Iraq also faced renewal of the gravest military struggle in its history. Last week George Bush said that Saddam’s use of gunships in a combat role violated the terms of the three-week-old temporary cease-fire. It would be impossible for the United States to withdraw from Iraqi soil under such circumstances, he said, and warned the dictator: “Don’t do it.” Then Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of Operation Desert Storm, followed up. In a letter to the ruling Revolutionary Command Council in Baghdad, he implicitly threatened to shoot down any Iraqi fixed-wing aircraft found in flight and increased allied air patrols over areas affected by the rebellion. “It may be their country,” said a senior Bush aide, “but we control the airspace.” It was clear that Washington had placed limits on what Saddam could do to stay in power: a resort to chemical weapons against insurgents would surely provoke a U.S. military response, for example. Bush still hoped for a coup that would keep Iraq from spinning into anarchy. And he meant the American presence to provide some psychological impetus in that direction.
Saddam’s downfall seemed closer than ever. In his first televised speech since Feb. 26, he claimed on Saturday to have crushed the uprising in Shiite areas in the south (map) “with God’s aid.” (Saddam and most leaders of the ruling Baath Party are Sunni Muslims.) He warned Kurds he will soon put down their revolt, too. It won’t be easy. Support for the uprising “is coming out of the woodwork all over the Middle East,” said one U.S. intelligence official. “There’s never been such a moment of liberation in living memory,” exulted Kendal Nezan, head of the Kurdish Institute in Paris. “It’s as if the Jewish ghettos in Nazi Germany had rebelled and the movement had taken over the countryside.”
The Front of Iraqi Kurdistan, a coalition of Kurdish parties, claimed by the weekend to hold 95 percent of northern Iraq, a mountainous region the size of Hungary that is home to more than 3 million Kurds, almost a fifth of the country’s population. Rebels controlled the entire Iranian and Turkish frontiers and were besieging Kirkuk, a major oil center. Rebel leaders said the Iraqis had brought 5,000 Kurdish women and children to Kirkuk as hostages. They vowed to press the attack. Intelligence officials confirmed that Saddam had lost control of much of the region.
Although it started with riots, the Kurdish uprising relies on a battle-tested organization. Since the British denied them their own state in the aftermath of World War I, the Kurds have risen against Baghdad an average of once a decade. Saddam kept them down only by exiling tens of thousands and interning others in squalid camps; in 1988 he used poison gas against them. By January, thousands of fighters returned from bases in Kurdish Iran, Syria and Turkey, prepared to maintain order and to strike should Saddam falter. But the most powerful guerrilla commander, Masoud Barzani, said he would not open a second front against Saddam for fear that the Iraqis would punish civilians, using chemical weapons. If he doubted Bush’s promise to confront Saddam, that was understandable. During the early 1970s, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger promised the Kurds covert U.S. and Iranian support if they fought Iraq. The support was withdrawn when the shah won a border settlement from Iraq in 1975, and tens of thousands of Kurds were forced to flee.
A policy reversal in Turkey boosted the uprising. “The news is good, unprecedented,” said Nezan. “Turkey has officially recognized the Kurdish community for the first time.” Turkey has fought Kurdish insurgents on its own territory for eight years. But on Feb. 25, President Turgut Ozal sent an emissary to London to meet with representatives of the Iraqi Kurds, NEWSWEEK learned. Ozal’s representatives told the Kurds, “We are Sunnis, non-Arab and democratic, so we are a better bet for you than the Iranians,” according to one source familiar with the talks. Representatives of the two top Kurdish guerrilla groups flew to Ankara on March 8 for talks with senior Turkish Foreign Ministry and intelligence officials. Ozal created an uproar in Turkey by revealing the Ankara meeting last week. “Everybody, the Americans, the British, the French, all are talking to them,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we?”
Residents of Kurdish internment camps already had begun to overrun local police posts after hearing radio reports of the uprising in the south. “The urban population then joined them and attacked military posts around the cities,” said Nezan. Kurdish guerrillas entered the battle, and thousands of local Iraqi militiamen overthrew their officers and crossed to the rebels, bringing large numbers of weapons, Nezan said. He said Iranian Kurds are bringing food and supplies into the region, which contains about a third of the nation’s oil reserves. U.S. intelligence satellites last week spotted Army and Republican Guard units moving north to quell the rebellion. Squads of French-built helicopters were attacking with rockets, napalm and incendiary bombs, the rebels said. But, says Nezan, “with 150,000 men in arms, the tanks and weapons seized from the Army and the support of the population, unless [the Iraqis] use chemical weapons against which the Kurds have no protection at all, they can hold out. For months, or perhaps more than a year.”
The Shiite revolt in the south is far less well organized, in spite of support from Iran, including the infiltration of Revolutionary Guard units. Cities along the lower Euphrates River have been ravaged by savage and chaotic battles since March 3. All now are without food, water and electricity; disease is rampant. Shiite fundamentalists first freed prisoners, then slaughtered government officials and suspected collaborators. In al-Nasiriya, they hanged the mayor in the town square after gouging out his eyes and cutting off his nose, said a refugee who reached the U.S. checkpoint in Safwan last week. Some retreating Iraqi Army units attacked government buildings, then joined the revolt. “There was no [rebel] organization at all,” said an American soldier based near al-Nasiriya.
Loyalist Iraqi units retaliated with tanks, artillery and helicopter attacks, indiscriminately blasting civilian areas. “The tanks fired on the houses randomly,” said Muhsen Khamas, a 53-year-old shopkeeper who fled to Iran last week. Kazwan Fiyasser Kasaf, a teenager who fled from al-Amara to a refugee camp in the Iranian border town of Bostan, said Saddam’s forces “burned young people with gasoline and threw women from the top of the bridge.” U.S. intelligence officials last week said they had reports of rebel areas hit with artillery rounds and short-range FROG-7 missiles loaded with white phosphorus. Normally used to mark military positions, it causes severe burns. Iraqi helicopters also dropped tear gas.
The Shiite rebels were not winning, but they have brought chaos to the region. Opposition officials in Teheran said Saddam’s forces often control Basra, the regional capital, during the day, only to lose it at night. The boom of shellfire in Basra still could be heard late last week in the Iranian City of Khorramshahr. Stretched to the limit, Iraqi commanders are forced to leapfrog their forces from one trouble spot to another without being able to hold onto their gains. “You work on it over here, and then you go over here to work on another problem and it comes back up in the place that you left,” said Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams. A rebel group claimed last week to have taken Hilla, a regional capital 60 miles south of Baghdad. “Everything may be finished in one week, if not less,” said a spokesman for the Teheran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution. A more sober assessment came from a senior Middle Eastern diplomat in Riyadh: “The resistance says the people are rebelling. Saddam says the uprisings are being quashed. I’m afraid they both may be right.”
By deploying helicopters against the rebels, Saddam left himself open to Bush’s new threat. That was only the latest in a long string of tactical blunders. But administration officials recoiled at the thought that American forces might follow up with military operations should Saddam call his bluff. For one thing, any rebel group installed with U.S. military backing would instantly be suspect. “This is just a reminder to Saddam that we’re in a position to do anything we want to do, and he should proceed very cautiously,” said a senior Bush administration official.
Bush’s move positioned the United States to gain influence with whoever inherits power from Saddam. Even if he falls in a military or Baath Party coup, as Washington hopes, the Kurds and Shiites are likely to grow in stature. Saddam himself conceded as much Saturday by promising a new constitution and parliament. Kurdish leaders already are planning a parliamentary system that would grant them control of their homeland and a share in government equal to their population. So are the rest of the 20-odd dissident organizations that met last week in Beirut under Syrian protection; they planned to reconvene in Saudi Arabia next month. “These things are possible now,” said Nezan. And if Saddam survives? The human cost will be huge. At least the United States will not be accused of standing by idly.
