The Gun (63 page)

The long arc of the history of automatic small arms was almost complete. From the days of Fieschi and Puckle, to the work of Gatling, Gardner, and Nobel, through the marvels of Maxim, who conceived the most important steps, rapid-fire infantry arms, at first a dream and then expensive, had become ordinary and available to almost anyone. At first, when few combatants had them, they were instruments of imperialism, state power, and army-meets-army international war. Now they empowered disorder and crime. In Iraqi Kurdistan, as in large tracts of the developing world, every party had assault rifles, and the assault rifles were almost all patterned on the original Kalashnikov. They had come here from many sources: from Iran, Romania, Russia, Egypt, Poland, the former Yugoslavia,
and China. They had arrived to markets by many means: shipped across borders from outside, looted from state arsenals, handed out by neighboring governments hoping those who used them would frustrate Baathist rule. Some had been made in a factory that the Baathists had built for themselves. And now they were so locally abundant that buying one was only a matter of a young man’s asking where to shop. Created in the race among nations to develop weapons that might ensure national security and improve soldiers’ chances in war, they had been imitated, replicated, miniaturized, and fine-tuned, cycle after cycle, design by design, shipment by shipment, until something like parity among riflemen had been reached. Parity, it turned out, meant not just that any modern fighter could be well equipped. It meant that almost anyone could be shot. Parity looked like this: Karzan Mahmoud toppled and fell, landing in a puddle of cold standing water. There he lay, on his back, blinking up into raindrops peppering his face. He had no idea how many times he had been hit. His body was broken; his mind, for the moment, was strangely detached. His blood stained the puddle red. He thought he heard thunder.

Only a few seconds had passed. He did not have much time. Over the decades the men and women who studied the effects of modern military rifle bullets on the so-called human frame had documented the physical processes now playing out within Mahmoud. They knew the ways that different bullets fired at different ranges cut through human skin, human muscle, and all forms of human flesh. They understood how these bullets snap and shatter human bone, and how the knifelike shards of bullet jackets and ruptured bone intermingle and radiate outward, cutting more tissue as they scatter. Those scientists, and pseudoscientists, with their thawed human limbs and severed human heads filled with pseudo-brains, had documented and described how the parts that make up a man can be made to break. Many of their tests had been on cadavers. Karzan Mahmoud was not a cadaver. Not yet. He panted, moaned, struggled for comprehension, blinked through blood and gritted teeth. What was he to do? His wounds outmatched him. If the puddle were a bathtub, he would drown. He had reached incapacitation, that hard-to-measure but you-know-it-when-you-see-it performance state that ballistics scientists had tried to ascertain and guarantee. Theory was theory. Laboratory work was laboratory work. Forensic autopsies were forensic autopsies. From
these pursuits, the physical processes happening within Mahmoud—who was suffering from a form of violence common in our time—were almost precisely sketched in the books and the minds of those who knew what firearms do to men. Technical studies did not sketch this: what it looked and felt like when military rifle bullets smacked human life, when incapacitation meant not just preventing action but summoning death, when rifles and gunfights were stripped of engineering, politics, romance, or any whiff of fable.

Gatling spoke of sparing men the horrors of battle, so that their lives might be saved for their country. Was Mahmoud lucky that those two early shots had grazed his forehead and not blasted his cranium into chunks, as the experts knew they could? He remained alive, spared not because the machinery of war had made his services obsolete, but because an angle of impact, twice, had been oblique. He was a leaking mess of holes, many of them limned with bullet fragments and the broken bits of bones that had given him his shape. His blood was flowing out and time had become excruciating, if short. Was this better? Not youth, not will, not fitness, neither training nor hard-won knowledge could bring a man broken in this way back to what he had been, seconds before. Slogans and money meant nothing here and now. Even ideas were few. Karzan Mahmoud was not a cadaver. Not yet. He was a man who wanted to stand and feel the handle of a pistol wrapped within his shooting hand. He could not. Instead, he was fighting sleep.

And the gunfight raged. The three attackers were all firing. The battle flowed around him. Mahmoud wanted to participate. But nothing worked. He felt cold.

“Yunis,” he called to another driver. “I’m hurting.”

“Yunis,” he said. “Yunis?”

Time slowed for Mahmoud. For others, it raced. The street where Salih lived was an alley with the contours of a vertical-sided irrigation canal. In such a place, the members of a group could not readily disperse to fight, or even get out of one another’s way. The guards returned fire. Mahmoud looked over and saw one of the attackers slumped on the ground nearby. A bodyguard had shot him. The man looked dead.

The two remaining attackers were charging, firing their Kalashnikovs on automatic as they came, sweeping the street with lead. Ramazan Hama-Raheem, one of the intelligence chief’s guards, had been between
the taxi and the gate. As Mahmoud was hit, he spun to face the fight. He had an instant to react. He fired his Kalashnikov, and thought he hit one of them in the leg. As he fired he was struck. A bullet blew apart his right shin, another broke his right hip. He twisted, falling, and was raked by more. A burst hit him in the back. Another shredded his left thigh. One round hit his upper left arm. Another grazed the top of his skull. He landed on the ground with one working limb: his right arm. His assault rifle was useless to him now. He could not lift it. But with a right arm, he had a chance. He drew his Makarov semiautomatic pistol. He fired and fired, but he struggled for aim and after seven shots was out of ammunition. With only one working arm, he had no way to reload.

Another guard, Balan Faraj Karim, who had been inside a guard hut when the attack commenced, joined the fight. He had not seen the taxi arrive, or the three assassins advance. He stepped into a shootout midway through its course. There had been two groups of bodyguards on the street. The attackers had charged into their midst, splitting and confusing them. Karim scanned the bedlam. He had only seconds to figure it out. It was not clear who was who. He saw a man trotting in his direction—a stranger in
peshmerga
dress. Karim decided: foe. He raised his weapon. The other man fired first, a long rippling burst. Karim felt the bullets splatter through him. They seemed to hit him everywhere. He collapsed. The man rushed by.

Gasping, Karim looked himself over. He had been shot in the stomach, the left shoulder, the right thigh, and multiple times in the left leg, including through the ankle and the calf. Another bullet had hit the back of his neck, probably as he spun and fell. It had passed through meat without hitting spine. He was helpless; a heap. He could do little more than watch, at least until his own time ran out. He looked around. He saw the collapsed forms of other guards, and that of the prime minister’s secretary, Amanj Khadir, who had also rushed outside and been shot. He watched another friend from the prime minister’s security detail, Shwan Khzar, firing his assault rifle. But Khzar’s Kalashnikov ran out of bullets. As he tried switching to a pistol, the man who had shot Karim opened fire with another burst. Khzar fell. The attacker limped down the street, away from the gate, stepped around a corner of a cinder-block wall, and was out of sight.

This surviving gunman, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, had decided to forgo
entering the prime minister’s compound. His two accomplices were dead. He was alone now; there seemed little chance to press further. He hobbled across a vacant lot. He had a few seconds to think. A bullet had passed through his lower left leg, but missed bone. He could walk, and his uniform could help him. Passersby might not suspect him of his crimes. He reached the road and hailed a taxi. When it pulled over, he stepped in and gave an address. Soon he was moving away from the mess of bodies he had left behind, enveloped by city traffic.

The survivors in front of Salih’s house stirred. The prime minister had by luck been kept from harm. He had been seconds from stepping outside, but a telephone had rung. An aide called him back, and he had not entered the kill zone. At the sound of gunfire his aides rushed him deeper inside. On the asphalt, Balan Faraj Karim, immobilized by his wounds but one of the few men outside still conscious, scanned the street. He did not see the prime minister. This was the only good sign. His eyes settled on Mahmoud. Karim called to him.

“Karzan?” he said. “Karzan?”

There was no answer. He knew that Mahmoud was dead.

Karzan Mahmoud was not dead. He was sliding back and forth between sleep and consciousness. Soon he was aware of being jostled. A white Land Cruiser was beside him. Hands lifted him and put him in the back. A shopkeeper’s face was above Mahmoud, consoling.

“What happened?” Mahmoud asked. “Who shot us?”

The shopkeeper shushed him. “Don’t talk,” he said. “Don’t talk. You’re okay.”

At the hospital, Mahmoud overheard that the prime minister’s secretary had died. The staff cut away his blood-soaked suit and dress shirt. The doctors worked. Mahmoud was naked and sedated: the wrecked remains of a young man. He saw gloved hands pull fragments of bullet and bone from his arms. A policeman questioned him.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Mahmoud answered.

“What is your phone number?”

Mahmoud answered again, but now he had a headache. He was wheeled off for X-rays. Before surgery, he saw the prime minister at his side.

“You helped me,” Salih said.

“You are okay?” Mahmoud asked.

“Yes.”

“Be careful, Dr. Barham,” he said. “Be careful.”

The surgeons worked on Mahmoud, the first time, until 2:00
A.M.
They tallied wounds from twenty-three bullets. None had hit his spine or vital organs. The bullet that entered his back had cut only muscle and flesh. The head grazes had not fractured his skull. Twenty-three bullets, the doctors said. While Mahmoud was asleep, and the anesthesia was wearing off, he heard his mother’s voice.

“Karzan,” she said.

He woke. The doctors, he learned through a haze, had quarreled over whether they should amputate his right arm and left leg. For now he retained them. He asked questions about the attack. No one wanted to answer. On the third day, he read a newspaper and learned that five of his friends had been killed. Three others, besides himself, had been crippled. Elsewhere in the hospital, Balan Faraj Karim woke to doctors who explained why they had amputated his left leg. He misunderstood. “No,” he cried. “You do not need to cut my leg.” He argued. “Send me somewhere,” he said. “To Europe,” he suggested. “A different doctor can keep my leg.” But his leg was already gone.

The surviving attacker, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, did not make it far. He was captured while hiding in a house in the city. In the months that followed, Khadir occupied a solitary-confinement cell on the second floor of the city’s jail, in conditions that might drive a sane man mad. His room was a concrete closet, chilly and unlit, accessible through a small steel door. There, before Kurdish security officials led him away and executed him, he sat in the darkness, his skin growing paler and his flesh growing softer, passing hours praying to his understanding of his god. He expressed no regret. When the opportunity presented itself, he voiced satisfaction, even pleasure, at what he had done. Conversations with Khadir did not follow linear thought, and his ruminations were prone to militant tautology. Doe-eyed and eager for company, he talked openly, but kept his history neat and free of gray. He had been born in Erbil in the mid-1970s and claimed to have left Iraq for study in a religious school in Yemen. He was cagey on the question of whether he met jihadists while abroad. He
denied that he had. He also punctuated the denials with laughter and self-satisfied smirks. “I am very clever,” he was given to saying. This confirmed something self-evident:
I lie.

Khadir’s militancy had wide-reaching roots. He had lived for a while with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, or PKK, on Mount Qandil, the high-elevation base in Iraq near the border with Iran. But he felt little affinity for the PKK’s fighters, whom he considered apostates. By 2001 he had come down off the mountain and taken up with Taweed, an armed Islamic movement. In a series of mergers with other local Islamic groups, Taweed became part of Ansar al-Islam, the Supporters of Islam, a confederation of armed Islamic parties that was emerging as a regional threat and demanded that the region be ruled by its interpretation of shariah law. It declared jihad against the PUK.

By 2002, Ansar al-Islam was large enough to field a visible guerrilla force of at least several hundred fighters, to run at least two jihadist training camps, and to control territory and several villages along the Iranian border. Its turf was a mountainous region, not the date-palm Iraq of the lower Tigris and Euphrates, but a zone of rolling foothills set against snowcapped peaks. There its fighters occupied trenches remaining from the Iran-Iraq War, augmenting them with bunkers and road checkpoints to create a statelet within a statelet that it governed its own way. The group closed a girls’ school, forbade shaving, and desecrated a Sufi cemetery and mosque. It was northern Iraq’s neo-Taliban.

Qais Ibrahim Khadir had taken an oath only to Taweed. But as Taweed evolved he changed with it. He rejoiced at the attacks on the World Trade Center and admired Osama bin Laden. “What does al Qaeda mean?” he asked, rhetorically. He had his own answer. “Al Qaeda,” he said, “is a state of mind.” Sitting in handcuffs in a room near his cell, Khadir gave himself high grades. Action, in his view, equaled accomplishment. Though he had failed to kill Barham Salih, he considered the operation an achievement. “We succeeded,” he said. “According to our beliefs, any operation we do is a success when you do it.”