The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Page 27

  So we came down the hill into the hot dry valley of Kirkuk, where entrepreneurs sometimes sell people to kidnappers.

  Kurdistan is an idea, or a series of ideas, encompassing parts of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. My Turkish taxi driver in Vienna sternly said, upon learning where I was headed, that Kurdistan does not exist. The Kurds I met in northern Iraq thought otherwise. Of the four countries just listed, all but the first lack, and intend to continue lacking, autonomous Kurdish regions. Many Arab nationalists in Iraq would likewise do away with the Kurdish Regional Government if they could. My interpreter's father, who had been a member of the National Assembly in 1997, said: "Maybe there is a chance that Arabs will suppress us again, since they consider us second class. If it happens, I don't think that Kurds will be able to fight back. Let us hope there will not be another Saddam."

  By the half accident from the first Gulf War that brought the KRG into existence, Kurds are some of my country's few remaining friends. I felt almost young again to be in a place where "America can do everything." When I got home, I told my neighbors about it, and they said: "Kurds, Shias, Sunnis, I can't keep them all straight."

  Kirkuk's various fortresses of officialdom express their character with prudent literalness. In perhaps the most glorious of them all, Brigadier Sarhad Qadir, chief of police of Kirkuk districts and sub-districts, had agreed to receive us. The fixer threaded his incredible six-cylinder vehicle through a pinball machine of gates and concrete slabs. A blue-clad policeman met us and slowly inspected the underside of the car with a pole mirror, then waved us through. We traveled along corridors with armed escorts. Sarhad's office was typical of such places: a long, spacious, air-conditioned room with half a dozen matched chairs and sofas along the side walls, a television shining and softly babbling at the back wall, and then in front a grand desk with a uniformed man beside it. A young man brought tea in narrow-waisted glasses.

  Sometimes when an official wished to create an informal impression he would come and sit in one of the armchairs beside me; then he would gaze across the room at the interpreter while I politely craned my neck. Sarhad, however, sat at his desk. Three silver stars shone on each shoulder of his black vest. His hair was cropped; his mustache was dark. Behind his chair hung photographs of him in the company of various dignitaries. I spied a framed memento of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Miniature Iraqi, American, Kurdish, and Kirkuk Governorate flags flew beside the telephone. Nor should I omit the framed certificate from an American official, the framed appreciations of an American combat team, or the framed article from an American military newspaper: "Iraqi Police Uncover Major Weapons Cache." The uncovering had been one of Sarhad's triumphs.

  About the situation in Kirkuk he said: "In comparison with last year there is a big difference, a big improvement, not 100 percent but more than 60 percent. Last year, there were daily explosions of nine vehicles. But now in one week one cannot even find one explosion."

  When he seized the weapons cache in Kirkuk's Hawija district, he also found dossiers on various party members and journalists, and on himself. "You cannot imagine how accurate was this information. It was like your friend or your wife had provided the information."

  In the same fortress I was now escorted to the office of one of Sarhad's subordinates, Major General Jamal Taher Baker. He wore blue and a gun at his hip. He said that "the security here is good, but not very good; we have some problems with IEDs they put on the road." I asked to know the reason for improvement, and he explained: "They will kill children, women, old men, and destroy schools and other places. And now the people know this, and sometimes they give us information." On the day we spoke, he had 393 persons in custody, either twenty-three or thirty-three of them women (the interpreter was inconsistent). Their cases had not yet been tried. I asked if I could interview any of them, and that was how I met Colonel Khorshid, who was, so the interpreter wrote in my notebook, the "prison and holding director."

  The colonel called in a prisoner for me. His name was Basim Mahmood, and the police told me that in 2007 he had been caught holding the controller in a huge explosion in Kirkuk that killed eighty-six people and injured two hundred more. He was thirty-two. He came from Basra. He had entered Kurdistan two days before the crime.

  "Did you take part?" I asked him.

  "Under torture I confessed to this."

  "In Basra, what do people think about the Americans in Iraq?"

  "The British are there, not the Americans."

  "All the same, what do they think about the Americans?"

  "I don't know."

  He was smiling mournfully, with his hands behind his back. He was a big man with an almost babylike face. I asked him whether he had anything he would like the Americans to know, and touching his belly he replied: "I want to say that I am innocent, and until now my family doesn't know where I am."

  They took him away, and when I asked the colonel for his comments he said: "I want you to know that when the terrorists are captured, first of all they confess everything, but later on, when they have spent some nights here, they change their minds."

  I asked his opinion of human nature: Did he think that most people lacked integrity? Perhaps the interpreter did not understand or properly convey the question; he was always better with quantities than with the abstract. In any event, the colonel replied: "I think most of them are liars."

  On my second visit to Kirkuk, departing Sulaimaniya and passing the gypsum factory (and near Chamchamal a row of dusty metal-shuttered concrete cubes, a few with people sitting in them, then a bus of schoolgirls off to the mountains, the girls in rainbow finery, some of them dancing), we saw an auto accident, the shattered vehicle surrounded by silent people, and then cleared Bani Maqan Checkpoint, exempted from waiting in that long line of petrol trucks, where a crouching donkey brought up the rear. We rolled down the hill into Kirkuk, waving to a yawning soldier, and then at the city limits the checkpoint soldier saluted me slowly. The fixer and the interpreter did not appear very tense. An old woman in a black robe spread the wings of her back, toiling up a dirt hill.

  I asked the fixer to telephone Azadi Hospital to see if there were any new casualties. We drove there in the hot tan afternoon, into the lighter tan of the entrance portico in whose shade two soldiers, one in concrete-colored camouflage, the other more darkly dressed, peered into each arriving taxi or private van, while other visitors stood waiting in an unmoving crowd for their turns to pass by the soldier in desert camouflage who sat beside his AK-47 in the lobby. This we also did, accompanied by another soldier (who said that for his own safety he always changed out of uniform before he went home), and after ascending dim flights of stairs were ushered behind a half-drawn curtain where a young policeman lay: Heman Abdullah, born in 1981. His neck was bandaged, and a tube was in his bandaged arm. In a dreamy moaning voice he said: "A car was exploded near my house. They have located an IED near my house. I have been shot two times before but survived..."

  As gently and briefly as I could, I went over the tale with him. "It was a trapped car," he said, holding his forehead. "I suspected that it would happen, but I was not able to protect myself. It was a Volkswagen taxicab. I stopped the car, and the driver started running. I shouted, but no one heard anything. I am blind in one eye and my head is damaged. I was unconscious for two days after the explosion."

  His brother sat next to him. He was also a policeman. He said that this morning three other IEDs had already been found. " The terrorists, they are now chasing those people who are working," he said.

  The wounded man was saying: "My brother told me they are suspicious about a car outside. There is a crowd gathered outside. I asked the crowd to step back..."

  He grimaced and licked his lips. He said that the terrorists had attacked him in one form or another six or seven times. He could not say which group was after him, or even if it was the same group.

  I asked the policeman what color the explosion had been, and he answered that it was a dusty brown lig
ht.

  ***

  On my third visit to Kirkuk, when we had nearly arrived at the checkpoint by the checkpoint just before the city gate, which is to say the narrow spot with the waist-high caltrops and sandbags and the burly soldier in sunglasses who stood beside the overhang, I asked the fixer to telephone the hospital again. He reported that there had been one new casualty, but the patient's injuries had been sufficiently mild to justify release. It was now noon; the bomb, a small one, had detonated in the city center at ten that morning. Did I want to see the place?

  We were all of us a bit silent as we made our way there, the car rushing past the open doorway of a shop that sold women's dresses, then a field of cornlike weeds not much larger than my hotel room, a very crowded cemetery on a sand hill, the narrow headstones practically touching, a sidewalk suddenly occupied by uniformed schoolgirls going home for lunch, soldiers and policemen whose trauma plates on their black bulletproof vests were light and cheap over their hearts, a mosque's verdigrised onion dome, a bread factory through whose open door I could see one man punching the pallid dough while another brought the warped, bubble-pocked naans out to a table on the sidewalk; and I had a slightly sick feeling in my chest, wondering if we might arrive just in time for the next explosion. But the Turkish proverb the interpreter once smilingly quoted to me—All my luck is black except for watermelons, and then it is white—could not be true of me since I was an American. The barbed wire here, by the way, was of a simpler type than I am used to in the American West: small single points like thorns. Tables of secondhand books were propped behind wire on the sidewalk.

  The fixer always insisted on going out first in such situations. I was his guest, even if his paying guest; moreover, he liked to take charge. Already trotting down the street, he motioned to me over his shoulder. As I opened the car door, the interpreter told me to take care. The fixer had asked him to stay with the car.

  The place was a small alley. The blast was indicated by broken glass, shards of concrete the size of small boulders, a bit of rubble, a few men ringed around—always the indication of catastrophe: a ring of people gazing inward.

  The proprietor of a neighboring shop kept repeating that he could not understand anything, that he had just inserted the key in the lock to open the steel shutter of his photocopy establishment when the explosion happened and he could understand nothing; eight people were wounded and one killed; he'd seen a human leg go flyi ng. He was a Turkmen named Shad Adi. His shutter was warped now and someone was trying to pull it up from within while all of us men pushed at its convexity until it clicked back into its riding grooves. The target, two stores down, had retailed military clothing and supplies. The IED had been hidden on one of those wheeled carts so prevalent in the shopping districts; so another spectator explained to me, gesturing with a bottle cap. Here the grating had caved in more severely; but the owner's brother, Shirwan Samad, who had been working inside, had, peculiarly enough, remained safe—never mind that he had been deafened; he could speak to us but did not know how to read our lips. "It was a very, very loud explosion," the man with the bottle cap said. A few rags of military camouflage lay in the dirt or hung from crevices in the wall of shop shutters. The owner vowed to make another shop "by tomorrow." It was, all considered, a trivial explosion. No one you or I know was affected. As I stood there in the alley, the fixer several lonely meters away, making his own interviews, I was sweating with anxiety, knowing how conspicuous I looked, wondering if the person who had detonated the cart was watching us. The other men kept flicking their eyes uneasily from side to side. When we returned to the car, I saw that the fixer was also shaken; then we returned to work, and those men we had interviewed continued their own dangerous lives.

  Why was Kirkuk so much more dangerous than, say, Sulaimaniya? Because it was not inside Kurdistan; because it remained ethnically mixed; because it was contested.

  In 616 B.C. Kirkuk was on the front line between the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

  Ahmed Mohammed Hassan, the ward nurse at Azadi Hospital, said that he and his colleagues "just come out of home directly to the hospital and back. We try to avoid crowded places." He stayed in at night. Meanwhile, the proprietor of a clothing store for women opined: "Maybe I feel safer at night. Most of the operations take place at daytime." He had seen one car bomb, then another; he reckoned them up; perhaps he had witnessed four. There had been two bombings so far this week in Kirkuk, he thought; he considered his life to be improving. This person, a Turkmen, perceived no betterment in the ethnic situation. All the same, he was the only resident of Kirkuk who ever told me it was the best place in the world.

  The fixer's niece expressed a more typical opinion, cynically, bitterly giggling as she said it: "I have seen nothing good in this city. I have got nothing from this city. You see, there is discrimination. When the teachers are Arab and you are a Kurd, we cannot write in Kurdish or we will be punished." Her throat was pulsing above the hijab.

  "In this Kurdish area I have no fear," she said. "But my college is in an Arabic area."

  Her father remarked that from 2003 until perhaps 2005 or 2006, Kirkuk had been fairly safe, but then the occupiers failed to guard Saddam's old munitions. "That was the Americans' mistake. But even now it is much better here than in other provinces."

  "How many times have you seen explosions?"

  "So many. Every time you go to the market, you must expect it."

  "When was the last time you experienced one?"

  "Within the last few days. It was in a restaurant, at seven or seven thirty in the morning. It was a mortar shell. There were not so many casualties."

  "Can you explain about the mortar shell?"

  "Usually the terrorists set up mortars on traps at night and time them to be exploded in the early morning."

  He had two daughters, one in a red, the other in a lavender headscarf. Both wore ankle-length dresses.

  The young woman in the red hijab was a pathologist. She said: "We are not certain when we are going out that we will come back." Terror victims were often taken to her hospital, of course, and once when "an explosion killed so many people" she slept poorly for two weeks, "because of all the dead bodies and the blood." She saw bomb casualties once or twice a month.

  The daughter in the lavender hijab praised her city lovingly, with her knees always together, her bare feet always touching. She studied history at Kirkuk University, which, as she said, lay in the Arab district. "You cannot feel safe," she said. Once, when she was on her way to an examination, a bomb went off, "so I forgot everything."

  I asked the family whom they blamed for the terrorism, and the mother, the fixer's sister, said: "Most of the operations are committed by former Baath Party members. But sometimes they catch some people from Pakistan or Sudan or other countries. I am surprised why they come here and do not do it in their country."

  "So what is the best thing to do with the former Baathists?"

  "I believe according to my opinion they will never return to be good people. So the best solution is to push them out of the city."

  We never stayed overnight in Kirkuk, because that would have been reckless. Pointing out the hotel that was now closed because the proprietor kept arranging to have his guests kidnapped, the fixer had detailed the proper procedure for the city: Arrive in late morning, leave by three or four, and remain in certain neighborhoods no longer than an hour. Refrain from carrying any bag or backpack into a restaurant; that way, perhaps they will not recognize that one is a stranger. (I look up from the table and catch a man's eye, and look quickly back at my plate.)

  The fixer used to go more frequently to Kirkuk and to Mosul and even to Baghdad, but, as he pointedly said, journalists always pushed and pushed, so that he started to wonder why he was doing this. In Baghdad one sometimes had to sleep at the office for four or five days if something bad was happening. Now he avoided working there. As for Kirkuk, I pushed and pushed, even though the fixer assured me that my work there was finished.r />
  No, he preferred not to keep driving to Kirkuk. He wanted even less to go to Mosul, where he estimated the chance of being murdered at about 90 percent, and regarding this he invariably said he wouldn't mind if his head were cut off, since that must not be painful, at least not for long; but he had a horror of being killed with a heel or shovel blade to the neck. I told him that if they killed me he could take all my money and if they killed him I would take his money, and then we both laughed, and the next morning we drove with the interpreter to Kirkuk for the fourth time.

  There had been no explosions so far that day. Gazing at the long flatbed trucks full of cement bags in the traffic jam before the final checkpoint (manned by that same soldier in sunglasses), I wondered whether something would detonate. Two boys kicked a blue metal drum down the street. A tiny black-haired girl followed a man in sweaty garments who was pushing a wheelbarrow of wet cement along the sidewalk. And now came the Kurdish restaurant whose food had declined since it was first blown up, and now the low concrete houses of Kirkuk. Driving rapidly through the shopping district, where so many bombs had been detonated (TNT in plastic bags, the fixer said) that the store owners no longer permitted cars to park in front of their premises, we arrived at the Syrian Christian church called Mar Ghorgis, whose wall shrugged behind feeble caltrops and almost casual loops of barbed wire, across the street from an ice cream shop and a small restaurant with a rotisserie. A headscarfed old cyclist slowly pedaled by. The late morning reeked of smog. I asked the interpreter whether it was dangerous for the owners of the two food establishments to be situated so close to a Christian church, and he said: "Of course." We were all feeling anxious, and when an orange and white taxi rolled up slowly, a huge metal tank lashed to its roof, and stopped level with our vehicle, I felt a bit sick. The taxi departed.