David Axe

In Kanan, there was a tension in the air, the kind of atmosphere veteran American soldiers recognize as a community bracing for an insurgent attack. The average Iraqi knows a lot more about the comings and goings of insurgents than most authorities let on. Before many attacks, people shutter their shops, close their drapes and pull their children off the street.

There was a loud crack and a puff of smoke — a rocket exploded on the rooftop of a building next door to a polling site. A near miss, but this is what residents were waiting for, and the reason they weren’t at the polls.

Despite promises to leave election security to native forces, American troops rushed to the scene. They discovered several bombs in streets leading to the polls and destroyed them with C-4 explosives. One child ventured into the street near a rusting playground, only to dart inside seconds before an explosion.

In Baquba, where Shiites and Kurds lined up to vote at the city’s 22 polls, an insurgent mortar team fired several rounds. An American mortar at Camp Gabe — where Task Force 82 of the 1st Infantry Division is based — fired back. Col. Dana Pittard, the brigade commander overseeing TF-82, was touring Baquba with an entourage of staffers and reporters when a firefight broke out at one poll. Pittard and other Americans evacuated election workers and a handful of voters and shut down the poll. Later, eating plates of tacos at Gabe, Pittard and his staff laughed and compared the evacuation to a dramatic rescue of American nationals from some distant war-torn land. Then they discussed raiding the abandoned poll’s stash of ballots and taking them to another poll that for some reason had no ballots at all.

Later, after polls had closed at 5 p.m., a patrol from TF-82′s Bravo Company received radio reports from election officials. There were 3,000 voters at one Baquba poll, 2,500 at another; overall turnout in the area hovered at around 75 percent of all registered voters. “We can’t even get that many people to show up at [our] elections,” said Pvt. 1st Class Andrew Ballast, 20.

But registered voters accounted for only around half of Baquba’s 150,000 to 200,000 eligible voters, and most of those voters who did turn out were Shiites and Kurds. Despite a provincewide exception to an anti-election fatwa issued by Sunni clerics, most of Baquba’s Sunnis stayed home, and so did many Shiites in besieged towns like Kanan.

Of the relatively few Sunnis who did vote, many are students and other moderates who aren’t swayed by fatwahs or extremist politics. Firas and Mohamed, two Sunnis waiting at a highway checkpoint, say they voted for Allawi’s party because he’s a secular leader — like Hussein was. “I like Saddam, I like Allawi. I love Iraq,” Firas says in halting English. Both he and Mohamed refuse to give their last names.

“How long America go in Iraq?” Mohamed asks.

I shrug and say, “Years.”

“No, days,” Mohamed says.

Looking ahead, the implications are grave. Iraq is increasingly fractured and decreasingly secure. Policing is handled almost entirely by Americans, who are growing tired of back-to-back, yearlong deployments. There will be a new Iraqi government. It will be Shiite, and it will eventually ask U.S. forces to leave. Who will keep order when Sunnis inevitably resist a government they see as illegitimate?

The abduction in Baghdad on Jan. 7 of 28-year-old freelance reporter Jill Carroll, who was on assignment for the Christian Science Monitor, is the latest example of how difficult conditions have become. Her respected translator, Alan Enwiyah, was murdered at the time of the kidnapping; Carroll’s fate remains unknown. On Jan. 17, Carroll’s captors issued a statement demanding that the United States free all female Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody, threatening to kill Carroll if their demand was not met within 72 hours.

According to veteran war reporters, the security threat to journalists in Iraq today is as bad as ever. The growing danger and increasingly prohibitive cost of security measures have sharply limited their ability (and in some cases their willingness) to move around and provide accurate, comprehensive coverage of Iraq. Increasingly, they must rely on the U.S. military for protection and access. The remaining handful of non-embedded reporters in Baghdad are mostly holed up in a few besieged hotels, which, according to one source, are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Western reporters rarely venture out of the heavily fortified Green Zone, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories.

Since the beginning of the war, 60 journalists have been killed in Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 37 have been abducted, several of whom were found dead. Carroll is the first American woman abducted.

Veteran war correspondent John F. Burns, the New York Times bureau chief in Baghdad, says “hotel journalism” has become the norm rather than the exception, although he adds that his own bureau has worked hard to keep its reporters on the streets. Very few Times employees have decided to leave because of the hazards they face, Burns says. Nonetheless, the security situation has been “woeful for really quite some time now,” he says. “There are levels of risk that often seem beyond reason.”

Journalists here are concerned and deeply sympathetic about Carroll’s situation, while remaining resolute about their work. “People are realistic … they know that these things can happen. They’re more likely if you have no protection,” Burns says.

Other veteran correspondents declined to talk about conditions in Iraq. Some agreed only on the condition that they were not identified. “Baghdad is ridiculously dangerous for a Westerner to move around in,” said one longtime freelance war correspondent in an email. “Large news organizations like Time magazine and the New York Times still send some people around, followed at all times by chase cars filled with dudes with AK-47s. And then they sprint in, do some quick interviews, snap some pictures, and sprint back home. Not really good journalism in my book, but it’s the only way to work.” Carroll remained one of few who were still willing to venture out on their own with only nominal security, he said.

According to Burns and other reporters, in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, journalists could more or less move freely throughout much of Iraq, including Baghdad. Then the insurgency began to flare up in summer 2003, and travel became more difficult. Local conditions varied — hot spots included Fallujah and Najaf — but everywhere the danger increased.

Burns says it was evident even back then that Iraq had become a “360-degree conflict,” as U.S. commanders had begun describing it. He says the major insurgent attacks on the U.N. headquarters and International Red Cross in Baghdad in 2003 were a turning point. “I came to the conclusion walking through the rubble that we would have to adapt measures for our security that were quite remarkable,” he says.

Soon thereafter, entire provinces like Al Anbar in the west essentially became off limits. Baghdad closed itself off to reporters “neighborhood by neighborhood,” according to one correspondent. By 2005, only a few reporters would risk pursuing all but the biggest stories without taking serious, “very expensive” precautions, including heavily armed escorts.

Even with extensive security measures — perhaps still only affordable for the largest media organizations today — staying in business also requires “a measure of good judgment and good luck,” Burns says. “With all the precautions in the world, we’re still part of the inshalla brigade.” (“Inshalla” means “God willing” in Arabic.)

Asked why insurgent groups would target journalists, public affairs officer Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, chief of the Army’s Baghdad press center, says that it boils down to trying to influence the media environment. “Insurgents count on the media to carry their story.” That story is about fear, death and destruction, he says, and “that’s certainly one way to get attention away from progress [in reconstruction efforts].” Johnson also acknowledges Iraq today is “a very dangerous, hazardous place” for journalists. They usually travel predictable routes, stay in known locations, and are a “fairly available target,” he says. He declined to comment about Carroll’s case.

The worsening security situation means that options for journalists, other than embedding with the U.S. military, are almost nonexistent. This state of affairs raises concerns among reporters. One is that it could fuel the perception among Iraqis that Western media are in bed with the military occupiers, further stoking hostility. It also leaves reporters — and perhaps their audiences — wondering whether coverage from Iraq is increasingly in the hands of the military, as it wields greater influence over journalists’ protection and access.

Insists Burns, “We are not an outpost of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq.” But increasingly, relying on military transport and security is the only safe and cost-effective way to report on Iraq, and the Times bureau is no exception to that, he says.

Even Lt. Col. Johnson acknowledges that embedding can shape a reporter’s work.

On PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on Wednesday, CBS News reporter Lara Logan spoke about just how constrained the media, especially television crews, are now: “The big complaint about this war coming from the American military and the Bush administration is that the media aren’t telling the ‘real story.’ They don’t talk about all the good things that are happening, and I frequently say to American military officers and soldiers on the ground: ‘Look, you want us to risk the lives of all our team to come and film the opening of a bridge that was intact before it was bombed in this war anyway, or a school that’s had new windows put in and been painted? I mean, those are just not reasons to risk the lives of all the people that are involved in trying to tell the story.’”

Logan reiterated how little freedom of movement there is in Baghdad and beyond. “We used to be able to drive to Fallujah,” she said. “I want to go down to Najaf and interview Moqtada al-Sadr, I can’t do that anymore. It has a huge impact on your ability to tell the story.”

After numerous kidnappings and killings of journalists, some French and Italian agencies decided simply not to send their reporters back to Iraq. But grim as the conditions may be, Burns says that the New York Times bureau continues to adapt to the security threat and will stay in Iraq. And he believes other big media will do the same. “What’s the alternative?” he asks. “The American press can’t leave, because it’s an American war.”

Scenes like this have become all too common the last five months, as insurgents have shifted from attacking U.S. troops to targeting Iraq’s ill-equipped and in many cases poorly trained new security forces. A wave of suicide bombings since April 28, the date the new Iraqi Cabinet was sworn in, has claimed more than 500 Iraqi lives — roughly half of them recruits for the security forces, including many police recruits waiting in line to apply for jobs.

According to the Pentagon, Iraqi forces — police, army, border patrol and an independent oil-security force — now total more than 150,000 men and women. Over the past several months, Pentagon officials have maintained that the Iraqi forces are steadily improving and growing in numbers — and the top brass has talked up the prospect of drawing down U.S. troops in significant numbers by this summer, after handing off much of the responsibility for securing the country to the Iraqis.

But the last month’s eruption of insurgent violence has underscored the weaknesses of the nascent security forces and cast into doubt Pentagon plans to bring U.S. troops home. U.S. generals themselves warned late last week that America’s involvement in Iraq “could still fail.”

Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American officer in the Middle East, pointed in particular to the Iraqi police forces, who he said lack ”sophistication, chain of command, [and] cohesion of leadership,” and are susceptible to corruption and intimidation. ”I don’t know how much I would say time-wise they’re behind, but they are behind,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

Some outside military experts — as well as numerous U.S. soldiers who’ve worked side by side with the Iraqis, and with whom I patrolled in Iraq between January and May of this year — don’t foresee handing over responsibility to the Iraqis anytime soon.

“I would not expect to see a significant draw-down [of U.S. troops] prior to 2007, absent a significant falloff in the insurgency, which is not a prospect at the moment,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org in Washington. “Restoring Iraq to military self-sufficiency will require at least a decade,” he says. “For that reason alone, Iraq will remain an American protectorate well into the next decade.”

Blaming this entirely on native forces and declaring them inadequate is an unfair generalization. Even despite the recent surge in violence, in some areas — downtown Mosul, for example — Iraqi forces have begun limited independent operations. And some types of forces — particularly the border patrol, special police, and units in the Kurdish northern part of the country — have proved themselves by operating independently and at full strength. In late March, I even spent a couple of days traveling with Iraqi army soldiers around the northern town of Sulaymaniyah, without any U.S. escort — a veritable death sentence in many other parts of Iraq. The troops in Sulaymaniyah were well-equipped, disciplined and led by experienced, competent officers who had been transferred to the Iraqi military from the Kurdish peshmerga militia.

Establishing reliable security forces elsewhere in Iraq has proved a difficult and sometimes Sisyphean task. Despite the wave of deadly attacks, U.S. commanders maintain that the number of Iraqis volunteering to enlist continues to far outnumber the places available in training courses, which are aimed at bringing the number of Iraqi forces to about 300,000 by the end of next year.

But getting Iraqi forces to perform is another matter. “The Iraqi security forces were close to meeting their force-structure goals last summer,” Pike says, “but then the goals went way up and the forces on hand collapsed.”

Pike is referring to the widespread flight of Iraqi police and army troops in the aftermath of the November 2004 battle for Fallujah.

“It all happened in two weeks,” says Lt. Col. Bradley Becker of the meltdown of Iraqi police and army in his area. Becker commands a battalion of the 25th Infantry Division from Fort Lewis, Wash. Since October, Becker’s battalion has patrolled the dusty approaches to Mosul, an area known to U.S. soldiers as Q-West, after its most important town, Qayyarah.

In early November, in the wake of the battle for Fallujah, Q-West, which had been pretty peaceful to that point, “fell apart,” in the words of Maj. Kevin Murphy, 36, Becker’s operations officer. Rather than stand and fight, most police in Q-West dropped their weapons and ran. They never came back.

By mid-November, Becker says, “I went from 2,000 police to 50.” There was a similar exodus in the Iraqi army. “Let me tell you, there were some sleepless nights,” he says.

Around the same time, Iraqi police in the contested city of Samarra “dissolved” under insurgent attacks, according to 42nd Infantry Division Capt. Robert Giordano. U.S. troops in Mosul, Samarra and elsewhere had no choice but to rebuild local forces from scratch beginning in November. Civilian police trainers were brought in from the States to finish the job, and they continue to operate from an Iraqi army base near Sulaymaniyah.

Giordano says the new Samarra police force is “excellent.” He may be right: Despite several attacks in recent weeks, Samarra’s police haven’t suffered another meltdown. Yet.

Iraqi forces in Q-West have undergone a similar renaissance. As a result of six months of intensive effort by Becker’s troops and other coalition forces, Iraqi forces in the area are back up to strength: There are three battalions of 500 Iraqi soldiers each manning checkpoints and outposts in Q-West. And hundreds of Iraqi police operate out of new stations in Qayyarah and surrounding towns. They too have stood up to recent attacks.

Today, Iraqi forces in Q-West are “capable of semi-independent operations,” in Murphy’s estimation.

What a “semi-independent” operation looks like is demonstrated on the cold night of March 25, near Qayyarah. Tom Burns, a second lieutenant in the 25th Infantry Division, leads a joint American-Iraqi patrol looking for smugglers and insurgents on the area’s remote, dusty roads. The Americans are in two speedy, heavily armored Stryker vehicles; the Iraqis trail behind in pickup trucks. Every couple of miles, the Strykers have to idle to let the pickups catch up, eliciting rolled eyes and muttered epithets from Burns and his crew.

Spotting a good vantage point atop a steep hill that only the Strykers can mount, Burns, 22, decides to leave the Iraqi trucks guarding a secondary road. But in the spirit of cooperation — and just in case he needs someone who speaks Arabic — Burns gestures at several young Iraqis to climb into his vehicle. Gazing back at the Iraqis he’s leaving behind, Burns shakes his head and mutters, “Like little lost sheep.”

Equipment for Iraqi security forces is in short supply. Deputy police chief Josef Hussein, working out of a compound in Qayyarah that is within blocks of several police stations destroyed in attacks, complains that his troops lack transport, radios and machine guns. American officers in Qayyarah have promised Hussein that they will do all they can to meet Iraqi forces’ needs. But privately, the same officers admit to me that funds are short.

Equipment shortages have plagued Iraqi forces since the first new army units were stood up in the fall of 2003, according to Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In stark contrast to American soldiers, almost all of whom have their own body armor (even if they have had to pay for it themselves), many Iraqi soldiers share a limited number of armor vests and often go without. And while U.S. forces travel in up-armored Humvees, Strykers and other armored vehicles (in some cases also of their own furnishing) that protect them from snipers and roadside bombs, Iraqi forces rely on trucks — or simply walk.

O’Hanlon questions why outfitting the Iraqi forces hasn’t been a greater priority. “There’s no good reason why Iraqis can’t be equipped,” he says. More than two years into the reconstruction, the Bush administration seems to agree; the president will soon sign an $81.3 billion “emergency” war spending appropriation approved by Congress last week, which includes $5.7 billion for training and outfitting Iraqi troops.

Equipment issues aside, hiring trustworthy natives willing to stand up to insurgents is one of the U.S. military’s major challenges in Iraq — especially when it comes to the Iraqi police. Despite their importance and the heavy casualties they’ve suffered, the police — especially those in Sunni towns — are widely considered the most corrupt and least reliable of the Iraqi security forces. After decades of being mere cogs in an authoritarian system, most of Iraq’s regular police are incapable enforcing the law, U.S. soldiers say. Unlike the Iraqi army, which was completely disbanded, then re-formed and trained by U.S. forces, many of the Iraqi police on the streets today are the same cops that served under Saddam Hussein. That means a lot of the Saddam regime’s thuggish habits are still at work in many towns.

“The Iraqi police are corrupt as hell,” says 38-year-old Master Sgt. Justin Lucios from the German-based 1st Infantry Division, which occupied Baquba until February. Lucios says old-school Iraqi police are more likely to flee than fight, just as they did in Q-West and Samarra last fall.

Even harder than motivating individual police and soldiers has been finding able leaders. Two Iraqi army battalion commanders in Q-West deserted their units last fall. To fill the gap, Becker awarded a colonel’s commission to Ra’ad, a Kurdish private security contractor who voluntarily fought insurgents during the meltdown. Ra’ad has done a fine job since then, according to Becker, but he’s the exception to the rule, and Americans continue to lead Iraqi units in all but the most permissive of environments. During the January elections, 1st Infantry Division officers in Baquba took charge of poll security at many locations despite repeated promises to let the Iraqis handle it themselves.

According to several Army officers I spoke with, U.S. soldiers across Iraq continue to take the lead even in small-scale combat operations — a tacit admission that Iraqi forces simply aren’t up to the task. Often this means that individual American noncommissioned officers, or NCOs, sideline their Iraqi counterparts. From January to May this year, I often saw this taking place while patrolling with U.S. and Iraqi forces in the Sunni triangle, and in northern and eastern Iraq.

On one Jan. 26 patrol in the town of Kanan, 1st Division Staff Sgt. Joshua Marcum, 25, led a joint U.S.-Iraqi force on a door-to-door search of Iraqi homes looking for insurgents who’d been shooting at polling places. At one home, while Marcum’s translator cowered outside for fear of being recognized by insurgents, Marcum could only gesture the other Iraqi soldiers who accompanied U.S. soldiers inside the house. He motioned for them to stand guard over the residents in the living room while he and his American troops went room to room with a flashlight, opening drawers and cabinets and checking under furniture for any evidence of wrongdoing. Marcum told me he didn’t trust his Iraqi comrades with any but the simplest of tasks.

O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute says that the pecking order between U.S. and Iraqi forces will not change anytime soon. “Leadership is not do-able in 12 months. [It] grows in five- to 10-year increments, and it can take up to 20 years to train a senior NCO. They’re the linchpin of a military.”

Nevertheless, the U.S. military is making efforts to train Iraqi NCOs as quickly as possible. Becker’s troops in Q-West have recently opened an NCO academy staffed by American trainers and have begun seeding Iraqi army units with graduates. But even providing candidates for this school is a challenge when so many Iraqi men are unfit for military service after decades of difficult living and malnourishment. All new Iraqi army recruits must endure a tough three-week basic training run by U.S. forces. In late March, more than 10 percent of one recent basic training class in Q-West failed the physical requirements, according to Becker.

At a March meeting with U.S. and Iraqi officials, Col. Ra’ad pleaded for local sheiks to recommend able-bodied young men to the Iraqi army. “We have the best instructors in the coalition,” Ra’ad said, referring to Becker’s soldiers. “But please, do not put a man’s name on the list if he is physically unfit.”

Poor leadership, a lack of equipment and fit recruits, and a culture of corruption in some sectors don’t bode well for the ability of Iraqi forces to handle the country’s security on their own, says Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. In the meantime, a steady stream of Iraqi recruits — many of them foremost in need of a way to feed their families amid the country’s broken economy and infrastructure — risk their lives simply waiting in line to apply for thankless, dangerous jobs in Iraq’s deadly cities.

Back in Baquba, in the wake of the suicide bombing that gravely injured four Iraqi cops, Army reporter Sgt. Kim Snow from the 1st Infantry Division watches Iraqi police recklessly roar up and down the street in their pickup trucks, firing their weapons at nothing. It’s become clear that the sole suicide attacker, who now lies in pieces among the burning wreckage, was the only threat in the area. The rounds from the Iraqis’ weapons rain down on the surrounding streets, where civilians are quickly scattering into buildings.

Snow grimaces at the spectacle. “Business as usual,” she says.

“They love us here,” Sgt. 1st Class Jose Alvarez Jr., 34, says. He smiles and waves at a truck full of pretty Kurdish girls in traditional dresses.

Especially today. It’s Noruz, the Kurdish new year, a celebration of the day more than 1,500 years ago when, they say, a Kurdish blacksmith defeated a tyrant whose shoulders sprouted satanic baby-eating snakes. Until liberation in 2003, Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s territory were prohibited from celebrating any national holidays. Now they’re making up for lost time — and they have soldiers like these 148th troopers to thank for it.

Elsewhere in Iraq, in cities like Baghdad, Baquba and Mosul, the armed insurgency against U.S. and Iraqi forces continues to claim lives. But this is the other Iraq, the area in and around semiautonomous Kurdistan, where for more than a decade after the Gulf War, U.S. fighter jets kept Iraqi forces at bay so that the Kurds could live in relative peace and prosperity. Here, most locals welcome the American soldiers. Even Staff Sgt. John Murdoch, a 35-year-old math teacher from Idaho Falls, is a hero. “As far as deployments go, this is a pretty good one,” he says.

Atop the mountain, at a hilly, flower-sprinkled resort teeming with Kurds in traditional baggy suits and sequined dresses, Murdoch attempts the traditional Kurdish dance (left foot, right foot, shake your shoulders), jokes with teenagers who marvel at his over-6-foot height, and holds babies while their parents snap photos.

In light of Iraq’s volatile sectors, the soldiers almost can’t believe their luck. Day after day, they play ambassador to an adoring nation. They tour the countryside with Kurdish colonels and generals, eat kebabs in restaurants where the patrons smile and wave, and even visit a carnival built atop a former Iraqi army outpost to shake hands and sip smoothies.

It may seem like a walk in the park — and sometimes it literally is — but there’s a serious military purpose here, the maintaining of a different kind of order. After a decade of relative autonomy within Iraq’s borders, the unofficial Kurdistan is strong and self-reliant, with its own armies, courts and national assembly. And it’s only getting stronger. Kurds living abroad have begun to return home to set up new businesses. Construction is booming. Families forcibly evicted by Saddam’s armies are reclaiming their property. The Kurds in Kirkuk, which lies just outside Kurdistan’s de facto borders and commands 40 percent of Iraq’s oil, are demanding a greater share of oil revenues and more political power. And as part of a deal with the Shiite majority United Iraqi Alliance, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani is expected to become Iraq’s next president, in exchange for Kurdish backing of the alliance’s pick for prime minister.

Indeed, the Kurds are rising. And the U.S. Army is here to make sure they rise only so far. The Kurds’ ambitions for full independence are well known, and U.S. officials have faced a delicate balancing act in ensuring that the powerful minority region is integrated into plans for a unified, democratic nation. A fight over control of key resources, not to mention the eruption of ethnic vendettas, could spark the civil war many have feared would rock post-Saddam Iraq.

“Without us, the Kurds would have their own country by now,” says 2nd Lt. Rick Ferrell, whose Tennessee Guard unit — the 278th Regiment — performs a mission similar to the 116th’s, albeit with less dancing, further east near the Iranian border. “We’re a buffer,” Ferrell says.

Acting as a buffer sometimes feels like a strange role to the 116th. Most soldiers here say they like the Kurds as much as the Kurds like them. At Camp Stone, in stark contrast to most bases in Iraq, there’s a real sense of kinship between occupiers and occupied. Many soldiers are learning Kurdish from the handful of translators who live and work alongside them at this tiny outpost sandwiched between a chicken farm and the national headquarters of the peshmerga, Kurdistan’s fierce green-suited militia. On March 23, over omelets whipped up by an Army cook in a brown T-shirt, 24-year-old medic Spc. Sean Peine recites the handful of phrases he’s learned from K.G., a translator in his mid-20s:

“Spas — Thanks.”

“Choni bashi — How are you?”

“Zor bash — Very good.”

At the hilltop resort, Peine strolls rolling green slopes and talks about the dental missions he leads into isolated villages in these mountains. Despite Kurdistan’s relative prosperity, there are plenty of places with no dentists and lots of health problems. He says it breaks his heart to see these people suffer.

The 148th’s Noruz celebrations are hosted by Iraqi army Brig. Gen. Anwar Dolani, 47, an enormous bear of a man wearing a brown suit and clutching a bottle of scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He presses Peine and the other Americans into plastic seats and barks at his men to bring soft drinks, kebabs and chai. Then he sits, drinks, smokes and watches his liberators stuff themselves with food that’s almost guaranteed to give them indigestion.

Fourteen years ago, Dolani was a renowned peshmerga officer. In 1991, when the old Iraqi army moved to crush Kurdish resistance in these mountains, Dolani and one of his lieutenants, Ahkmed Mohamed Kamal — now a colonel under Dolani in the new Iraqi army — were there to stop them. On a mountain road near the celebrations, the rusting hulk of a destroyed Iraqi tank marks the spot where Dolani and Kamal’s soldiers stopped the Iraqis cold. It was a heady moment in the decades-long Kurdish resistance, and sweet revenge for a defining atrocity that had occurred only three years earlier.

It was March 16, 1988: Iraqi fighter jets swooped low over the Kurdish town of Halabja, a peshmerga stronghold, dropping the lethal agents sarin, tabun and VX, and canisters of mustard gas. Thousands died instantly. Thousands more clawed to rivers and streams seeking relief from the burning only to die in the water. Kamal and his troops cautiously approached the town. When they sensed the gas, they turned and fled back into the mountains that had protected them for so many years.

In 2003, after the fall of Baghdad and the liberation of Kurdistan, survivors of the Halabja attack built a memorial in the ruined town. Inside, there’s a black wall inscribed with the names of all 5,000 victims. Outside, there’s a cemetery with rows of identical headstones under a sign that reads “It’s not allowed for Baaths to enter.”

Today, Kamal and K.G. stand among the headstones, Kamal alone with his thoughts, K.G. recalling the day in 1991 when his family fled Kurdistan ahead of Saddam’s army. After years of flight that claimed the life of his father, K.G. settled in Texas in 1997 and took a job translating for the Defense Department. (Translators in Iraq have been threatened by insurgents for collaborating with U.S. forces; K.G., who works in Sulaymaniyah for the Army, asked that his full name be withheld.) K.G. says he’s proud of America’s work in Kurdistan — but in spite of all the local goodwill today, the United States still shares the blame for the area’s troubled past. “The U.S. helped out Saddam,” he says, referring to the Reagan administration’s support of Saddam during the Iraq-Iran war two decades ago — which included helping supply the Iraqi dictator’s chemical weapons program.

Nevertheless, Kamal is back home now — one of his homes, at least — and it’s all about “freedom,” he says.

In light of the region’s wealth and progress, Kurdistan’s freedom may be Iraq’s loss. After lunch, Dolani sounds a conciliatory note. “We Kurds are never against anyone,” he says. “On earth, a human’s a human. We want to have a unified Iraq.”

But on the way back to Camp Stone after a pensive afternoon at Halabja, Kamal sings a different song. “There are 40 million Kurds in the world. This is the 21st century. Everyone’s getting educated, getting technology,” he says. “But we don’t even have a country.”