CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Betrayal

. . . waving our red weapons o’er our heads, Let’s all cry, “peace, freedom, and liberty!”

—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, i, 110–11

ON THE EVENING OF 24 FEBRUARY 1991, as the Sky television crew and I were preparing to set off for Kuwait from the Saudi border town of Khafji, a CIA-run radio station called The Voice of Free Iraq broadcast a call to the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein’s regime. It was explicit: the war and destruction would continue unless the Iraqi people overthrew their dictator. The radio didn’t say that the moment of liberty was at hand. Iraqis were told that if they wanted to survive, they must rebel. “Hit the headquarters of the tyrant and save the homeland from destruction,” the radio said. But anyone listening to the station was entitled to believe that the Western and Arab armies would come to their rescue.

The speaker was Salah Omar al-Ali, ex-member of Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council and the Regional Command of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, personally purged by Saddam in 1972. The radio was transmitting from Saudi Arabia. And al-Ali was quite specific:

Rise to save the homeland from the clutches of dictatorship so that you can devote yourself to avoid the dangers of the continuation of the war and destruction. Honourable sons of the Tigris and the Euphrates, at these decisive moments of your life, and while facing the danger of death at the hands of foreign forces, you have no option in order to survive and defend the homeland but to put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang.

No option. No option if Iraqis were to survive. This was crude, frightening stuff. Saddam, al-Ali said, was “the criminal tyrant of Iraq” who was pushing the country’s sons to a massacre because he had refused to withdraw from Kuwait:

Prove to your people and nation that you are faithful and honourable sons of this generous country and this honourable nation. Stage a revolution now, before it is too late. He thinks of himself alone. He is not interested in what suffering you endured during the past few months of this destructive crisis. He insists on continuing to push your faithful sons into this massacre in defence of his false glory, privileges and criminal leadership.

Saddam, according to the broadcast, had already smuggled his family and personal wealth from Iraq. “He will flee the battlefield when he becomes certain that the catastrophe has engulfed every street, every house and every family in Iraq.” The Voice of Free Iraq used Iraqi state radio frequencies and the same opening music for its news broadcasts; it had begun its short- and medium-wave broadcasts at the start of the year, and the Iraqis had tried to jam the station’s heretical messages almost at once, even though it only transmitted for a few hours every evening.

But it wasn’t just the CIA’s clandestine radio that was relaying this dangerous, apocalyptic message. Seventeen-year-old Iraqi Shiite Haidar al-Assadi listened in Basra to the call to arms over the Arabic Service of the Voice of America and expected “the allies to liberate Iraq and rid us of this criminal.” He put a Kalashnikov rifle over his shoulder and walked the streets of his native city, tearing pictures of Saddam off the walls. Only days earlier, al-Assadi’s home had been destroyed when a U.S. jet fired a missile into several buildings in the city, leaving his brother with shrapnel wounds to the shoulder. But like many other Iraqis who suffered under Allied bombardment, he heeded the American appeal.

“I joined in because ever since I opened my eyes, people around me hated Saddam. Both my uncles were imprisoned for twelve years for saying that the Iran–Iraq war would not end without the death of Saddam . . . I remember listening to the Arabic service of the Voice of America which told us that the uprising was large and we would be liberated.” By 6 March, The Independent’s Richard Dowden had moved in front of the American army and reached the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah 160 kilometres north-west of Basra, already in Iraqi rebel hands. As he wrote in his extraordinary dispatch:

The revolution, bursting out after years of oppressive Baath rule, appears confused and chaotic, united only by the hatred for Saddam Hussein of the Shia Muslims in southern Iraq. It is a nationalist revolution aimed at ridding the country of the Baath regime, according to its leaders, but it also has strong overtones of an Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalism. Abu Iman, the rebel commander of this town, said the regime would be replaced by a government of the people which would not model itself on western democracy or the Iranian revolution, but follow its own path. It would be neither Sunni nor Shia but for all Iraqis.

Where Saddam’s portrait had been defaced, Dowden found posters of Ayatollah Khomeini and a leading Shiite cleric. But he was also given a printed announcement by Nasiriyah’s “revolutionary committee” which said the aims of the new government

were to finish the war, sweep away the Baath system and establish a new government based on democracy and nationalism. It ordered Baath members to join the new government despite what they had done to Iraq. However, according to the revolutionary leaders, the governor of the town, Taha Yassin Hussein, and other leading local Baath figures have already been executed. This appears to be a revolution of the poor. All its leaders were scruffily dressed in dirty kuffiyas and djellabas; they were unshaven and argued constantly . . .

Yet another “highway of death” had greeted Dowden as he approached Nasiriyah, where the road was:

littered with wrecked military vehicles, many of them with decomposing bodies hanging from them or lying on the ground near by. At the entrance to the town, by the rebels’ roadblock (which consists of a chair, a table, two tyres and a cluster bomb casing) are two juggernauts. Inside each are the corpses of about 100 Iraqi soldiers. These refrigerated meat lorries were bringing the bodies back from the front four days ago and, we were told, their drivers refused to stop at the roadblock. The rebels fired on the drivers who fled. The bodies have not been touched since.

But Dowden finished his report with a disturbing comment from the local rebel leader, Abu Iman:

The Americans are not helping us. They stop us on the road and take our weapons. It is they who helped build up Saddam, then they destroyed him; now the war is over they will support him again.

In the years to come, American and British leaders would deny responsibility for the mass Iraqi uprising which they encouraged. Already in northern Iraq, tens of thousands of Kurds had also risen against their oppressors and—ignoring past American betrayals—eagerly awaited allied help. The first reaction of British prime minister John Major was sarcastic. “I don’t recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular revolution,” he snottily remarked. And in the first days of Kuwait’s liberation, the men who claimed they’d fought a “just” war got away with it. So great was the relief in the West that so few Americans and British had been killed during the conflict which had apparently ended, so appalling were the stories of individual Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, so enormous the oil fires—though they burned at even greater temperatures across southern Iraq, where American B-52s had set the wells on fire—that the terrifying events north of the American lines went initially almost unnoticed.

War breeds a special kind of exhaustion. We all suffered from it beneath the vast clouds of burning oil that turned day into night, blanketing huge areas of Kuwait and Iraq; Western and Arab soldiers, fleeing Iraqis, liberated Kuwaitis, fearful Palestinians, Iraqi prisoners, journalists too, we moved through a cloak of half-darkness and fatigue. Slogging fourteen floors up the fire escapes of Kuwait’s Meridien Hotel, the reporters who might have been moving further north were staggering under a burden of broken phone lines, immense tiredness and statistics. The figures came at us like gunfire. General Schwarzkopf announced on 27 February that “we were 150 miles from Baghdad and there was nothing between us and Baghdad” and that his army had captured or destroyed 3,000 Iraqi tanks, 1,857 armoured vehicles and 2,140 artillery pieces. More than 50,000 Iraqis had been taken prisoner. British military figures put the number of prisoners at 175,000 and suggested that up to 4,000 Iraqi tanks might have been destroyed in the liberation and the thirty-eight-day air bombardment that preceded it.

No one questioned how Schwarzkopf could have acquired such precise statistics less than twenty-four hours after President Bush had announced the liberation of Kuwait. He had confidently announced on 30 January that all thirty Scud missile sites in Iraq had been destroyed in “almost 1,500 sorties” while on 14 February, U.S. Lieutenant General Tom Kelly said that thirty days of bombardment had destroyed about 1,300 “of the 4,280 Iraqi tanks in and around Kuwait” and that around another 500 had been severely damaged. Only a truly sceptical eye would have spotted a Reuters report on 27 February which quoted British Captain Simon Oliver of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards as saying that Saddam’s best Republican Guard troops, still equipped with their T-72 tanks, appeared to have escaped the allied forces south of Basra. “We have seen tank tracks leading north, and the Republican Guards may have withdrawn,” he said. Journalists should have guessed what the military must already have known; that the Republican Guards had other, far more pressing business inside southern Iraq.

The Americans were quite specific about their casualties: 148 Americans killed. They were less forthcoming about Iraqi losses. On 14 February, Kelly said he thought “the number’s very high because of the constant bombing.” By 28 February the Saudis were talking about 100,000 Iraqi dead, while a former French military analyst, Colonel Jean-Louis Dufour, estimated Iraqi dead at up to 150,000. Schwarzkopf talked only of “a very, very large number.” On 19 February, Saadoun Hamadi, the former Iraqi deputy defence minister, had claimed that 26,000 Iraqis—civilian and military—had been killed in 65,000 air sorties. When a Pentagon source told Newsday almost six months after the Kuwait liberation that 8,000 Iraqi troops had been buried alive in their trenches by the earthmovers and ploughs mounted on the tanks of the attacking U.S. Mechanized Infantry Division, the brief moment of compassion which this engendered probably had more to do with guilty consciences over Western inaction towards the Iraqi insurgents than it did with the enormous loss of human life that it represented.¹⁴³

Only later would we learn some less heroic truths about the liberation of Kuwait. The Americans, it transpired, dropped nearly as many tons of bombs each day as were dropped on Germany and Japan daily during the Second World War. Of the 148 U.S. servicemen killed, 35—almost one-quarter—had lost their lives to “friendly fire” from other American forces.¹⁴⁴ The non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office would subsequently state that the Pentagon and its military contractors made claims for the precision of their Stealth fighter jets, Tomahawk cruise missiles and laser-guided “smart bombs” that were “overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data or unverifiable.” The supposedly “invisible” Stealth achieved only around a 40 per cent success rate on bombing runs, while only 8 per cent of the bomb tonnage dropped on Iraqi targets were “smart” or guided munitions. The much-trumpeted Patriot anti-missile missile, the GAO said, destroyed only 40 per cent of the Scud missiles aimed at Israel and 70 per cent of those fired at Saudi Arabia. In fact, as Seymour Hersh, that blessing for journalism, would reveal, an Israeli air force report later stated that “there is no clear evidence of a single successful intercept” of an Iraqi Scud by a Patriot over Israel.

Inside the city of Kuwait, we journalists were overwhelmed by stories of Kuwaiti loss and fierce revenge against the Palestinians, a phenomenon that the Americans simply ignored. Only a week after the liberation, parts of the city resembled the anarchy of wartime Beirut, with gunmen controlling streets and Palestinians kidnapped from their homes by armed Kuwaitis. Western ambassadors and relief organisations pleaded with the few Kuwaiti ministers to have arrived—the emir and his immediate family had not yet deigned to return—to restore law and order before they lost control of the capital.

Yet even the Kuwaiti army seemed set on retaliating against the Palestinian community, some of whom had undoubtedly collaborated with the Iraqi occupiers. Up to 400 young Palestinians were said to have been kidnapped from their homes in the first three days of March. When Colin Smith of The Observer and I drove into the Kuwait City suburb of Hawali—home to tens of thousands of Palestinians—on the morning of 3 March, we found Kuwaiti soldiers driving twelve armoured vehicles through the streets, shooting in the air, ordering shops to close and beating Palestinian civilians who fell into their hands. Incredibly—or so it seemed to us—American Special Forces troops who were present did nothing to stop this brutality, instead shouting obscenities at journalists who asked why they did not intervene.

When three armed Kuwaiti soldiers began to beat up a Palestinian boy on a bicycle in Hawali, Smith and I were forced to intervene, physically pulling the Kuwaitis off the young man and ordering them to lower their rifles. The fact that Smith and I were still wearing the camouflaged gas capes in which we had smuggled ourselves into Kuwait must have persuaded the Kuwaitis that we were allied personnel and they let the boy go. But when we shouted at U.S. Special Forces personnel to help us, they either stared at us or laughed. When I asked a U.S. Special Forces officer, a captain, why he would not come to our assistance, he replied: “You having a nice day? We don’t want your sort around here with your rumours. This is martial law, boy. You have a big mouth. Fuck off!” Smith and I took the number of the American vehicle—IS055A—and I later visited the reopened U.S. embassy to tell them what we had seen. By chance, the BBC had filmed the incident. After some minutes, a U.S. officer emerged along with Fred Cuny, one of the most courageous American aid officials of the postwar years. But the American officer seemed little interested in what we had to tell him. “Have you people seen any sign of Palestinian terrorists in these streets?” he wanted to know.

So here we go again, I said to Smith later. Palestinians are terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. The Americans were more anxious about “terrorists” than law and order.¹⁴⁵ The two men confirmed the registration number of the Special Forces Humvee and said they would “look into the matter.” The soldier admitted that “we’re having problems all over the city—we’ve had a colonel of ours threatened by armed men. Things are getting completely out of control. Has this BBC film been shown?” Cuny, a tall, balding, heroic man who was to acquire legendary fame for his selfless work with refugees in Kurdistan and Sarajevo—and in Chechnya, where he would ultimately lose his life—seemed at first more interested in preventing the BBC from airing the tape than in persuading U.S. forces to act with discipline. “I thought we’d stopped the tape getting on air,” he said, and seemed put out that he had failed.

In itself, the incident was minuscule. Compared with the crimes committed by the Iraqis in recent weeks—not to mention the uprising now burning its way across Iraq—the youth’s painful experience was insignificant. But it was symbolic of a disturbing reaction among U.S. forces in the aftermath of the liberation. Weeks later, Cuny would tell me that he had filed a report on the incident and that the abusive Special Forces team had been sent back to the United States within days. But they had been disciplined not because they allowed a Palestinian youth to be beaten in front of their eyes. They were sent home because they “submitted an incomplete report.” The Special Forces officer had informed his superiors of a “confrontation” with journalists—but had chosen not to mention the reason for this “confrontation”: his refusal to help the Palestinian boy.

Much worse was to follow. Death squads roamed the streets of Kuwait, one of them run by a son and nephew of a senior Kuwaiti prince. American government officials held a secret meeting with the prince later in March 1991, and, after listening to his indignant denials, handed him a list of names, dates and other details of the execution squads. Cuny was transferred to the fields of Kurdistan in northern Iraq to cope with the tide of Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam’s vengeance, and it was he who disclosed to me in late April that an undercover team of U.S. Special Forces and specially trained military reservist officers—including a U.S. federal judge and an assistant district attorney for Philadelphia—had been tasked to track down the fate of hundreds of missing Palestinians in Kuwait. The State Department, according to Cuny, learned long before the liberation that Kuwaiti authorities had drawn up secret plans to deport the entire Palestinian community into Iraq in buses painted with the logo of the Red Crescent humanitarian relief organisation. Another plan that reached American ears was for Kuwaitis to execute large numbers of Palestinians “to try to stampede the community into a mass exodus”— a variation on the method used by Israel to depopulate western Palestine in 1948, although this was not an observation the Americans made.

Cuny admitted that “things were not right at first in Kuwait. Our people on the ground didn’t understand what their role was. Some of our senior officers were not reporting things up the channel. We would find that our Special Forces officers based in Kuwait police stations would know people were being tortured there but couldn’t prove it. We would have American officers who would hear someone screaming but who couldn’t say the man was being tortured because he wasn’t witnessing it. So they wouldn’t report it to us.” All of this I duly reported in The Independent, although the inaction of Americans listening to screams of torture yet failing to report them because they couldn’t actually see the torture was a truly bizarre—almost Iraqi—explanation.

But the kidnapping of Palestinians was already going on,¹⁴⁶ and, in the end, the Kuwaiti government got its way. Within months, it deported more than 200,000 Palestinians. Others would follow later. The only difference was that many of them travelled north to Iraq in Red Cross buses actually hired by the Red Cross—rather than in buses disguised with the insignia of the Red Crescent. The Kuwaiti resistance themselves acknowledged that 5 per cent of their comrades-in-arms against the Iraqis were Palestinians, but this did not save them.

Yet the experience of those same Kuwaitis was sometimes so terrible that other crimes faded from our tired reports. By the time of the liberation, the resistance had already compiled a list of martyrs, who included women as well as men, some of whom—arrested in the very last hours of the Iraqi occupation—suffered terrible fates. Abu Sami, Abu Ahmed and Abu Saad were among them. “The Iraqis knew who they were,” a member of the Kuwaiti resistance in the suburb of Qurain told me. “They had been watching them for many days and they decided to get them at the end.” Two of their comrades in Qurain were women but their fate was the same. “They penetrated their heads with drills,” the resistance man, Tariq Ahmed, said. “We saw the bodies afterwards. They were murdered in this way.” Such appalling accounts might be dismissed as exaggeration were it not for some of the bodies that later turned up in Kuwaiti hospitals. At least three were found to have drill holes through their arms and legs, mechanically crucified.

If nothing else, it should have given us a terrifying picture of the treatment that the Iraqi government would visit upon any Iraqi rebels who unwisely heeded the American call for insurrection further north and then fell into the hands of Saddam’s security men. Still, however, reporters in Kuwait—including myself—were obsessed by the extent of the Iraqi army’s defeat in Kuwait rather than by its fearful reincarnation inside Iraq. In the very early days of the liberation, I drove beyond the Kuwaiti frontier with Lara Marlowe of Time magazine. There was still little sign of the terrible events taking place beyond the American lines, only the distant sound of shooting further north, and an American army officer who talked of men arriving at his checkpoint to beg for weapons and being told that they could have none.

On the Iraqi highway north of Safwan, a young black tank crewman from the American 1st Armored Division offered me a cold Pepsi on top of his Abrams tank and we sat there together, staring north across the grey and dun-coloured wastes of southern Iraq. The tank was parked on a perfect clover-leaf motorway intersection whose smooth six-lane highway possessed a dangerously normal perspective, a transplanted bit of Europe or America amid the debris of war, an illusion heightened by the concrete picnic tables placed at regular intervals along the road. It was cold and damp and we could hear the roar of the oil fires whose clouds towered high into the desolate sky. “Just think of it,” the American tanker said after a while. “They call this the cradle of civilisation.”

And of course, he was right. Just east of here lay the great ziggurat of Ur, the 4,000-year-old Sumerian city of Mesopotamia and biblical birthplace of Abraham; a sharp-eyed U.S. artillery officer had just stopped a tank crew firing live rounds into the monument when he spotted “historic ruins” on the corner of his map. North towards Baghdad lay Babylon and Nineveh and the great primal rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates, as well as the Shiite shrines of Najaf and Kerbala.

From the north, three Iraqi soldiers in the red berets of Saddam’s Republican Guards walked gingerly towards Lara and myself. They had no weapons and moved with their arms away from their sides in the familiar “walking duck” attitude we all adopted when we wanted to demonstrate that we were harmless. Cigarettes? they asked. We gave them some Marlboros, watched by the American soldier on the tank. Then the tallest of the three men pointed to an Iraqi army truck abandoned in a field to the north of the highway. Would we give him permission to drive it away? Sure, we said, but we’ll just check with the Americans. Any problem with these guys taking their truck back? we asked. The soldier on the tank gave us a thumbs-up. “They’re beaten—they can take their crap,” he said. There were more cigarettes and the three Iraqis then walked purposefully to the Russian-built military lorry, started the engine and bumped off across the desert floor northwards. Only later did we ask ourselves why they came for the lorry. Amid all this destruction, why did they care about an abandoned truck? What would the Republican Guard want this stuff for now?

Next day, I understood. Back at Safwan, the empty clover-leaf motorway interchange had transformed itself from Western-normal to Eastern-terrible; drifting down the highway towards us came the damned. Some were Iraqi soldiers, others frightened women; many were wounded. Around us flowed a mass of huddled, shuffling figures, many crying, others throwing themselves into the motorway ditches to sleep. Hundreds of Kuwaitis kidnapped in the last hours of the occupation but newly freed by the Basra insurgents were now on the road with terrible stories of hospitals crammed with the dead and dying. One of them was a pharmacist and former Kuwaiti MP called Ahmed Baktiar. He had been taken to Basra hospital to help the wounded men and women littered across the floors, he said. “A young man just died in front of me. The tanks were coming and they were firing straight into the houses on each street, reducing the houses to ashes. There are lots of people dying of a strange sickness. Some think it’s because they have to drink the water lying in the streets which is contaminated. Others say it’s because the water in Basra now contains oil from the smoke over the city.”¹⁴⁷

And all the while, the tide of sick and starving and frightened people shuffled past us. Some came in hand-pushed carts, old men and babies with filthy blankets thrown over them, and I thought of the medieval carts that went from house to house when the Great Plague struck Europe, collecting the dead. Some of the people in these carts were dead. There were two television crews pointing their lenses at close range into the faces of the refugees, and I noticed how, for once, the faces did not react to the cameras. It was as if every face was also dead.

Two U.S. embassy officials were standing beside a station wagon along with a senior American officer. “We can’t have them just all coming down here,” one of the embassy men said to Staff Sergeant Nolde of the 1st Armored Division. “They can’t cross the border. We have no facilities to handle this. They’ve got to go back.” I noticed Cuny standing beside the embassy men, listening in silence. “Look, you’ve got to stop them moving down this road,” the embassy man was saying. “It’s tragic, I know that, but we simply don’t have the facilities for them.” Cuny asked if extra first-aid tents couldn’t be erected for the refugees, and the embassy man sighed. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Liberation, a clean victory—and now this mess. And on television. You could see his problem. “You’ve got to stop them, Sergeant,” the embassy man repeated. The officer joined in. “Iraqi agents could infiltrate back into Kuwait among the refugees.”

But suddenly, there on this cold, damp, hellish road, all the bright sunlight of what was best about America—all the hope and compassion and humanity that Americans like to believe they possess—suddenly shone among us. For the young, tired 1st Armored staff sergeant turned angrily on the man from the U.S. embassy. “I’m sorry, sir. But if you’re going to give me an order to stop these people, I can’t do that. They are coming here begging, old women crying, sick children, boys begging for food. We’re already giving them most of our rations. But I have to tell you, sir, that if you give me an order to stop them, I just won’t do that.” You could see the embassy men wince. First it was these pesky folk cluttering up the highway, then the television cameras, and now a soldier who wouldn’t obey orders. But Sergeant Nolde just turned his back on the diplomat and walked over to a queue of refugee cars. “Tell these people to park at the side of the road over there,” he yelled at the soldiers on his checkpoint. “Tell them to be patient but we’ll try to look after them. Don’t send them back.”

Around Nolde, two famished Iraqi families, the women in filthy black chadors, the children barefooted, the men’s faces dazed, were sitting in the dirt, tearing open the American military ration packs with their nails, scoffing the cold lumps of stew, pouring the contents of the sauce packets into their mouths. Across the cold sand, Nolde’s soldiers had already helped to house an Iraqi woman and five children. Their story was simple and terrible. Their father had been executed for refusing to join the Republican Guard, their mother raped afterwards. The children were taken by their aunt southwards towards the American lines and there they all were now, squatting in an abandoned electricity shed. The Americans were feeding them, and had found four puppy dogs and a small, gentle-faced donkey which they had given to the grimy children.

Now a line of battered cars was driving steadily towards Nolde’s position, packed with fearful civilians. Many had not eaten for days. The men were unshaven, the women in tears, the children had urinated in the car in the long journey across a devastated Iraq. Whole families were crying for civilian relatives killed in the allied air assault. Their convoy stank. A little girl was held out of the window of an old black Mercedes by a screaming woman. The child’s body was jerking grotesquely, the convulsions about to kill her.

This was not quite what the generals in Riyadh had been thinking about when they announced their days of “battlefield preparation” and “communications interdiction.” Nolde ordered one of his men to run down the line of cars. “Where is the car with the sick child?” the soldier kept shouting in English, until someone translated his question into Arabic. There was a wail from the Mercedes. “Get a medic down here, fast,” the soldier ordered. Two more Americans arrived, a big, black soldier who took the little girl into his arms and touched her brow. “Oh, Jesus, she’s having a fit,” he said. “Tell the field hospital we’re coming down with her.”

The stricken child, together with her distraught mother, was taken from the car. Nolde arrived to order the vehicle out of the column. “Tell the rest of the family we need to search their vehicle then they can go and wait by the Red Cross truck,” he said. Nolde and his twelve soldiers of the 1st Armored handed out more of their own rations. There would be no medals for performing these duties.

And with good reason. For a conflict of interest was becoming apparent. That is why the American officer and the U.S. diplomats had arrived to inspect Nolde’s position. The newly returned and “legitimate” government of Kuwait—on whose behalf the Americans had gone to war—had no desire to see these refugees given sanctuary in Kuwait. The officer even muttered into Nolde’s ear the following revealing sentence: “We had an Iraqi soldier give himself up near here the other day and a Kuwaiti soldier just took him to one side, shot him in the head and pushed his body into a ditch. If you let these people through Safwan, they could face the same danger.” Nolde looked at the officer in contempt. He must have known very well what was going on. He was being ordered to send these people back to their deaths—not because of “lack of facilities” or “Iraqi infiltration” but because the Kuwaitis didn’t want them cluttering up their newly liberated treasure-house emirate. And Nolde refused.

There weren’t many good moments in this war—or any other—but here, just for a moment, an angel’s wings brushed past us, the spirit of Raoul Wallenberg in the Budapest railyards, handing out Swedish passports to the doomed Jews of Hungary. No, this wasn’t the Second World War. Let us have done with such obscene parallels. But these Iraqis would die if they were forced to turn back and the sergeant had disobeyed an order so that they might live. Just as an equally young officer on the Somme seventy-three years earlier had refused to execute another soldier. The American sergeant had refused to obey. Would that Bush and Cheney and Schwarzkopf and John Major had shown his courage now.

In Basra, the Independent’s correspondent, Karl Waldron—bravely clinging to his assignment until the last moment of escape on 6 March—now described the results of their betrayal with frightening simplicity:

It was almost over by 2.00 am. The T-72s of the Medina unit of the Republican Guard deployed from the centre of Basra, crashing their way through barricades in the narrow streets . . . Small nests of resistance, mainly Shia groups such as the “Brothers of Atiq”—the liberated—maintained their fire until they were overrun or forced to withdraw by the advancing heavily armed infantry . . . on Nassr Street, the last remnants of a cadre, the day before proudly in uniform, red bandannas tied round sleeves and heads in the universal image of revolution, were now in mufti . . . There was ammunition aplenty here but it was the wrong calibre for their Soviet rifles; what was left that would work was now in the ammunition clips of the sentries watching for the Guard’s advance. The squeak of tank tracks . . . signalled that they were closing in and the group fell back, its numbers gradually dwindling as men disappeared into the night with their treasonable loads. As we ran south, hopping the low fences round the apartment blocks, the noise of other tracks was audible, this time ahead of us . . .

The refugees who now streamed down to Safwan told in horrifying detail of what happened behind those Iraqi tanks. They had seen rebels hanged from tank barrels, tanks driving over corpses; some said that Baath party officials participated in the mass lynching of civilians. Iraqi troops who had gone across to the insurgents were now being hanged, their bodies riddled with bullets.

In Basra, Haidar al-Assadi, the seventeen-year-old who had listened to the Voice of America calling upon Iraqis to stage the uprising against Saddam, now fled the city for the Shatt al-Arab and the doubtful refuge of Iran.¹⁴⁸ Many of the surviving rebels did the same, along with Waldron:

It became clear that the only way out was back to the [river], a scramble over the rubble of recent allied air attack, where we hoped the tanks would not go, praying that the Iranian on the boat on the other side had not lost his nerve. When we found it at last, there were two others returning to Khorramshahr. One man in his late twenties, the other a little older, sat shivering in the prow of the small boat, taking cover from the wind and rain under a fish box tarpaulin. As they recovered, the muttered trickle of condemnation increased to a torrent: Saddam, Bush, Fahd, Mitterrand, formed an unholy alliance in the flow of curses. “Why didn’t they come? Why did they let them come?” asked the younger man. He said the resistance groups had

heard of the liberation of Kuwait, had expected allied support or at least that allied troops would prevent Iraq deploying its heavy armour into Basra province, much of which must have been seen by American satellites and must have passed within the range of allied guns. The spectre of the allies having won their war and now fearing the emergence of a Shia block in the northern Gulf, abandoning the people of Basra, will not go away. Even worse, the allies tolerating or encouraging the survival of the Saddam regime.

The Iraqi Shias were correct. “Better the Saddam Hussein we know than an unwieldy weak coalition, or a new strong man who is an unknown quantity,” an American diplomat would later be quoted as saying. Those who survived Saddam’s fury drifted semi-conscious to the American checkpoints in Iraq with further tales of mass executions—4,000 a day, they said, especially in the smaller Shia cities north-west of Basra or south of Baghdad where the population had no chance of fleeing to Iran. In many cases, the evidence of their testimony—which was all true—would not emerge for another twelve years. Only in 2003, for example, would I discover what happened in the town of Musayeb when at last—after the Anglo-American occupation—the mass graves began to be opened.

EACH NEW MASS GRAVE produces some extra helping of wickedness, some tiny incremental addition to cruelty. In the oven-grey desert west of the Tigris, it was a gleaming steel rod amid a heap of brown bones and a rag of cheap cloth that symbolised Saddam’s rule: a hip replacement. A gravedigger gently tapped at the leg of the decomposing corpse beside it; there was a ghostly, hollow sound. The murdered man had a wooden leg. On the day of their death, they were hospital patients.

Body number 73—they are numbered by the diggers according to the chronology of their discovery—even had a hospital tag still tied to a bone. If they had their identity papers—and Saddam’s executioners seemed to care little about such matters—their names were written in crayon onto the white shrouds in which their remains were wrapped. Thus these men’s lives were revealed in a stranger’s hand. “Abdul Jalil Kamel Badr” was written on a heap of bones, hair and decaying flesh. “Student at Kufa University Educational College—Arts Department.” Somehow the “arts department” bit made one draw in one’s breath.

They lay in their white shrouds—more than eighty of them—under the midday sun like dead sheep, just as others were lined in rows, 470 at the latest count, in the school basketball stadium back in Musayeb, the scruffy town on the Tigris where all of them—Shia Muslims to a man—obeyed the order of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, twelve years ago to assemble for a “meeting.” Every man over seventeen had to be there and the few women who watched them gather in their thousands said that at least forty lorries were waiting for them on the first night, 5 March 1991. The Muslim Shia rebellion in this area had just been crushed. The executioners were already waiting at the desert killing fields at Joufer Safa. The name means “beach of rocks.”

Many of the just-discovered dead still had their hands—or at least bits of their hand bones—tied behind their backs. Ahmed Kadum Rassoul had been bound in this way. So had Rada Mohamed Hamza from Hilla, and Ali Hassouni Alwan and Ibrahim Abdul Sadr. So had the unidentified male “wearing dark green military clothing and shoulder patches” who was obviously a deserter from the army who had taken up arms for the Shia uprising. “There are many other sites all round here,” a farmer, who was helping in the excavation, told me wearily. “Some of us heard the shots at the time and saw the bulldozer. It was very ‘ordered,’ very routine. We were told that if anyone spoke of it, they would immediately be shot.” He pointed to patches of disturbed land to the south—you could see the revetments left by the bulldozers once the deeds were done—and it was only then that the truth became obvious. There were thousands murdered here. Once a mass grave was closed, Saddam’s killers simply dug another one.

You imagine a neat hole in the back of the skull. But as the Iraqi villagers in the grave pit brushed away at the grey desert soil, the heads that emerged were cracked, the bullet having broken open each skull. Nor did the earth always give up its dead so willingly. One gravedigger tugged for minutes at a great rock until it suddenly came away and a skull with dark hair and a shirt with bones spilling from it sprang towards him.

A clutch of American soldiers, a U.S. Rangers officer, two British forensic scientists and a bossy man from USAID were watching the exhumations. The soil was littered with cheap plastic sandals and sometimes—it was oddly moving— tufts of hair, like a child’s on the floor of a barber’s shop. Many of the bodies were in dishdash white domestic robes, the clothes they must have been wearing when they were ordered from their homes. Another corpse had a wristwatch whose date had stopped at 9 March; it had resolutely ticked away on its dead owner’s wrist for another four days in the earth.

But mass graves are political as well as criminal affairs. Hussein Kamel Hassan, Saddam’s son-in-law—the man who ordered this slaughter—is the same Hussein Kamel who fled to Jordan and gave away Iraq’s chemical weapons secrets. Before he returned to Iraq—to be murdered, of course, by Saddam— Kamel Hassan talked to the CIA about Iraq’s chemical weapons. Did he talk about this too, about the desert killing fields, about the fate of the men of Musayeb? In the children’s stadium, the shrouds lay in military lines. Just over 170 had been positively identified. “These people are the victims of Saddam,” Riad Abdul Emir—one of the mass grave investigators—said as he walked slowly along the rows of dead. “But they are also victims of the Arab regimes who cooperated with Saddam, and of the West which supported him—because our 1991 intifada could have succeeded were it not for the interference of the American administration. They let Saddam do this because it was in their interests at the time.”

The presence of eight Egyptian bodies—apparently truck-drivers working in Iraq who may have tried to fight on the Shia side or merely been freed from prison in the initial days of the uprising—suggested that other foreigners might soon be found. Where, for example, were the more than 600 Kuwaiti prisoners who never returned from Iraq in 1991? Mohamed Ahmed was vainly searching through the corpses for his brother’s remains. “These dead people had rights,” he said. “But how can we ensure that they get their rights?”

BUT THE DEAD HAD NO RIGHTS in Iraq. Nor the living. In Beirut, twenty-three Iraqi opposition groups were brought together in mid-March 1991 under the auspices of Syria, a great mass of arguing, pleading, angry men—some of them Shia preachers, many others defectors from Saddam’s regime—to demand help from the Americans so that they could set up a new and free nation amid the ruins of Iraq and the Baath party. It was pitiful. In a coffee shop opposite the Bristol Hotel, a Shia delegate looked at me with exhaustion. “What are the Americans up to?” he asked as dozens of his fellow Shias and Sunnis, Kurds and communists thronged the lobby. “The American army allowed the Republican Guards to pass down the road to Basra to attack our fighters there. Why did they do that? I thought the ceasefire agreement said there should be ‘no movement of forces.’ Do the Americans want Saddam to stay?”

I drank so many coffees that day. Scarcely a soul did not ask about America’s intentions in Iraq, although the Beirut conference which began on 10 March—the area around the Bristol Hotel infested with Syrian troops and plain-clothes intelligence men with pistols in their belts—was supposed to agree on a common political goal for the post-Saddam era. There was even talk of a government-in-exile, although it was discreetly referred to in Baath-speak as a “joint command,” an instrument of power in Baghdad after Saddam’s demise which would ensure that a new nationalist and democratic Iraq would emerge from the ashes. But not a single American observer attended the conference.

It seemed to have a supreme irrelevance. I had driven from Kuwait via Saudi Arabia for Bahrain, where I picked up MEA’s resumed service to the Gulf and flew home to Beirut. We travelled over Iran and at dawn over Turkey I looked east and saw the black oil clouds from Kuwait and Iraq hanging high over the frosts of Ararat, darkening even the sacred mountain of ancient Armenia and that country’s own long-hidden mass graves. When I landed at Beirut and drove home and stood on my balcony in the cool morning air, I looked out over the Mediterranean and there in the distance was that same smudge of black rime on the horizon. Some of the Iraqis at the Bristol would walk down to the sea and notice the same grim mark of their country’s fate.

Amid desolation, they searched for hope. They listed the Iraqi cities they claimed Saddam had lost. They insisted the mere fact that 325 Iraqis from such different faiths and factions could meet together was in itself a victory. The banner strung across their conference hall announced that “our unity is a guarantee of our salvation from dictatorship.” No one, they told us, wanted to force an Islamic republic on Iraq—already they realised that this was the American and Kuwaiti and Saudi nightmare—but it was left to Ayatollah Taqi al-Mudaressi to express their fears. “Some Iraqis are beginning to think that the Americans prefer Saddam,” he said. “They are wondering if America prefers Saddam without teeth to an Iraq without Saddam.”

All the Iraqis in Beirut talked in code. When they proclaimed their desire for popular elections and a democracy, they were trying to assuage American fears that an Iran-style Islamic republic would be set up in a post-Saddam Iraq. When they talked of unity, they were attempting to convince each other that Iraq would not be divided into a Shia state, a Sunni state and a newly-born Kurdistan. And when they condemned the presence of foreign forces on Iraqi soil—for which read American troops—they were denying that they were Western stooges. “We will not accept foreigners on the sacred banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates,” one of the delegates shouted from the platform. At which point, the Americans lost interest in this display of democracy.

This wasn’t the only reason. For while the Islamic parties were largely Shia groups, the Sunnis who constituted about 40 per cent of the population were not represented by a single political organisation. Nor could Christians and communists have taken much inspiration from the start of the conference, at which delegates listened to a long reading from the Koran. Lebanese Shia leaders were closely linked to some of the Iraqi movements. Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim, the man believed to be behind the Basra insurrection—who would be assassinated in a massive bomb explosion in Najaf during the American occupation twelve years later—was the first cousin of Sayed Mohamed Hussein Fadlallah, regarded as the spiritual adviser to the Lebanese Hizballah movement and the secret inspiration of the Iraqi Dawa party. Hakim’s mother was from the Lebanese Bazi family.

But there was one small feature of the make-up of this conference that went unmentioned. We all knew that among the Iraqi parties were the seventeen who made up the “Joint Action Committee for Iraqi Opposition” which had met in Damascus in December 1990 to seek a new and democratic Iraq. They included the Dawa, the Islamic Council—the most important of the pro-Iranian groups with close links to Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, the former Iranian minister—the Iraqi Communist Party, and at least four Kurdish parties and two groups, the “Islamic Movement” and the “Independent Nationalists,” supported by Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis also insisted that Salah Omar al-Ali’s “Nationalist Iraqi Constitution” and Saad Saleh Jaber’s “Free Iraq Congress” participate in the conference. And Salah Omar al-Ali was the very same former Baathist who had issued that devastating, fateful call for an uprising over the CIA’s radio station on 24 February.

In days to come, these American-organised appeals for an insurgency against Saddam would be compared to the Soviet demands for a Polish uprising against the Germans in Warsaw in 1944, when Russian troops reached the eastern suburbs of the city and appeared ready to liberate the Polish capital once the insurrection began. In the event, the Poles obeyed the call to rise up against the Nazis—and the Soviets waited until the Germans had annihilated the rebels, efficiently destroying the Polish nationalist forces that would have opposed communist rule. The Iraqis working for the Americans and the Saudis had now done much the same. They appealed for an insurrection and watched Saddam annihilate the rebels, thus destroying any chance of an Islamic republic—or any other kind of state—in Iraq. Later—twelve years later—they would take Baghdad and appoint their own “interim government,” much as the Soviets did in postwar Poland.

In Beirut, I interviewed Ayatollah al-Mudaressi, who agreed that Basra had probably fallen but claimed that Amara, Nasiriyah, Diwaniyah, Samara, Najaf and Kerbala were still holding out against Saddam’s forces. While the Americans might be tempted to support a toothless Saddam out of fear that an Islamic republic might take its place, he told me, the United States should realise that the Iraqi rebellion focused on the rebuilding of Iraq, not on revolution:

This fear the West has is directly linked to Iran. The West does not have good relations with Iran—so it is worried about what happens now in Iraq. But this is a misjudgement. The uprising did not take place during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. It has happened because of what Saddam has done. You cannot copy a revolution from one country to another. I think we must ask the people what kind of republic we want. Personally, I would like an Islamic republic—but not by force. If the people choose this road, I am with them. If they choose another road, I am with them. But Iraqis will not forget America’s lack of support when they overthrow Saddam.

But within twenty-four hours, the Iraqi opposition was admitting what we all knew: that the Shia insurgency was collapsing. The most convincing evidence of this came from Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, brother of Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr al-Hakim, who acknowledged that Najaf and Kerbala were no longer “in the hands of revolutionaries.” Even the communists admitted that the uprising now faced “serious difficulties.” Only the Kurdish delegates were able to encourage the conference with claims that their own guerrillas were still capturing villages north of Kirkuk.¹⁴⁹

The most dignified figure in Beirut was that of old Mohamed Mahdi Jawahiri, Iraq’s finest living poet. Ninety years old, he sat on the dais in a crumpled jacket with a soft cap on his bald head, speaking in the language of verse. “I didn’t expect to participate in this conference,” he said:

The children of Iraq are smiling at this moment, old men too. Our people under the regime of Saddam Hussein are suffering—all of us are suffering—execution, torture and deportation. But we are patient and united. My heart is with you. My hand is in yours. The intifada in Iraq needs your help . . . There is a limit to everything and for every crime there is a punishment . . .

In the end, the Iraqi opposition could only end its deliberations with an uninspiring demand for a host of “committees”—those get-out institutions so loved by Arab leaders who want to avoid serious decisions—the most important of which was supposed to be the “Committee for National Salvation,” the nearest they could agree to a government-in-exile, and the most ridiculous of which was the creation of a delegation to tell the rest of the world what was happening in Iraq—as if the world did not already know. For it was now clear that when the American 1st Armored Division halted its tanks north of Safwan, the killing fields went on moving northwards into Iraq without them, consuming the land in fire and blood. As many—perhaps more—Iraqis were now perishing each day than died in the allied air assaults of the previous month. It was Ayatollah al-Mudaressi who graphically summed up his people’s tragedy. “Kuwait has been liberated,” he said, “at the cost of the blood of the Iraqi people.”

As the truth of this was made manifest in the execution grounds of southern and central Iraq, Washington watched in cruel silence. The administration, according to The Washington Post, could not decide whether it wished to keep U.S. troops in Iraq to restrain “Hussein’s ability to suppress the rebellions” or withdraw “so Iraqi military forces could consolidate control and then possibly challenge his claim to leadership.” The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, was at his most craven. “What’s the better option to get rid of Mr. Saddam Hussein?” he asked rhetorically. “I really don’t know.” The Bush administration had taken no position on the issue “because it really is an internal problem” within Iraq. Powell had “no instructions to do anything” that would benefit either side.

American aircraft were now flying at will over Iraq, low enough for their pilots to see the battles with their own eyes. Their reconnaissance pictures picked up the street barricades, burning buildings and Iraqi tanks—and in some cases the attacking Iraqi helicopters which Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled had obligingly allowed them to keep flying—in the streets of Iraq’s major cities. If the Americans would reluctantly move in to protect the Kurds—as they were later forced to do by public opinion—no such inclination was shown towards the Shia of southern Iraq. Despite the eyewitness evidence of terrible crimes against humanity, there would be no attempt to save the Shia population whose religious links with Iran so frightened Washington and its Arab allies in the Gulf.

On the American lines in southern Iraq, further descriptions of these atrocities were now being given by Iraqi ex-soldiers. Ibrahim Mehdi Ibrahim, a thirty-two-year-old army deserter, told how Republican Guard units lured families from their homes with promises of safe passage and then trained artillery on them. Saddam’s soldiers, he said, were trying “to harvest them, the wheat with the chaff, with helicopter gunships while they hid in the fields.” A U.S. Army medic told of treating terrified Shia refugees who had been “beaten with pipes, with burns and a lot of kids beaten with barbed wire. A lot had families killed off. A couple of girls, twelve and thirteen, were beaten on the face with fists or blunt objects.” Several weeping men arrived at an American checkpoint at Suq as-Shuyukh with identical stories of entire families massacred together by Iraqi Republican Guard forces. Another Iraqi army deserter said that “families that wanted to leave, they were surrounded and mowed down on the street. We saw with our eyes how they brought the wounded out of hospitals and shot them along with the doctors treating them. When the Iraqi army entered one week ago, the families that had fled the fighting returned with their children. They lined them up against walls and executed them.” The secrets of the mass graves outside Musayeb—revealed so many years later— proved that this man’s story was no exaggeration.

In America, The New York Times announced that the United States had “consigned the Iraqi insurgents to their fate,” quoting a “senior official”—as usual, anonymous—who said, “We never made any promises to these people. . . . There is no interest in the coalition in further military operations.” This was certainly the case among America’s Arab allies. For if the behaviour of the United States and Britain was both shameful and immoral, the reaction of most of the Arab regimes was humiliating. Many Arab journalists had expressed their revulsion that the Iraqi army—the largest and supposedly the most sophisticated in the Middle East—had been routed so ignominiously. In Arab newspapers, the destruction on Mutla Ridge was called a nakba, a catastrophe—the same word used for the Palestinian exodus of 1948. But except in Syria, there were few words of sympathy in Arab capitals for the desperate men fighting on against Saddam in the ruins of southern Iraq or in the Kurdish mountains. The massacres in Basra and Najaf and, later, in Kirkuk elicited no expressions of horror from the Gulf kings and emirs, nor among the ageing presidents supported by the West. Almost all had their own minorities to repress—many of them Shia minorities—and were in no mood to rouse their people to indignation at the outcome of the Iraqi insurgency. To his disgrace, Yassir Arafat—a man whose own people’s exile should have awoken in him an equal sympathy for the fleeing Kurds—expressed not the slightest compassion for them.

The calvary of the Shia went largely uncovered by Western reporters— certainly by television—and its dimensions could only be gathered from the desperate men and women arriving at the American checkpoints north of Kuwait. In Kurdistan, however, television and newspaper reporters were on the ground, living—and in at least four cases dying—among the fighters and refugees as Saddam’s counter-attack set off a tragedy of biblical proportions. Journalists trudged alongside the tens of thousands of Kurdish men and women as they fled north into the snow-thick mountains along the Turkish border, old men dying of frostbite, women giving birth in the snow, children abandoned amid the drifts. As The Independent was to say with bleak accuracy, “the mightiest military machine assembled since the Second World War watches the atrocity show from the sidelines.”

So, despite the anguished dispatches of their own correspondents, did the great American newspapers and the East Coast heavyweight “opinion formers.” The Washington Post was in favour of non-intervention, while The New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb complained that “the logic of intervention leads on, inevitably, to capturing Baghdad . . . While Iraqi troops failed to fight in Kuwait, we cannot count on similar timidity in their citadel. And who will fight on our side? No one. And what of civilian casualties? Many more. And what do we do after we have occupied Baghdad? And for how long? And at what cost?”

Here again, the ghosts of the future might visit the past. Yes, if American forces had continued towards Baghdad, as Schwarzkopf quite soon believed they should have done, what would have happened? The Arab coalition would have fallen apart. America—probably alongside Britain—would have had no “friends.” But there can be little doubt that if the Americans had pressed on to destroy Saddam’s regime, they would have received the welcome from the Iraqis that they confidently expected—but did not get—in 2003. Indeed, after the betrayal of 1991, the Americans could never receive that welcome. In 1996, President George Bush Senior was to speak on television in a series of interviews that his own son would rashly ignore when he illegally invaded Iraq in 2003. If U.S. forces had pursued Saddam to Baghdad, Bush Senior said haltingly, “there would be, downtown Baghdad . . . America occupying an Arab land, searching for this brutal dictator who had the best security in the world, involved in an urban guerrilla war.”

Which, of course, subsequently came to pass, even if Bush failed to realise that it was the capture of Saddam that would encourage the “urban guerrilla war” of which he presciently spoke.¹⁵⁰ The moral issue, however, is that Bush had supported the call for the Iraqi rebellion. He had enthusiastically endorsed the rising. The CIA’s radio station had broadcast appeals to the Iraqi population to overthrow Saddam. These appeals, it was plain, burdened the Americans with a moral obligation to protect those they had called to arms on their side. To ignore these brave and desperate men when they responded—to leave them and their families to be exterminated—was not only an act of dishonour but a crime against humanity. Yet even after the American government was forced to offer military protection to the Kurds—albeit when their insurrection had been substantially crushed—they could still regard the Gulf War as a moral conflict, indeed an uplifting one for Americans. By August 1991, U.S. defence secretary Dick Cheney was able to describe the war as a “catharsis” for post-Vietnam America. “It was almost a healing process for a wound that had been open for a long time,” he said.

The real wounds—the tens of thousands of desperately wounded survivors of the Iraqi insurgency, the broken, decimated families of the Shias and Kurds, the even greater number of executed fighters and civilians now entombed beneath the sands of Iraq by Saddam’s killers—were not part of Cheney’s “healing process.” Their catharsis was to die. They did our bidding. They had served their purpose. They had failed to topple Saddam. This was their fate. But “we” had been “healed.” Bush had called for the overthrow of Saddam and then said he never intended to help the rebels in their struggle. An Associated Press report bluntly outlined the Bush policy in early April. The president, it said, “is betting that Americans are more concerned about getting U.S. troops back from the Gulf than helping Iraqi rebels topple Saddam Hussein.”

But the yellow bunting and the church bells with which we Westerners were enjoined to celebrate the “end” of the 1991 Gulf War were now a mockery. The splintering of the fragile glass upon which the Middle East rests had now stretched 800 kilometres up the Tigris and Euphrates. More human lives—most of them civilians—were being destroyed every day inside Iraq than at any time since Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. “We warned them of this,” a senior Gulf Cooperation Council official told me in Riyadh. “We told the Americans that the liberation of Kuwait might set the region on fire. We told them they might have to stay, even though our people did not want this. But they never, never learn.”

You only had to talk to the Kuwaitis, let alone the Iraqi opposition or the Syrians, that dreadful spring to realise that for them the events in the Gulf represented not an isolated, dramatic moment in their history—bloody yet controllable—but a tragic continuum that began before the break-up of the Ottoman empire and which was now growing more terrible in the mountains of Kurdistan. Historically, no Western involvement in the Arab world has been without its betrayals, although treachery followed more swiftly on this occasion than anyone could have guessed. What was supposed to have started as a noble Western crusade to free Kuwait from aggression had turned into a tragedy of catastrophic proportions. “Future historians,” I wrote in my paper in April 1991, “may well decide that the liberation of Kuwait marked only the first chapter of the Gulf War, the massacre of Shiites and Kurds inside Iraq the second. History itself suggests the West will not be able to avoid involvement in the forthcoming chapters.”

By the first week of April, 2 million Kurdish refugees were clustered along the icy frontiers of Turkey and Iran, up to 12,000 of them dying on the borders. And America, along with its Western allies, now decided that the tragedy—far from being the logical result of their own appeals for an insurrection—was yet another of Saddam’s crimes against humanity. Kurdish suffering, and the brutality of Saddam’s killer-squads, did represent a crime against humanity by the Iraqi regime. But all Western involvement in the Iraqi insurgents’ predicament would now be expunged in a welter of humanitarian aid. Guilty consciences would be drowned in meals-ready-to-eat, tents and millions of dollars’ worth of aid. And in the weeks to come, as U.S. and British troops deployed in northern Iraq to protect the Kurdish refugees, dropping thousands of tons of blankets and food in hundreds of air-drops—several of which actually killed the recipients when they crashed into the mountains—a new and deeply unpleasant message would be put forth by the West. Come, see what happened to the Kurds. See what Saddam’s murderers were capable of. Who could now doubt the moral case for war against Saddam? Here was final proof—amid the refugee camps in the mountains—of Saddam’s viciousness. Just as we would dig up the mass graves of the insurgents and their families twelve years later as more “final proof” of Saddam’s iniquities—to “prove,” of course, that we were right to have invaded Iraq in 2003—here in 1991 we were displaying an equal body of evidence to display his wickedness. The Shia dead, needless to say, had already been largely forgotten.

History now had to be rewritten to take account of these less than subtle shifts of U.S. policy. “We will not countenance interference in refugee operations,” Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, ponderously warned Saddam on 14 April. Then, in the very same breath, he added, “We are not going to intervene, as we’ve said before, in a civil war.” This was outrageous. Without anyone challenging these deceitful remarks, Scowcroft turned the insurgency that his own government had called for into a “civil war” between Iraqis. The rebels were now participants in an internal dispute. Those whom we had called upon to overthrow Saddam were taking part in a conflict that now had nothing to do with us. These Iraqis, of course, believed what we had originally told them: that they were trying to overthrow a dictator at our request.

President Bush then proceeded to expand on this new and mendacious narrative of events. In a speech in Alabama the same day, he said that Washington would “not tolerate any interference” in international relief efforts, but then said, “I do not want one single soldier or airman shoved into a civil war in Iraq that’s been going on for ages.” Note the semantics here. Saddam must not interfere in the distribution of international relief—but he wasn’t interfering, or even planning to interfere, in what the Americans were to call “Operation Provide Comfort.” Saddam’s helicopters and murder-squads were annihilating the insurgents and their civil populations before they could reach the relief centres, machine-gunning and bombing the Kurds as they desperately tried to reach the shelter of the mountains. When they arrived there, they were evidence of Saddam’s brutality. But while they were on their way, they were participants in a “civil war”—and therefore unworthy of intervention. Furthermore, they were—before they reached the location of our “international relief efforts”—taking part in a civil war that had been “going on for ages.”

It was a mystery to most Iraqis that they were involved in a civil war in the first place, let alone one that had been going on for so long. True, Saddam’s persecution of the Kurds might have been intended to ignite just such a conflict. But civil war was the one form of violence from which Iraq had been historically free. There had never been a civil war in Iraq. And this remained true when, twelve years later, the American and British occupation forces in Iraq claimed that their enemies in the country were trying to foment a civil war—having presumably forgotten that Bush Senior thought one had already occurred in Iraq. All this, it should be recalled, was a pre-run for our refusal to save the lives of the innocent in the Bosnian war in 1992, just a year after the Iraq war was declared to be at an end. In Bosnia, as the Muslims were slaughtered by the Serbs, European and American statesmen repeated the same mantra: that this was a “civil war”—indeed, that this “civil war” had been going on for “ages.”

Maybe the American line troops and the marines understood the truth, along with the aircrews who now found themselves home from Kuwait and turned round within days and sent all the way back to the country they thought they’d finished with. They were there in their thousands, another army, this time an army of conscience—of guilty conscience, I suspected—ordered to save lives rather than to kill. The Shia lives were gone, of course, the last execution pits filled north of Basra, but the Kurdish lives were still there, some of them. The Americans were smart guys. A helo ride was to plug into real small-town America, cassette in my hand as we flew over the making of a new country which one day, if the Kurds weren’t betrayed yet again—as I rather thought they might be—would be a nation called Kurdistan. The first break-up of Iraq.

As usual, the Americans wanted to be tourist guides. “OK, Bob, we’ll show you some of Iraq.” Warrant Officer Tim Corwin meant exactly what he said. He guided the CH-47 Chinook—“Cyclone-Seven-Five”—off a mountain wall above a 600-metre chasm where the valleys and the great fertile plains of Mesopotamia spread out below us. On the aviation chart, which bounced on Corwin’s knee in time to the engines, we were indeed moving deep into Iraq. In reality, we were flying over a country called Kurdistan. Woe betide the Iraqi soldier who fired on us or on the British troops snaking down the mountainsides below us.

Corwin’s voice, crackling through the headphones to Chief Warrant Officer “Chuck” Lancaster, told the whole story. “Iraqi half-track on the right. Three Brits beside it. Very pretty valley, this whole place. If you see any bad guys, let me know.” On the end of a rubber-coated radio wire, Sergeant James Sims swung his heavy machine-gun barrel out of the American helicopter’s starboard door, traversing the valley walls that raced past us. “No one,” he replied, his eyes scanning the outcrops of rock above him, feet braced against the turbulence that wafted up out of the crevasse. “Ain’t no bad guys.”

Outside al-Amadia, there were more “Brits,” Royal Marine berets moving along a road, green flowers against the black tarmac, and a string of Land Rovers. Corwin pressed his radio button. “The Brits are all over the place.” Lancaster nodded and pressed his own button. “I like to see that.” More Land Rovers now on the long straight road to Zakho, and civilian cars piled high with bedding.

On the hilltops, the Iraqi bunkers lay abandoned, the muddy tracks of armour and guns slinking away towards the nearest roads. An Iraqi fortress, complete with gunslits and four stone turrets, drifted past to port, its Iraqi flag in tatters, its doors open to the wind, the last wreckage of Saddam’s persecution of the Kurds. This was no longer Iraq. It had become something different, a new creation shaded onto our maps, ever deeper down the rift valleys towards the heat haze over Mosul.

Cyclone-Seven-Five thumped away beneath us as the hills receded. “Sure is beeeoootiful country,” crowed Corwin. “This is like home in Arizona.” The mountains to the north blocked the horizon, gashed with snow, a trail of fluffy white clouds clinging to the granite, “trash” in Lancaster’s aviation language. The four American army flyers looked at it all intently, back-chatting like Vietnam aircrews, filling the radio lines with complaints and transponder checks and torque calculations. They were humorous, intelligent men who happily mixed politics with avionics. At the back of the helo, Sergeant Charles Nabors sat in silence most of the time. You learned a lot by flying with them and listening to them, the lines crackling, mud huts slipping beneath the hull of Cyclone-Seven-Five, another little womb-bubble in which I could crouch with my cassette recorder and feel safe, with a Cyclopean eye on the world. Far to the west, the Tigris glistened.

CORWIN: Sure I know this is history. I guess this is going to be the state of Kurdistan, whatever they say.

LANCASTER: If we have to stay here more than three months, my humour level will be going down.

CORWIN: I just hope it’s not going to be a quagmire like Beirut, Lebanon. I just hope Bush knows what he’s doing.

LANCASTER: He’ll have to, ’cos I tell you the people won’t put up with shit. This is costing a whole bunch of money. We’re costing between 2,500 and 3,000 dollars here on this helo every hour in maintenance alone. Moment. Contact provider on 375, I’ve got a mission up to Five-Delta. Only thing I’m concerned about is the fuel pump in that altitude. Just look at that village. It looks like the Old Testament.

CORWIN: It’s just like you read in the Bible. Tarsus is west of here, that’s where Paul came from. And Mount Ararat’s to the east. Isn’t that something? I was in Izmir where they imprisoned Richard the Lionheart. I was fifteen miles from Troy earlier. Just think, Homer, the Odyssey . . . There’s so much blood on this ground, it’s unbelievable. All in the name of Christianity—all that blood and gore.

LANCASTER: How long do you reckon this quagmire will last? CORWIN: I’ll bet you a can of beer not a month and a half—Bitburg Pils. What about the Kurds?

LANCASTER: They don’t trust us.

CORWIN: No—rightly so.

LANCASTER: Did we help them out when the rebellion happened? NABORS (at the back of the helicopter): I had a four-year-old kid die in my arms. I guess she had dysentery. She was very dehydrated. We took her on board with all her family for Zakho to try and save her. She began breathing very bad and I held her in my arms, like. All the men in the family knelt beside me on the helo and put their hands on her. They were praying, you see. Her father put his hand on her forehead and prayed and looked away. That’s how the Kurds all prayed for her on the Chinook, for the little girl. You see, they knew she was gonna die. Then she just died. She went like that. In my arms.

I walked to the back of the Chinook. Nabors’s eyes were filled with tears.

Below us drifted the remains of a medieval—perhaps neolithic—village, grass-covered circles and roads of antiquity in what was once Iraq. They were good men on Cyclone-Seven-Five. They were transporting food into Yekmal camp, high in a Turkish mountain ravine, and Lancaster took us in, cursing the ground control, swearing when he tore refugee tents out of the ground with the wash of his rotors. There were 60,000 people under canvas below us and when Corwin switched off the engines we suddenly heard the sound of 60,000 people talking. When we took off, we were back in our glassed, Olympian world, swooping over pine stands and waterfalls, victorious in flight, safe in our little existence of transponders and torques and oil pressure above Kurdistan. Perhaps it is with this detachment that we create nations.

Certainly, the operation to save lives sometimes bore an uncanny similarity to the opposite. It was the daily mission report that gave you a palpable sense of unease. “This is the twenty-eighth day of Operation Provide Comfort,” it would announce. “As of six a.m. . . . a total of 1,954 missions have air-dropped 8,713 tons of supplies . . . All sorties are being flown by the U.S., the UK, France, Canada, Italy and Germany . . . total coalition forces . . . continue to grow, with over 13,146 military personnel from eight countries now participating . . . ” Where had we heard this language before? Why, only two months earlier, the same literary hand was welcoming us to the twenty-eighth day of Operation Desert Storm. The number of missions and sorties, the number of coalition partners, the strength of military personnel were presented to us then with the same bravado and pride. Then, the F-16s and A-10s delivered ordnance on a target-rich environment. Now the CH-47s delivered rations and blankets on a refugee-rich environment. War-speak had become peace-speak, a unique but almost imperceptible linguistic shift. Only the uniforms had changed: instead of kitty-litter yellow, they wore mountain green.

There was nothing self-serving about these American servicemen who returned to Iraq. They had a far more acute sense of responsibility than their political masters—most guessed they would be returning long before Bush and Major said so—and an impressive desire to save life. I helicoptered into Ilikli—a ravine of grass, poplar trees and a frothing stream that the American Special Forces called “Happy Valley”—to find young soldiers opening wells and springs, installing pumps and water spigots and medical vaccination tents. Sergeant Johnny Hasselquist of the U.S. 10th Special Forces Corps, whose Kurdish interpreter had been a member of the Iraqi invasion force in Kuwait the previous August, had been administering medicine to sick refugees for two weeks, living beside them, sharing his food with them, falling sick himself with acute diarrhoea in order to stay with the civilians he was sent to rescue. There was the same infinite sadness about his account of events as Charles Nabors had experienced:

We had a baby girl die yesterday. We knew the kid would die. She was premature. She wouldn’t eat. She was dehydrated. We told the mother to boil the water she gave her baby but whatever we told her, she wouldn’t boil it. She took the water from the stream, which is contaminated. She said it tasted OK. We said “Boil it.” She wouldn’t. So the baby died.

These men were all now seeing at first hand a kind of suffering they had rarely witnessed before in their lives. There was no doubt about their humanity when faced with this torment of the innocents. They knew they had a responsibility to these people, that they should “be here.” What was lost was the narrative sequence, the missing link between Operation Desert Storm and Operation Provide Comfort. Saddam’s regime had committed atrocities aplenty against the Kurds. Indeed, the Americans now encouraged journalists to travel down to the “liberated” town of Halabja, the scene of one of the monstrous gassings ordered by Chemical Ali in 1988. But all of this missed the point. These Kurds were not dying in the mountains because Saddam had suddenly decided to resume his persecution now that Kuwait was liberated. His army had turned viciously against the Kurdish people because they had responded to our demands to rise up against the Baathist regime. Their predicament now was brought about—directly—by our encouragement, our policy, our appeals. We, the West—and our “friendly” Arab dictators in the Gulf— bore responsibility for this catastrophe, yet we dressed it up to our advantage and deleted everything that happened between the liberation of Kuwait and the arrival of these hundreds of thousands of teeming masses in the mountains. Yes, we did have responsibility for them—but as victims of our political immorality as much as of Saddam’s cruelty. Like the daily mission reports, our humanitarian “relief” was the flip-side of war.

It was scarcely surprising that the Kurds, having reached the frozen wastes of their mountains, now refused to leave them. The American and British commanders were anxious to persuade them to return south under Western protection, to live in the vast tent cities that the Americans were erecting around Zakho and the Iraqi towns to the east. The snowline was disappearing, the last frosts a dirty grey stain along the peaks. Soon the heat would be up, the water would grow fouler and there would be widespread disease. But the Kurds wouldn’t budge. We put this down to fear of Saddam—they were frightened that his army would return to kill them all—but we understandably ignored the fact, which every Kurd explained with great eloquence, that they didn’t trust us to protect them if they moved out of the mountains. We promised we wouldn’t allow Saddam’s killers to reach them, but we were the ones who had told them to destroy Saddam and then left them to their fate less than two months earlier.

This was Sergeant Frank Jordan’s problem when I found him standing boot-deep in a field of poppies at Tel el-Kbir, not far from Zakho. The last time we had met, the U.S. reservist from Maine—a very kind man with spectacles and lots of lines on his face—had been up to his ankles in sand in southern Iraq, trying to cope with the thousands of Shia refugees to whom he could give no tents and little food. Now he was guarding hundreds of tents and thousands of ration packs with scarcely a refugee to take advantage of them. The American role in Iraq had come full circle.

The United States had taken just three days to transfer Jordan from Safwan to Tel el-Kbir, and now the fifty-three-year-old grandfather was waiting for the Kurds to come down from the mountains. But of course, they were not coming. It was not quite the same Sergeant Jordan whom I found now. Instead of the desolation of sand, he was surrounded by thick, ripening corn and those sad, blood-red poppies. Instead of coping with the aftermath of war, he was waiting to cope with the results of our betrayal and beginning to realise that perhaps the war was not over after all. “There was a lot of shooting up in the hills last night,” he said. “And when I was in Zakho, there were lots of Iraqi soldiers and I was nervous because I kept thinking about snipers.”

Under the terms of an understanding solemnly agreed between the Allies and the Iraqi authorities in Baghdad, the Iraqi army would withdraw farther south while the representatives of the Iraqi state—the police—would remain behind to ensure “law and order” and the sovereignty of the Iraqi nation. It would debase the nature—and the gravity—of the crisis in northern Iraq to mock Jordan’s concerns, but Gilbert and Sullivan would have found the inspiration for a lively operetta down the road in Zakho, where hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were pretending to be policemen, while hundreds of Iraqi secret policemen pretended to be civilians. The American troops were going along with this charade, even though the policemen were carrying Kalashnikovs and the Americans M-16 rifles. A policeman’s lot was not a happy one.

Only the tens of thousands of Kurds refused to abide by this theatrical code because they, at least, acknowledged that the Iraqi soldiers were not policemen and that the U.S. civil affairs officers were soldiers. If the latter would only acknowledge the reality of the former, then the Kurds might feel secure enough to come down from the mountains. In the meantime, the operetta continued. “What is your name?” I asked one of the Iraqi “policemen” outside the Zakho police station. “My name is policeman,” he replied as his plain-clothes colleagues laughed. If I stopped to chat to a schoolteacher, an engineer, a stall-holder, two or three young men in civilian clothes would glide to my side to listen. Asked for their identity, they would chorus asker (soldier) or taleb (student). How earnestly Saddam Hussein must have fostered higher education in Kurdistan. So why did his people not love him?

“We want the Americans to stay,” announced one city worthy. “Why they no come?” And here one had to go back to Sergeant Jordan’s tents. For many of the marines constructing the massive, empty encampment at Tel el-Kbir were members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit which, back in 1983, as the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit, played a somewhat different role in Beirut. In 1982 the Israelis invaded Lebanon and the U.S. Marines turned up to evacuate the PLO guerrillas trapped in the city. “Mission accomplished,” they officially announced when they left a few days later. There followed the massacre of hundreds of unprotected Palestinian civilians by Israel’s Phalangist allies. America’s conscience— and a public outcry not unlike the one that greeted the Kurdish exodus—sent the United States back to Beirut to “protect the civilians,” a mission that quickly involved the Marines in the Lebanese civil war because they took the side of the Phalangist government installed by Israel. In October 1983, 241 American servicemen—most of them members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit—were killed by one of the Middle East’s first suicide bombers. In 1990 the Iraqis had invaded Kuwait; the United States drove them out and again announced, in effect, mission accomplished. Then came the uprising we had encouraged and the television pictures of the Kurdish trek into the mountains that sent the Americans back to Iraq. The parallels were not exact, of course, but they were understood. Sergeant Jordan was fearful that if the Americans stayed too long in northern Iraq, they would be suicide-bombed again. Twelve years later, his fears would prove true. But he saw it all in simpler, more human terms:

When they told us to withdraw from Safwan, they told us not to look back. But from my armoured vehicle I saw a little Iraqi boy. He didn’t wave or give V-signs like the others. He just stared at me with these fixed eyes and then he rubbed his tummy, never taking his eyes off me. He must have been so hungry . . . I was so angry . . . for two days, I couldn’t talk to anybody. Now I can’t stop thinking about the numbers of dead Kurds, about 1,000 dead a day.

Yet the Middle East’s conflicts overlap like the tectonic plates that, every few decades, shift malignly below the region and bring down its cities and offices and apartment blocks and mosques. North of the Iraqi border one night, I was unable to find a room at any of the truck-stop hotels on the southern Turkish border road and ended up driving into the hills at night because a Christian missionary had told me of an ancient village where I would be given a bed. My Turkish taxi-driver was negotiating the potholed road when orders were suddenly screamed at us from the darkness. I opened my door, told the driver to douse the headlights and put on the inside light of the car. Running down the road towards us, rifles to shoulders, was a squad of Turkish soldiers. They wore blue berets—soldiers of Turkey’s Special Forces—and shouted aggressively as they stood around the car. I didn’t understand a word, but I didn’t need to. My driver was now beside the car, arms in the air, torchlight full in his face. In such circumstances, I use the “outraged Brit” performance. I put my hands on my hips and bellowed: “What on earth is going on?”

An officer walked up to me and I stuck out my hand. It’s a sure-fire way of reducing tension among angry soldiers. However furious or frightened or drunk, no officer wants to humiliate himself by refusing to shake hands with a perfectly friendly stranger. The soldier duly moved his rifle to his other hand and shook my hand and smiled and asked, in absolutely flawless English: “What exactly do you think you are doing here?” I told him. I was looking for a bed, I had been told of this village in the mountains and I planned to spend the night there. “Do you know there’s a problem here?” he asked.

Ah yes, there was indeed a problem. The Kurds. If the Kurds of Iraq were prepared to rise up against Saddam—and then get betrayed by us—and then flee to the mountains, the Kurds of Turkey were also, some of them, prepared to rise up against Atatürk’s Turkish state because they, too, would like to live in a country called Kurdistan. This was the same “Kurdistan” that President Wilson had initially agreed to protect more than seven decades ago but which, like Armenia, was simply forgotten in the wastes of American isolationism. The Turks, as we have seen, had dealt with inspirational cruelty with their “Armenian problem” seventy-six years earlier. Now a system of military repression, resettlement, “ethnic cleansing,” torture and extrajudicial murder was being used by the Turkish state to deal with the current “Kurdish problem.”

And of course, the Turks were now doubly fearful of Kurdish nationalism because the Kurds of Iraq were demanding their own nation and a million and a half of them wanted to flee across the Turkish border into the Turkish part of their “homeland.” Since Turkey was a NATO ally and a “friend” of the United States— hence America’s cowardice in addressing the Armenian Holocaust—Washington was also anxious to keep the Kurds of Iraq inside Iraq, which was an unspoken and all-important reason for sending U.S. troops to protect the Kurds inside Iraq and persuade them to leave the mountain frontier and move back towards their Iraqi homes. This was also one reason why Sergeant Jordan had been told to pitch all those tents outside Zakho. The Iraqi Kurds had to be kept away from their fellow Kurds in Turkey. The Iraqi Kurds had to be protected. But so did the Turkish state, as I would soon learn to my cost.

I had grown used to “choppering” around northern Iraq. The Americans gave us an almost Vietnam-like freedom on their helicopters, obligingly issuing us passes to travel on any machine to mountain fastnesses that would have taken days to reach by road or on foot. Our documentation and helicopters were arranged by a bald American civilian air controller with a hook instead of a right hand. Even on the most fog-bound or gale-kicked days, he would send us off into the mountains with his men to watch the Kurds surviving and dying in the snow-covered camps. I turned up at the Salopi air base on 29 April with my haversack of notebook, maps and spare clothes, a day of horizontal rain and wind when at least twelve helicopters were thumping and roaring on the apron. “Captain Hook” was soaked and scarcely looked at me as he handed me my chit and pointed through the storm. “Go! Go!” he shrieked in my ear and I ran towards the green, jerking chopper whose crew were beckoning to me through the rain. They didn’t seem to have the usual laid-back panache that I was used to seeing in Corwin, Lancaster and the others. The pilot gestured impatiently at me from the cockpit as I climbed aboard, and one of the crew gave me a fierce shove from behind that had me landing on my belly on the floor.

That’s when I realised that this was an Apache gunship, a big tank-killer, not one of those nice friendly Chinooks with a long snout, but a sharp, pointy, state-of-the-art piece of military aggression packed with serious-looking Americans. I sat on the spare seat, struggling into my safety harness as the machine bashed up into the sky. That’s when I noticed that all the Americans were in civilian clothes. And that they were all carrying pistols or snipers’ rifles. The American opposite, a big, beefy man with a lantern jaw, leaned towards me and shrieked in my ear: “Where you from?” England, I said plaintively. A journalist from The Independent newspaper. “Jeeesus Christ!” he shouted and turned to his neighbour and screamed in his ear. The two men frowned at me, the muscular guy shaking his head in disbelief. He leaned towards me again. “There must have been a fuck-up!”

I didn’t know. I’d boarded the helicopter “Captain Hook” told me to take. Or I thought I did. It dawned on me then that I was on the wrong helicopter. Or rather— it took a few seconds in the din and rain to grasp this—that as a journalist I was clearly on the right helicopter. Whatever was happening, it had to be more exciting than another food drop. I leaned towards lantern-jaw. So where are you from? I asked. “U.S. embassy, Ankara, most of these guys are CIA. You aren’t supposed to be here!” I stared at him. And I grinned. In fact, I positively burst into laughter, so loudly amid the cabin noise that even lantern-jaw gave me a smirk. I leaned towards his ear again because now it was my turn. “Jesus Christ!” I said. And he gave me a more friendly smile. “You,” he said, “have got yourself one hell of a fucking story.”

The chopper barrelled across the landscape, leapt through the cracks in the mountain chain, climbed with breath-sucking speed into the clouds and raced along the snowline, its passengers staring in front of them like men possessed. We were heading east at an astounding speed. I pulled my laminated map from my sack and traced the miles by laying my outstretched finger against the mountains. We were heading directly towards the Iranian border. Lantern-jaw took my map and turned it towards me, his own finger on a tiny name printed in italics. “Yasilova,” it said. I squinted at the map as the Apache jerked between two walls of rock. If a helicopter ever came into contact with rock, Lancaster had told me, the rock “always wins.” And we were moving far faster than the old Chinook.

In one moment, we had soared through dark blue skies and then sideways into a cloud bank to emerge scarcely 5 metres from the tops of pine trees. The Apache had an astounding ability to “skid” in the air, to turn corners like a car and to flatten out and swoop like a bird at a patch of rock. And I remembered all those burned-out tanks and armoured vehicles and cars across the sands of southern Iraq and realised, yet again, that the Iraqis never had a chance of surviving. This was death by computer, the same computer upon which our lives now depended in this mechanical wasp. Yasilova. It meant nothing to me. The Iranian border ran just a fingernail to the right of the name. And then we descended.

The CIA men and the embassy guards—I guessed they were all the same— checked their ammunition and held their weapons across their chests as we came whupping down a fairytale valley of soft grass and spring-leaved trees and a small river that moved in a torrent over the landscape. There were refugees below us, dirty tents and men and women looking up at our Apache and then, straight in front of us as the doors opened, the soldiers of two great armies pointing their rifles at each other, Turks to the left, British Royal Marines to the right, the Turks manning a machine gun on one side of the river and the green berets of the Brits moving through the lighter green of the grass, weapons at the ready. As the rotors cut and the CIA men sprang out of the helicopter, lantern-jaw tapped me on the knee. “Your guys and the Turks are about to go to war,” he shouted. And he shot me a real big smile. “I told you you had a great fucking story!”

I was out of the chopper like a rat, running for my life with the Americans, down towards the river where a Royal Marine radio operator was struggling with his back-pack through the mud in the direction of the Americans. The Turks were running up the eastern bank of the river, shouting and pointing their guns at us. High up on an escarpment 25 kilometres to the east, along the ridge-line of a great white mountain, lay the Iranian border. What, I wondered, did the Islamic Republic make of this?

Some of the CIA men were splashing through the river towards the Turkish troops, many of whom were standing beside piles of bedding and mattresses and boxes of food. The rest were running in front of me towards the British. And then we were among the British. “What’s your position?” one of the Americans shouted at a young officer. “Have you exchanged fire?” I saw the soldier shake his head. “Not yet,” he said. “You’re not going to,” the American replied. And then a British marine with a Home Counties accent touched my sleeve. “Are you by any chance a reporter?” he asked, and when I nodded, he actually smiled. “Bloody good—we need a reporter here.” I could hardly believe my ears. The British Ministry of Defence spent much of its time trying to keep journalists away from real stories like this. In fact, ever since I’d worked in Northern Ireland, the ministry had taken a particular dislike to my reporting. But this was not controllable. This was Planet Earth—albeit of a cold and mountainous variety—and something very odd was going on. Why were British soldiers about to shoot at Turkish soldiers for the first time since Gallipoli?

Surgeon Lieutenant Peter Davis of the Royal Marine Mountain and Arctic Warfare Cadre was the only doctor ministering to 3,000 refugees—some of whom were standing around us with a mixture of awe and terror—and he explained what had happened with the precision and speed of all professional soldiers. “The Turkish soldiers have been stealing the refugees’ food and blankets, so we had to stop this and we’ve been standing off, locked and loaded ever since.” I looked across the river to the huge pile of water boxes and blankets that stood guiltily next to the Turkish troops. The Kurdish refugees—many of them Assyrian Christians, some of whom had fled all the way from Baghdad—stood with the British whom they obviously regarded as their protectors. The Turks had just stolen another sixty boxes of water from these homeless refugees, and for several minutes the outnumbered British and Americans had been forced to watch the Turks stealing more blankets, bed linen and food, all of it supplied by international charities. The British wanted to fly all 3,000 Kurdish refugees out of Yasilova to protect them from the Turks—but a Turkish officer had refused them permission to fly. Now Davis and his men were piling what was left of the Kurds’ food onto an RAF Chinook parked by the trees to take it out of the Turks’ reach. They were going to fly the relief supplies away from the refugee camp.

There were Americans who had been here with the British for a week and all of them, along with the marines, told a story of successive Turkish army looting throughout the entire period. A British captain was shaking with anger as he spoke. “The Turkish soldiers here are shit,” he said. “They don’t seem to care what happens to these Kurds—and it’s the Turks who are supposed to be running this camp. They take whatever they want. One of them said to me: ‘It’s better to starve the Kurds—that way, we can control them.’ I can’t let that happen.”

The scandal at Yasilova camp had gone unreported, partly because it was so remote, partly because it had only now degenerated to the verge of open military hostilities, and partly because of the natural desire of the coalition armies—who had known about this disgrace for days—to maintain good relations with Turkey. When British and American troops first arrived at Yasilova camp, the Turks were in sole charge. “The Kurds were in a pitiful state,” an American said. “They were suffering from acute diarrhoea. There were no medical services given by the Turks. The place was on the verge of a cholera outbreak.” It was still the most squalid of the camps. The place reeked of sewage.

At least a hundred of the refugees were begging the British and Americans to take them to Europe because, they said, they were about as frightened of the Turks as they were of the Iraqis. “We have relatives in Austria, in Sweden, in America,” one young woman pleaded with me. “For God’s sake, tell them we are here.” There were dark stories in the camp, that the Turks were trying to divide up the families and charge them for transport to another camp to the west. The British were still piling their food supplies onto the Chinook, heaping boxes of water and blankets onto a pallet beneath the machine. “If the refugees can’t have it, we’re damn well not going to let the Turks take it,” one of the marines said.

I flew out on the RAF helicopter along with the food, a sick child, a Kurdish woman looking for her lost son and a Kurdish man who had been wounded in the eye during the uprising. We dropped them off at Zakho and flew on to Diyarbakir, where I now had a hotel room. I called Harvey Morris in London and told him I had a story for the front page—which is where the scandal of Yasilova appeared next morning.

I knew the Turkish authorities would resent the report. With a million Kurdish refugees on their frontier, the Turkish army felt it was losing control of the relief operation—in reality, it did not have the resources to maintain it—and in Turkey, any criticism of the army can be regarded as a crime. This was part of the legacy of Atatürk, whose own military career at Gallipoli was part of the legend upon which modern, secular Turkey had been built. But Turkey also wanted to join the European Community—as it then was—and could scarcely deny the truth of what had happened at Yasilova. Or so I thought.

I spent the next day back in the air, travelling with the American Chinook crews around Zakho, but when I returned again to Diyarbakir, a British relief worker told me that “the Turks are very angry and I’d let your office know if I were you.” I called Harvey. “Of course the Turks will be angry,” he laughed. “You’ve offended their bloody army. Call me if you have any trouble.” Trouble came two hours later with a knock on my bedroom door. I opened it. In front of me stood the hotel manager, a small Kurdish man, but behind him stood two tall, unsmiling men in black leather jackets. “I am sorry to bother you, Mr. Fisk, but some policemen are here to talk to you.”

The police spoke no English, I no Turkish, so the diminutive Kurd assured me that they came as “friends” and would like me to visit the police station. I was to take my belongings with me. I lifted the phone, and—as the policemen protested—dialled London and got through to my foreign editor, Godfrey Hodgson. I told him in one sentence what had happened, that I suspected this might be more serious than we had imagined, and asked him to call my elderly parents in Maidstone to tell them we had a problem. Bill and Peggy would not want to hear this on the radio.¹⁵¹ Trailed by a colleague from the Daily Mail, I was driven to the police station, where a portly police inspector invited me to sit in his office. “You are here as a guest of the police inspector,” my luckless hotel manager explained. “You have not been arrested.” In that case, I said, I would like to take tea with the police inspector. He scowled. Tea arrived after half an hour. From the wall above him, Atatürk scowled down at me too.

So did Paul O’Connor, the British embassy’s second secretary in Ankara. “They want to question you about your report,” he said coldly. “My advice is to say nothing.” What quickly became apparent, however, was that the police were considering formal charges against me for defaming the Turkish army—I suspected that this was a military order to the police, not an instruction from the interior or foreign ministries in Ankara. One of the cops told me, with considerable pleasure, that defaming the army carried a sentence of ten years. I sat in the inspector’s chair, rememberingMidnight Express and cursing “Captain Hook.” My chopper ride with the CIA was having unpleasant repercussions.

More policemen entered the room. The inspector took several telephone calls, glancing at me as he listened to the speaker. A plain-clothes cop arrived with a massive old German typewriter and began to root through my bag, slowly extracting my toothbrush, spare blanket, chocolate bars and—to my despair—a book on Armenian history. It was now one in the morning. O’Connor drooped with tiredness. He asked that I be allowed back to my hotel. The inspector said he had no power to permit this. The cop with the typewriter then announced that my interrogation would begin. O’Connor objected. But I decided that an interrogation might be just the thing to end this farce. I asked him to translate; which, to be fair, he wearily agreed to do, struggling to stay awake. The construction of the Turkish language is such that each sentence has to be completed before it can be translated. It would be 4:45 in the morning before this nonsense was over.

When did I first enter Turkey? Had I entered the country from any place other than Habur (the border crossing from Iraq outside Zakho)? Did I come to Diyarbakir directly from Ankara? Did I work for The Independent ? Did I write an article in The Independenton 30 April 1991? Is there another Robert Fisk on the paper? Did I have any other article published in The Independent on 30 April 1991? This was witless stuff, infantile, ridiculous. I began to realise why the Turks could not suppress the Kurdish revolt in southern Turkey. It was also quickly becoming obvious that the police version of my story came not from my own paper but from the reports of Turkish correspondents in London who had recycled my report back to Istanbul and Ankara.

Did I see Turkish soldiers stealing water? Did I take pictures of this? I understood this question. If I had photographs of the Turkish army looting, then the prosecution would collapse. So they needed to seize those pictures. But I didn’t have any. I kept replying that the answer to their questions could be found in my article in The Independent. Did I see Turkish soldiers stealing helvar? O’Connor struggled to translate this exotic commodity which turned out to be a form of Turkish biscuit that I had never seen let alone tasted in my life. More cops now arrived and—despite O’Connor’s presence—stood around me, each holding wooden coshes in their hands. The inspector said that I might like to spend the night in the basement of the police station. “This is getting a bit heavy,” O’Connor muttered. Then came the moment I had been waiting for:

COP: In the article in the newspaper Independent on 30 April 1991, and which bears your name, is it true that the aid in Yasilova camp has been looted by Turkish soldiers?

FISK: My father always told me that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was one of the titans of the twentieth century. I believe my father was right. Unfortunately, some of your soldiers at Yasilova did not obey the high standards and principles set by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish nation.

Suddenly, the atmosphere changed. I silently thanked Bill Fisk for all those boyhood history lessons. I’m not at all sure that Atatürk was a titan (or that Bill thought so), but I was quite prepared to become his admirer for the inspector and his friends. They began to talk to one another with great animation. Swooning with tiredness, O’Connor told me they would probably now allow me to return to my hotel. The word “deport” popped up in their conversation. And I knew why. If my argument was going to be a rousing condemnation of the way in which the Turkish army had turned its back on the father of the nation—a man whose integrity I would defend against the army—then there could be no prosecution and no court case. And so it came to pass.

A few hours later, I was solemnly informed that I would be deported, and O’Connor trotted off to buy an air ticket. Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Murat Sungar announced Fisk’s imminent departure from the homeland; “his existence in Turkey is no longer needed because of his prejudiced, biased and illintentioned reporting,” he said. It was a bumpy flight back to Ankara and I had to comfort one of the two Turkish cops guarding me because he had never travelled in an aircraft before. But “Captain Hook” ’s decision to put me on the Apache was now rippling the pond. The Turks ordered that the British Royal Marines should also be deported and claimed that they had roughed up a local Turkish official. The Ministry of Defence immediately “redeployed” them south of the border and inside Iraq. Journalists’ organisations protested. The European Commission demanded an explanation from the Turkish ambassador to the EC in Brussels. One of AP’s executives in New York sent me a two-liner: “Hard to imagine the quality of the meals in a jail in Diyarbakir. You’re probably envying the Kurdish refugees about now.”

The problem was that the Kurdish refugees had already disappeared from this ridiculous saga. It was the honour of the Turkish army that was now at stake. The Turkish army’s chief of staff, General Dogan Gures—who should have been disciplining his soldiers at Yasilova and protecting the Kurds—thundered that my perfectly accurate report was “planned, programmed propaganda.” But what was I supposed to have done? Declined to board the helicopter at Salopi? Ignored the evidence of my own eyes at Yasilova? Censored my own reporting in the interests of Western–Turkish relations? At Ankara, I was put aboard a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. “You’re the man who’s being deported, aren’t you?” the stewardess greeted me. “You must have been telling the truth.”

Which is what I wanted to go on doing in northern Iraq. But how to return there now that Turkey was closed to me? I flew back to Beirut and drove to Damascus, where the former subjects of the Ottoman empire were more than happy to oblige. I explained my predicament to Mohamed Salman, the minister of information—to be disgraced by the Assad regime eight years later—who suggested I visit a certain General Mansour, in charge of Syrian army intelligence in the border city of Kimishli. I drove the length of Syria, back to the Turkish border—I could actually see the Turkish flag outside General Mansour’s window—and he arranged for a squad of Syrian troops to take me down to the Tigris River where it flowed out of Turkey and formed the border of Syria and northern Iraq. An old man in a wooden boat was waiting in the dawn light and the Syrian soldiers waved goodbye as he rowed me silently across the great expanse of pale, soft water to the other shore where three peshmerga Kurdish guerrillas were waiting for me. Sister Syria—as Assad’s nation was called with dubious affection in Lebanon—had friends inside Kurdistan. “Mr. Robert?” one of the Kurds asked. “We are here to take you to Zakho.” And so I returned to the story of the Kurdish disaster.

It was now late spring. The Americans and the British were planning to leave. The United Nations had arrived with their observers to “protect” the Kurds. Yet only by extending “free” Kurdistan farther south could the Americans close down the refugee camps in which the Kurds had eventually been induced to live after leaving the mountains. Soon the Kurds would be attacked again, usually by Turkish troops and pilots who would, in the coming years, bomb Kurdish villages where they believed guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, were hiding. Turkish soldiers would enter Zakho in contravention of all their agreements with the Western allies. And Saddam would strike back against the Kurdish exiles in northern Iraq whose plots to assassinate the wretched dictator—it was all part of a hopeless CIA conspiracy—miserably failed. So while the Americans tried to leave northern Iraq, they had to push farther south to set up more “safe havens” for the Kurds. They approved of new Kurdish negotiations with Saddam. They were now enthusiastic to work with the Baathist regime—or “the government in Baghdad” as they preferred to call it—in order to withdraw. Suddenly, the Americans needed Saddam’s cooperation.

The Kurds saw the implications of this. They could not stop the Americans leaving, but they could purge what was left of Baath party rule from the towns that were to be included in the “safe haven,” and this they did with their usual ruthlessness. Many of Saddam’s acolytes were murdered or driven from their homes, their police stations taken over and their torture chambers opened for the first time in more than two decades.

Deep in the underground dungeons of Dahuk secret police headquarters, the young Kurdish women who were raped and murdered by the Iraqi mukhabarat had left their last record on the filthy walls. One drew a portrait of herself with large eyes and long hair flowing over her shoulders, a pretty girl wearing a high-collared blouse. Another drew a rose, above it the words: “I am going to die. Please tell the others.” Yet another, whose name appears to have been Nadira, wrote on her cell wall just four words: “This is my fate.”

The Kurdish peshmerga and several hundred of the local Dahuk population had stormed the police station, almost too late to prevent the Iraqi plain-clothes men burning files containing the names of the prisoners—and their tormentors—in a concrete sentry box at the main gate. They were still smouldering when we arrived there, watched uneasily by twelve Iraqi policemen who were now, in effect, hostages of the Kurds. The last young woman to be imprisoned here had died in these foetid cells just two months earlier. Thepeshmerga said they found three of the women’s bodies, naked and with their hands bound, in the cells. One of the girls was twelve years old. Another, older woman had been gang-raped and died later. Anyone who wanted to know why a million and a half Kurds fled their homes in March 1991 had only to visit the Dahuk police station.¹⁵²

On the face of it you might have expected the Americans to have taken a look at this evidence of Saddam Hussein’s barbarism. The Dahuk secret police offices, housed in a large two-storey villa, stood only a few kilometres from the new U.S. military headquarters. Here at last was proof that the servants of the dictator so often compared by President Bush to Hitler really could behave like Nazis. Were not some of the Allies once demanding war crimes trials?

Not any more, it seemed. At least two of the most senior police officers in Dahuk—men who must have known of the terrible secrets beneath that villa— were now meeting daily with senior U.S. army officers to discuss the return of Kurdish refugees to the town. Colonel Moakdad and Colonel Jamal were now instrumental in ensuring there were no clashes between armed Iraqis and allied troops in Dahuk. Each morning, driven by chauffeurs in Oldsmobile limousines, they would turn up at the new hotel which the Americans took for their headquarters, occasionally saluting the U.S. troops.

How much longer could this hypocrisy continue? On 25 May, Colonel Moakdad even arrived with a peshmerga representative, turning to an American colonel who greeted him and twining his two forefingers together. We are friends now, the gesture said. The Iraqi police and the Kurds were supposed to be in alliance while their leaders negotiated in Baghdad. Once those talks were complete, the Iraqis would guarantee democracy to the Kurds, or so we were supposed to believe. And then, of course, the Western allies could go home. Any price, it seemed, was worth paying for a withdrawal, even indifference to the secret police headquarters.

There was a neat perfumed garden in front of the building, rose bushes neatly planted beside the path. The portico of the headquarters had been tastefully decorated with small brass Arabic lamp shades. It was as pretty as the garden outside the Savak torture chamber in Tehran in 1979. But a few metres to the right were some stairs. With the local peshmerga leader, Tassin Kemeck, we pulled open a steel door nine inches thick and descended. Water dripped down the staircase. At the bottom were a series of narrow cells and several large rooms. They were strewn with excrement and dirty blankets. “This is where they brought the women,” Kemeck said. “They were not wives of peshmerga, just pretty women. They tortured them, raped them and killed them. Some were very young. The Iraqi army used to come to the women in this cell”—here he pushed open a heavy iron door— “and rape them one after the other.” On the floor was a stained mattress and some women’s clothes. The walls were covered in graffiti. “Sometimes they wrote their names in blood,” Kemeck said.

But America’s desire to call Saddam to account had receded as its desperation to withdraw from Iraq increased. No one was more clear-cut in his determination to get out than the commander of the 15,000-strong coalition army in Kurdistan that now controlled 13,000 square kilometres of northern Iraq, Major General Jay Garner. Twelve years later, Garner would be the first of the American proconsuls in occupied Iraq—a man who so alarmingly mismanaged the task that he was replaced within months—but in 1991, no one could have been keener to negotiate with the Iraqi authorities. “We’ve told the Kurds from the first day that we’re here for two things,” he said. “To stop the dying in the mountains and to create an environment in which they could resettle. We never signed up to be a north Iraq security force . . . We were sent here to do one thing and we’ve done that pretty well. I don’t think the Kurds will go back to the mountains unless they’re under attack. And if they are, that’s a problem for the United Nations and world leaders, and they’ll have a tough decision to take. That’s what leaders get paid for—tough decisions.”

Garner, a short, stocky man who talked in clipped, carefully punctuated sentences, was deputy commander of the U.S. Fifth Corps in Europe. But in Kurdistan, he was playing politician. “I don’t think you should keep forces here. The Kurds are Iraqi citizens. I don’t think you should keep forces to protect citizens from their own government. I agree this is a vicious leader [in Baghdad], a vicious regime. But if you want military forces to stay here, you’ve got to change the mission and got to change the rules . . . They [the Kurds] were dying at four hundred a day in the Turkish mountains. They weren’t Turkish citizens so something had to happen there. Right now, their own leaders are close to signing an agreement with Saddam . . . they live here. The fact that we came here gave them a better bargaining position.”

Garner was a little like an unhappy policeman who has to invent his own laws while walking the beat. If UN Security Council Resolution 688 allowed humanitarian intervention in a foreign country, it afforded few guidelines to the U.S., British, French, Spanish and Dutch staff officers who met the general each evening for their daily briefing. “My worst fear,” Garner confided, “is getting our people in the middle [of a battle] and then getting hurt. The Iraqis and the peshmerga have been fighting ever since we got here . . . We’re not an occupation army. No one’s under martial law. There’s no legality . . . ”

In the corner of Garner’s office was an old bolt-action rifle bearing on its stock the coat of arms of the Pahlavi dynasty. The bolt was rusted and the wood had cracked but the Shah’s lion was plain to see on the royal insignia. For Garner, the Iranian firearm—turned in by an Iraqi soldier when the Western armies arrived in Kurdistan—was a souvenir of the “civil war” that Garner’s president believed had been going on “for ages,” the conflict which the two-star general intended to keep out of. It all seemed so simple. The Kurds would patch things up with Baghdad. The Kurds were Iraqi citizens, not Turkish citizens—clearly, Turkey’s concerns were high on Garner’s list of priorities—and if Saddam came back to persecute them, well, that was the UN’s problem.

Garner did admit to a private uneasiness in talking almost daily to Iraqi officials who might well have been responsible for torturing civilians before and during the Kurdish uprising in Dahuk. But he said that his job did not involve such emotions. “In meetings with me, they are polite. You have a few who’re tough. They’re pretty hard. Those who come to the meetings in civilian clothes have been a bit more direct. They’ll stand up and give you a long political lecture and reflections on the way you do things. We listen to them and say: ‘Thank you for your comments.’ ”

So this is what it had come to. Thank you for your comments. The Beast of Baghdad was no longer to be feared. He was to be placated, worked with, relied upon to treat his Kurds—“Iraqi citizens”—fairly. The end was surely not far away. Summer was coming to northern Iraq in a lazy way, a warm breeze rippling the hundreds of square kilometres of wheat fields around Dahuk. Anticipating the effects of United Nations sanctions in 1990, Saddam had ordered Iraqis to plant wheat on all available land. The American humanitarian groups, the U.S. military and the UN were now encouraging the Kurds to harvest the crop that was sown to beat UN sanctions.

In the middle of the dual carriageway north of Dahuk where six hot and tired U.S. marines were waving returning Kurdish refugees through their wire chicane, there stood a sign with the words “Allied Control Zone” stencilled in black paint. To the east, a battery of marine 105-mm howitzers nestled under camouflage in the heat haze, a little ghost of all those artillery positions that once lay across the Saudi desert 800 kilometres to the south. The world’s conscience was being eased. The epic tragedy of the Kurdish retreat to the mountains had now been ameliorated by return and resettlement. Instead of dying babies and sick children, the fields around Zakho were now filled with thriving families. At night, a necklace of lights moving down the mountains proved that the Kurds were returning home.

So who could be surprised when General Colin Powell, arriving at Saddam’s private airport at Sirsenk on the afternoon of 30 May, said, in so many words, that there would be no guarantees for the Kurds left behind? The “international community” would be “measuring Baghdad’s actions in the weeks ahead,” he told us. The United States would use “every diplomatic and political means and whatever other means might be appropriate” to convince the Iraqi authorities not to use force against the Kurds.

Powell’s press conference was weird. He simply wouldn’t mention the name Saddam. The monster who had obsessed the world for months could no longer be spoken of. I even asked Powell about the omission. Here he was, I said, standing on the very tarmac of Saddam’s personal airport—black marble tiles lining the unfinished terminal building—and within sight of Saddam’s winter palaces on the surrounding mountains, yet the name of Saddam would not cross his lips. Why? And he replied with an evasiveness that was truly courageous. “It would not be in the interests of the leadership in Baghdad to return to this area in force or in an aggressive way which would threaten these people and cause them to fear for their lives again.” He talked, too, about “the government in Baghdad” as if this was some vast democratic bureaucracy. And that was it. Saddam had been erased from the discourse.

When an American reporter asked Powell if the United States had really won the 1991 Gulf War despite the massive oil fires in Kuwait, the ecological damage in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia’s unwillingness to assist American security plans, the Kurdish catastrophe and the deadlock in the Middle East “peace process,” Powell reminded his audience that the invasion of Kuwait had been reversed and the emirate had now been restored to its legitimate (if undemocratic) government. “Our closest friends in this region are no longer threatened by the fourth-largest army in the world.” This was a victory. The strategic situation in the region had entirely changed. What had not changed, of course, was the continued presence of Saddam in Baghdad. But that was a name General Powell would no longer mention.

There were times when even history could not be mentioned in Kurdistan. In Zakho there was a fine Roman bridge, and the locals would tell visitors that the low, grass-covered hills that protect the town were trodden by Xenophon’s Greek thousands. Fifteen kilometres farther west, on the banks of the Habur River, history was too recent to be addressed. The locals do not mention that nine thousand Armenians were massacred here during the 1915 Armenian genocide. Because the Kurds were the murderers.

So Zakho was a town with secrets. It kept them even from the allied armies. In 1919, it was notorious for the assassination of British army officers, killed by Kurds who were demanding independence during the British Mandate. British soldiers were shot dead in the same year in the neighbouring village of Amadia— currently governed by the Royal Marines. No wonder Zakho hid its past as it hid its present. Opposite the Iraqi police station, I would be told, was the mantaqa jehudi—the “place of the Jews”—where Zakho’s substantial Jewish community lived until they departed for the new state of Israel in 1948. The houses there were poor, single-storey, mud-and-brick affairs. The old Jewish cemetery lay beneath the foundations of the Ashawa Hotel on the other side of town. Saddam’s men saw to that.

But take a walk across the river to the kenaisi—“church”—district and you would be among both Kurds and Armenians, grandsons and granddaughters and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the killers and the killed of 1915. Even now you could not ask about the massacres without arousing suspicion. The Kurds would tell you that the Turks were responsible. The Armenians would tell you, correctly, that the Kurds hereabouts were the culprits, on Turkish orders. “We have Kurdish friends,” an Armenian businessman told me. “Of course we talk about what happened. My Kurdish friends and I have coffee together. We have agreed that what the Kurds did was a mistake. They were used by other people— the Turks—to do what they did against us. But, yes, most of my friends are Christian.” There were only about 1,500 Armenians left in Zakho, living among 150,000 Kurds. A few hundred Assyrians and Chaldeans made up the only other Christian communities.

The Armenians obeyed the law under Saddam. When the Kurds of Zakho fled to avoid military service, the Armenians obediently went to fight for Saddam Hussein. Three Armenian soldiers from Zakho died under allied air attack in 1991—in Kuwait, Basra and Mosul. More than 130 Armenians from the town were killed in the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran. The only Kurds who fought in the 1991 war could be found in the refugee camps outside Zakho, although they were not from the town. One of them lived in a blue-and-white tent with his father and mother, a young man with a moustache who was a member of the Iraqi Rafidain Tank Regiment and survived the American and British attacks on the Mutla Ridge. “I was hiding in the sand when the planes came,” he said, making the usual appeals that his name should never be printed. “I saw all the Iraqi vehicles in the traffic jam and they started blowing up. There was a military petrol lorry and I saw an American plane fire a rocket at the lorry. There was a golden fire and the lorry went to twice its size and then it disappeared. I managed to reach Basra and was given five days’ leave so I travelled up to the mountains here to escape.”

But the Kurdish revolt did not bring the Kurdish and Armenian communities in Zakho any closer. When the Kurds returned to the town under U.S. protection, they found that the Armenians had not left their homes. “They thought we had taken the side of the government,” an Armenian teenager said. “They did not understand that we could not afford to rebel. We are too few.” Several Armenian families fled to the mountains when the Kurdish rebellion collapsed. Four Armenian babies were among the hundreds who died on the Turkish frontier, sharing their graves with the descendants of those who had massacred their great-grandparents.

Now the Armenians were interested in a different crisis. “We want to go to the Motherland,” an Armenian engineer said. “The Soviet Union is breaking apart and soon Soviet Armenia will be a free country, our Motherland which will protect us. I don’t hear the Baghdad or the Kurdish radios. I listen to the Armenian radio every night at six-thirty, from Yerevan in the Soviet Union. They say: ‘This is the broadcast of the Armenian Republic.’ They tell us that the Russian soldiers and the Azeris are raping our women like the Kurds did. Will Armenia be free soon? Can we go there?”

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to leave Iraq. All except the dead. Some would say that 200,000 died in the uprising that followed the liberation of Kuwait—twice the total of Iraqis who were killed in the war according to some estimates—which would mean that well over a quarter of a million souls perished in Iraq in the first half of 1991. Among the dead were thousands of Marsh Arabs, whose fate went largely unrecorded because their homes lay in the ancient Sumerian wetlands of eastern Iraq.

Back in 1982, in the fleapit shop of one of Baghdad’s seedier hotels, I bought a guidebook to the country. It was published by the Baath party or—as it pompously proclaimed on page 1—by the “State Organisation for Tourism General Establishment for Travel and Tourism Services.” And where did this little booklet advise me to go for some tourism? “And now, off to a unique world, the Marshes, where nature seems to preserve its virgin aspect. Miles and miles of water, with an endless variety of birds, of fish, of plants and reeds and bulrushes, dotted as far as the eye can see with huts, each a little island unto itself.” The first time I saw the Marshes, just east of the Baghdad–Basra highway, the tourist guide was true to its words. For kilometres, thousands of reed huts stood on earth and papyrus islands, each inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a time warp of simplicity which, according to old Arabic scripts, may have begun with a devastating flood around AD 620.

Saddam probably began to drain the marshlands in 1989, just a year before his invasion of Kuwait, and the officially stated explanation—“security reasons”— could not fail to hide its potential effect. For years, the Marsh Arabs were turning up in Kuwait and Iran with stories of dried-up riverbeds, of starvation and disease. The man who rebuilt Babylon in his own image was destroying Sumeria. Of course, it was his war with Iran that first drew Saddam’s attention to the vulnerability of the marshland; it was here that the Iranian boy soldiers made their biggest penetration of Iraq and Saddam, as we have seen, swamped the marshes with gasoline, fire and death by electricity. Within a year of the end of that war, the first work began, massive walls and dams of pre-stressed concrete, initially in secret and then—once the first satellite pictures revealed what Saddam was doing—in public. After 1991, American journalists were taken to see the northern ramparts of what was described as an “irrigation” project. They were banned from the crusted lake-beds further south, for it was here that Saddam was still being assaulted, by army deserters who emerged from the wetlands at night to assault army convoys and police posts, even three years after the 1991 war.

As usual in the Arab world, everyone knew what was happening and no one said a thing. The American and British pilots flying the pointless southern “no-fly” zone could see the receding waters of the Marshes, the evaporating reedbeds and lagoons. But we did nothing. And the Arab regimes remained silent. Neither Mubarak nor Arafat nor Assad nor Fahd—none of the supposed titans of the Arab world—uttered the mildest word of criticism, any more than they did when the Kurds were gassed. The Iraqi exiled writer Kanan Makiya drew attention to an incendiary article in the Baath party’s Al-Thawra newspaper in April 1991 while Saddam’s army was still trying to crush the southern rebellion. The author attacked the Marsh Arabs for their poverty, backwardness and immorality, referring to them as vicious, slatternly and dirty. “One often hears stories of perversion that would make your mouth drop,” the paper said. So the Marsh Arabs—whose brides were once carried to their weddings on convoys of reed-boats—were bestialised before their culture was destroyed. Saddam had dried up another corner of Iraq, put the people and the birds to flight, and made sure that there were no more little islands unto themselves.