DISPATCHES
In The North,
Fear And Hate
BY
BORZOU DARAGAHI
His
voice was frantic. “You guys have to come back toward Tikrit!”
my photographer screamed into the satellite phone. “Our car
broke down! You can’t leave us!”
It was April 14, the day before U.S. Marines took Saddam Hussein’s
stronghold of Tikrit. But we had heard reports of General Tommy
Franks saying on CNN that the Americans were already there. An
Associated Press photographer, Kevin Frayer, and I, driving behind
a team from NBC, had entered the city with our translators and
drivers only to find it devoid of any U.S. presence. Instead,
it was filled with shady characters, condemning the U.S. and hailing
Saddam Hussein. “Be careful,” a man at a gas station
told me. “There are Syrian suicide bombers here.”
I was discreetly interviewing people when my Kurdish driver, Muhammad,
suddenly demanded that I get back into the car, along with my
translator, Tahseen, who is also Kurdish. Alarmed by his behavior,
I complied. He suddenly burned rubber toward the bridge out of
the city, with Kevin trying to follow behind in his nearly crippled
vehicle.
“Please, stop the car,” I said.
Normally an excellent driver and employee, Muhammad refused. “Please,
stop the car,” I repeated.
“There’s nothing here,” he kept repeating. “There’s
nothing here.” Kevin was pleading on the phone, which I relayed
to Muhammad. But still he refused to stop.
It was a learning experience. I always knew Iraqi Kurds mistrusted
their Arab countrymen, who oppressed them for decades. But I never
realized just how viscerally and primordially they hated each
other until that day on the road from Tikrit. I think that, now
that the war is over, tensions between the country’s ethnic
groups will be northern Iraq’s big story.
My trusty driver and translator had hitherto accompanied me on
the hairiest of missions. They hiked with me up a hill as we spied
on the Badr Brigades, the Iranian-based Shiite Iraqi opposition
group that had begun setting up a military camp southeast of Darbandekhan.
They had tolerated the tedium of the Salahuddin opposition conference,
where Iraqi windbags expounded on their visions for a democratic,
pluralistic, federal Iraq while we shivered in third-rate hotels.
They had guided me through the Halabja area, where Ansar al Islam,
the extremist Islamist group holed up high in the mountains, had
embarked on a campaign of assassination and bombings in the valley
below. My driver had kept his cool as we came upon the scene of
a car bomb northwest of Halabja that had just killed an Australian
journalist and several Kurds.
Muhammad and Tahseen had helped me explore the back roads and
smugglers’ routes in the no-man’s-land surrounding government-controlled
Kirkuk. Antiaircraft tracers lit up my driver’s face as he
watched the coalition’s nighttime bombing raids over that
city, his hometown, and the Kurds’ lost dream city. On April
10, we gunned it in a convoy behind Kurdish pesh merga and United
States Special Forces as they stormed Khaneqin, a Baghdad-controlled
city to the south of the autonomous Kurdish area, soaking up the
adulation of residents welcoming us to their newly liberated town.
We sped through the desert past miles of abandoned Iraqi military
positions and deserting Iraqi soldiers on our way to Kirkuk.
But those were all in Kurdistan. Now we were in Arabia, and my
driver and translator were like fish out of water. All day long
on the drive to Tikrit they had complained and fretted and resisted.
They weren’t unique. Two journalists from NBC had to fire
one of their drivers midway to Tikrit because he refused to go
any further.
But leaving Kevin behind was an altogether different story. “Stop
the car, you coward!” I yelled at Muhammad. “Go back
now! I’m not going to leave Kevin behind.”
As if waking up from a trance, he finally began to slow down.
We turned around and went back to get the photographer. We found
him putt-putting along at five miles an hour in his ailing car.
He was very glad to see us.
Kevin’s Kurdish driver, Adnan, had raced his engine and clogged
up the carburetor of his Nissan. Kevin said a nice Arab taxi driver
had offered to help, but Adnan contemptuously shooed him away.
He said he didn’t believe any Arab could fix his car.
Adnan is a simple working-class guy. But even my translator, Tahseen,
a sophisticated, upper-middle class, college-educated twenty-three-year-old,
punctuates every third or fourth sentence he interprets from an
Arab or Turkoman with “but he’s lying” or “he’s
an idiot.” And such bigotry does not bode well for the future
of Iraq.
As the cities of northern Iraq fell to coalition forces and came
under the control of Kurdish authorities, incidents of hate crimes,
looting, and reprisals by newly triumphant Kurds against Arabs
and Turkomans began to rise. Armed Kurds began kicking Arabs off
their farms and out of their homes.
Working in Iraqi Kurdistan for three months, I had viewed Kurds
as victims of history and of the more dominant ethnic groups around
them. But as we towed Kevin’s car back over the semidesert
to Kirkuk from Tikrit, back to Kurdistan from Arabia, a vision
formed in my mind’s eye: of ancient mountain people on horseback
raiding the villages of the flatlands below, and quickly scurrying
back up to their untouchable retreats in the canyons above.
To read more from Borzou Daragahi, click
here.
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Borzou Daragahi is a Teheran-based reporter for print and radio
media.
