The Kurds Go Their Own Way - Can freedom flower in Iraqi Kurdistan?

Excerpts from an article by Michael J. Totten
Reason magazine, September 2006

Two hours into my first tour of Erbil, my guide for the day taught me to feel lucky. “If we were doing this in Baghdad, we would be dead by now,” he said. Our driver nodded vigorously. “It’s that dangerous?” I asked. “With your face,” my guide replied, “and with our Kurdish license plates on the car, we could not last two hours.” So goes the capital of Iraq. But I was touring the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the war is already over.

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked. Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road. Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.

The second line of defense is the Kurds themselves. Out of desperate necessity, they have forged one of the most vigilant anti-terrorist communities in the world. Anyone who doesn’t speak Kurdish as their native language—and Iraq’s troublemakers overwhelmingly fall into this category—stands out among the general population. There is no friendly sea of the people, to borrow Mao’s formulation, that insurgents can freely swim in. Al Qaeda members who do manage to infiltrate the area are hunted down like rats. This conservative Muslim society does a better job rooting out and keeping out Islamist killers than the U.S. military can manage in the kinda sorta halfway “safe” Green Zone in Baghdad.

In a region where rule by reactionary clerics, gangster elites, and calcified military dictatorships is the norm, Iraqi Kurdistan is, by local standards, an open, liberal, and peaceful society. Its government is elected by a popular vote, competing political parties run their own newspapers, and the press is (mostly) free. Religion and the state are separate, and women can and do vote. The citizens here are tired of war, and they’re doing everything in their power to make their corner of the Middle East a normal, stable place where it’s safe to live, and to invest and build.

But to carve out their breathing space, the Kurds have adopted discriminatory policies that would make any liberal-minded Westerner squirm. It remains to be seen how the contradictions will sort themselves out in the long run. But the outcome is important, especially if Kurdistan reaches the day—and it seems increasingly likely that it will—that it breaks entirely free of Baghdad and declares independence.

The Kurdish Autonomous Zone

Only 200 U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Even those are mere tokens. The Kurdish armed forces, the Peshmerga (“those who face death”), are in charge of security. They do a remarkable job. Since Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime was toppled, only a handful of violent attacks have taken place in their part of the country.

Granted: In 2004 a suicide bomber killed Sami Abdul Rahman, the deputy vice president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, along with more than 100 other people. Last year another suicide bomber self-detonated just outside the perimeter of the fake knock-off “Sheraton” hotel. Bits of flesh splattered the flowers near the front door.

Those were major attacks. But not much else has happened. Meanwhile, the rest of the Kurds’ country—if we can still think of Iraq as their country—is the most terrorized place in the world. For that reason, among many others, Iraq might not survive in one piece. The overwhelming majority of Iraqi Kurdistan’s people are packing their bags for independence. Most have already said goodbye.

Not one Iraqi flag flies in Erbil. The national flag does appear above government buildings in the eastern city of Suleimaniya. But it’s the old flag, the pre-Saddam flag, the one that doesn’t have Allahu Akbar (“God is Great”) scrawled across the middle of it. The only reason it’s flown in Suleimaniya at all is that the city is headquarters to Jalal Talabani’s political party, the left-wing Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and Talabani is the president of Iraq. (Note: The prime minister, not the president, is head of the government.)

In January 2005 the Iraqi Kurds held an informal referendum on independence. More than 80 percent turned out to vote, and 98.7 percent of those voted to secede. The Kurds have long dreamed of self-determination; today, when they look south, they see only Islamism, Ba’athism, blood, fire, and mayhem. To them, Baghdad is the capital of a deranged foreign country. The only people I met who thought of Kurdistan as “Iraq” were the foreigners. When a Palestinian-American aid worker warned me about security, he told me, “Never forget that you’re in Iraq.” But the Kurds kept saying, “This isn’t Iraq.”

A Tightly Guarded Utah

Some Middle Eastern countries—Egypt, for instance—are grim, depressing places that feel like they’re circling the drain. Iraqi Kurdistan is optimistic, full of hope, infused top to bottom with a go-go, build-build attitude. Vast tracts of lovely new housing developments are under construction all over the major cities. Suleimaniya, the region’s cultural capital, has doubled in population in the last three years. It’s up to around 800,000 now, although no one is sure how many people actually live there. Like all cities that undergo rapid urban migration, most of the newcomers live on the outskirts. Unlike most Third World cities that explode in population, the outskirts of Suleimaniya are more prosperous than the old inner city.

Urban beautification campaigns are under way everywhere. Freshly cut bricks are being laid into sidewalks. Enormous new parks, some so large you might need a car to get from one end to the other, can be found in both Erbil and Suleimaniya. Highways are well-signed and in perfect condition. Advertisements for DSL Internet connections line the road from Erbil to the resort town of Salahhadin. There are no statues of tyrants, dead or alive. Most of the statues I saw were of poets. It’s a different world from the shattered country below. It’s easy to imagine the place as a reasonably well-functioning conservative democracy, a moderately prosperous Utah of the Middle East.

The longer central Iraq burns, the more distant the Kurds feel from Baghdad. But while the Kurds may not feel like they belong to Iraq, they don’t pretend they aren’t still shackled to it.

Erbil’s faux Sheraton is surrounded on four sides by six-inch thick concrete bomb blast walls. It isn’t physically possible to drive anywhere near the front entrance, let alone park there. Well-armed soldiers at the far end of the driveway search every inch inside, outside, and underneath each car before manually lowering the saw-toothed tire-busting blockade. Security agents in a squat concrete building scrutinize everyone who walks toward the front door from behind one-way glass windows.

Erbil’s international airport likewise is built with one-way glass. Step outside, turn around, and you’ll find that you can’t see a thing inside the terminal. Every time I walked into a government office in Suleimaniya, security guards asked if I had any guns. I didn’t, but there was always a pile of them on a table that others had dropped off before they were let inside.

I expected the Peshmerga to let me blow through the checkpoints with minimal hassle because I’m American. Instead, they scrutinized me just like everyone else. A couple of times I got pulled out of the line for even closer inspection. The soldiers were cold, serious professionals. The only people who have an easy time at these checkpoints are those who perfectly speak Kurdish with a local accent. That’s the one trait that can’t easily be faked, and it’s the only trait that can be trusted.

Kurds love freedom, but they love checkpoints too; in general, they see them as the barrier that holds back the horrors from the south. People don’t merely trust and appreciate the security. They feel it. A detached garden restaurant on the grounds of the “Sheraton” has all-glass walls on three sides. The only wall made of metal and stone is the one behind the well-stocked bar. Suburban Suleimaniya is a wonderland of brand-new modern shiny glass buildings. No one in their right mind in Baghdad would build brand-new structures like these.

During Beirut’s civil war the profits of window and glass companies perfectly tracked the rise and fall of the level of violence. When people felt safe from the chaos of war, they replaced the windows blown out from bullets, rockets, and car bombs. When they felt under siege and pessimistic, they didn’t bother. Iraqi Kurds are so optimistic they're putting up new glass buildings for the first time in their history.

Perhaps the security apparatus is a bit overdone. Few Kurds are in the mood to take any chances, though. The Peshmerga are in charge of security here; the Iraqi army has been infiltrated by Ba’athists and isn’t allowed anywhere inside the autonomous zone. Like most people, the Kurds believe a modern civilized country needs a state with a monopoly on the use of force. But they don’t think the state in Baghdad is civilized yet.

The Peshmerga offered to patrol the roads in and out of Kirkuk, which is just outside Kurdish government territory. But the U.S. authority on the ground wouldn’t have it. Arab tribes in the area might get twitchy about being policed by the Kurds. The Kurds took the pushback in stride. The minister of the interior in Suleimaniya laughed out loud when I asked him how well they get along with the American military. “Ha ha ha, our relationship is very good,” he said.

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