On August 7, President Obama reluctantly authorized the use of force in Iraq. He said it was to protect U.S. personnel and the Yazidis under attack from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Obama’s return of U.S. forces to Kurdish Iraq was part of a massive lobbying effort by a series of high ranking former U.S. military officers and diplomats on the Kurds’ payroll. Like the generals and admirals who took to the airwaves to promote George Bush’s Iraq war, a similar cast of characters is urging U.S. support for the Kurds.
General James Jones
The two main Kurdish political families, the Barzanis and the Talabanis, received millions of dollars a month from American taxpayers through their political parties on their rise to power. They shared the wealth with their American benefactors. One of the most blatant conflicts of interest is Obama’s former National Security Adviser, James Jones.
The Kurdish fighting force, the peshmerga, was nothing short of amazing against Saddam Hussein. But over the past decade they grew old and prosperous. A lesser, hollowed out force replaced them. Only U.S. military help kept the Kurds from being overrun. The Kurds control massive oil holdings in the Kurdish region of Iraq. The money made by the Kurdish leadership has gone into building mansions, office buildings, infrastructure, airports, and businesses – and to many Americans. That is why so many former military, intelligence and diplomatic officers urge U.S. support for the Kurds. The American people have few honest brokers when it comes to their former leaders.
Daniel Pearl
When Islamic terrorists beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, Americans were learning about the alleged mastermind of his murder, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and the new prison opening at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As the years passed, prisoners in orange jumpsuits and beheadings became part of our consciousness. When President Obama tried to extricate the United States military from Iraq and limit U.S. involvement in Syria, it was already clear his efforts would fail. The failure was inevitable because, like the financial system’s “too big to fail,” none of the root problems had been addressed and fixed. When a representative of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria murdered journalist James Foley last week, he basically declared war on the United States and President Obama responded in turn.
ISIS is not an independent entity created out of whole cloth as a result of the war in Syria. Many of these Islamic extremists faded into the Sunni tribes in Iraq during the vaunted surge. Paying off Sunni sheiks allowed the United States to exit the war we started without the embarrassing chaos like the one at the end of the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, payments from wealthy, hardline sheiks from our Gulf state allies – including Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia – not only continued to fund Islamic extremists, they also held back from the United States intelligence on their activities which had been ramped up in Syria and Lebanon as well as Iraq as far back as 2006.
By 2008 it was clear that the number of Islamic radicals in Iraq was growing proportional to the increasing influence of Iran. The Gulf princes who fund radical Islam – largely under the direction of the most extreme Saudis – began playing games in Lebanon, particularly Tripoli, and Syria, and the region surrounding Tikrit in Iraq. When it came to the real issue of terrorist financing, in 2009, the Obama administration did not go where the facts had been pointing for years and – like the Clinton and Bush administrations – it failed to hold these countries accountable.
Cullinan Diamond Mine, Gauteng Province, South Africa (Wikicommons)
For example, tanzanite, sapphires, diamonds, and rubies from Africa are used to launder funds to Al Qaeda and other radical Islamic groups through middlemen known to our intelligence agencies in places like Dubai. (Dubai also serves as the center of activity for efforts by Islamic states to secure nuclear material and components for nuclear weapons. Both the British and American intelligence agencies know that elements of the A.Q. Khan nuclear network still operate there today.)
Daniel Pearl was the first to report on conflict gems from Africa funding Muslim extremists. The completely unregulated gem trade has for years been a preferred method of payment for terrorists. Regulating the international gem trade would hurt middlemen in Israel and many European countries as well as some American businesses, so little has been done. The colored gemstone market today reflects this regulatory inactivity.
When Arab states and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged President Obama to intervene in Libya, it had the same consequences as our failed Iraq policy a decade before. Mrs. Clinton’s actions in Libya ended up removing a government strongman who had turned his nuclear and chemical weapons over to us and replacing him with a jihadi playground. The Libya debacle was enough for President Obama to refuse to undertake the same interventionist policy in Syria. The president took to heart the idea that the United States should not create a political vacuum unless it knows what will replace it. But this policy only delayed the inevitable. Radical Islamists had already spread across the region by the time President Obama took office in 2009. The die was cast in Iraq. The terror had already spread.
In 2008, PEC’s National Security News Service put an ad on a website looking for volunteers to help with a new project to cover the Iraq War. The response was substantial and diverse. One young woman, Vian Faraj, came to office and wanted to write about her homeland in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Yazidi. English was not her first language so another volunteer, Bonnie Ho, worked with her to translate Vian’s story. We last heard from Vian in 2011 when she returned to Iraq. The following is the story she wanted to tell. Reading it now is chilling but it will give you a sense of just how much warning we had about what was to come. Vian’s 2008 piece demonstrates that there is no excuse for us not to have known.
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Vian Faraj is a Kurdish Iraqi studying in the United States. Her father was an armed Kurdish fighter—a peshmerga (literally, “those who face death”). After Saddam Hussein attacked the Kurdish region in 1991, Faraj fled to Iran with her family. She returned to Iraq at the age of 14. She attended the University of Sulaimaniyah, where she earned degrees in mathematics and politics. She plans to earn a doctorate in political science and return to Iraq to teach politics.
Few people outside Iraq know anything about the Yazidi, an important Iraqi minority and followers of one of the original religions of the Kurdish people. Yet nearly 400,000 Yazidis live in the heartland of the Middle East—largely in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Their only temple, Lalish, is the Yazidi equivalent of the Muslim Mecca and is one of the most historic places in Kurdistan. The Yazidi ultimately came to the world’s attention only last year when news media documented their deaths at the hands of Muslim extremists.
For the past two years, I have visited with and learned about the Yazidi. As a Kurdish person but not a Yazidi, I wanted to learn more about their history and about my Kurdish background. I wanted people to understand and remember these people, who have been persecuted by Saddam’s regime and who sometimes survived only by living in mountainous regions of the country. Only since the fall of Saddam have Yazidi men finally been able to exchange their Arabic garb for Kurdish clothing.
In Iraq, Yazidis often isolate themselves on the outskirts of Arab cities, as they do in “No Man’s Land,” land contested between Arabs and Kurds outside of Mosul, an area so dangerous that when I first went to meet my contact there, she sent armed men in two separate cars to meet me.
The Yazidi people, though unique in their history and religion, are not immune to the struggles facing mainstream Iraqis. The shared plight of Iraqi women is one good example. Most women in Iraq are expected to marry before they turn thirty, even if they continued their education and went to university. There is similar pressure for Yazidi women. My Yazidi contact from outside Mosul was a beautiful but nervous 33-year-old woman. I asked her why she wasn’t married.
“Because of the inconsiderateness of men! In our culture and our religion, we are not allowed to marry people who are not Yazidi,” she said. She was embarrassed. Only one of her seven sisters was married, and one of them was 40. Yazidi people also are divided into four levels, and no one from the first level can marry someone from the other levels. These religious rules are difficult to change, even by dissenting members of the religious council.
“We don’t have anything to do here in this country except to live our lives as housewives,” she said. What she said had a strong impact on me. In a country in ruin, the only opportunities these people have are to become parents, wives, and husbands. Even these choices are limited. My contact knew that if she broke these rules, she might suffer the same fate as Du’a, a 17- year- old Yazidi woman who married a Muslim man in 2007. She was stoned to death, supposedly by her own people, because of this outside marriage.
But Du’a’s killing was not only an attack on women’s rights; it was an example of the extremism that can take place in Iraq. Du’a’s killing served as a vehicle for increasing conflict and terror in the region. The video of her death by stoning was widely circulated, but I could not bring myself to watch it. Some of the people in the crowd were not Yazidi, and I believe some of those involved were followers of the Baathist party who were interested in creating conflict between Muslims and Yazidis. The same night Du’a was killed, a threat was sent out to the Yazidi people over the Internet, and the Yazidi people went out to the streets to protest.
Less than one week after Du’a’s murder, extremist Islamic groups seeking bribe money killed twelve innocent Yazidi people, including women and children. It was like hell. I was in a Yazidi area when one of the bodies was returned to a neighbor. The mother and sister of the dead person went outside and struck themselves. They screamed, “How come you’re dead? Who killed you?”
My friend didn’t let me go outside because I was a stranger who looked Muslim. “Maybe the Yazidi people will do something. You won’t be safe,” she said. I wanted to go back home. My friend told me to tell people what I saw and explain that the victims were regular people, who weren’t in high profile positions. Yazidis are not the only targets of these extremist groups; a Christian priest was killed as well.
I had returned home a few months later when, on the eve of a Yazidi religious celebration, bombing attacks killed more than a thousand Yazidis and wounded more than three thousand in Sinjal, according to Kurdish news sources. We were about five or six hours away when we saw the news on live television. The Kurdish government brought the wounded to my city hospital. Television programs solicited blood donations, and everyone contributed. The wealthy brought blankets and clothing.
I can’t forget those days. You try to make your life okay, but when you see that, it’s no longer okay. I was working at the National Center for Gender Research, training women from other cities for political participation and for making life more democratic. When I saw all of these things happening, I felt depressed. Why couldn’t I make more change? War is everywhere, and all of what I have tried to do is gone.
The tension between Muslims and Yazidis has since lessened. I believe the two groups respect one another. I believe there are some people who want Iraq to be peaceful and others who do not, like those who want the Baathist regime’s return or other countries that will be threatened by Iraqi or Kurdish success. Safety is still unpredictable. In the Yazidi Kurdish area, you should not go out after 5 p.m., and if you go out in the morning you should carry a gun. Even though I do not live in the Yazidi areas, there are no borders. There is no permanent safety; and we have relatives we worry about who may live there.
The population of Iraq is divided into eight religious groups: Shia, Sunni, Yazidi, Kakaee, Kildanee, Christian, Sirianee, al-Saaba, and al-Mandanaeea. The Iraqi nationality formations are Arabic, Kurdish, Turkoman and Kldo Ashury. Yazidi Kurds live in five different countries. Some of them are in Syria, some of them are in Iran, most of them are in Turkey, and some of them are in Russia.
