The War Diaries

New York- Photojournalist Jason Florio had a slideshow at the Apple Store in the South of Houston street district tonight where he took the audience through over a decade of adventure and memory spanning Islamic Asia and Africa with 9/11 interspersed. Jason has the before pictures to many of my after. Afghanistan just before 9/11, the towers just before the collapse, Iraq just before the neoconservative destruction of the Ba’ath Party and so on. I took a few snaps on my Blackberry but check his site for a more complete view.

Perhaps the last photo of Massoud alive (at least by a Westerner) from August of 2001. Looks good blown up huge in the Apple Store theater. ©2001 Jason Florio

A diptych from Jason's pre-war "Poets of Baghdad" series. Jason told the audience that he tries to humanize people that are otherwise being demonized to justify vulgar foreign policy objectives. ©2003 Jason Florio

"All Done, Go Home." Baghdad, Iraq, April, 2003. ©2003 Derek Henry Flood

Washington D.C.- The Jamestown Foundation is hosting a conference on Thursday, March 4th at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (at 1779 Massachusetts Avenue Northwest; Metro Dupont Circle) on the country-wide elections to be held on March 7th and the future of the country’s stability and security. The lunch hour will feature keynote speakers Zalmay Khalilzad & Dr. Colin Kahl.

The topics will include:

•The Iraqi Elections and the Shifting Political Landscape

•Iraq’s Changing Security Environment

•Foreign Relations & Energy Policy

•Future Challenges to Iraqi Stability

To register for the conference, please click HERE.

New York- My former editor and colleague at Asia Times Online, Charles McDermid, has an article today with local Suleimani-based reporter Rebaz Mahmood on the fourth and perhaps ultimate death sentence for “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majid, the most brutal enforcer of the al-Anfal campaign in northern Iraq in 1988. Charles is now working in Iraqi Kurdistan for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting and is gearing up for coverage of the Iraqi general elections to be held on March 7th by the Independent High Electoral Commission of Iraq (which is meant to coincide with the “Status of Forces Agreement” referendum on the future of U.S. troops in the Republic of Iraq). Almost seven years after the United States military and its allies tried to erase the legacy of Saddam Hussein by destroying Iraq in order to try and save it, or remake it into a pro-Israel, emasculated Arab client state of neoconservative folly, the legacy of Ba’athism and Halabja continue to haunt the politics of this shattered post-Ottoman successor state.

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From Greece to Iraq-via Turkey: From West to East.

Abu Dhabi, UAE- Well it’s that time again. The end of the road. I’ve been going non stop for almost four months. The timeline goes something like this: Depart NYC July 30th-Arrive Abu Dhabi, Six nights at my friend Arif’s in climate controlled villa, bus to Dubai, fly Dubai to Kabul and arrive in Afghanistan on the 8th of August-Depart Kabul on the 2nd of September to Dubai, take a taxi from Dubai to Sharjah (neighboring emirate), stay one night at Sharjah youth hostel, next day fly one way to Athens, Greece, immediately take bus to Piraeus port upon landing, play brickbreaker on my Blackberry on steps of massive Greek cathedral to pass the time, then try to sleep hiding on chairs on deck of coffee shop until I get woken up by ouzo-smelling cleaning crew, take 7:15am ferry to Ios island, 10 days of whooping it up on Ios and finishing up writing from Kabul, then overnight ferry trip to Turkey via Paros and Samos (spot group of African and other assorted migrants being dragged out of the Aegean and marched to Samos’s detention center and get asked by Greek policeman not to pay attention to them),

Greek Island Zigzag.

Arrive in Kusadasi, Turkey the following morning of September, 15th, two nights there, then bus to Fethiye, 2 nights there, bus to Antalya, 4 nights there, bus to Adana, 1 night there, overnight bus to Cizre near Iraq border, cross Turkey-Iraq border on foot/taxi, Kurdish guy I’m ordered by Turkish soldier to get in taxi with gets in fisticuffs on zero line at border, take taxi from Zakho on Iraq side 3 hours to Erbil on September 25th, travel to Qandil mountains on Iraq-Iran border, cross back to Turkey on October 7th, take bus to Mardin, 2 nights there, take bus to Erzurum, 1 night there, over night bus to Turkey-Georgia border, arrive in Tbilisi following morning on October 11th, 17 days in Georgia, travel to Chechen border for book research, fly Tbilisi-Dubai, arrive Dubai on October 28th, one night at Dubai youth hostel, get another Afghan visa the next day, buy 3:30 am ticket to Kabul, arrive back in Afghanistan on October 30th, fly back to Dubai on November 9th, paid random Keralite guy at airport to drive me to Arif’s in Abu Dhabi, spent the last 2 weeks here doing the better part of nothing, flying to Dublin tomorrow, 2 nights there, then arriving back in NYC on November 24th. Phew! It’s been a long one.

From Iraq to Georgia- via Turkey: From South to North.

I have a new piece in this week’s edition of Terrorism Monitor on the Jamestown Foundation site that can be read here. It is the first long form interview with PJAK leadership that I’m aware of.

A joint PKK/PJAK martyrs graveyard in the Qandil region along the Iraq-Iran border. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

Mardin, Turkey- After a long two weeks in Iraq, I’ve returned to northern Kurdistan a.k.a. southeast Turkey. I wasn’t able to update the site much while in Iraq as the poorly named Hawler Palace Hotel did not have an internet connection. I finally after much networking and sweating it out in said depressing hotel room was able to meet members of the Partiya Jiyana Azad a Kurdistanê (PJAK), Iran’s counterpart to the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (PKK)in Turkey. While the PKK may describe itself as a Kurdish national liberation movement, the PJAK considers itself an armed democratization movement. Many skeptical media accounts describe the PJAK as nothing more than an “offshoot” of the PKK but from the standpoint of the PJAK, this is simply the work of state propaganda meant to divert attention away from the Islamic Republic of Iran’s own internal “Kurdish Question.” Roj, a Kurd originally from Turkey, was a representative of the Koma Civakên Kurdistan (KCK-a Kurdish rebel umbrella congress that includes the PKK and PJAK) who had lived in the West at some stage, mentioned the concept of the “Deep State” in reference to Kurdish oppression while interpreting for me with a PJAK commander. The idea of the Deep State, which may be the Middle East’s penultimate conspiracy theory, stems from an idea that no matter how far democracy advances within Turkish society, there will always be a hidden, radical Kemalist agenda that will steer the country away from ultimate freedom to dissent. The Deep State is a highly cynical concept in and of itself an is seen often as anti-Kurdish by those affected by Ankara’s pogroms in the 1980′s and 1990′s during violent uprisings in Turkish-controlled Kurdistan. The Treaty of Sèvres was meant to implement a Kurdish state in the northern Middle East (though not to include all of “greater” Kurdistan) two years after hostilities concluded in the Great War (WWI). “Ataturk” Mustafa Kemal, a brilliant German-allied Ottoman military commander turned Turkish nationalist politician, founded the Republic of Turkey three years after Sèvres in 1923. With the abolishment of the Ottoman caliphate, Ataturk was under no obligation whatsoever to grant the Kurds an independent state. As the crumbling empire was partitioned, the Kurds were left in the cold and Sèvres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne. The rest, rather than being history, is in fact the very volatile present. The de facto state held by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq confounds Ankara. On one hand, Turkey profits greatly from the massive influx of goods and services in northern Iraq. As much as the Turkish parliament rejected Colin Powell’s advances during the first wildly disastrous Bush term, Turkey stood to profit greatly from such an American misadventure in the Middle East. One only has to see the queue of hulking Turkish trucks headed into Iraq at a border open 24-hours a day to get a glimpse of how much the political limbo in which the KRG exists greatly benefits Turkey.

A dated photo of a female shaheed, or martyr, at the PKK cemetary. Roj informed me that this woman was actually an ethnic Turk fighting against her own ethno-nationalist government. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

On the other, if the KRG were to eventually form the basis for a sovereign Kurdish state, many in Turkey fear that the Turkish “Deep State” (if such a nebulous concept in fact exists) would be forced to act in a way that can’t yet be foretold. Some observers believe that Iraq’s January 2010 General Elections may pave the way for Joseph Biden’s poorly thought out “Soft Partition” of Iraq and the eventual formal secession of the three KRG-held governorates. However, the creation of a landlocked Kurdish state in northern Iraq poses a problem for groups like the PKK and PJAK that may believe the KRG would have to sell them out in order to survive amongst neighbors hostile to the idea of a State of Kurdistan as a geopolitical reality.

The latest empire to roll through the region is none other than the United States. The problem for the Americans is that they are neither from the region, nor are they soldier-scholars (with a few notable exceptions). Upon entering Zakho, the frontier town in the KRG’s Duhok Governorate, next to the taxi stand while waiting for a car to fill up sufficiently to ride to Erbil. I spotted a Rhino Runner armored bus in an adjacent lot like the one I saw in Kabul’s Green Zone in August but dared not photograph. Behind the Rhino where a huge column of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles which I couldn’t tell whether they were headed into or out of Iraq. Two weeks later on the way out, to drive from Erbil to Zakho, the taxis pass through a contested, apocalyptic string of mixed Arab and Kurdish villages in Ninewa Governorate on Iraq’s ethnic fault line. A foreboding sandstorm began to whip up into a blinding fury all around us and suddenly we were in a traffic jam as a convoy of the above mentioned MRAPs bulldozed their way through traffic with the lead vehicle announcing “Get out of the way or I will shoot you. Repeat: I will shoot you.” The three Kurdish men in the taxi, having no clue what the man in the lead car in the convoy was saying, looked at me as if for some kind of commentary on seeing my own countrymen in one of Iraq’s deadliest areas. “Jaish-e-Amriki” (American soldiers) I said dryly in Arabic. Perhaps the MRAPs were being delivered to Mosul, I can’t be sure. I find it fascinating seeing these massive occupations through civilian eyes, which is the only way I see them since I deplore the notion of embedding. I had the same experience in Kabul recently when I saw MRAPs plowing through Shahr-e-Naw, snarling traffic for miles. After we left dry, trash strewn, suicide bombed Ninewa, we enter the rainy, rolling hills of Duhok with it’s freshly paved roads, trash collection and undulating calm. It was as if Mosul was a world away.

A Rhino Runner bus parked quietly on the Turkish-Iraqi border. Note the Turkish license plate. Was this the one that brought Saddam Huseein to the gallows or a khaki-booted Don Rumsfeld on a tour of the Green Zone? ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

Erbil, Iraq- I have a piece in today’s Asia Times about the Change movement and the state of Kurdistani politics that can be read here.

Erbil, Iraq-Still waiting for some contacts to come through on this next story, won’t/can’t announce what it is just yet…just keeping my fingers crossed.