Bloodbath Beyond the Green Zone: The
Unreported IraqPatrick Patrick
Cockburn, CounterPunch, 9 June 2006
ARBIL, IRAQ - The gap between
Iraq of the Green Zone and Iraq as it really is grows
ever wider. On 20 May, five months after the election of
parliament, Iraqis were told they had a new government
boasting a minister for tourism but, despite the war
raging across the country, no ministers of interior or
defence. Shia and Sunni leaders were still disputing
control of these crucial jobs. The much-publicised hand
over of sovereignty to an Iraqi administration two years
ago was forgotten as Zilmay Khalilzad, the American
ambassador, proclaimed the virtues of the new
administration which is so much his creation. The Shia,
60 per cent of the Iraqi population, won two elections
last year but the US has fought to deny them complete
control of the Iraqi state. "So far," one high
ranking US official was quoted as saying, "the Shia
have not demonstrated that they can govern, and they have
to demonstrate that now."
The Iraqi government was voted into office by members of
parliament meeting in a stuffy hall in the heavily
fortified Green Zone. Anybody entering the zone has to
pass through at least seven lines of sand bagged
checkpoints, razor wire and sniffer dogs. At 6.30 am, a
few hours before parliament met, a bomb exploded in Sadr
City, the impoverished Shia bastion in east Baghdad. It
killed 19 and wounded 58 people, most of them day
labourers who had gathered near a food stand as they
waited to be hired. This atrocity was probably in
retaliation for attacks by black-clad Shia gunmen,
probably from the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, on two
Sunni districts in west Baghdad the previous day.
Loudspeakers on the minarets of Sunni mosques in the rest
of the city announced that the al-Jihad and al-Furat
neighbourhoods were being assaulted and called on people
to go and help them.
The sectarian civil war in Baghdad is sparsely reported,
but from the mixed provinces around the capital there is
almost no news. It is too dangerous for Iraqi as well as
foreign journalists to go there.
There are sporadic police reports of the violence but
they are impossible to check out. On the same day that
parliament met, for instance, the bodies of 15 people,
all tortured before they were killed, were delivered to
the morgue in Musayyib south of Baghdad; nobody knows who
killed them or why. Two months ago I met an Iraqi army
captain from Diyala, a province north east of Baghdad
famous for its fruit, which has a mixed Sunni, Shia and
Kurdish population. He said Sunni and Shia were killing
each other all over Diyala. "Whoever is in a
minority runs," he said. "If forces are more
equal they fight it out."
I knew Diyala and its capital Baquba a little. It is
well-watered compared to much of Iraq and has lush
orhcards. In the 1990s I used to visit villages along the
Diyala river where they would give me fruit to eat.
Many farmers specialised in growing pomegranates. At that
time their main concern was the breakdown of the health
services because of UN sanctions. In the hope that I was
a foreign doctor people would disappear into their houses
to bring out dusty old x-rays of their children, taken
before the collapse of the local x-ray service. After the
invasion of 2003 I drove to Baquba, a nondescript city of
350,000 people, but it was an early centre of armed
resistance to the occupation and soon became too
dangerous to visit. I thought, however, that I could find
out what was happening there by taking advantage of the
province's peculiar sectarian geography. In eastern
Diyala there is a pocket of Kurdish populated territory
at the centre of which is the town of Khanaqin. I could
reach there safely by travelling south out of Kurdistan
down a long finger of Kurdish controlled land running
along the Iranian border. It would be too risky to go
beyond Khanaqin but once there, if what the army captain
had told me was true, there were bound to be Kurdish and
Shia refugees who had fled there from Baquba and further
west.
This turned out to be true. I drove south from
Sulaimaniyah through Iraq's only tunnel past the lake at
Derbendikan along the Sirdar river, its valley a vivid
green between the hills. A Kurdish official had told me
the road was "absolutely safe" so long as I
turned east over a bridge across the Sirdar below a
ramshackle town called Kalar and circled round to enter
Khanaqin. Under Saddam Hussein the town's Kurdish
inhabitants had been mostly forced to leave and nearby
villages were destroyed.
They had returned but now there is a new wave of refugees
who are desperately seeking refuge here as Sunni Arab
death squads and assassins drive out Kurds and Shia Arabs
from the rest of Diyala.
Salar Hussein Rostam is a police lieutenant in charge of
registering and investigating families fleeing from the
rest of Iraq. "I've received 200 families recently,
mostly in the last week," he said, gesturing to a
great bundle of files beside him. "They all got
warnings telling them to go within 24 hours or be
killed." Most were poor. One family had been rich
but had just lost all its money: "One of their
relatives was kidnapped and only released after they paid
$160,000." Two medical workers had been sacked from
their jobs in Baghdad because they belonged to the wrong
ethnic group. But the reason most of the refugees fled
was simple: they believed they would die if they did not
abandon their homes.
Kadm Darwish Ali, a Kurd who had been in the
investigation branch of the federal police in Baquba,
said that at first he had ignored warnings to leave the
city where he had lived since 1984. But after the
explosion of violence which followed the blowing up of
the Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February this
year the threats had got worse. It was not just the lone
assassin he feared. On 21 March insurgents over-ran one
police station in Diyala after the officers inside ran
out of ammunition and killed nearly two dozen of them.
"Everything got worse after Samarra," said Lt
Ali. "I had been threatened with death before but
now I felt every time I appeared in the street I was
likely to die." A month ago he sent his family to
Khanaqin and later followed them himself. "It
will," he concluded, "get worse and
worse."
In a three room hovel off a track with sewage running
down the middle of it live Sadeq Shawaz Hawaz and his
brother Ahmed and nine other relatives who also fled
Baquba. Sadeq and Ahmed had been fruit traders in the
city's market, but several weeks ago, when they were at
work, a car with four men in it came to their house. This
was in a Sunni district while the brothers were Shia and
Kurdish. "A tall man came to the door," said
Leila Mohammed, Ahmed's wife, who spoke to him. He asked
for the men of the family and was told they were not
there. He muttered 'we will get them' and left. A week
later the same men were back ordering them to leave by
evening prayers. Without any money or anywhere else to
live the family still clung on. But a week later there
was a third visit during which the tall man offered
Leila's five year old daughter Zarah chocolates if she
would tell him the names of the men of the family. At
this point their nerve broke and they fled leaving most
of their belongings behind.
"They threatened the Kurds and Shia and told them to
get out," recalled Ahmed, "Later I went back to
try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting
and I was trapped in our house. I came away with
nothing."
The same pattern is being repeated across central Iraq.
It is a civil war waged by assassins and death squads.
Iraq is breaking up into its constituent communities. The
Sunni minority in Basra are in flight; Shia Arabs and
Kurds are being forced out of the parts of majority Sunni
provinces where they are not strong enough to defend
themselves; Kurds in Mosul, divided by the Tigris river,
are moving from the Sunni Arab west bank to the east bank
where Kurds are the majority. But it is Baghdad, with a
population of six million, that is the heart of the
conflict.
The Sunni Arabs are fighting for their districts and the
Shia for theirs like Beirut at the beginning of the
Lebanese civil war in 1975. In Baghdad some 30 or 40
bodies are turning up every day. But even the dead are
not spared sectarian discrimination. Sunni families are
becoming less willing to look for them in the city morgue
since it is now guarded by Shia militiamen appointed by
the Ministry of Health which is itself controlled by the
party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia nationalist cleric.
Will the new government of Nouri al-Maliki change any of
this? Iraqis are desperate for peace. Baghdad is
paralysed by terror. In Basra one person is being
murdered every hour according to an adviser to the
Defence Ministry. "If the new government establishes
security in Baghdad they will be heroes," Fuad
Hussein, chief of staff to the Kurdish leader Massoud
Barzani, told me "and if they fail they will be one
more government of the Green Zone." The moment when
the Iraqi state could be reconstituted may already have
passed. Probably the only place in Iraq that this is not
evident is inside the Green Zone where Tony Blair arrived
the day after Maliki announced his cabinet. Blair's
statements at a press conference were useful only as a
check list of what is not happening in Iraq.
He praised the formation of "a government of
national unity that crosses all boundaries and
divides." But that is precisely what it does not do.
If it did it would not have taken five months to put
togethor. Interior and Defence ministers would have been
chosen immediately. Blair said that the strength of the
new government was that it had been democratically
"elected by the votes of millions of Iraqi
people."
This was of course also true of the previous government
of Ibrahim al-Jaafari whom the US and Britain spent
months trying, ultimately with success, to displace. The
American and British dilemma since the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein is that democracy in Iraq primarily
benefits the Shia, the religious parties and Iran. None
of these are much liked by the White House or Downing
Street but, for all their manoeuvres, there is not much
they can do about it.
As American and British power decline in Iraq the
country's neighbours make plans to increase their
intervention. Iran and Syria always wanted to keep the US
busy in Iraq so it would not be able to move to overthrow
their governments as it had threatened to do. Three years
after the fall of Baghdad they think they have succeeded.
"The mood in Tehran is that the US is very weak in
Iraq and cannot do anything against Iran," said one
Iraqi commentator. The Sunni Arab states in the Gulf
along with Egypt and Jordan are fearful of triumph of the
Shia majority in Iraq acting in alliance with Iran.
Turkey, Iran and Syria worry that their own Kurdish
minorities will be radicalised by the development of a
prosperous Kurdish state, independent in all but name but
under the umbrella of a feeble Iraqi state. In the Sunni
community of Iraq the salafi, extreme militants as
hostile to Jordanian and Saudi monarchies as they are to
the US, have for the first time gained a base that they
were never able to establish in Afghanistan.
Iraq is at the crossroads of the Middle East, sharing
common frontiers with Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
Syria and Turkey. All, for one reason or another, are
fearful of what is now going to come out of Baghdad.
Intervention by neighbours of Iraq is generally
invisible, often taking the shape of money flowing to
favoured parties and militias. But high up in the
snow-streaked Kandil mountains on the Iraq-Iran border in
north-east Kurdistan it is easier for Iran to send cruder
signals to Baghdad and Washington without provoking a
military response. Here, on the night of 31 April to 1
May Iranian artillery fired 2,000 shells into Iraq
signalling to the US and its Kurdish allies that Tehran
is not intimidated by any threats against it.
The Kandil mountains form a natural fortress with
towering peaks, deep gorges and no paved roads or
bridges. Nevertheless I found it surprisingly easy to
enter. In the mayor's office in Sangasser village on the
plain just below the mountains I met Mohammed Aziz whose
family had a small farm in the mountains and whose mother
had been slightly injured in the shelling. He wanted to
take her a sack of flower so he was keen to drive us to
the valley where she lived. The only way to get there was
by taking a four-wheel drive along earth tracks and beds
of rivers. It looked like their would be a further
problem. It is so difficult for a regular army to attack
the Kandil that Kurdish guerrillas have traditionally
retreated there. For several years it has been controlled
by the Turkish Kurd PKK movement whose fighters retreated
from Turkey in the late 1990s. It turned out, however,
that they were eager to talk to the press about the
bombadrment.
Even 2,000 shells had not done much damage to the hamlets
of flat roofed houses and animal pens clinging to the
sides of steep valleys.
Farmers showed us where explosions had dug shallow
craters and shrapnel had sliced branches off the trees.
"I was awoken by the sound of the shelling in the
middle of the night and I saw there was fire
everywhere," said Meri Hamza Farqa, the elderly
mother of Mohammed Aziz who lived in Shinawa village.
"The children and I ran out of the house and
scattered in different directions. A shell blew up near
me and I was hit by mud and stones. Later I saw blood
coming from my arm."
Physically isolated from the outside world the villagers
live by rearing sheep and cattle that graze on steep
hills covered in grass and dotted with small oak trees.
But the villagers have satellite TV dishes and were up
with the news. They suspected that the Iranian attack on
their hidden valleys was one result of the growing
confrontation between the US and Iran. The Iranians might
also have timed the shelling to coincide with a visit of
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Ankara, thereby
showing Iranian solidarity with the Turkish government in
its long war with the PKK. Not that the barrage had done
much damage to the guerrillas safe in their mountain
bases. But the farmers thought it wise to run away.
"As soon as the bombardment was over we decided to
leave," said Meri Hamzaa. "When we got back a
few days later, all my hens and two of my goats had died
of hunger."
The guerrillas are elusive. "When you see one, there
are another 15 or 20 hidden nearby," Azad Wisu
Hassan, the mayor of Sangaser had told us. But in the
middle of a grassy plain surrounded by mountains the PKK
have built an extraordinary monument. It is a large and
beautiful military cemetery with a soaring white pillar
in the middle. There is a fountain, red and white rose
bushes covered in flowers, decorative trees and the
marble tombs of dead guerrillas, mostly young men in
their twenties. "Seventy-five of us started out from
Turkey but 49 were killed on the way," said one
fighter accompanying us. Most of the walls of the
cemetery are white but others are painted in the red and
yellow colours of the PKK; at one side there is a gateway
with a sign over it reading: 'the garden of flowers for
martyrs.'
Heavy artillery fire from one country into another is not
common and would attract attention in most parts of the
world. But it is a measure of the violence in Iraq that
the attack on the Kandil and other parts of the frontier
passed almost unnoticed inside and outside the country.
More and more of the killing here is unreported because
it is too dangerous for the local police or journalists,
foreign or Iraqi, to go to the scene of a murder to find
out what happened. For instance Saddam Hussein is on
trial in the Green Zone for killing up to 148 Shia from
Dujail north of Baghdad after an attempt to assassinate
him in the village in 1982. The former Iraqi leader's
appearances in court are highly publicised and shown on
TV.
But unknown to anybody, until revealed by a brave Iraqi
journalist, is the fact that the people of Dujail are
being massacred once again. Sunni insurgents, sympathetic
to Saddam, are murdering them at checkpoints on the main
road to Baghdad. Twenty people from Dujail have been
killed in recent weeks and another 20 are missing.
The last justification for the US and British occupation
is that it is stopping a civil war. All too evidently
this is what it is not doing. Iraq was always going to be
in turmoil after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The Shia and Kurds were bound to overturn Sunni
predominance. But a foreign occupying army was the worse
force in the world to oversee this traumatic political
and social change. Iraqis were suddenly being asked not
only if they were Shia, Sunni or Kurd but if they
supported or opposed the invader. The answer from each
community was different. The Kurds supported the
occupation. The Shia community was ambivalent and
intended to use it to take power themselves. They wanted
the US and British military presence to end but at a
moment convenient to themselves.
The Sunni opposed the occupation root and branch and
launched a ruthless and effective guerrilla war against
it that has so far killed or wounded 20,000 American
troops. These radically different responses to foreign
occupation by the three big Iraqi communities deepened
the divisions between them. Each community began to view
the other two as murderous traitors. Conflict was always
likely after Saddam Hussein as a deeply divided Iraq
tried to recover from his disastrous rule. But it was the
added ingredient of a prolonged US and British occupation
that ensured this conflict would be so extraordinarily
violent.
This piece, originally published in CounterPunch,
is reprinted with permission.
Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent of The
Independent, has been visiting Iraq since
1978. He was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for
war reporting in recognition of his writing on Iraq. He
is the author of a memoir, The Broken Boy. His
previous book, with Andrew Cockburn, is Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession.
His forthcoming book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in
Iraq, will be published in October 2006.
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