Quil Lawrence

Saturday, Jun 4, 2005 5:33 PM UTC

Fear and explosions in Kabul

Afghanistan isn't Iraq yet. But when a suicide bomber blew himself and two other people up inside my hotel's Internet cafe, it became impossible to ignore the rising anger at foreigners here.

By Quil Lawrence

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The American honeymoon in Afghanistan may be over. Until last month the Bush administration could take comfort that Afghanistan was everything Iraq was not. Its population was generally pro-American and grateful for the U.S. intervention. Afghan President Hamid Karzai was happily beholden to the advice of the U.S. ambassador. Even Afghan prisoners released from the U.S. prison in Guantánamo seemed for the most part to have no hard feelings and simply went home. Now a wave of violence, much of it aimed at foreigners, has changed the mood in the country.

Anti-American riots swept Afghanistan in May for the first time since the U.S. invasion in 2001 after Newsweek printed allegations that a Quran had been flushed down a toilet at Guantánamo. But before the riots, Kabul, the capital, had already become a less friendly place for foreigners. My own calm was shattered when I checked into the Park Residence hotel on May 7. I had just unpacked my bags when a single thunderclap sounded from across the courtyard. It wasn’t a big explosion, and I almost believed the hotel clerk who said he thought the boiler had blown. It turned out that a suicide bomber had hit the hotel’s Internet cafe, where foreign workers for nongovernmental organizations often go to check their e-mail.

By the spray of blood on the walls, it looked as if the bomber had stepped into the lavatory, perhaps to arrange his explosives, which then detonated prematurely as he stepped back into the cafe. The explosion killed two people in addition to the bomber and blew shards of glass into the street. After a quick look I fled to my room, fearing a second, bigger bomb — a common tactic. But the bomber had been alone.

Although aid workers and U.N. officials are loath to accept it, the party mood is over. In the past month there have been four attempts to kidnap foreigners in the center of Kabul. One was successful, and Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni remains a hostage. Her captors’ videotape demanding ransom evoked the videos released by insurgents in Iraq, where occupying soldiers and foreign humanitarians are all considered fair game.

But the riots, which spread to half a dozen provinces, were a wake-up call. The targets, as usual, were mostly international aid organizations — the only soft targets available. The government tried to blame the riots on elements of the Taliban, a plausible explanation in eastern provinces like Nangarhar and Laghman but less so in provinces like Badakshan or Tachar, which are still dominated by members of the Northern Alliance, who fought alongside the United States to oust the Taliban in 2001.

The violence has “made us rethink. We have to think about the safety of our staff. If that means that [Afghan] communities suffer — we have to balance,” said Nik Rilcoff, country director for the British charity Merlin. On the day I met with her, five Afghan employees of a U.S. company had been killed in the south. The next day six more were massacred while escorting their co-workers’ bodies home. Rilcoff said she is torn between keeping up the charity’s aid work and protecting its workers.

The demonstrations in Kabul were mild in comparison to those in the provinces. About 500 students marched up and down the main boulevard at Kabul University as dozens of riot police made sure they didn’t move east into the city proper, where things would have certainly gotten bigger and less predictable.

Handing out fliers of the now iconic pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, one demonstrator, Muzaid Karim, told me, “When they started to attack Islamic values the Afghan people couldn’t tolerate it. If things continue, then the [friendship between the United States and Afghanistan] will be in serious trouble.”

Toward the end, the demonstrators turned to that great symbol of freedom of expression around the world — the burning of an American flag. But they lacked the forethought to soak it in gasoline. Eventually, by burning a bundle of their pamphlets and roasting the flag, they managed to get it going.

Worked up, the crowd began yelling “Death to Bush,” “Death to America” and “Long live Islam.” I asked Omar Samir, who was yelling “death” the loudest, if the Americans hadn’t done a few things to help his country. “What is helping? In four years we haven’t seen any major changes in Afghanistan … Just the turbans are nowhere to be seen,” he said, meaning the Taliban.

The slow pace of reconstruction isn’t the only gripe. Afghans were angry about the abuse of the Quran, but they seemed more concerned about the agreement on U.S. military bases that President Karzai would soon be signing in Washington, and about the detention of Afghans at Guantánamo and the two U.S. military prisons in Afghanistan.

Afghans in the past have not seemed to share the rest of the Muslim world’s outrage about America’s detention of so-called enemy combatants in its war on terror. Perhaps because of the way different factions in the Afghan civil war often tortured and murdered prisoners, U.S. detention methods seemed relatively tame to them.

Some 50 Afghan prisoners were released this week in what the U.S. military called a goodwill gesture, and about 80 were released at the beginning of last month. I tracked down one of the released detainees, a man named Shireen Anwari, in his hometown of Gardiz. Anwari told me a now familiar story of having been arrested in the middle of the night, apparently after being denounced as a terrorist by one of his neighbors. Anwari said he was held at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, for 14 months and then released without charge. Although his treatment in prison had recently improved, he said, he’d previously been forbidden to speak for months at a time. If he broke the rule he’d be forced to stand with his arms in the air or in other stress positions for hours on end.

Anwari’s story is consistent with that of numerous other detainees and is hardly the worst tale to come out of Bagram. According to Human Rights Watch, at least nine detainees have died at Bagram, some of them beaten to death by U.S. guards. (The worst of the abuses were committed in 2002, by soldiers who later were transferred to Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.) After an hour of answering my questions, Anwari had just one for me.

“Why are you asking me all of this? Everyone knows that the Americans are doing these things. And no one is going to do anything about it,” he said.

For a while, though, it did look as if someone — none other than President Karzai — was going to do something. Karzai has long been seen as a puppet of the United States, and indeed, he was handpicked by the United States to lead Afghanistan’s interim government. But since his election last October, Karzai has been trying to strike a more independent pose — and the unrest in Afghanistan seemed to provide the perfect moment for him to do so.

When the riots happened, Karzai was in Europe hitting up donors for cash. He came home righteous and angry. First he scolded his countrymen for making him look bad. But then he said — in public for the first time — that the Americans had made mistakes. “Afghanistan is no longer owned by anybody else. We are the owners of our country,” he said.

He then challenged the Bush administration in a way not even close allies like Tony Blair of Britain and John Howard of Australia have done in public — saying all prisoners would be turned over to Afghan control and that U.S. military action in Afghanistan would now be subject to the approval of his elected government.

“We have told the Americans that we don’t want them anymore to go to people’s houses and knock down doors and arrest people without our permission. We have told them, Stop!” Karzai said, “No operation should be conducted in Afghanistan without the permission of the Afghan government.”

Afghans loved it. One newspaper declared that Karzai had finally stood up to the USA.

The timing of his sudden show of defiance was impressive: He was scheduled to meet with President Bush in the White House just a week later, on May 23. Afghans and ex-pats in Kabul theorized that before his big trip to Washington, Karzai had pushed through a deal with the Americans and that Bush would yield to his demands to increase Karzai’s prestige.

If the plan was to make Karzai look good, someone neglected to tell Bush. The president met with Karzai and thanked him for his commitment to freedom and for taking such good care of the first lady when she visited Afghanistan.

As for substance, Bush gave Karzai zero. He said America would continue to “consult” with Afghanistan about U.S. military operations and continue to “work our way through” the Afghan prisoners in places like Guantánamo. Karzai smiled and said he hoped that Bush would come to Kabul sometime soon.

When Karzai returned to Kabul, the Afghan government furiously downplayed the demands Karzai had made. His enemies were quick to use the occasion, however. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the most powerful insurgent leaders, assailed Karzai for having come home empty handed.

“This agreement shows that the invasion of Afghanistan by the U.S. forces was not meant to remove the Taliban regime or eliminate al-Qaida but to have permanent bases here,” he said, echoing the complaints of many of the protesters. “We have always told people that Americans will have to be forced to leave this country; otherwise they will [follow through on their] plans to stay here for a long time.”

American military forces thought they would be mopping up people like Hekmatyar at this point, but springtime has opened up the snowy mountain roads used by insurgents. While coalition officials say they’re getting more help from the Afghan population and the newly trained Afghan army, attacks on U.S. and Afghan government forces are more frequent now than they were a year ago. On Wednesday, a suicide bomber killed 20 mourners at the funeral of a pro-government sheik.

Still, Afghanistan has not yet turned into Iraq. Most of its warlords are not joining the insurgency; rather, they’re trying to co-opt themselves into the government at the highest possible price. Compared with the alternative, that’s fine by the United States. After all, as one Western diplomat said, the end of the honeymoon doesn’t mean that the relationship is over. It just means both parties have a more realistic idea of what they’ve gotten themselves into.

Monday, Jan 31, 2005 4:15 PM UTC

The Kurds take Kirkuk

Election Day was jubilant for Kurds returning to the oil-rich city. But if rivals question the vote, they might call in reinforcements.

By Quil Lawrence

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Hoshyar Darbandi made a quick trip to his hometown of Kirkuk this week to cast his vote. Leaving his wife and kids behind in Stockholm, Sweden, he may have the honor of being the Kurd who came the farthest to make it to the polls. Darbandi could have voted for the new Iraqi parliament from a safe distance in any number of European cities that allowed Iraqi exiles to vote, but he wanted to come home to vote in Sunday’s local elections. To Kurds, who wins the local race in Kirkuk is as important as who eventually becomes prime minister in Baghdad. Maybe more: Most Kurds don’t care if Baghdad continues slipping into an anarchic black hole. Kirkuk, they’d like to keep.

“We’ve never written our own history,” said Darbandi, as he walked from a polling station at the end of Election Day. “It’s always been forced on us.” Darbandi walks comfortably through the crowd here, though his haircut, his boots and his new ski jacket give him away as a returned exile. Like hundreds of thousands of Kurds, he was driven out of this part of Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaign in the 1980 and ’90s. Darbandi fled to Iran in 1984 at age 22 and then was granted asylum in Sweden. Now he’d like to move his young children back to Iraq. But he doesn’t call it Iraq. To him this is Kurdistan, and Kirkuk is the jewel in the crown.

Kirkuk is one of the spots where an Iraqi civil war is supposed to start. Analysts in Washington often neatly divide Iraq into a homogenous Shiite south, a de facto Kurdish state in the north and a troublesome Sunni wedge in the center. The idea has some merit. In many ways, Iraq makes more sense in three than in one. But as some sort of partition passes in and out of vogue with talking heads, Kirkuk remains a big bump in the road map.

Kurds say the city is their Jerusalem. A sizable Turkoman minority says Kirkuk has always been theirs. Arabs living here are terrified — some rightly and some wrongly — that they’ll be punished for the Arabization campaign that Saddam waged here when he evicted or killed Kurds and gave their homes to poor Arabs from the south along with large cash payments.

Holding a census here to find out who is the real majority would probably unite the city briefly; everyone would criticize the findings before the open warfare began. But Sunday’s voting may achieve the same result. And if some people consider the results foul when the final count is in, perhaps a week to 10 days from now, they may call in support from the outside. The Kurdish parties to the north have over 60,000 militiamen (and some women) to back up their claim. The Turkomans have an ethnic and possibly military link to the Turkish capital, Ankara. Some Turkomans and many Arabs are Shiite Muslims, with links to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani or the more militant Muqtada al-Sadr. And, of course, the Sunnis already have the sympathy of the insurgents.

What’s amazing is that almost no one here struggling for power in Kirkuk mentions that the place is swimming in oil — maybe a fifth of Iraq’s massive reserves. Even putting that significant asset aside, people seem willing to fight for Kirkuk. Let’s just hope they did their fighting at the polls.

Since the U.S. invasion, Kurds have been flocking to Kirkuk. One, Haybad Rostum, turned to her son when asked her age — he said without much certainty that she’s 56. She has borne 12 children and lived most of her life as a Kurd in Saddam’s Iraq; it’s no wonder she looks older. I met her this week in Kirkuk, but this is not her home. Until this month, she was living in Hawija, south and west of here.

Hawija wasn’t part of the Kurdish autonomous zone under Saddam. Haybad says she and her family suffered then, but they knew how to follow the rules and stay alive under the Arab Baathists who controlled the city. But in the power vacuum left by the U.S. invasion, she says, the same old Baathists have taken over, and they blame the Kurds for helping the Americans. After months of threatening letters and graffiti, nine Kurds were assassinated in Hawija last month. One of them was Haybad’s nephew. Haybad, as well as hundreds of other Kurdish families, picked up and left for Kirkuk.

After decades of fleeing or being forced from Kirkuk because of Saddam’s ethnic cleansing, they’ve been coming back here these last two years as a place of refuge. Their return is bittersweet. I sat in Haybad’s house, and as her sons and nephews slowly filled the room, another bit of irony hit me — I realized I’d been here on the day Kirkuk fell in April 2003. This was an Arab neighborhood then, and I was interviewing Shiite Arabs who were all afraid Kurds were going to come back and commit a little reverse ethnic cleansing. It may not have been the same house, but Haybad and her sons have moved into a neighborhood the Kurds have taken over from fleeing Arabs. It’s like musical chairs. When the Kurds try to declare an autonomous zone, Hawija may be left standing with the Arabs, but Kirkuk is going to be firmly seated in Kurdistan. The Kurdish politicians keep saying they have no intention of declaring independence. But at the same time, they sanctioned a referendum during Sunday’s vote asking if Kurds would prefer to stay in Iraq. The result is a foregone conclusion.

What may have delivered Kirkuk to the Kurds had to do with refugees, but not those like Haybad. At the last minute, the Kurdish leadership managed to secure voting rights for about 100,000 returnees who don’t have official residency. The Kurds see it as redressing the crimes of the past. But to the Arabs and Turkomans in town, it looks like stacking the voter rolls. The sometimes bombastic Turkoman Front representative in Kirkuk, Fowzi Akram, told me before that Election Day this “cheating” was making the Kurdish victory a certainty. Akram said that meant civil war is just around the corner. He sat in his office in the center of the city as his assistants loaded up their trucks with pamphlets and Turkoman fanfare.

“When the civil war comes to Iraq, it will bring a fire so hot it will burn the wet with the dry,” he said. Then he gave me a Turkoman Front flag, a Turkoman Front lighter and a stainless steel watch with their symbol on the faceplate. On Election Day, the Front didn’t make trouble and the streets around his office were deserted.

Like the Afghan elections last fall, no one can really say if Iraq’s were fair. Almost no one was willing to risk sending international monitors. I didn’t see any outright cheating, but the playing fields were as crooked as the day is long. The night before the election, I took a tour of one voting station in the Kurdish neighborhood of Shorja. Pictures of Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani were still hanging over the door to the voting booths. The manager said he had forgotten to take them down and quickly covered up the portraits, mostly, with a few sample ballots.

On Sunday morning, the polling stations in Shorja were packed with voters. At one, I saw a line of more than a thousand men and women with their kids, everyone in Sunday best. The men wore suits, the women long dresses and gold coin jewelry. Their numbers constantly replenished as the day wore on. It wasn’t long before the Kurds started to party — even a couple of years on, many still can’t believe that they’re finally back in Kirkuk. Along the streets hung Kurdish flags the size of billboards. Kurdish men and women danced to drums in something between a stomp and a Texas line dance.

The sight of a long line in a public place made me shiver; on a typical day in Baghdad, it would be an invitation to a car bomb. But the security lockdown was working in Kirkuk. There were only two attacks during the voting. Early in the morning someone fired a mortar into a stadium full of Kurdish returnees. A 16-year-old boy named Yusef Nejem died. No matter how much they patrol or enforce curfews, the U.S. forces can’t so far stop the mortars, rockets or roadside bombs. Another mortar wounded three in an Arab neighborhood late in the afternoon.

The Kurds weren’t the only ones sending not-so-subtle suggestions to voters. The streets in Turkoman areas were covered in graffiti, including blue Turkish crescents and the number of the Turkoman party on the ballot. The mood in those parts of town wasn’t so jubilant, but there was still voting. Other places were downright tense. Some of my BBC colleagues had been filming in a market early this week when a few Arabs urgently whispered to them that it wasn’t safe. Kirkuk is still a border town between the chaos in the south and the relative peace in the north.

Arabs in Kirkuk didn’t appear to be voting in the same enthusiastic numbers as other ethnic groups. The main Sunni parties boycotted the polls, and there were American attack helicopters zooming around the city, which may explain any hesitance to go vote. With a Kurdish driver and translator, it was risky, but we stopped for what was supposed to be a quick visit at a middle school in Hy Nassir, a solidly Arab quarter.

The visit got long all of a sudden. Despite the letter-size Election Commission sticker on our windshield, the Arab police around the station greeted us at about 40 yards with a few shots in the air. My colleague Ayub Nuri, a Kurdish journalist with perfect Arabic, shouted and pointed to the sticker and we slowly approached. The cops fired off about a dozen rounds with their AK-47s — and it wasn’t clear just how high over our heads they were aiming.

We turned the car around, amid shouts of “Journalist!” out the window in Arabic and a mishmash of Kurdish and English orders and expletives inside the car. Many Iraqi police wear ski masks for their own protection, and the sight of four of them running toward our car with their guns leveled was reminiscent of Fallujah. Suddenly, we were jumping out of the car with our hands up.

After a few moments, our disbelief turned into fear, and then ridicule, as the men giggled and apologized to us. You should have had a bigger sticker on your car, they told us, as if we could have asked for one from the American major who had given out credentials.

But we’d been made, and badly. The neighborhood knew we were there, and suddenly everyone down the block looked a little mean. (Kirkuk is about as far south as you can go before the total red zone of the Sunni triangle. Insurgents can move in Sunni areas with ease.) The guys on the corner cheered up with a little conversation, but they said they couldn’t promise our safety beyond that block. The police showed us around the polling station and bragged about a good turnout among Arab voters. Then they advised us to wait for a patrol car to escort us out of the area. We waited an hour for the cruiser they called, and then gave up and just made a bolt for the highway, without incident.

Turkoman neighborhoods also reported a high turnout, though the suspicion of a fix being involved never quite vanished. At the day’s end, the polling station at Al Tisayn, a middle school, was close to empty, but the administrators said they’d had more than 2,000 voters during the day. The staff represented a good slice of Kirkuk: a Kurd, a Turkoman, a Christian and an Arab. “You see the whole Iraqi family here,” said Omar Muhamad, a Kurdish engineer working at the center. Nearby a Turkoman newspaperman, also on staff, agreed. “Yesterday everyone was afraid; today we all feel very strong.” But then he went on, “Still, we have heard that in Shorja, the Kurds are not allowing Turcomans to vote.”

“Excuse me — but did you see this? Speak of what you saw,” said Muhamad, the Kurdish engineer, who hadn’t walked so far away.

“No, please, I am speaking. He is not letting me speak,” said the Turkoman, who wouldn’t give his name.

“There was no problem, but some mistakes. And some groups want to make trouble,” he continued. “This is the first time we’ve tried this in Iraq. Maybe next time it will be normal.”

He was right about the groups wanting to make trouble in Kirkuk. After a quiet Election Day, intense gunfire, mortars and American jets were heard late into the night.

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Quil Lawrence is a BBC journalist who covers Afghanistan and Iraq for the World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, Public Radio International and WGBH in Boston.