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Iraq: US
running with the enemy
By Nir Rosen
BAGHDAD - The US Central Intelligence Agency
used former members of Saddam Hussein's government to
induce regime elements to defect in the prelude to
Operation Iraqi Freedom. This has emerged from the
admission of two key collaborators with the CIA. One of
the men is Faris Sulayvani, who was the commander of the
Fursan, the all-Kurdish militia numbering up to 200,000
that fought with Saddam against pro-independence Kurds
and in the 1991 first Gulf War against the United States
as well.
Sulayvani, who is the leader of his
50,000-strong tribe of Kurds, is related to Saddam
through marriage. He worked for Iraqi military
intelligence and was also involved in business, securing
contracts thanks to his close association with the
regime. In 1994 he had a falling-out with the minister
of defense, Ali Hassan Majid, commonly known as Chemical
Ali, and he fled with his family to Turkey, then Ukraine
and Germany, finally arriving in the United States in
1998, where he was immediately debriefed by the CIA in a
series of 20 meetings. These meetings culminated in
Sulayvani being dispatched to Syria, where he met with
tribal, military and security officials from Iraq.
Unbeknown to the Syrian government, the Iraqis
Sulayvani met included Taleb Abdel Jabbar, who was head
of security in northern Iraq, Liwa Yasin Saleh Jaheishi,
who was head of security for Tikrit, and Muhamad Majid,
a high-level General Security Department official. He
also induced friend and ally Arshad Zebari to meet him
in Damascus and return to Iraq, where Zebari persuaded
the Kurdish Surchi tribe and the northern Sunni Arab
Shammar tribe to defect. Additionally, in Germany and
the Netherlands, Sulayvani met with other leaders of
tribes, such as the Muzuris.
The officials
Sulayvani met in Syria without that government's
awareness were cautious. "They said, 'We are afraid the
US will betray us like they did in 1991,'" he said,
referring to the US call for an Iraqi uprising and
subsequent refusal to assist it, "'but we'll work with
you.'" He added that the officials he induced to abandon
Saddam "helped in the fall of Mosul and Kirkuk", the
north's biggest cities.
The other collaborator
was Arshad Zebari, who had been a minister in Saddam's
government for more than two decades. His roles included
security positions and governorship of the northern city
of Sulaimaniya. Most controversial, however, is his
participation in the Anfal campaign of 1988. This
military operation, in which Sulayvani's troops also
took part, was led by Chemical Ali, and it was here that
he earned his nickname for his use of chemical weapons
to punish Kurds for rebelling against Saddam's
government. Tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians died
in what a United Nations report called genocide because
of the systematic attempt to wipe out entire Kurdish
villages and a way of life.
Sulayvani
established the Iraqi National Front in 2002, an exile
political party that was recognized by President George
W Bush in September of that year as eligible to receive
US government funds. Late last year he volunteered for
the Free Iraqi Forces (FIF), the exile Iraqi militia
that the US army trained on a base in Hungary for three
months. Sulayvani returned to Iraq with US troops and
another controversial member of the FIF named Galub
Baradosti, who had also been a member of the Fursan.
Their presence angered many FIF members who had joined
idealistically to battle the regime that Sulayvani and
Baradosti had until recently supported.
Zebari's
name appears on an August 8 US Department of the
Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control list of
specially designated nationals and blocked persons just
below the name of al-Qaeda's Ayman al Zawahiri. Zebari,
who in 1987 destroyed the village of Barzan, home to the
Barzani tribe that dominates the Kurdish Democratic
Party, receives protection from the CIA, and carries a
card identifying him as a "friend of the United States
of America" who is entitled to free travel, as well as
armed security. "We are against Barzani," he explained
from his home in Mosul. Zebari admired Saddam's
intelligence until 1990, "then the man changed", he
said. "After 1991 he isolated himself from the people of
Iraq. Saddam's advisers told him what he wanted to
hear."
Anonymous US security officials in Iraq
justify the anomaly of Zebari being both listed and
courted by the US by explaining that only former regime
members had the knowledge and contacts that could be
useful to the CIA in its attempt to seduce supporters of
Saddam away from his regime. The CIA initially supported
Ahmad Chalabi, but allegations of financial
irregularities and Chalabi's 50-year absence from Iraq
drove the US intelligence agency to find more recent
exiles, such as Ayad Alawi, a former high-ranking
Ba'athist and leader of the Iraqi National Accord, as
well as former Iraqi chief of staff General Nizar
Khazraji, who was exiled in Denmark and under
investigation for war crimes thanks to his participation
in the 1987 gassing of Halabja that cost more than 5,000
lives during the Anfal campaign.
The risks of
such association, however, are that it may drive the
already anxious Kurdish leadership farther away from
Iraq and the US effort, since the majority of Kurds
still hope for independence and may resent the presence
of those who fought against them on the list of US
government friends.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
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