantinople and Persia, and its layers of successive civilizations had nothing to do with Arab glory. Around the city's markets and the citadel, residents still lived in close quarters, and a visitor found the variety of faces and dress, tolerant manners, public female presence, and polyglot street life of a mixed city. Kirkuk felt closer to Istanbul than to Baghdad.