The Gun

him.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Mahmoud answered.

“What is your phone number?”

Mahmoud answered again, but now he had a headache. He was wheeled off for X-rays. Before surgery, he saw the prime minister at his side.

“You helped me,” Salih said.

“You are okay?” Mahmoud asked.

“Yes.”

“Be careful, Dr. Barham,” he said. “Be careful.”

The surgeons worked on Mahmoud, the first time, until 2:00 A.M. They tallied wounds from twenty-three bullets. None had hit his spine or vital organs. The bullet that entered his back had cut only muscle and flesh. The head grazes had not fractured his skull. Twenty-three bullets, the doctors said. While Mahmoud was asleep, and the anesthesia was wearing off, he heard his mother’s voice.

“Karzan,” she said.

He woke. The doctors, he learned through a haze, had quarreled over whether they should amputate his right arm and left leg. For now he retained them. He asked questions about the attack. No one wanted to answer. On the third day, he read a newspaper and learned that five of his friends had been killed. Three others, besides himself, had been crippled. Elsewhere in the hospital, Balan Faraj Karim woke to doctors who explained why they had amputated his left leg. He misunderstood. “No,” he cried. “You do not need to cut my leg.” He argued. “Send me somewhere,” he said. “To Europe,” he suggested. “A different doctor can keep my leg.” But his leg was already gone.

The surviving attacker, Qais Ibrahim Khadir, did not make it far. He was captured while hiding in a house in the city. In the months that followed, Khadir occupied a solitary-confinement cell on the second floor of the city’s jail, in conditions that might drive a sane man mad. His room was a concrete closet, chilly and unlit, accessible through a small steel door. There, before Kurdish security officials led him away and executed him, he sat in the darkness, his skin growing paler and his flesh growing softer, passing hours praying to his understanding of his god. He expressed no regret. When the opportunity presented itself, he voiced satisfaction, even pleasure, at what he had done. Conversations with Khadir did not follow linear thought, and his ruminations were prone to militant tautology. Doe-eyed and eager for company, he talked openly, but kept his history neat and free of gray. He had been born in Erbil in the mid-1970s and claimed to have left Iraq for study in a religious school in Yemen. He was cagey on the question of whether he met jihadists while abroad. He denied that he had. He also punctuated the denials with laughter and self-satisfied smirks. “I am very clever,” he was given to saying. This confirmed something self-evident: I lie.

Khadir’s militancy had wide-reaching roots. He had lived for a while with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan, or PKK, on Mount Qandil, the high-elevation base in Iraq near the border with Iran. But he felt little affinity for the PKK’s fighters, whom he considered apostates. By 2001 he had come down off the mountain and taken up with Taweed, an armed Islamic movement. In a series of mergers with other local Islamic groups, Taweed became part of Ansar al-Islam, the Supporters of Islam, a confederation of armed Islamic parties that was emerging as a regional threat and demanded that the region be ruled by its interpretation of shariah law. It declared jihad against the PUK.

By 2002, Ansar al-Islam was large enough to field a visible guerrilla force of at least several hundred fighters, to run at least two jihadist training camps, and to control territory and several villages along the Iranian border. Its turf was a mountainous region, not the date-palm Iraq of the lower Tigris and Euphrates, but a zone of rolling foothills set against snowcapped peaks. There its fighters occupied trenches remaining from the Iran-Iraq War, augmenting them with bunkers and road checkpoints to create a statelet within a statelet that it governed its own way. The group closed a girls’ school, forbade shaving, and desecrated a Sufi cemetery and mosque. It was northern Iraq’s neo-Taliban.

Qais Ibrahim Khadir had taken an oath only to Taweed. But as Taweed evolved he changed with it. He rejoiced at the attacks on the World Trade Center and admired Osama bin Laden. “What does al Qaeda mean?” he asked, rhetorically. He had his own answer. “Al Qaeda,” he said, “is a state of mind.” Sitting in handcuffs in a room near his cell, Khadir gave himself high grades. Action, in his view, equaled accomplishment. Though he had failed to kill Barham Salih, he considered the operation an achievement. “We succeeded,” he said. “According to our beliefs, any operation we do is a success when you do it.”

Outside the prison, his victims suffered. The mother of one victim had died upon hearing of her son’s death; she collapsed with a heart attack. Ramazan Hama-Raheem was handicapped, barely able to walk. “Only I know my pain,” he said. “If you look at me now—look—my face, it is beautiful and calm. But inside, pain.” He entertained a dark fantasy, which became a regular vision: He was alone and holding a pistol to his head. His depression was almost total. He was too strong to kill himself, not strong enough not to consider it every day. “My life,” he said, is “jail, and I can’t get out.” Balan Faraj Karim had no fantasy whatsoever, not even the despairing fantasy of relief through suicide. He found sanctuary in sleep, which provided him with a dream. In this dream, he said, “I am sleeping in a bed in an American hospital and they have just finished the surgery to my shoulder and two legs.” But always he would wake and find himself as Khadir had made him—a one-legged, disfigured man, unemployed, stuck in Iraq. He had two young children. His wife would later tell him that she did not know, hour by hour, what to do: to take care of their children, or to take care of him. Karim passed long days crying.

Karzan Mahmoud at first fared little better. He had lived to be reassembled, put back into the shape of a man with metal rods and screws. The shape of a man was not enough. Mahmoud had form, not function. His left leg and hip could barely support his weight, and his wounds, which had been soaked in a dirty puddle after he was shot, were contaminated. By late in 2002 his upper thigh was swollen, purple, and oozing; a deep and festering infection had settled in. His right arm did not bend. His left hand could not open and close. He was stooped and slowly weakening. His youth and the remains of his vigor kept him alive, though the infection and its fevers had such a hold on him that it seemed likely to finish his pain soon. Fortune and friendship intervened. Several months before he had been shot, Mahmoud had hired out as a driver for Kevin McKiernan, a reporter for ABC News. The two men became friends. McKiernan returned to Iraq in fall 2002. In the rush of work during the run-up to the American invasion, the two men met many times. Mahmoud brought McKiernan his medical records, and McKiernan taped the X-rays to a window, photographed them, and emailed them to a friend from high school, Dr. Michael Brabeck, who worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts McKiernan and Brabeck, half a world apart, made Mahmoud their project.

By spring 2003, as the American war in Iraq began, Mahmoud was living in Dr. Brabeck’s house in Massachusetts and receiving pro bono care that few victims of Kalashnikov bullets receive. By the summer, three surgeries later, his right arm had been reset with a ninety-degree bend at the elbow. His left hand was functional. His infection was defeated and his femur partially repaired, enough so that he was on a trajectory to walk without a cane.⁷³ His grimace subsided. His eyes brightened. By early in 2006, with Saddam Hussein ousted and the PUK’s leader serving as Iraq’s president, Mahmoud was working in Canada, at the Iraqi embassy in Ottawa. He was not, by any of the typical measures of mobility for a twenty-seven-year-old man, healthy and fit. He limped visibly, his right arm was almost useless, his right hand had little grip. And the former wiry bodyguard, adept at tae kwon do, was gaining weight, a consequence of his inability to exercise as he had before. But he was free from infection, able to dress and feed himself, and bathe, and shuffle up and down steps, and drive on the highway, and work at office tasks. He was blessed to be alive. He knew it. “My God helped me,” he said one night in Ottawa. “I like my God.” He had been helped, but not healed. He knew he never would be. And he found, when considering the rifle that had altered his body and diminished his life, that he wondered about Mikhail Kalashnikov, who lent his name to the weapon. He had a question for the man who proudly insisted he was the inventor of this device. “Why did you make this machine?” Mahmoud asked. “You don’t like living people? You are smart. Why not make something to help people, not make them dead?”

Mahmoud was sipping tea, pinching the small warm glass with a mangled hand, furrowing his bullet-scarred brow. “Are you not afraid to see the judge?”[42]⁷⁴

Mikhail Kalashnikov, in winter, adapted yet again.