Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (28 page)

Their aim was clear; they wanted a Kurdish state and described this is as the overall aim of the Kurdish people. But they also stated that this aim will never be a reality without America standing behind them. The students proudly described how fourteen years of self-management and self-administration has been accomplished by the Kurdish people. They saw themselves as one of the world’s best experiments ib self-made democracy.

Kurdish youth often referred to themselves as a “successful experiment.” They look around their neighborhood, including their own country, and they see violence, corruption, and autocracy. They see their peers either in quiet submission or rebelling quietly and underground. When they look at themselves, they see something different and they are proud of this.

It is this pride in what they have achieved since 1991 that makes Kurds hesitant to view themselves within the larger Republic of Iraq. Iraqi Kurds are among the most democratic people in the entire Middle East, but there is one thing about Kurdish society that deviates from this democratic momentum: Young Kurds do not want to be part of the Republic of Iraq.

They tore down their statues of Saddam Hussein in 1991, they’ve already had their civil war in the mid-1990s, and they’ve already had their first elections. Joining the Republic of Iraq is, for many Kurdish youth, a setback, a return to the past. This point came up often, so I asked them, “What does it mean for you to have a Kurdish president of the Republic of Iraq?”

One of the students, a young man named Havîn, jumped right in to say that while they are pleased the president is Kurdish, this is not the most important thing to them. Pressed further, he confessed that the current political situation leaves them no choice but to be with the central government. However, this is not what they ultimately want, which is independence and their own Kurdish state. Havîn paused for a moment to take a sip of his orange soda, and then spoke again. He seemed optimistic about the prospects of an independent state, almost too confident that this would happen.

After hearing repeated claims that they wanted their own state, I asked why they had no interest in being part of a unified Republic of Iraq. One of the students, a rather articulate and well-dressed boy named Qeşem, suggested that it is not natural for them to be part of Iraq, but this is the wish of the neighboring countries and the international community. He expressed a fear that as a minority group, the Kurds will have their future determined and shaped by the larger Arab demographic. Qeşem and his peers believed this to be an ominous legacy of the Ba’ath Party and felt that the Iraqi people still view society through the Ba’athist lens.

Qeşem then reminded me that the Arab nation, the Arab parts of Iraq, are part of a larger Arab nation, but the Kurdish part is part of the Kurdish nation. The Kurds want the authority to work with the establishment, but not be forced into a situation where they are required to work with the religious and Islamic ummah. From the Kurdish perspective, they have their own flag, they have a parliament and government, and they have experienced self-administration for fourteen years. With all of these things, they believe it only makes sense for them to eventually have their own state. Qeşem reminded me that they have lived and died for this right, telling me, “We have a river of blood and victims that led to the success of the Kurdish experiment. Now that we almost have it, we don’t want to relive history.”

Qeşem had touched on the fundamental contradiction of contemporary Kurdish political culture: Young Kurds were adamant about being prodemocratic, but they were wholeheartedly against majority rule. They wanted Iraq’s wealth equally distributed among Kurds, Sunni, and Shi’a and they wanted a commission independent of the parliament to be in charge of this disbursement. It was important to them that the Shi’a not control the nation: One student warned that “America should take care of this point that the authorities should be equal among the nations. America must not give the rights of one nation to control another nation. We are a land of Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen, Shi’a, Sunni, and Christians.” Most of these youth looked down on Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis as primitive in their thinking because they have only recently come to know life after Saddam.

O
ne of the other impressive student organizations
I encountered was the Kurdistan American Society, or KASFA. The goal of this civic group was to connect young Kurds to the outside world. Such an organization is significant: Rather than helping young Kurds move to the outside world, it seeks to make Kurdistan
part
of the outside world, integrating the young population into a global civil society. Unlike in most of other parts of the Middle East, young Kurds don’t want to leave home. They see the Iraqi Kurdistan Region as a success story and they want to be around to benefit from the fruits of their accomplishments. They want to invest in Kurdistan, they want to be part of it, and they want to enjoy the freedoms they have. This mentality completely changes the psychology of the youth. The high level of seriousness among the youth is probably directly related to the fact that they see themselves as professional brokers in every aspect of Kurdish life.

The young leaders of KASFA expressed sympathy for Jews in Israel and appreciation for the American government, two stances rarely found in the Middle East. Revealing their sophisticated understanding of international politics, however, the young men made clear to me that their support was primarily practical: They knew that Americans and Kurds (and to some extent Israelis) shared common objectives and, more immediately, common enemies. They were well aware of the American abandonment in 1991, and recognized that most transnational alliances were based more on shared missions than on any sense of unconditional loyalty. They know that the United States has use for Kurdistan, and they know that they have use for the United States. And though this mutual affection may find its roots in realpolitik, the Kurds are indeed Iraqis who like us.

There was noticeably less partying in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region than in other parts of the Middle East I had been to. Their social gatherings are more tame and conservative, at least the ones I saw. An academic friend of mine had put me in touch with the boys of KASFA, who, in addition to sharing their NGO with me, also insisted on planning what they described to me as a typical Kurdish evening. While the events began at sundown, the preparation started long before that. After I met with them one afternoon for a typical interview over a can of orange soda, the two founders—Honar and Aram—insisted that we needed to go to the local market. Honar was in his late twenties. His head was shaved and he had a very round face. He had one of those pushing-young-adulthood bellies and a big smile. His colleague Aram was a bit taller, darker-skinned, and had a stylish part in the middle of his head. He sported some scruff, but on the whole, he was fairly clean-shaven. Both of them dressed in khaki pants and collared shirts. This seemed to be the Kurdish youth uniform.

We hopped in a taxi together and within ten minutes arrived at the market in downtown Arbil. From the road, it was difficult to see the sheer size of and congestion in the souq. But peering into the market through a narrow open way, I could begin to see we were about to enter into organized consumer chaos. As we walked through the busy rows of shops, which looked more like organized tables, I began to ponder why we had actually come here. Honar and Aram seemed to be on a mission, which I soon learned was a quest to find me Kurdish attire for the evening. As we navigated through the crowded shops and tables of clothes, watches, utensils, spices, and other knickknacks, we finally arrived at a place that looked like a store, as it actually had a door and walls. It was a clothing shop with different color clothes on gigantic rolls. The shopkeeper took my measurements, cut me some cloth, did some sewing, and gave me what seemed like a Kurdish kit. There was a head wrap, a gray shirt, large gray pants that looked like they were for a five-hundred-pound man, a random long piece of cloth, and a red-and-white string. Honar and Aram went with me back to my hotel, told me to come down at seven
P.M
., and asked me to bring my “Kurdish kit” to the hotel lobby, where they would help me make my transformation.

I became impatient and insisted on trying to dress myself. I had seen enough traditionally dressed Kurds with their baggy pants and cummerbund at stomach level to assume that I knew what I was doing. Confident that I had pulled it off, I walked down the stairs from my hotel room to the lobby. Almost in unison, the entire hotel staff—dressed in their cleanly pressed white dress shirts with extra starch and black bowties—burst into a fit of laughter and flocked toward me. They clearly felt I was a disaster or the Kurdish version of a fashion nightmare. I was like a race car in a pit stop as a whole crew of hotel staff fixed me up.

Honar and Aram were impressed when they saw me, but they were unaware of the frenzy that had preceded their arrival. They intended for the evening to be a surprise and took me thirty minutes outside of Arbil to the town of Salahaddîn.

There was no hot spot as I had expected. This was not an underground party and it was not a street party. Instead, it was Aram’s home. He lived in a small white house, decent-sized, with a large cement patio and large windows. Aram led me inside and showed me to the dining room, where, rather than being one of many individuals dressed in Kurdish attire, I was alone in this. The children—Aram’s brothers and cousins—loved it and got a kick out of taking my head wrap off my head when I wasn’t looking.

This was a different kind of dining room. There were no tables and no chairs. Thin and faint white curtains concealed the one window in the room. The only furniture was a small wooden stand with a fifteen-inch color television with the sound blasting. But it wasn’t Al-Jazeera or a local prayer channel; it was Nic Robertson reporting for CNN from Baghdad. Ten of us sat around a white sheet that was virtually covered in oversized portions, bottles of soda, and utensils. This was a feast.

There were over a dozen bowls of food, each with a mixture of something a little different. There were rice dishes, lamb, beef, kebabs, greens, and assorted vegetables. Some of the smaller bowls had a white creamy yogurt, while others had dip that looked more like hummus. This was enough food to feed a small army.

The substance of our dinner conversation began with an elaborate description of all the fine dishes I saw on the white sheet. From there it quickly moved to the Iraqi insurgency, but mostly because I probed them on this. It wasn’t that they were reluctant to talk about the violence in the Sunni region, but they didn’t view this as anything that had to do with them. As far as they were concerned, this was an Iraqi problem and they were Kurds. They view cooperation by integrating themselves into the Republic of Iraq as a mere formality. We exhausted this topic and after enough conversation, there is only so much you can get out of a people who don’t identify with what is going on in their own country. So we talked about Kurdish music, and the kids around the table played me their favorite tunes.

Traveling to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region was like traveling to an oasis of peace and stability in the middle of a bloody war zone.

IRAQ, 2005

L
eaving Kurdistan, I drifted off to sleep in the car. Even in the hours before the sun has risen, the scorching heat of the Iraqi desert is unbearable. During the summer, just breathing is a difficult task. Still, it didn’t take me more than five minutes to fall into a deep sleep. My visit to Iraq had been fruitful and less dangerous than I had anticipated and I was satisfied with the trip. For once heeding the severe travel restrictions imposed by the American government, I had shown rare restraint and avoided the war zone that most of Iraq had become. Though traveling alone throughout the Middle East is never without its anxieties, I was able to sleep soundly, knowing that I was as safe as I’d been in months. When the afternoon heat finally woke me a few hours later, I blinked open my eyes and tried to focus on the Ibrahim Khalil border between Iraq and Turkey. There was one slight problem: It wasn’t there.

I had entered Iraq at this crossing, but now I saw nothing around me that resembled the route I had taken to Iraq, and was planning to take out. I no longer saw the beautiful hills of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. The buildings were dilapidated and there was a turned-over and burnt-out car on the side of the road. These were not typical sights for northern Iraq. It looked like a war zone, the Iraq I had so wisely avoided visiting. I leaned to the front seat to ask the driver where he’d taken me.

It was then that I realized that I was alone.

I’ve been in a lot of dangerous situations before, but something about this one really scared me. It was nearing 130 degrees and I was alone in what appeared to be a war zone in the middle of Iraq. If I’d known then that I was actually in the heart of the Iraqi insurgency, I would probably have had an anxiety attack.

In my last ten days in Iraq, forty-six American soldiers had been killed throughout the country, with a significant portion of those fatalities occurring in the Al Tafal Region southwest of Mosul. In addition to this, an American journalist in Basra had been shot in the head and killed during that same period. If Iraq was unsafe to travel for soldiers and journalists, what did that mean for me, a twenty-three-year-old unarmed American Jew?

Fortunately for me, I was tired, disoriented, and willing to convince myself that I was jumping to conclusions about my location. But the danger of the situation became immediately apparent when I stepped out of the car to stretch my legs and look around. On a cement wall, I could see a defaced painting of the former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. Just east of the defaced image, a tattered old Ba’ath flag flew high above a local checkpoint. No longer under the protective banner of the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government, I stood staring at the standard of the new Republic of Iraq. I had no idea where I was.

I knew that I had fallen asleep in Kurdistan, expecting to wake up when my driver had arrived at the Iraq-Turkey border. Instead, I was alone, somewhere in the heart of Sunni Iraq. The only thing that kept me from giving in to utter dread and terror was the irony of the situation: After years of recklessly putting myself in harm’s way, I’d finally acted responsibly and somehow ended up in the most dangerous situation in which I’d ever found myself.

I was suspicious of every person who walked by. The Kurdish government was no longer protecting me and there was plenty to be afraid of: As not simply an American, but as an American Jew, an “entrepreneur” could make a nice chunk of change by telling insurgents of my location. Once captured by insurgents, well, I’d seen the horrifying videos too.

Fearful of everybody, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. But I had to know where I was. If I didn’t get out of Iraq and safely to Syria or Turkey, I could be killed. Frozen in terror, I could do nothing but watch as a middle-aged man walked slowly by, eyeing me suspiciously.

He wore a long, dirty white robe and had a large, full beard. His face was wrinkled, especially around his nose and eyes, which were squinting at me from beneath particularly bushy eyebrows. He wore a white head scarf kept in place by two woven black rings. He was also almost certainly not an insurgent. The bucket and metal tool he carried identified him as an average workingman.

“Shu ism haida medina?”
I asked the man.

“Al-Mawsil,”
he answered in an almost unintellegible voice.

I was in Mosul, the most dangerous city in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. There was literally no other city he could have named that would have been more terrifying.

I knew then that I needed to make myself invisible—and fast. I had no time to panic, to remember that I should have been hundreds of kilometers away, peacefully crossing from Ibrahim Khalil in Iraq to Habur in Turkey. Some horrible twist of fate had brought me to Mosul, and I needed to accept that and figure out how the hell I was going to get out of the Iraqi insurgency alive.

My first thought was that the driver had abandoned me and would be returning with insurgents. This type of setup was not especially rare, and I wasn’t paranoid to expect the absolute worst: namely that I had put my life into the hands of a man who had just as quickly sold it to terrorists who would pay for the opportunity to torture and kill a Jew from the United States.

I had two equally unpalatable options: I could look for a friendly face in one of the least hospitable environments in the world, or I could continue to trust the driver who had brought me there and then disappeared. Dizzy and nauseated from fear, I managed to think straight long enough to figure that running and hiding were mutually exclusive, and that if I ran, it would probably be much harder to hide once I got to wherever I was running to. So I hid.

What followed were the longest forty-five minutes of my life.

I walked back to the car and pulled the rusty handle. I curled up in the back to lie down so that nobody could see me from the outside. Unfortunately, the car was parked at a rather busy intersection in the outskirts of Mosul, and I was on display for whoever happened to pass by. The road was lined with shops selling everything from chewing gum to tires, and the dirt side streets were trafficked by a steady stream of consumers, pedestrians, and shopkeepers. Every so often, I would see someone peering directly into the car to look inside.

As I sat there—an unarmed American on display in the middle of the Iraqi insurgency—my imagination ran wild. Every time I saw someone on a cell phone, I wondered if they were calling insurgents to tell them about the idiot American just waiting to be kidnapped. When people came to look into the car, I wondered if they would rob me or worse. Strangely, I found the prospect of having my wallet and passport stolen more terrifying than imminent bodily harm. The prospect of being stuck in Mosul without any means of escape was a nightmare whose ending I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Every time I made eye contact with one of the passersby, my heart stopped. So I closed my eyes, praying against all odds that I would somehow fall asleep, and maybe even wake up safe and sound in Turkey. But if my fear wouldn’t keep me awake, the temperature would. It must have been at least 140 degrees in the car, and I had no water. Overheated and dehydrated, I was slipping into a state of delirium beyond terror.

I began to flashback on the past year and wonder whether all of this was really worth it. Here I was—crouched in the steamy backseat of a rusty car, hiding from enemies whom I wouldn’t recognize until it was too late—and for what?

It then occurred to me—in the midst of all the self-pity and paranoia—that the fear I was experiencing probably represented only one-tenth of what Iraqi youth must feel on a daily basis. This realization alone was enough to keep me going; through the staring faces and the vigilant eyes, my suspicion began to subside. I had a momentary sense of calm, or at least something approaching calm.

I had been in compromising situations before, with Shi’a extremists and Sunni Palestinian militants. The Sunni insurgents in Mosul, however, were of a different sort. In comparison with the extremists I had come into contact with in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian camps, those in Iraq were an entirely different breed. Being a researcher, a student, or any other identity would not protect me with these thugs. If I was caught, I would likely die in a brutal and horrific manner. This was my fear in Mosul. At the time I could not have envisioned how the situation would degenerate. I was there in August 2005, but just six months after my journey through northern Iraq, Sunni insurgents bombed the twelve-hundred-year-old Shi’ite holy Askariya shrine in Samarra. The attack on this symbol of Shi’a Islam led to terrible sectarian violence as the Shi’a sought reprisal and a series of back-and-forth attacks brought the country to the brink of civil war. The brutality of this slaughter was horrific and inhumane, with decapitations, senseless bombings, and even the use of drill bits to torture victims. It was a horror to come that would have at the time seemed unimaginable.

In my time in the Middle East, I had learned that extremism exists on a continuum, that there is a broad spectrum of views, methods, and goals for these groups. While Hezbollah and Hamas employ brutal terrorist tactics, most notably suicide bombing, they view themselves as some form of a resistance movement. In Iraq, the insurgents reject the entire international system and use Iraq as their primary front without any clear objective. It would have been overly paranoid to imagine myself being taken hostage and decapitated by Palestinian militants; there was no reason not to fear this very real possibility in Mosul. I was in a playground for lawless insurgents, ideological hijackers motivated by little more than rage and bloodlust.

As it turns out, clumsy Americans are not the only ones who live in fear in this part of Iraq. Sunni youth in Iraq are for the first time in their lives experiencing life as a minority—without the protection of Saddam Hussein and his cadre of Sunni loyalists from Tikrit. While many Sunni youth secretly despised Saddam, they also took for granted the comfort and opportunities that they enjoyed relative to the Shi’a and Kurdish populations. Now, they were terrified to walk in the streets; their futures were suddenly cloudy, even foreboding. The insurgency was happening in their own backyard and the hijacking of Islam by their fellow Sunnis had made their social and political situation in the new Iraq precarious at best. I saw in them a growing helplessness, not unlike the tragic impotence I saw among Palestinian youth. They didn’t have the luxury that Kurdish youth have to write letters, print protests, and demonstrate. They live each day as it comes and have to focus on staying alive. Stability is all they have room to ponder; this was not a youth population that seemed empowered to play a role in shaping their future. They didn’t know what to do: If they could leave Iraq, many would. For the majority caught between rejecting the insurgency and ensuring their own safety, however, life in Mosul is a devil’s bargain.

Before I knew it, I heard a knock on the passenger-side window. It was the driver, unable to get in the car. I had locked all of the doors. He smiled at me and nodded his head, gesturing for me to open the door. He appeared to be alone, so I obliged. I immediately saw that he had two large red jugs in his hands. They were filled with what appeared to be gasoline. I started screaming at him in English. “Where the hell did you go? You just leave me on the side of the street in Mosul? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?” I yelled. He listened and nodded politely. He had no idea what I was saying. I stopped screaming. I asked him where he had been the past forty-five minutes and the absurdity of his answer almost made me laugh. He had left me abandoned in Mosul so that he could walk to buy black market gas for nine cents a gallon so that he would not have to pay the actual twelve-cents-a-gallon price. He had put my life in grave danger for what probably amounted to thirty-six cents. I had at least a hundred times that amount just in souvenir currency for family and friends. Despite my driver’s total lack of common sense, I couldn’t really press the issue. I’d already been in uncomfortable situations with drivers in Syria near the Iraq border, and I figured that I had no other choice but to make the best of my driving companion for a tour of the Iraqi insurgency.

Cheap gasoline explained why he had disappeared, but I still didn’t understand why we’d ended up in Mosul when I hadn’t had to pass through this horrific place on my way into the country. His answer to my inquiry was either naïve or reckless, I wasn’t really sure. He had chosen the most direct route out of Iraq, totally disregarding the danger of driving an American through the heart of an insurgency. This detour to Mosul wasn’t an accident: It had always been his plan to cross into Syria through the very borders that insurgents were using as hideouts. The route he had planned made us susceptible to roadside bombs and ambushes; the border crossing he had chosen was not guaranteed to be open to Americans. I happened to have a multiple-entry visa for Syria, but my driver didn’t know that. Syria does not just issue visas on the spot and I seriously doubted that my driver would stand by my side as I found some way either to head back or to expedite the process. That’s not just a reflection on my driver; it would have been unreasonable to expect favors at such a dangerous border. Either this man had no sense of risk or he really needed to get to northeastern Syria in a hurry. His choice of route was risking not only my life, but his, as well. If insurgents or other hostile characters saw him driving an American—even a civilian unaffiliated with the armed occupation—they would have assumed he was working with the U.S. government.

And even if our car was not spotted by insurgents and ambushed, just driving on the road in the Sunni part of Iraq is a suspenseful and terrifying experience. Roadside bombs are unsophisticated, cheap, and extremely prevalent. I had heard stories of bombs made from cell phones, plastic bags, masking tape, and gunpowder. I winced every time our car approached garbage on the street, while the driver blithely barreled along. Each slight bump set my heart pounding.