The Gun

$100 per assault rifle. By one example, Romanian surplus was initially sold at $93 to $98 each for a fixed-stock rifle, or $115 for a rifle with a folding stock.⁶⁹ These prices were roughly comparable to the price of an M-16 rifle—in 1966.⁷⁰ The brokers then flipped the rifles at higher prices to the American companies awarded the Pentagon contracts, which in turn charged the Pentagon more—in the range of $150 to $165 a rifle, including air-freight delivery costs to Baghdad or Kabul. The rifles had typically been manufactured during the Warsaw Pact years and had sat unused in the decades since; they were considered new. Some vendors passed off used rifles to the Pentagon by reconditioning them with new finishes and lacquers. Newly manufactured rifles would cost significantly more, because of the increased costs of labor, energy, and commodities required to make them. The point, well-known among purchasers, is this: Because of the glut of rifles from Cold War–era stockpiles, it costs very little to outfit fighters with Kalashnikovs. The expense is small enough that many governments hand them out to those who might serve their bidding, as Egypt and Libya and other Arab states did with the Palestinians, as the United States did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as Sudan did to the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose commanders fought for years without worrying about running short of guns, or seeking funds to buy more. At the bottom of the hierarchy, where the fighting and killing and many of the crimes take place, those involved were armed almost effortlessly, and free of the burden of attending to the details. “The thing you get for free,” one amnestied LRA commander said, “you don’t bother to ask the price.”⁷¹

Almost a century and a half after Dr. Richard J. Gatling developed a workable design for a rapid-fire arm, the armaments world had reached that stage. After decades of assault-rifle production in planned economies, eight- pound automatic rifles could be issued to child soldiers at no cost to their commanders, jihadist movements pitted against the world’s most powerful and modern military force could arm fighters for about two hundred dollars a man, and the opening class in terrorist training camps was an introduction to the AKM. Outside the West, the rifle was at the very center of war and preparations for it. By 2001, when Mullah Omar received his price list, the United Nations had attempted a rough tally of the human costs to those in places where the rifles are used most. It found that small arms had been the principal weapons in forty-six of the forty-nine major conflicts in the 1990s, in which 4 million people died, roughly 90 percent of them civilians.⁷² For most of these wars and most of these young conscripts, Kalashnikovs were the primary rifle. If the United Nations’ numbers were accurate and hundreds of thousands of people were being killed by small arms each year—in wars, crimes, acts of state repression, or acts of terror—then it would never be possible to document, person by person, the Kalashnikov’s role in what it all meant. Case studies would have to do, offering insights into the experiences of a victim here, or a victim there, serving as representatives of an enormous class. Each war provides new casualties. Each day the tally climbs. But it is possible to slow down and to examine what the weapons can do to an individual victim, a man like Karzan Mahmoud.

Mahmoud was shot in spring 2002 in northern Iraq, a region that had been an all-but-forgotten seam in the wars in the Middle East. No one much noticed that day, though a new war was gathering. The American military had chased the Taliban from Kabul several months before, and President George W. Bush’s administration had switched focus. The northern portion of Iraq, loosely protected by a no-fly zone, was a semiautonomous Kurdish enclave, a statelet within a state, where Washington was quietly renewing engagement with the Kurds, seeking allies for the war ahead. Ryan Crocker, an American diplomat, had come to Sulaimaniya, capital of the eastern portion of the Kurdish zone, to meet with the officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of two principal Kurdish parties. The PUK ruled Iraq’s northeast, mixing promises of democracy with old-time cronyism and centralized party power. It had descended from a guerrilla force—the peshmerga, those who face death—that waged mountain war against Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Iraq. But the party’s surviving military leaders were now older and mostly softer, interested in politics and business more than in fighting a lonely war. Its military formations were small, inadequately equipped, and unevenly led. And they had outright enemies— Hussein to the south and an Islamic fundamental movement in their midst. This was the territory in which Karzan Mahmoud operated, as a bodyguard, in a land of hidden danger and treachery.

The three assassins arrived near the home of Prime Minister Barham Salih at 3:45 P.M. on April 2, wearing a mix of traditional peshmerga dress and modern camouflage uniforms. It was a chilly spring afternoon. A light rain shower was falling. The assassins had shaved their beards and looked neat, resembling officers from the local Ministry of the Interior. For their approach, they had bought a local white-and- orange Volks-wagen taxi so that they might blend in. The prime minister’s residence, a two-story house, was located several lots from the corner, set back several yards from the road. As the taxi neared, Salih was finishing a meeting with the city’s director of intelligence and preparing to drive to meet Crocker. The security teams of both men waited outside. The taxi stopped at the corner. The assassins stepped out. They wore Kalashnikovs on slings. They moved casually toward the officials’ bodyguards, who suffered the confidence of numbers. The guards, after all, were twelve.

Mahmoud was Salih’s driver that day. Moments before, he had left his white Nissan Patrol, and was walking through the drizzle toward the taxi when it pulled up. He was wearing a blue suit and red tie. He had intended to visit a market at the corner, but the taxi diverted his attention. Mahmoud was twenty-four, a peshmerga for six years. A polite man, he emanated decency, respect, and kindness of an order that could seem a fault. He approached the three men to tell them that they should move their car down the street. No one was allowed to park here. He was drilled in manners and protocol. It showed.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

The lead man had a question. “Is Dr. Barham home?”

“Yes,” Mahmoud answered. “What do you need?”

About fifteen feet separated the two men. The man stepped forward, swung his Kalashnikov up to level, and fired a burst at Mahmoud’s face.

Mahmoud was small statured, the sort of athlete whom larger and more powerful men misjudge. He had spent five years in intensive tae kwon do training, which had left him limber and loose and equipped him with dodges that could look instinctive. He sensed the shift—from routine traffic encounter to terrible danger—in the instant the assassin’s face changed. The Kalashnikov muzzle rose. Mahmoud fell. He bent his knees, forcing his shins forward toward the ground. As his lower body dipped in that direction, he pushed off the balls of his feet and threw his shoulders in the other, backward, while raising his chin and arching his spine. His hands rose and extended, to protect his face. It was a blind rearward snap-dive, a desperate juke that risked slamming the back of his head onto asphalt. It saved him from the first blast. As Mahmoud arched while falling, his combined movements changed the angle his face presented as a target. Two bullets hit him in the head. They did not strike squarely. Both grazed him, each slicing a groove from his lower forehead, by his eyebrows, to his hairline. Then came more. He had pushed his hands up into the space between the muzzle and his face, directly into the path of a long automatic burst. Several bullets tore through Mahmoud’s right elbow and forearm. At least two hit his left hand, shattering fine bones. An instant had passed. Mahmoud slammed onto the street, his right arm useless, his left hand ruined, his brow about to pour blood. He was alive.

He heard gunshots. The three attackers were striding forward and firing. He was at their feet. Mahmoud had a thought: pistol. The bodyguards kept a pistol in the map pocket of the door of his vehicle, which was running, doors closed, about twenty feet away. He needed this gun. He could visualize the weapon—a 9-millimeter semiautomatic with its magazine and fourteen rounds inserted. If he could reach it he could fight. The assassins must have thought they had killed him, because they were firing toward other bodyguards. Adrenaline had put Mahmoud in an extreme state of alertness. Now it propelled his will. He rolled onto his side, spun from his young legs to his feet, and bounded in his suit toward his SUV. His shattered right arm dangled in its sleeve. His face was wet with blood. His revival must have startled the assassins: The dead man rose. He reached the car in several wild, zigzagging lunges, each turn meant to frustrate attempts to shoot him in the back.

One of the gunmen zeroed in on Mahmoud a second time. He fired a burst. As with Mahmoud’s first dodge, the zigs and zags kept him alive. They were not enough to spare him. A round hit his lower left back. Mahmoud reached the Patrol nonetheless. He was a lean young man, a martial-arts expert rippling with adrenaline and purpose, fired by the cornered animal’s will to live, but without working fingers or hands. He swung his right hand at the door. The pistol was right there. There. His hand had no grip. He could not make it lift the handle. Karzan Mahmoud had performed his last act in the service of Prime Minister Salih’s security detail. The assassin fired again. The burst rode up Mahmoud’s left leg, shattering the femur and the hip, reducing to fragments the main load-bearing bones and joint on his left side.