Pride and treason in the shadow of America
I originally reported this story for a general interest magazine in late-2017. I’m publishing it now, for the first time, in a special Monday Long Read edition of War, U.S.A. to mark one-month of publishing.
I .
By the tip of Lateef Majeed's right index finger, stained a deep blue, everyone would recognize the choice he made: he voted in favor of Kurdish secession from Iraq. We sat together last September in Lateef’s cousin’s house, on the outskirts of Tuz Khurmatu, Iraq, a town off the highway connecting Kurdish Kirkuk to the north, with Baghdad to the south. It was an appropriate setting for my visit. In the months and weeks leading to the independence referendum, the Kurds had been trading increasingly hostile verbal salvos with the central government. Baghdad-backed Iraqi militias amassed along highways and outside key cities throughout the north, ready to suppress voter turnout. It was the first time in recent years that the military had shifted its focus away from its fight with the Islamic State.
With his legs crossed, Lateef, a 49-year-old Kurd, recounted a story he had heard that day from neighbors and friends. Reportedly, a small convoy of Kurdish fighters, known as the peshmerga, had been driving down the highway that morning, returning from a trip to polling stations of Kirkuk. The peshmerga were proud, uproarious. In the wake of their referendum votes, they believed they would be part of the birth of a new nation, or rather, the establishment of a nation that had simply never had a home. Delirious with nationalist enthusiasm, they stopped to indulge an afternoon tea.
To the Iraqi troops who were loitering outside the teashop, Lateef told me, the celebration was offensive. Not only were the Kurds disrespecting a holiday — it was Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom at Karbala of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad— but by voting to secede, they had committed treason. The Iraqi forces unloaded, killing at least one peshmerga fighter, and wounding another. Officials for both the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), or Iraqi militia, and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) both later corroborated the story, but ascribed the attack to nothing more than a personal feud.
Lateef, rotund and soft-spoken, anxiously fiddled his fingers as he related the account. He could relate to the peshmerga’s glorious sense of purpose, and had his own reasons to be wary of the Iraqi army, with whose forces he often traded and off who he had supported his family. In the 1980s, Lateef made his living trading livestock, cramming cattle and sheep into a rickety truck and delivering them to villages with riding distance of his home in Tuz Khurmatu. As the country’s economy developed, he managed to make a good living. The government in Baghdad cared for him. Saddam paid for universal healthcare. Education was free, and rated among the world’s finest. But the taste of a small fortune led Lateef to more legally dubious trading: Hidden beneath the lining of the truck bed he stashed silver, gold, and iron. While Iraqis had always harassed the Kurds, seeing them as inferior and displaced in a country in which they never rightly belonged, they were nevertheless his chief customers. One evening, when his compensation filled three burlap potato sacks, his countrymen turned against him. His truck and its cargo were confiscated by soldiers from the Iraqi army. For some time, he abandoned the work.
Over mint tea later that night, I noticed that the blue on Lateef’s finger seemed to have faded, though I had heard that the ink would stain well into the next month. His cousin, who had been sitting quietly across the room, explained. “He cleaned it because he was scared.” Not because he himself was peshmerga, but rather, the opposite. Years earlier, in an attempt to secure a living in post-Saddam Iraq, and having learned over time that self-preservation outweighs tribal loyalty, Lateef himself had joined the Iraqi army.
II.
To many Kurds, enlisting in the Iraqi Army is a betrayal — Kurdistan is their country and Iraq defines their nationhood only to the outside world. The referendum was only the latest in a frustrating, century-long effort to achieve independence.
Kurdish agitation for their own nation began in the waning years of Ottoman rule, though the first real opportunity did not present itself in the wake of the First World War, when the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres promised independence to the Kurds by offering them what is today parts of northern Iraq. Only three years later, that arrangement was upended by regional differences and sectarian infighting; a new treaty established Turkey, splitting Kurdistan in half. As maps were redrawn, pockets of Kurds were dispersed into what is now Iran, Syria, Turkey and Iraq, though efforts continued throughout the Kurdish communities of these nations to form a unified, independent nation. In 1946, a republic carved out of Iran became the first and last declared Kurdish state. Its autonomy was short-lived. Oazi Muhammad, the president, was executed by the Shah within a year.
In the decades since, Kurds have gained and lost semi-autonomy several times. In 1970, the nationalist Kurdistan Democratic Party signed an autonomy agreement with Saddam Hussein to establish the Kurdish Regional Government, an independent ruling body of the newly-formed region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, and a 1974 truce which reaffirmed the region’s status. Any dreams of eventual independence or secessions that these agreements inspired, however, were undone in 1988, when Saddam Hussein’s campaign of forced relocations and chemical attacks massacred roughly a quarter of a million Kurds. As four thousand villages were razed, Kurds were made to exhume their loved ones and bury them off Arab land.
Over the next three decades, the Kurdish position was gradually strengthened by American intervention. The Clinton administration had helped establish relative tranquility in the Kurdish region by instating a no-fly zone, George W. Bush had launched the war that deposed Saddam, and the Obama administration had bolstered the Kurds by supporting them in the mission to destroy the Islamic State. The peshmerga, which had supported US troops against Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party and the Iraqi army, had become a deadly fighting force, known for achieving victory against abysmal odds. But as a former senior adviser in the Kurdish Regional Government told me, if the Kurds sought independence, America's two-decades of “nation-building” would be seen as a failure. Since no U.S. president would want to be charged with further destabilizing the Middle East, many felt the Kurdish question was one they could leave unanswered without upending decades of disjointed foreign policy.
Nevertheless, success on the battlefield — in Mosul, Hawija, on Mount Sinjar — galvanized the Kurds and provided an opening for Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish Regional Government, to seek independence. In July 2014, as ISIS forces captured Mosul, Barzani went before the Kurdish parliament to begin the process of establishing self-rule. “The time has come to decide our fate,” he said. “And we should not wait for other people to decide it for us.”
For months ahead of Kurdish Election Day, the Trump Administration sought to curtail the referendum. Turkey, Iran and the UK, among other nations, worried about the implications of holding the referendum. Barzani told naysayers that he was willing to negotiate with Baghdad, but still wished to hear the voice of the people, which he saw as potential leverage against Iraqi president Haider al-Abadi. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, his party’s political rival, had also warned against the referendum, for fear it would undermine the regional government in the departure of the Islamic State and ahead of federal elections in 2018.
Tensions rose and militias clashed shortly after the polls closed, cascading even further after the results were announced: 90% of voters favored independence. Kurdish parliament members in Baghdad were told to return home. The Kurdish governor of Kirkuk, with whom I had been exchanging text messages and emails throughout my trip, was abruptly forced by Iraqi President Abadi to resign. He took shelter in the Kurdish capital of Erbil even as his city fell to advancing Iraqi troops who, in the hours after the referendum, fought skirmishes to reclaim territories claimed by the Kurds but which existed on Iraqi soil. Kurdistan’s regional airports were closed to incoming and outgoing air traffic. Foreign consulates in Erbil shuttered. When asked what contingency plans there might be for American citizens living and working in the Kurdish region, a spokesperson at the American consulate told me, “Don't come here.”
Amid the chaos, Lateef’s neighbors started to worry — planning the relocation of their families, reaching for rifles — especially after hearing about the teashop shooting. But despite his sympathies with his fellow Kurds, there was little action he could take as an Iraqi staff sergeant. “Because I’m in the Iraqi army, I can’t do anything personally,” he said. “Whenever someone Kurdish is killed of course it upsets me. It’s why I don’t like the Iraqi army. We can’t respond when Arabs threaten us.”
Lateef was one of about eighty young Kurdish men who joined Iraqi-backed militias in the summer before the referendum. They had varying reasons: Some felt that when the Iraqi parliament accredited the PMF as a legal fighting force despite backing from Iran, the central government in Baghdad was handing their country over to foreign reign. Rather than support the people residing in their borders, Baghdad had effectively welcomed an arsonist to a bonfire.
For Lateef, the decision had a different motivation. “I’m in the Iraqi army because the salary is good,” he told me. “If it was not for the salary, I would not spend a minute in the Iraqi army. Whoever joins the Iraqi army or the Hash’d al-Sha’bi”— the PMF —“as a Kurd certainly does this just for the money,” he said. Peshmerga coffers had long been empty owing to the ISIS occupation, which halted or entirely disincentivized millions in foreign investments. Since the militant Islamists’ incursion, the government had been unable to afford decent salaries for its fighters.
In Taqtaq, a small oil boom town on the edge of Iraqi Kurdistan, I met with Zahir, a recruiter for the Iraqi army who had been tasked with hiring fighters for a Kurdish unit to replace those lost against the Islamic State. I asked him why he thought Kurds would want to join a militia supported by the central government in Baghdad. “They don’t know anything,” he told me — all Kurds were plebes who could not understand the complex mechanisms of war and independence. He took care to emphasize that he was no longer involved in recruitment of any kind, and told me he prefers to stay at home reading Winston Churchill biographies.
One of Zahir’s potential recruits had been Dashti Kazim, a twenty-one year old who I found working at an auto body shop in town. On the day when he and his friends were called to collect their paperwork and report to a military supervisor, Kazim recalled, “I saw accidentally a paper in which there was a statement on it written, ‘For Hashd Al-Shaabi.’ That’s when we quit. We said, ‘If it is for Hash’d al-Sha’bi, there is the possibility at any time Hash’d al-Sha’bi will fight against Peshmarga.’” Working at the autoshop, it would take him three months to earn what the Iraqi army was offering for one. But money wasn’t everything. “You never think of killing one of your Kurdish brothers for money,” he said. “And, of course, since the referendum, we became more sensitive.”
Lateef, on the other hand, took the salary. I asked him if he would consider switching sides, join the peshmerga, and fight alongside his people. He nodded. “I have to protect my family,” he said. “If the situation gets worse, I will leave the Iraqi army and come back to Kurdistan even if the peshmerga won’t offer me money.” He shifted his posture as he spoke, readjusting his crossed legs. He seemed both anxious and certain — I wasn’t sure I could trust his reply.
III.
Lateef married his first wife, Najiba, in 1984, but separated in 2016, after their son Ashraf discovered that his father was carrying on an affair. On the day after the referendum and my visit to Lateef, I visited her home in Kirkuk, where she lives with her sons, Ashraf, Brwa, and Ibrahim. Outside, a for sale sign gathered dust as birds flitted around an aging Kandertree. The tree cast shade over an outdoor latrine typical of the region.
In the kitchen, Najiba and her daughter Layla were in the kitchen, dicing cucumbers and lemons. Ashraf, now 25, sat beside his mother and studied his smartphone. His Instagram account boasted more than 50,00 followers: he tells me he’s virtually famous. Chalak, Lateef and Najiba’s eldest son and the father of two small children d around the kitchen floor between the doorway and their father’s lap, was seated on the floor to his mother’s other side, and waited for lunch.
I asked Chalak whether Lateef would be safe in Tuz Khurmatu, about his father’s intentions as a Kurd in the Iraqi army, and if threats against Kurdish people had risen in the past few days and would rise further in the weeks ahead. “It is not safe for Kurds nowadays,” Chalak said, adding that his father would return to Kirkuk if only to get farther away from the disputed territories. “My father will, unconditionally, come home if the situation gets worse, because now the Iraqi government is sending back the Kurdish parliamentary and ministries as consequences of the referendum.” Fighters with Hash’d al-Sha’bi — which had recently become an authorized part of the Iraqi army despite concerns of human rights violations — were amassing near the Iraqi-Kurdish border. The Iraqi forces had fought alongside peshmerga to vanquish ISIS, but with their common enemy now mostly defeated, those wartime friendships were finished.
As the women prepared lunch—boiled chicken with zew sauce, green peppers and cucumbers, and mint tea — Najiba defended Lateef’s choice to enlist with the Iraqis, and to remain in the army despite growing evidence that they were targeting Kurds. The peshmerga salary is too low, she explained, since the fight against ISIS had crippled the region’s economy, and ground the once-booming oil industry to a halt. The peshmerga, Najiba pointed out. Her sons disagreed.
"My father has to forget about the money," Chalak said, one eye on his children as they loaded liters of Cola into the fridge. At one point he flinched, fearing that his daughter might fall, but she did not and he returned to the conversation. Chalak argued that his father should care foremost for his first family by leaving the Iraqi army and rejoining the Kurdish forces. Chalak reminisced on the honor his father brought in hedging his life to trade livestock and gold as a Kurd against the Iraqi forces in the 1980s. "We were happy then.”
“He still gives the salary from the Iraqi army to us,” Najiba replied. She despised Lateef for running off with another woman — she often slips into denigrations of her absent husband, and had recently sold her wedding ring at a pawnshop. But she needed the alimony. “You know if tensions rise between Kurds and Arabs, the salary won't be important,” said Chalak. “We'll be fearful of our lives.” There will be an all out war between Baghdad and the KRG.
Ashraf, for his part, was disappointed by his father’s apparent lack of political commitment. “I told him to join peshmerga, but my dad said, 'I couldn't afford the family,'" he said. “Seven months ago, I told him he was free to choose between the pesh or Iraqi army. If my dad joins the pesh and if he is martyred, then this is a proud thing for our family. But my dad said that even if he died in the Iraqi army, he wouldn't want his family stuck in a bad financial situation."
Posted for much of the battle of Mosul inside the city, where he guarded a top commander in the fight against the Islamic State, Lateef could have died a Peshmerga, leaving his family a healthy pension. [KRR4] “In the KRG, if they know you are a son of a peshmerga martyr, they respect you," Ashraf explained, looking up from his phone briefly, then passing it to his brother who laughed, before curving back into the cell phone’s glare. Surviving children receive free tuition to public schools and college from the Kurdish state. If you are Kurdish and your father dies fighting for the Iraqis, however, it is considered a disgrace — exile is too extreme, but social shaming fits.
"The difference is huge," Najiba agreed despite her defense of his decision. As she sat on the floor she cupped her hands over her eyes. Her dark hair fell onto her soldiers framing her soft, sunken eyes. She wore dark makeup and sat among her children, struggling against tears and the black rivulets of her mascara. "It's like night and day! If he dies in pesh, we don't feel as bad as if he were to die in the Iraqi army. We'd feel much better if he died for Kurdistan."
"Only the salary and nothing else," Ashraf said, shaking his head.
Najiba continued musing on the referendum, anxiously waiting for lunch, twiddling her thumbs while saying, “Before this situation, Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen were like brothers, and Sunni and Shi’ite were good to each other. Peshmerga is all Kurds, now Lateef is in Iraqi army. Out of fifteen soldiers, five of them are Kurds, the rest are Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs," she said. "If Kurds and Arabs start a war, I don’t know how he can save himself.”
After lunch, we had tea and grapes and bananas and plums. I could hear the birds through the windows as Chalak told me that he was unsure what choice his father would make in the coming months. Even if Lateef knew how much his allegiances hurt his family, how would losing out on his army salary help them? No matter the outcome, Chalak did not wish to abandon the relationship out of resentment. “Whatever he has done, he still is our father,” Chalak said. “He is the head of our family, and we would never break his heart.” He stopped, looked at a news alert on his phone, and added, "That was his decision to marry the second wife, but it affected us because we were a united family. Now we are all broken."
Lateef’s second wife, Nasreen, lives with him in a second home that he build with a portion of his Iraqi army paychecks and is Najiba’s cousin. She is Kurdish, and unashamed of her husband. In fact, she’s proud he works for the Iraqi army. And she, too, voted for Kurdish independence. They claim they are not affiliated with any government party, and dismiss the idea that they’ve been anything but loyal Kurds. They are adaptable, the family told me.
In the weeks following the referendum, homes in the southernmost reaches of Kurdistan were razed, and blood was spilled. Kurds lay dead in the streets of Khanaqin, to the east of Baghdad. Dozens of Kurdish soldiers died in clashes around Altun Kupri, just north of Kirkuk. Storefronts in Tuz Khurmatu were burned to rubble. Ashraf wanted to visit with his father, but Chalak told him that it was too dangerous. He drove to The Apple, a tea and shisha shop in Kirkuk, and called Lateef. “Dad, I talked to Chalak today and he said the situation in Tuz is not going well.”
“The situation in Tuz is not that bad,” Lateef said. “But it is not safe because of the things that happened between the Peshmerga.”
“How are the Kurds?”
“The Kurds are worried.”
“Is there shooting in Tuz?”
“No—there is no shooting yet.”
In few words he told Ashraf to take care; to remain fixed on his own future, but to protect his family. He said to his son that during wartime, he needed to look after his brothers.
Ashraf hung up. “He doesn’t talk much,” he said. Ashraf’s mother and siblings were back at the house preparing a move to Sulaymaniyah—they would be safe, the figured, as long as they shifted east. But he was thinking of what his family had already lost.
“I am proud of my dad. He feels bad, but does not have a better choice.” He inhaled some shisa flavored with lemon and mint. When he exhaled he said, “The thing is, we all lose our parents. But he is alive, and it is like he is dead.”
IV.
By November, Kurdish forces had seceded one-fifth of their territory to troops from Baghdad. Peshmerga were locked in desperate stalemates against Iranian-backed and Turkish forces for control of key border crossings. Turkish tanks deployed to the country’s border with northern Iraq in a show of force. Frustrated by the chaos the referendum had unleashed, Barzani addressed his countrypeople at the end of October, admitting that he had failed them and an announcing his resignation. A former senior American official had told me that there were few instances of separatist tribes winning independence and finding success afterward. He was right, it turned out. There was to be no independent Kurdistan.
Amid the violence, Lateef and his second family, to include Nasreen, fled south to the small city of Kalar, on the banks of the Sirwan River. Not long after they left Tuz Khurmatu, at least 20 people died when a car bomb exploded in the village. “I felt really sad and bad about the people who were being killed in Tuz,” he told me through Ashraf later. “But I knew they were being killed by the Shi’ite miliais.” Since it was the PMF and not the Iraqi army, he remained confident in his decision to remain enlisted. Besides, unlike the salaries to the peshmerga, the cash still flowed.
Lateef called in sick from his post in Mosul shortly after the referendum, in mid-November. I remembered what he had said on the night we met: “I am not going to fight peshmerga if I stay in the Iraqi army.” At the time, I had taken this to mean that if things got bad, he would join the peshmerga in solidarity. But in practice, when the moment came, and Iraqi forces stormed Kirkuk in mid-October, Lateef’s decision was to stay out of the fray. For several weeks after the referendum, as the gunsmoke came and went through Kirkuk, he remained on unofficial leave from the Iraqi army while collecting his monthly pay. In January, he told me that he was about to leave the army again. But he thought better of this.
And leaving now would seem futile.
A year after the referendum, relations between the KRG and Baghdad have improved somewhat. But economic autonomy for the Kurds has been lost and the territory seceded to the Iraqi forces remains gone. Most Iraqi Kurds still cherish the idea of independence, no matter how far-fetched it seems today.
Two votes were since held. In May, federal elections which included Kurdish regions were unable to form a government, and riots have since broken out across Baghdad and Basra, where the U.S. closed its consulate and evacuated its staff fearing worsening attacks. In September, Kurds went to the polls to vote for a new parliament whose incumbents were elected in 2013. What could have been a time of planning for a future of freedom turned instead instead back to pre-referendum indifference. Where more than 90 percent of eligible voters turned out to vote for independence, less than 30 percent voted this fall.
Besides, the referendum is pointless since the Iraqi Supreme Court ruled the vote for independence unconstitutional. It harmed all Iraqis: the Kurds who felt unheard and the rest who felt betrayed. “The status of Kurdish politics is different from previous negotiations,” a government delegate told local media ahead of the parliamentary vote. “Neither the referendum nor the threat of independence are strong cards to play anymore.”
Nothing would change, Ashraf and his family told me, even if they had a say.
The parliamentary vote would have offered a telegram of hope from the distant promise of independence, if only they were allowed to vote. But since Iraqi forces reclaimed Kirkuk and the surrounding territories, and since Ashraf, Chalak and Najbiba’s ID cards are registered in Kirkuk, and since they have lived there in somewhat distant solitude from the Kurdish majorities in cities like Sulaymaniyah, Dohuk and Erbil that were left largely unaffected by the outcomes of the referendum, they cannot vote. They cannot speak.
A failed referendum did have consequences. They live at home in exile.
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