A Road Unforeseen Page 4
The great goal of the KDP since its formation has been to gain control over the city of Kirkuk and the large and immensely profitable oil fields surrounding it. Iraq was never willing to cede this control. But on June 12, 2014, with Daesh poised to attack and the Iraqi army in flight, the city was left to the Kurds. The KDP quickly moved its peshmerga into Kirkuk and fortified the city.
Strangely enough, despite its love of annexing oil fields, Daesh did not attempt to capture this prize. Instead it moved on to other targets in Iraq and, on July 2, attacked Kobane, the central canton of the three run by the revolutionary Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD).
This time, Daesh had a tough opponent. The Syrian Kurds have two militias, the YPG (People’s Protection Units), made up of both men and women, and the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units), the autonomous women’s army. Though separate, they work together and are usually referred to as the YPG-YPJ. By the summer of 2014, the YPG-YPJ had been successfully fighting Daesh for eighteen months and was calling for Kurdish unity across borders and a coalition of all ethnic groups to fight the jihadis.5 They particularly hoped to forge a joint military strategy with the Iraqi Kurds.
But KDP leader Masoud Barzani was not interested in such an alliance: Coooperating with revolutionary Kurds would have alienated Turkey. He was more interested in capturing Kirkuk and laying the basis for an independent Kurdish nation in Iraq.6 So when Daesh began a major offensive against Kobane in July, the YPG-YPJ got no help.
On August 3, Daesh opened a second front against the Kurds by attacking Sinjar (also called Shingal), a town on the border between Iraq and Syria, populated largely by the Yazidis, a long-persecuted Iraqi Kurdish minority who practice an ancient religion that predates Islam and involves the worship of seven angels. Sunni fundamentalists call the Yazidis pagans and Daesh considers them devil-worshippers who should be exterminated.7
Daesh had been attacking Yazidi villages since June and, certain that a major offensive was coming, the Yazidis had appealed for help to both the Iraqi government in Baghdad and Barzani’s KDP.8 The Iraqi Army had fled the area, but the KDP said its peshmerga were fully prepared to defend Sinjar, which was, after all, only twenty-five miles away from their capital in Erbil.9
But when Daesh fighters neared Sinjar on August 3, the 17,000 peshmerga who were supposed to defend the Yazidis melted away, saying they had no instructions to fight Daesh.10 Only a handful of fighters stayed on their own to defend the otherwise unprotected civilians. They managed to hold Daesh back long enough to allow thousands of Yazidis to flee into the mountains, climbing higher and higher to keep ahead of Daesh. Then Daesh cut off the roads behind them and they were marooned without food, warm clothing, or water.11
Naima Faris, a woman in her forties who lived in a village on the outskirts of Sinjar, was recovering from a hysterectomy when the attack began. She could barely walk but her children insisted they had to leave at once. Her daughter-in-law didn’t even take the time to locate her shoes so the two shared a pair of slippers and wrapped their feet in Naima’s keffiyeh throughout the next weeks. “I ran away, dragging myself over the rocks. My clothes were destroyed. We didn’t eat for twelve days,” Naima said. They caught goats and milked them to feed the children. Her younger brother, his wife, and their children were captured and she has not heard from them since. She says of the Iraqi peshmerga, “How were we supposed to know that they were leaving us to the wolves?”12
What happened to those who did not escape was genocide pure and simple, reminiscent of the worst horrors of the Bosnian war. According to a UN report, at least 5,000 men were gunned down, while thousands of women and children were captured and held in pens to be sold into sexual slavery or used as prizes to reward jihadis.13
As soon as Daesh took over a Yazidi village, they sorted the victims. First they separated the males and females. They told all the boys to lift up their shirts; those who had armpit hair were herded together with their older male relatives, driven or marched to a nearby field, forced to lie down, and killed with a barrage of machine gun fire. The little boys would be forced to convert and sent to training camps to be indoctrinated and taught to fight their own people.14
Matthew Barber, who researches Yazidi culture and was in Sinjar in the summer of 2014, says the real purpose of the offensive was to capture Yazidi women. Daesh even brought flatbed trucks for the purpose.15 The captives were taken to the nearest town, where Daesh separated the young unmarried girls from their mothers, forced them into buses that had been prepared in advance, with curtains over the windows, and drove them to their destined point of sale, where they were stripped naked and examined for breast size and good looks. The prettiest virgins, who fetched the highest prices, were auctioned off at the Daesh slave market in Raqqa, where buyers haggle furiously to drive the prices down.
“There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs, then fighters,” according to a reporter for the Washington Post. “They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market.”16
By 2016, though at least 2,500 Yazidi women were still held captive, some had escaped by themselves, and others had been rescued by an underground railway run by Yazidi men.17 One of the rescuers, Khaleel, described what the women told him:
“They beat the women, they gang rape them, they make them have forced marriage with many men. Some women have their infant babies taken away by force. . . . They take them to a slave market and give women to each other like a gift.” The vast majority are raped, including young children, since Daesh doctrine says it is okay to marry nine-year-old girls. Women who try to resist are killed, or put out in the sun until they die of heat prostration. Khaleel tells of a nine-year-old girl who was brutally raped by a middle-aged fighter, who tore her vagina; she was then made to have FGM surgery, after which he tried to rape her again.18
A prepubescent twelve-year-old Yazidi girl who escaped after eleven months in captivity told The New York Times of repeated rapes by her “owner:” “Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her—it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted. He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again, book-ending the rape with acts of religious devotion.” When she told him he hurt her and asked him to stop, he said that by raping her he was drawing closer to God.19
As part of its recruitment drive for foreign fighters, Daesh published a guide to sex slavery in December 2014. This guide explains that it is perfectly permissible to take people such as Christians and Jews as slaves, but not Muslim apostates—all apostates, male and female, must be killed for leaving the faith. Other unbelievers are fine; they should be raped immediately “after taking possession;” this includes girls who haven’t yet reached puberty, as long as they are “fit for intercourse.” Since the Daesh interpretation of Muslim law says it is forbidden to have intercourse with pregnant slaves, captives are fed birth control pills to ensure they don’t conceive.20
Knowing that the KDP had promised to defend the Yazidi, Kurds in Rojava and Turkey were stunned when they heard that the peshmerga had withdrawn from Sinjar. The YPG-YPJ forces in Rojava were already stretched very thin because of heavy fighting going on in Kobane and Qamishli; they had also sent fighters to Rabiah in Iraq to help KDP peshmerga hold a border crossing there. But they could see that if they didn’t help, nobody would. The women guerrillas had a special motivation, knowing what happened to women captured by Daesh.
The commanders asked for volunteers in Cizire canton and a group of women trainees who had not yet seen combat put up their hands, as did fighters from the YPG, and even local policewomen in the asayish, who normally handle only civil crimes. They were joined by more experienced PKK troops, including the women’s unit, YJA-Star.21 The entire force set out immediately. To reach the Yazidis, they had
to go many miles across the border into Iraq, and then make their way through the mountains. They arrived above the town of Sinjar on August 4, the day after it fell to Daesh.
In the mountains, they found tens of thousands of stranded refugees, including elderly people and children who were sick or starving. Many were not strong enough to travel the long distance through Iraq to get to Syria. That meant the rescuers would have to create a shortcut through the mountains, fighting Daesh as they did so, and evacuate the Yazidis directly into Rojava.
By now the attention of the world media was riveted upon the Sinjar mountains, but nobody in the West seemed to notice the arrival of the YPG-YPJ and PKK troops. On August 6, Reuters reported that thousands of Yazidis, including 25,000 children, were in danger of imminent starvation.22 The next day, President Obama authorized limited air strikes against Daesh in Iraq and air drops of supplies to the Yazidis.23 Beyond that, there was nothing but talk and hand wringing. The United States continued to “weigh its options,” the UK and Germany talked about sending aid, and the Pope condemned the jihadis.24
Daesh seemed invincible at that point. On August 9, The Guardian reported, “In the last two weeks alone, Isis has fought on five fronts: against the Iraqi army, the Kurdish peshmerga, the Syrian regime, the Syrian opposition and the Lebanese army. In Syria the group has all but consolidated control of the eastern provinces of Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, as it made advances against government forces in Raqqa and subdued most of the rebel forces in Deir Ezzor. It is also advancing into Aleppo, reaching the city’s eastern outskirts, and in Hasaka, and is battling the Kurdish militias in the north-east. In Iraq it has advanced to a point only half an hour’s drive from Irbil, the Kurdish capital.”25
Meanwhile, though nobody was looking, the YPG-YPJ and PKK militias, without heavy weapons or air cover, cut a path of roughly 100 kilometers (64 miles) through the mountains to Cizire canton, battling Daesh all the way. On August 10, they got the last of the Yazidis out and were able to report that they had brought an estimated 100,000 refugees to safety.26
As one of the few success stories of the Syrian civil war, the battle of Sinjar and rescue of the Yazidis deserve close examination. The story raises many questions. Why did Daesh leave the oil-rich city of Kirkuk alone and instead attack Kobane and Sinjar? Why did the KDP peshmerga fail to help the Yazidis as they had promised? Why were the PKK-linked militias the only ones who rose to the challenge?
When Daesh reached Kirkuk on June 12, 2014, its fighters paused on the road, and then, instead of attacking, proceeded on to Mosul. During the whole summer offensive in 2014, with the exception of one suicide bomb attack in early June, Daesh left the Iraqi Kurds alone. And the Kurdistan Democratic Party did nothing to help the Yazidi until KDP peshmerga retook Sinjar Mountain with much fanfare in December—although most of it had actually been liberated a month earlier by a combination of peshmerga, YPG-YPJ, and Yazidi forces.27
Were the KDP leaders willing to sacrifice the Yazidis to their dream of an independent state with its capital in Kirkuk? Journalist Dexter Filkins, who was in Erbil, the capital of the KRG, three months later, related, “With the newly acquired land, the political climate for independence seemed promising. The region was also finding new economic strength; vast reserves of oil have been discovered there in the past decade.” Indeed, that July, while Kobane was being pounded, President Barzani asked the KRG parliament to begin preparations for a vote on self-rule. “The time has come to decide our fate, and we should not wait for other people to decide it for us,” Barzani said.28
Najat Ali Saleh, who was in command of the KDP peshmerga at the time of the attack on Sinjar, claimed they intended to fight. In fact, he seemed ashamed and embarrassed by their failure to battle Daesh. He told Filkins, “We were totally unprepared for what happened,” adding that party leaders were so incensed by the capitulation that they relieved five commanders of duty and held them for interrogation.29
But other sources tell a different story. Dutch-Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani refers to an “informal non-aggression pact between the IS and Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, which allowed the latter to seize Kirkuk and expand its territory by some 40 percent while the IS consolidated its hold on Iraq’s Arab Sunni heartland.”30
A week after the attack on Sinjar, Rudaw, a press agency based in Erbil, said Daesh had proposed a truce: If the peshmerga did not attack them, they would leave Kirkuk alone. “According to information provided by the peshmerga forces, the ISIS checkpoint is only half a kilometer away from the Kurdish forces and that via taxi drivers on the road, the militants have asked for reassurance that they will not be attacked from the north.”31
Christoph Reuter of Der Speigel refers to the same truce to support his contention that the leaders of Daesh are practitioners of realpolitik, willing to make deals: “This is not a jihadist outlet of believers. They have no problem to have deals with the KRG, with Barzani’s government, like: ‘we take Mosul and we don’t touch Kirkuk.’ So you had no clashes or conflict from June to August 2014, then suddenly they felt powerful enough and they took a lot of the Kurdish areas.”32
In August 2015, Ezidi Press, a Yazidi paper published in Germany, ran an extremely detailed investigative piece called “The Betrayal of Shingal,” not only indicting the KDP peshmerga for having failed to defend them, but accusing them of taking away their weapons, thus making it impossible for them to defend themselves, and of actually turning back Yazidis who tried to flee villages marked for attack. The article named names and published pictures of the four peshmerga commanders involved. It noted that, despite Barzani’s announcement that he would bring all those responsible to justice, in the year that had passed since the attack, there had not yet been a serious investigation of what had happened.
“Why was the genocide not prevented by the peshmerga, which was supposed to be committed to it, why was the IS not stopped or at least held back until the civilian population was able to get to safety? Even one year after the disaster, the cause that allowed this genocide to happen is either not being addressed or only brought to the agenda in a political battle . . . We are speaking of a genocide that has claimed thousands of Yezidi’s lives and has brought slavery to thousands of women and children.”33
In June 2014, two weeks after Barzani’s forces captured Kirkuk, Asya Abdullah, co-president of Rojava’s Democratic Union Party (PYD) was asked about a statement by Barzani that the flight of the Iraqi troops had presented an opportunity for the Kurds to move into Kirkuk and the KDP had taken advantage of it—not mentioning the price paid by the Yazidis. She answered by saying it was essential that everyone fighting Daesh unite: “It is legitimate to defend Kurdistan, but also it is a must to defend Turkmens, Arabs, and Assyrians and to include them in the administration. With the recent attacks of ISIS, a common defence force of the Kurds is an imperative. Defending both the national gains and the gains of all the people with whom we live is possible by developing a common strategy and a defence force.”34
But Barzani and the PDK have repeatedly been torn between their desire to fight alongside other Kurds and their economic relationship with Turkey, which is determined to divide Iraqi Kurds from the PKK and PYD. Such attempts by regional powers to play one group of Kurds against another, and the Kurds’ own oscillations between rivalry and cooperation, are themes that go back a long way. To understand what is going on today, some history of the region is helpful.
The Kurds
The Kurds are often called the world’s largest nation without a state.35 Though most are Sunni Muslims, some belong to religious minorities like the Yazidi and Alevi. Under the Ottoman Empire, most were either peasants or pastoral herders who moved around from place to place. Land was concentrated in the hands of aghas (village chiefs), who collected taxes for the sultan and were often predatory. A layer of religious leaders, shaikhs, had the job of keeping order and resolving disputes between tribes. By the 19th century, however, the Ottoman empire was no longer isolated; the
Russians and British were making promises to various tribal rulers in exchange for political or military help. The aghas in turn played the empires off against the sultan, sometimes siding with one and sometimes with the other, but not uniting against either.36
This pattern—small groups playing their enemies off against one another instead of uniting against them—is characteristic of tribalism. Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich once offered a “tribalism for dummies” definition: “Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them. Kings and emperors imposed temporary truces, at most. But in the past three hundred years the idea of nationhood took root in most of the world. Members of tribes started to become citizens, viewing themselves as a single people with patriotic sentiments and duties toward their homeland. Although nationalism never fully supplanted tribalism in some former colonial territories, the transition from tribe to nation was mostly completed by the mid twentieth century.”37 But tribalism has remained an important factor in key locations of the US “war on terror,” including Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
By 1914, when World War I began and Turkey came in on the side of Germany and Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire had shrunken considerably from its greatest size, but it still covered substantial territory, including the countries that are now Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the other Persian Gulf states. Most of the Kurds were concentrated in Turkey and Iraq.
To get Kurdish help against the Turks, the British and French allies made the Kurds many promises, offering them assurances of independence or at least autonomy. Despite these pledges, Britain and France made a secret treaty during the war, the Sykes-Picot agreement, which carved the Ottoman Empire into “protectorates” that they would control: England got Jordan, Palestine, and southern Iraq; France got Lebanon, Syria, and northern Iraq. Sowing the seeds of future conflict, Britain also secretly promised Palestine to both the Jordanian Arabs and the Zionist movement. Another ally, Russia, was given pieces of Turkey but after the revolution of 1917 the Bolsheviks gave up all claim to the territory and made the Sykes-Picot treaty public.