Somber Thoughts About Kurdish Friends

I find myself thinking a lot about Kurdistan lately. Let me explain.

This week, I took a work trip to San Diego. I was initially sort of dreading it - I strongly dislike California, which is to say, most Californians. (Being a Pacific Northwest native, I can say without contrition that we're raised from birth to dislike Californians, particularly when they aggregate, and with good reasons that I won't go into here.) A seemingly unrelated factor is that, particularly owing to the continuing war in Iraq and Syria and its impact on the Kurds, I've been thinking about some old friends lately.

I spent more than a year of my life training soldiers, and that work led to the formation of some important, though sporadic, friendships with a gaggle of Iraqi expatriates. I was probably acquainted with forty or fifty of them, mostly Kurds and Chaldeans. I worked closely with ten or fifteen of those. I stayed in sporadic contact with three of those. One of them, whom I'll call Greyhound, died in a car accident in 2008; a picture of him sitting on a AH-64 Apache is inset. A second, whom I'll call Dingo, has apparently gone back to Iraq for the time being. That leaves the third, whom I'll call Hovawart, with whom I hadn't spoken since 2012... Until Monday. More on that presently.

I wasn't - we weren't - actually in the Army, but we worked so closely with the Army, in such similar conditions as the Army, that I'd go so far as to say that working with them was akin to having served with them. Greyhound and I were once detained overnight, and spent hours competing with each other to harass and harangue the soldiers charged with guarding us. A few times, Hovawart was assigned to a task that kept him in the field for something on the order of a week, and we'd make runs to the store every couple of days and bring him chow, cigarettes, and other bits and bobs to keep him going. There are few folks with whom I've shared that kind of comraderie.

So, like I said earlier, I took a trip to San Diego for work, and I realized shortly after landing that a suburb outside San Diego is where my former colleagues live. I phoned one of them - the one with whom I've kept in the closest contact over the years, though it's still been sporadic - and we immediately made plans to meet up the following night. Since the last time I saw him, he's gotten married and become a father, so I was able to meet his wife and his young son. We remembered Greyhound together, spoke a bit about Dingo, and shared a couple of meals before I had to leave. He also called another woman we'd worked with - the one in the white coat in that group picture - and she came over to see me as well. It was fantastic to catch up with them, and I hope that I'll keep in more reliable contact with Hovawart than I've done in recent years.

Not surprisingly, Hovawart and I spent a lot of our time together talking about Kurdistan. At times, it was funny - while driving, we were between two big pickups, and he joked that "I'm stuck between two ISIS!" Mostly, we talked about how hard the Kurds are fighting, how they need and deserve help, and how they're finally starting to make progress against ISIS. Hovawart was and is frustrated with Turkey, and he's not particularly impressed with the American government's handling of the situation. He's frustrated at what he sees as an American reticence to arm the Kurds, based upon the worry that the weapons might eventually be used against Americans. Hovawart made the comparison between arming Kurdistan in 2014, and arming the Afghan militias in the 1980's, but dismissed it because, and I quote:

"That's not how the Kurds are. They never bite the hand that feeds them. It's not in their nature."

The Afghanistan comparison is imperfect - most of the weapons that America and its partners supplied to the Afghan militias who were fighting the Soviets, and that everyone was worried about in late 2001, had reached their shelf life. There's also the inconvenient matter of ISIS/DAESH's knack for reappropriating American-supplied equipment. But, ultimately, Hovawart is right: there's no foreseeable future in which the Kurds and the West would be at odds, and Kurdistan itself is much more stable and secure than Afghanistan or the Arab regions of Iraq.

I overheard in the cab that took me back to my place from the airport that the Kurds had broken the siege at Mount Sinjar, which is what finally spurred the Obama Administration into action on the Kurds' behalf a few months ago. On Friday, I saw three articles at War is Boring: I Flew to Mount Sinjar on an Iraqi Helicopter, Getting Off Mount Sinjar Is a Nightmare, and - simultaneously horrifying and awe-inspiring - Starving and Surrounded, Kurds and Yezidis Refuse to Abandon Mount Sinjar. Seeing those articles so soon after having spent time with Hovawart upset my internal equilibrium.

An acquaintance of mine, Michael Totten, has spent a good deal of time in Kurdistan. In his excellent 2012 book, Where the West Ends, Totten recounts an impromptu trip from western Turkey to Dohuk. In recent months, he's written a number of articles about Kurdistan: The Kurds Rise From the Ashes of Syria, Who Are the Yezidis?, Iraq's Kurdish Firewall, A Dispatch from Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan, and one that my time with Hovawart specifically reminded me of: Why the US is Bombing Iraq and Not Syria. According to Totten:

The Kurds of Iraq are our best friends in the entire Muslim world. Not even an instinctive pacifist and non-interventionist like Barack Obama can stand aside and let them get slaughtered by lunatics so extreme than even Al Qaeda disowns them. There is no alternate universe where that’s going to happen.

He's absolutely right. The Kurds were American allies when Saddam Hussein was still in power. The Kurds were American allies, a safe rear echelon, throughout the 2003-2011 Iraq War. The Kurds want nothing more than to be left to their own devices in their own territory, and they're willing to fight to defend that territory - their nation - from those who would deny them that peace. It's frustrating to feel so helpless to help these friends - my friends - after they've been so hospitable to me. I hope that the international community continues to help the Kurds, and that they're able to reestablish the peace that they had enjoyed, at last, over the last few years.