The War Diaries

Antakya- I’m sitting here typing in a dark, musty hotel room at 5am in the Levant. Hatay to be exact. Hatay may very well be a part of the Turkish Republic but it is also a little talked about corner of the greater Levant.  Sometimes journalism is like what they say about war: lots and lots of waiting around doing nothing punctuated by extreme adrenalin rushes. I arrived in Antakya today which was blanketed in fresh snowfall. As the light went descended below the surrounding peaks, a bone chilling cold set in. Thanks to a contact I made on Lightstalkers, I met with a translator whose office happened to be directly across the street from my hotel. He told me that whatever I am trying to do here will not be easy. The local authorities from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs do their best to keep the Free Syrian Army on a tight leash.

I’m waiting to hear from a contact in the Syrian National Council to try and circumvent some of these restrictions. So for now I wait. The border is lined with tanks and snipers watching for anyone crossing in or out of Syria. In some stories that came out in 2011, some of the then newly arrived refugees claimed the snipers were Irani (Iranian), perhaps meaning they were on loan from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As anyone reading this blog might now, Tehran is terrified of losing their air bridge to Hezbollah in South Lebanon and the Bekaa. Syria is the air to land conduit for Iranian weapons and materiel to reach their proxies in the Israeli border. And Hezbollah needs Iran to act as a lever over the Syrians. And the Israelis need the entirely untenable status quo to remain in Syria for the time being for their storm clouds to appropriately gather over Netanz etc.

The transformation of Syria into some kind of a representative state which would mean being governed by its Sunni demographic majority is much too much for all of the regional players save for possibly Ankara. One of the key issues in this region is that everyone is too used to the status quo. Addicted to the status quo is probably more accurate. And that goes for Western analysts from 1967 onward as well. Syria is trying to jump out of the box it has been stuck in since 1970 when Hafez al-Assad came to power.

But the sand is running through the hour glass for the Assad regime. Sure it is still clinging to power and may do so for some time to come, but this is not 1982 Hama. Too much blood has been spilled and this time the revolution is being televised on Youtube. The MB in Hama thirty years ago had no such outlet for that massive crime against humanity that left one of Syria’s principal cities in ruins and sent MB members fleeing to distant corners of the Arab world to escape the Assad family’s wrath. Hafez al-Assad crushed their revolt and that was essentially the end of it…until now.

In short, it is a complicated mess here. A Sykes-Picot nightmare. Better than sitting in New York though…

Los Angeles- The AfPak Channel has an incredible photo essay that Messr. Mohammed Qayoumi, president of Cal State East Bay, gave them after he scanned a 1950′s era image book published by the Afghan Ministry of Planning in the now relatively very quaint days of the Zahir Shah monarchy’s Cold War zenith. Obviously the book is strictly representative of Kabul in that era though one must know that modernization was the order of the day in neighboring Iran under the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and to a lesser degree under the dizzying, revolving door of Pakistani regimes of PM’s Khawaja Nazimuddin, Mohammed Ali Bogra, Chaudhry Muhammad Ali, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Ibrahim Ismail Chundrigar and Ayub Khan to Afghanistan’s east and south when pro-Western foreign and domestic policies were in vogue throughout the post-colonial realm. Afghanistan, which had virtually no imperialistic baggage to shed, was attempting to move forward wedged, as always, betwixt and between “great” powers of the twentieth century. These so-called great powers of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, and Eisenhower Doctrine-era America among others, saw Afghanistan as a barren polo ground where Cold War manoeuvring was in play. “What an unlucky country.”

Los Angeles- The May issue of MLM is out. Worked hard on this one. Enjoy! If you’re not already enjoying, subscribe! 

New York- The new issue of Militant Leadership Monitor is online over at the Jamestown site. In our 2nd issue, I have another article on a recently killed Abu Sayyaf leader named Albader Parad who was recently taken down in a firefight in Jolo with Philippine marines. The death of Parad may yield the eventual decline of the ASG and could be significant to the future of U.S. involvement in the southern Philippines.

Other articles in this issue include:

• A profile of AQAP leader Said al-Shihri by Murad Batal al-Shishani

• A profile of AQIM leader Abedelmalek Droukdel by Camille Tawil

• A profile of radical Jamaican cleric Sheikh al-Faisal by Chris Zambelis

• Briefs by me on the capture by Iran of Jundullah leader Abdolmalek Rigi and capture by Pakistan of Afghan Taleban leader Mullah Abdul Salam

Subscribe to Militant Leadership Monitor

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

I dug up and scanned this picture from exactly a decade ago. As a youthful stunt, I scrawled “God Bless America” on a t-shirt and ran in front of the “Den of Spies” aka the former American embassy in Tehran. I handed the cab driver a tiny point-and-shoot camera and he took my picture from across the street. I’m obviously too far away to read the shirt but you can still see the old U.S. government seal over my shoulder. The taxi driver was freaked out at the idea of being caught but when we sped away he thought it was funny that I got away with it. I was in Tehran a few weeks after the student uprising of July 1999 and the whole city was on edge. I tipped him an extra 10,000 Rials for his trouble. Ahh the Clinton years were fun weren’t they? Too bad Bubba and Khatami never did have their “Dialogue of Civilizations.” Today is the 10th anniversary of the five-day long uprising that rocked Tehran and spread to other cities after the closure of a pro-reform newspaper. When I visited Iran a few weeks later, virtually no one spoke of the government’s horrendous repression and business seemed to be going on as usual in the bazaars and mosques during my stay. 

Me standing in front of the "Den of Spies". ©1999 by Iranian Taxi driver

Ten years later, I still have the shirt somehow. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

Keep that momentous pixelated video coming!

I posted a piece addressed to Ayatollah Khamenei last night on the HP here. 

According to the Guardian, during the called-for day of mourning, protests are not letting up from Kurdistan to Baluchistan and Ahmadinejad has not been spotted since Monday’s meeting of the the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Yekaterinberg. Today, the arm and headbands morphed from green to black in memory of those killed in the demo’s thus far. The democracy movement now appears to have gained enough momentum that real change may be afoot. It is up to the strength of the masses of the people at this point. Obama has not and really does not have a place to interject in Iran’s internal dynamics. People in the East have a long memory and if Baghdadis can bitterly compare the American sacking of Saddam Hussein to Hulagu Khan’s destruction of the libraries of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, then certainly Iranians will recall Operation Ajax just fifty-six years ago.