Hunting Down Saddam by Robin Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

was the price he paid for wanting freedom and autonomy for his people. There was a brief amnesty period, where the Iraqi government was to treat the Kurds like “ordinary citizens,” but brief it was. Rumors abounded that it had been a ploy to gather intelligence on, and identify, Kurdish leaders who were then swept up and tortured.
    The goal of the “Arabization” Project was to concentrate the Kurds into several large population centers. Saddam’s regime had destroyed over a thousand villages in the Chamchamal sector alone. The usual method was for the Iraqi government to move all of the people out of their homes before bulldozing them to the ground. Nothing was left of the villages. Once a sector was razed and “cleared,” anyone caught back in the area of his or her village was immediately killed. With the Kurds concentrated in certain spots, they could be “killed wholesale.”
    The stories of torture and murder reminded the Green Berets of the genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. This included the infamous poison gas/chemical warfare attacks on entire populations, which were an experiment in the killing effectiveness versus the effort which Saddam’s forces wanted or needed to expend. The Kurds were so spooked by their experiences with gas attacks that any white smoke or dust caused them to panic. Lining up the Kurds in front of trenches and shooting them, or telling the Kurds to get into the trenches first, before shooting them, was also a common story. Later, when Kirkuk itself was liberated, one Green Beret described the city as being filled with mass graves.
    â€œEverywhere you went, you were tripping over a mass grave,” he said. The Kurds told the Special Forces that the toll stood at over 250,000 of their people killed by Saddam. At first, the operators thought that number might be inflated, but after seeing the mass graves firsthand, it was easy to agree.
    In 1991, after Saddam had beaten down the Kurdish people through “Arabization,” no-man’s-land zones were put up between the Kurdish autonomous zones and the borders of the Iraqi regime.
    The chance that the Kurds might seek vengeance was a real cause for concern with the Green Berets, so they explained that the United States, and its laws of warfare, did not permit or tolerate such atrocities. The Kurds agreed. On the whole, they did not want to sink to Saddam’s level, no matter how terribly they themselves had been treated.
    The more the newly arrived Green Berets learned of the Kurdish mind-set and their chief political party in that sector, the PUK, the more they understood. They wanted to take part in anything that was different from the Iraqi regime, and tolerated many different Islamic groups, Socialist groups, labor groups, and myriad others. With all of these parties, it wasn’t a true democracy—everybody had a gun, and many ruled by force, but it was as close as they could get. One operator reasoned that perhaps this haphazard governance was why extreme groups like the Ansar al-Islam flourished.
    But the PUK had an enemy in Ansar as well, because of the Ansar’s desire to get control over the area away from Jalal Talabani, so that they could operate without restrictions as a terrorist base in the region. The PUK had frowned on it, but had done nothing to stop them. Soon, there were car bombs exploding around As-Sulaymaniyah, and Katucha rocket attacks by the Ansar on likely PUK locations. The Ansar would be dealt with severely in less than a week—it would be called Operation VIKING HAMMER and the story is told in this book.
    The Kurds of Chamchamal respected the Green Berets immensely once the initial rapport was established. The older Peshmerga chastised the younger fighters by telling them that the Americans came from halfway around the world to fight their fight for them, so they had better be very brave in their presence. Also, they knew the high premium on American