There were two major political factions among the Kurds. One was the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), under the leadership of Masoud Barzani (the son of a legendary resistance fighter), and the other was the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) under Jalal Talabani, who had broken away from Barzani’s group to form his own faction. Each faction had a tribal, political, and geographical base (the KDP—the stronger of the two—had power in the west, while the PUK had power in the east).47 Each had its own militia; and each had been contending with the other—sometimes violently—for years. They did, however, cooperate during Operation Provide Comfort.
The Kurdish fighters (the militias of each faction) were called “Peshmerga,” which meant “those who face death.” They were tough, battle-hardened guerrilla fighters who’d proved more than a match for Saddam’s soldiers, man for man, but had been no match for the artillery barrages, air attacks, and gas attacks they’d been subjected to during their many years of resisting Saddam.
We also found others in the camps, including Turcomans, Assyrian Christians, Chaldeans, and Arab Iraqis . . . all fleeing Saddam’s brutal regime. Some were defectors from his own government and personal staff.
DURING THE first week, we were really scrambling. Potter and his Green Berets on the ground were taking an assessment of what had to be done in the camps. We were working to connect with the Turks. NGOs were trying to get in with medical supplies; and the UN had also started to move in some teams. We had to set up procedures for working with both of them. All the while, we were setting up the civil-military operations center. But by the end of the week, we had managed to put all this together and were functioning adequately.
As we were working to stabilize the people in the hills, General Galvin and others were soliciting NATO and international support. Soon we were getting offers of medical, transportation, and combat units.
From April to June, we delivered seventeen thousand tons of supplies to the camps, while Dick Potter’s guys took control of the chaos. They organized the camps and ended the “survival of the fittest” atmosphere.
As time went on, we began to realize that the airdrops were not the most efficient way to deliver supplies to the camps. The airdrops quickly provided emergency supplies to the most remote areas; but they were highly inefficient, and very expensive. Bundles ended up all over the hillsides; and then we couldn’t control the distribution once they were on the ground.
We knew we had to shift increasingly to helo delivery and eventually ground transportation. But that was easier to talk about than to do. The road networks up in the mountains were ghastly. There’d already been serious accidents that had cost us some people. So before we could switch from air to ground, we had to improve the mountain roads and consolidate the refugees in more accessible locations.
Toward the end of April, Ambassador Abramowitz advised us to contract for Turkish food, tents, and transportation. This was wise advice. The change reduced costs by four-fifths—a huge saving. Turkish food was more in line with the refugees’ normal diet (they didn’t like the relatively expensive MREs we’d been giving them). Instead of the military tents we’d been forced to use in the camps (also expensive, and we never had nearly enough of them), we were able to contract with Turk tentmakers who took tarpaulins and other ready-to-hand materials and turned them cheaply into usable shelters. Several thousand Turkish truckers, who’d been put out of work because of the sanctions against Iraq (most drove oil tanker trucks), took the big oil tanks off their frames, turned them into open-bed rigs, and went back to doing what they did best—navigate the tricky and dangerous mountain roads. They moved the food and supplies into the mountains. All of this gave a big boost to the Turkish economy—badly hurt by the cutoff of trade with Iraq—which encouraged Turkish support for all of our programs.
The embassy sent us an excellent liaison team headed by Marc Grossman, the Deputy Chief of Mission. Their excellent advice and close coordination were invaluable.
AS WINTER turned to spring and the snows melted, our problems did not ease. Though we had supplied the refugees with food and shelter, the summer temperatures of up to 120 degrees in these locations would bring diseases and water shortages. The weak and traumatized refugee population—crammed into small areas, drinking, bathing, urinating, and defecating into an already contaminated water supply—was very susceptible to disease. And, sure enough, we began to see cholera, dysentery, and other communicable diseases.48
Some of the Kurds from the towns didn’t have a clue about basic sanitary procedures, such as: You don’t crap upstream and then draw your drinking water downstream. The Special Forces troops saved thousands of lives simply by educating people about adhering to proper sanitary conditions.
The end of the snow cover also meant the end of most of our water supplies. It was clear that we would soon have no water in the hills—a truly dangerous situation. There was only one solution to both the disease and the water problems: We had to move the refugees down from the mountains. We couldn’t keep them up there. Since it was clear that they weren’t going to be allowed to move farther north into Turkey, there was only one direction we could safely take them—south.
The initial plan we worked out with General McCarthy was to make an incursion into a valley in northern Iraq and set up huge refugee camps there.
By that time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had set up a liaison office with our JTF. Because they are used to dealing with refugees, they proved to be enormously helpful. Right away, they tossed cold water on the idea of creating refugee camps. “Don’t build them,” they warned. “They become miserable, and you’ll be running them for years. These people have to go home.
“If you have to make camps, make them austere. They should only serve as transient facilities.”
Since Washington was not ready to make the political decision to take over northern Iraq, we began to establish a few camps as an interim measure as we worked on plans for a more permanent solution.
After centuries of oppression, the Kurds had learned how to be tough survivors and to keep stoic through their suffering. But, fearing Saddam, they refused to leave the apparent safety of the Turkish border and go down to the new camps. We took videos and showed the Kurdish leaders how they’d have greatly improved quality of life and security in our new camps. They still balked.
But after much persuasion, we convinced them to send a delegation down to check out what we were building.
They didn’t like what they saw: We were building the camps like military camps, with everything lined up in lines, grids, and squares. “We can’t live like that,” they said. Their communities had a very different kind of structure from our “straight line” military alignment. “We build our communities around clusters of cul-de-sacs. We like to have several families facing inward.”
They then insisted on redesigning the camps, to make them more reflect their community structure, and on actually taking part in their construction. This was a good idea. It not only gave them the kind of environment they were comfortable with, it let them buy into the whole process. At the same time, it made us realize that the UN was right about the camps. They weren’t going to work as a long-term solution.
So then we thought, “Okay, we’ll stretch out a little bit more and take part of northern Iraq. At least we can get some people into camps and others into their villages.”
In several stages, we took the northern part of the Kurdish areas, stretching to the provincial capital of Dohuk (sixty kilometers south of the Turkish border) and out toward Iran. (There were thousands of Kurdish refugees across the border in Iran, whom the Iranians were taking care of. These refugees also wanted to come back home.)
But the UN was persistent: “If you’re going to get a little bit pregnant, get all the way pregnant. Take them all home.”
They were right again; and we made an assessment of what it would take to move them there.
ONCE THE decision was made to enter Iraq, we knew we wo
uld need additional forces. We also had to expand our own organization in order to control these new forces and coordinate our operations with those of the UN, the NGOs, the aid and security forces from other nations, and the agencies of our own government that had joined the humanitarian relief effort.
The JTF became a CTF (Combined Task Force), with the inclusion of forces from twelve other nations (including Great Britain, France, Spain, and Italy). Lieutenant General John Shalikashvilli (General Saint’s deputy at USAREUR, and, later, as a four-star general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) was sent to command the CTF; Jim Jamerson became the deputy commander; and I moved to chief of staff. Shali (as everyone calls him) had the command until June. Then Jim and I resumed our original billets.
A subordinate JTF (JTF Alpha) under Dick Potter’s command was responsible for the refugees in the mountain camps and getting them back into Iraq. Another JTF (JTF Bravo) was formed under Major General Jay Garner, U.S. Army, to enter Iraq and secure the Security Zones we were establishing. The Air Forces component was under the command of Brigadier General Jim Hobson. A Civil Affairs Command was formed under Brigadier General Don Campbell; and a Combined Support Command (CSC) for logistics under Army Brigadier Hal Burch. We also put in place a Military Coordination Center (MCC) under Army Colonel Dick Nabb, to work coordination with the Kurds and the Iraqis. There was a DART (Disaster Assistance Response Team) team led by Dayton Maxwell,49 and over sixty NGOs and PVOs (Private Volunteer Organizations) were also working with us.
The allied contributions to Provide Comfort were significant. The French, under the command of Major General Maurice LePage, a superb French Marine paratrooper, provided mobile combat teams that cleared the routes from the mountain camps back down into Iraq. The Royal Marines, under General Robin Ross, whose units had just returned from Northern Ireland, provided an excellent force for initial entry into the cities in the Security Zone. The Italians, under Lieutenant General Mario Buscemi, provided elaborate hospitals. The large brigades contributed by the French, British, Italians, and Spanish allowed us to give them each a sector of the Security Zone. General Shali ran this coalition brilliantly, with few (if any) written agreements.
We pieced together this highly nontraditional, ever-evolving organization on the go. Though some of its components were first-time structures, they met the task. Even so, these strange new structures bothered many older officers. This made me come to realize that nontraditional operations like ours were best handled by younger, more innovative officers who could think outside the traditional and rigid wartime doctrine with which the older officers had grown up.
General Shalikashvilli, a highly intelligent and capable senior officer and a real internationalist, was extremely effective dealing with the Iraqis and the thirteen-nation coalition. I learned a lot from watching him do that kind of business—persuading people, coordinating at that level. But when it came to the technical, tactical, and operational side of things we were trying to put in place, he was very traditional. He liked to follow standard Army doctrine.
For example, when we were looking at how to handle the Security Zones in Iraq, I said, “We’ll create a joint task force, we’ll stick it out front, with Jay Garner and Dick Potter in charge.”
“No, wait a minute,” he protested. “You’re going to put a joint task force under a joint task force? Is that doctrinally correct?”
“General Shalikashvilli,” I said, “who gives a shit? It’ll work. We should not worry about doctrine here.”
And when we started to change the refugees’ transition camps to reflect the Kurds’ cultural needs, he was skeptical. “What’s wrong with the way we built them?” he laughed. . . . In time, he came to accept the need for cultural sensitivity (which I thought was essential; we constantly emphasized this in our briefs); but I felt he didn’t think it was really all that important.
OUR AREA of operations was roughly the size of Kansas, encompassing 83,000 square miles of rugged mountainous territory, with little infrastructure. The biggest challenge after the initial crisis was to establish a logistics distribution system in this austere and rugged environment. The transportation system was frail, it was austere; the road networks were extremely limited.
Normally, the services provide logistics support to their own service components, while each nation similarly provides their own logistics to their own components. That’s an okay system under normal circumstance. But it did not reflect the realities we faced—an omnium-gatherum of nations, services, and agencies all trying to force their stuff through the fragile infrastructure, all at the same time. We had major humanitarian and military demands on the distribution system (besides our military supplies and equipment, we were handling relief supplies contributed by over thirty nations), and nobody was pulling it together. We had no central management, no prioritization, and very thin security. It was like forcing a gallon of water through a soda straw.
We could see right away that we needed to put in place a centrally designed distribution system, with forward staging bases and interim bases, where we could build up stocks of supplies which everybody could draw from.
The component commanders—Garner and Potter—fought this; each wanted to run his own logistics support. I had constant battles over this issue with them, two of my closest friends. They were shouting at me and I was shouting at them. “Don’t mess with our logistics,” they kept telling Shali. “We’re running our own show. We need our own stuff here.”
From the other direction, our logisticians were begging me to convince General Shali to form a Combined Support Command. But when I told him the logistics were going to break, and we were going to see a real disaster, he was reluctant to change the book-dictated system.
Finally, when it was totally obvious that it was either change or endure the world’s most embarrassing traffic jam, he made the decision to set up the CSC.
We opened small Humanitarian Service Support Bases (HSSB) in a “hub and spoke” system that let us stretch our reach well into Iraq. We brought down Army Brigadier Hal Burch (a USAREUR logistics commander), and he set it up.
OUR UNORTHODOX command structures eventually caught the attention of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. During a visit in May, Colin Powell, who is a very quick study, was initially impressed with how well the operation was going, but wasn’t clear how we had it all organized. The easiest way to explain that was to show him our organizational chart. . . . The chart was of course as weird as our organization; but we had done what we could to draw the lines and links and labels according to the proper doctrinal procedures. So we had lines for “Operational Control” and for “Tactical Control” and so on. Of course, when Powell looked at the chart, he saw right through it. “Is this for real?” he asked. “Tell me the truth. What kind of control do you really have here? What are your real lines of authority? Is it Operational Control?”
“Sir,” I told him, “what we really do is HAND CON (Handshake Control). We work out our problems on the fly and shake hands on the deals. We don’t have time to do anything else.”
He laughed. He loved that. It became one of General Powell’s favorite stories.
OUR RELATIONSHIP with the Iraqis was predictably tricky. Though the war was obviously over, the Iraqi forces in the north still presented a problem. Unlike units in the south, they had not experienced combat with superior American and Coalition power; and they were not as cowed. Later, after several units from southern Iraq were moved north, we used to watch with fascination how the southern and the northern Iraqi units reacted when our planes flew over their positions. Those who had faced us in the south during the war waved nervously and looked for cover, while the northern troops were more frequently defiant, and once in a while even fired at our planes.
The Military Coordination Center was set up to maintain contact with the Iraqi military; and an Iraqi, Brigadier General Nashwan Danoon, was assigned as our point of contact.50 For more important meetings with General Shali, the Iraqis sen
t a Lieutenant General Saber from Baghdad.
As we moved the refugees back to their homes in the south, we increased the size of the Security Zone and demanded the Iraqi military pull back. They were—unsurprisingly—reluctant to do that; and on several occasions we had to threaten them. A show of force always brought compliance (we had in all sixteen incidents of hostile fire with the Iraqis51).
Eventually, we decided to create a zone that allowed all 500,000 of the Kurds to return home . . . and we also decided to help them repair their homes and make them livable. We not only repaired much of the damage to the areas evacuated by the fleeing population, we provided services and utilities to forty-one communities until their local services could be reestablished.
At this point, we realized that wasn’t going to be enough. We just couldn’t leave them on their own. We had to make sure the Iraqis didn’t return once we pulled out.
To emphasize that point, the Iraqis massed seventeen divisions on the borders of the Security Zone we had formed. These divisions were there to block further expansion and to seal off the zone . . . and to convey a threatening posture toward the Kurds. As a result, we established what was called “the Green Line” as the border of the Security Zone. None of the Iraqis were allowed to pass it. Our air cover in the no-fly zone (which was larger than the Security Zone) further ensured the good behavior of the Iraqi military.
The process of moving the refugees and managing the Iraqis went through several stages. In the beginning, we agreed to allow the Iraqis a police presence in the Security Zone; but it quickly became clear that idea was a non-starter. The Iraqis’ idea of a “police presence” was the Mukhabarat—their secret police.
The Kurds were dead set against any Iraqi government presence, and the Peshmerga set about eliminating it the old-fashioned way—by killing the Mukhabarat and other Iraqi officials. Eventually, all Iraqi government presence was removed from the Security Zone.