The first question read: Previous Job. Rostam immediately scribbled in the German word feldherr, "general." The story had it that he paused only briefly before answering the second question: Special Skills.
"Killing my enemies," he wrote.
A native Kirkuki, Rostam was a stocky, powerfully built man who veered, unpredictably, from the cold-blooded decisiveness that made him a legendary guerrilla leader to mawkish excesses of sentimentality fed by enormous quantities of alcohol. Over one endless dinner I watched Rostam put away a fifth of Scotch and half a dozen beers by himself. The faces in the room that long night were a study in the extremes of physical diversity. Tiger Woods could be a Kurd—and so could Robert Redford. Kurdistan is one of the Earth's most strategic land bridges, serving as an invasion and emigration route between Asia and Europe for thousands of years. Over the centuries, the Kurds have mixed with all of their neighbors and invaders, producing a gene map that ranges from wiry-haired and dark to blond and blue-eyed. The bond that holds these people together is "a sentiment as much as anything else," one Kurdish archaeologist told me, "derived from traditional life in the mountain valleys and adjacent plains where Kurds have always lived, and from the embrace of a shared culture and identity."
Someone in Rostam's entourage almost always sang Kurdish songs during those boozy dinners—about life in the mountains, about love, death, and loss—that inevitably reduced the general to tears. But next morning, the Warrior always returned, prepared to use his Special Skills.
His hero and model, he told me, was Genghis Khan's grandson Hulegu. In 1258 Hulegu sacked Baghdad, ordering the slaughter of 800,000 Arabs. Not surprisingly, Rostam regarded the war-weariness of the Builders, especially the educated young, with disdain. "The kids today are soft as chocolate bars," he said.
In Kirkuk no one indulged in chocolate-bar methods. In the seven decades before the gulf war, the Kurds mounted countless failed uprisings against Baghdad. Some insurrections were initially encouraged by supporters in the U.S., then abandoned by them and crushed by Iraqi forces. Control over oil-rich Kirkuk was an issue in every one of those insurrections.
Beginning in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein pushed aggressively for the Arabization of Kirkuk, expelling thousands of Kurds from the city. Since his fall, thousands of Kurds have returned, living in tents and ramshackle hovels a short distance from their former homes, now occupied by thousands of Arabs installed in Kirkuk after the Kurds' expulsion.
Kirkuk is the most ethnically divided city in Iraq, a tinderbox of claims and counterclaims pitting Turkomans, Assyrian Christians, Shiite and Sunni Muslims against each other, and all of them against the Kurds. Lip service was given on all sides to resolving the ethnic tensions peacefully. But no one really believed it was possible.
The policy approach of the Warriors is simplicity itself: Every Arab who was moved to Kirkuk during Arabization should be kicked out. The two generations of non-Kirkuki Arabs born there since would also have to go. It is an undisguised demand for reverse ethnic cleansing.
"We call it justice," Rostam said—and most Kurds agreed with him.
As a reporter, I'd seen close-up the kind of justice the Kurds are asking for in Kirkuk—in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo. I'd seen the carnage wrought by ethnic nationalism in Northern Ireland and Basque Spain, the blind hatred in Israel and on the West Bank. After the Balkans, after Rwanda, the justice of ethnic nationalism was lost on me. But I'm not an Iraqi Kurd.
Another morning like any other in Kirkuk: We were en route to an interview when a loud thump shook the air, and an acrid column of smoke billowed into the sky. A young man had detonated 80 pounds (36 kilograms) of explosives and bolts strapped to his waist. The blast, outside a mosque roughly a quarter mile (0.4 kilometers) up the road, killed 23 people and wounded more than 80. Had we arrived a minute sooner, we would certainly have been among them.
There is nothing unusual about happenstance salvation south of the 36th parallel, or about happenstance death. A minute here, a minute there: the random distinction between obliteration and morning prayer.
This time, Rostam rammed his SUV in a 180-degree spin, and we tore a few blocks west to the headquarters of the Kurdish-led Emergency Services Unit (ESU), an elite rapid deployment force. A phalanx of armored vehicles was forming in the motor pool, ready to head for the bombing scene. Just after we sat down for a briefing in the office of the ESU's commander, Khattab Omar Arif, six men quietly filed in behind us.
They were one of the American counter-insurgency squads that show up in the wake of terrorist attacks. "Maybe Delta Force, maybe CIA, maybe something else," our interpreter whispered in my ear. "Nobody is really sure who they are."
The men wore no uniforms and no identification tags, and their squad leader's sole words to us were "no questions and no photographs." His comrades sported an eclectic Hells Angels' mix of shaved heads and shoulder-length hair swept into ponytails. One of them wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. Their arms cradled assault weapons with sniper scopes, and they had pistols in leg and shoulder holsters and tucked into the rear of their slacks.
Locals refer to them as Rambos. For an hour the Rambos sat in silence, eating fruit and sipping tea, listening intently as I interviewed Commander Arif. They were the only Americans we encountered in Kirkuk.
Behind the thinly veiled pretense of a search for national unity, Kirkuk was locked in an undeclared ethnic civil war. Some Rambos had reportedly collaborated with the ESU in the unexplained disappearances of hundreds of Kirkuk Arabs and Turkomans, many of whom turned up without formal charges in Kurdish prisons.
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