Everybody was desperate for food. Children were dying. Mothers were scraping out little graves.
When our two CH-53s made their first lifts of food into the camps, they were swarmed by panicked mothers who desperately threw their babies onto the choppers. (The Kurds were incredibly fertile. We learned later that seventy percent of Kurdish women of childbearing age were pregnant. Infant mortality was high.)
The brutal slaughter along the way by Saddam’s troops had only added to their trauma.
The Turkish military had been doing all they could to provide order and security (I have to hand it to them), and they were also providing food, medicine, and shelter, but far from enough to begin to cover what the refugees needed for survival. More important, the Turks were insistent that the Iraqi Kurds remain close to the border (even when that resulted in many deaths from exposure), forcibly preventing them from coming down the mountains into Turkey. In their eyes, the refugees were an Iraqi problem and not a Turkish problem… and they did not want to add the Iraqi Kurds to the problems they already had with their own Kurdish population.[44]
It did not take Dick Potter long to realize the magnitude of the potential humanitarian disaster we faced. He had originally gone in with a single battalion from the 10th Special Forces Group (commanded by Colonel Bill Tangney[45]); but early that first week he requested that the entire 10th Group (two additional battalions) be sent into the camps to stabilize these sites. His request was immediately granted; and the rest of the group had begun to ar- rive by the end of the week. This act saved tens of thousands of lives. Though more than 10,000 people perished in the flight from Iraq and later in the camps, this number would have been far larger had the relief effort not have been accomplished so swiftly. The efforts of the 10th Special Forces Group was the most significant contribution to that effort.[46]
Another pressing order of business was to learn as much as I could about these people: I had never heard of the Kurds before this operation. Fortunately, a U.S. Army intelligence officer, Nelgun Nesbit, who had grown up in Turkey before immigrating to the U.S., was available to fill in our ignorance; she was with us giving expert advice from very early in the mission. Her language capability and knowledge of the Kurds proved invaluable. Nell provided much of the information that we based our planning on. (She later went on to become a colonel in the Army.)
Nell was assertive, self-confident, and knew her own mind. She did not blindly follow the party line, which tended to upset the traditionalists; but I liked her. She got things done.
The point she repeatedly emphasized: We didn’t understand how the Kurds’ social system worked. As a consequence, we were trying to connect with them in ways that didn’t match their culture… picking the wrong people to deal with (a fact that I had already started to realize).
In the camps, we initially tried to connect with people we’d have normally linked up with — the ones who spoke English, the doctors, the lawyers, the teachers, the Western-educated. Many of these types came forward and curried our favor, but nothing was coming out of it. So then we looked for the political leadership — the mayors, the provincial executives. Still nothing was happening.
Nell Nesbit made it plain that we had to forget all of that Western thinking and reach out to the tribal chiefs (the Kurds are a tribal society) and figure out how the tribes were structured.
She brought in a Kurdish schoolteacher who answered my questions about social structure and decision making by mapping out the Kurdish tribal and political structures: how Kurds do things, who makes the decisions in the society. These were important issues for us as we tried to determine who were the actual leaders in the camps.
There were two major political factions among the Kurds. One was the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), under the leadership of Masoud Barzani (the son of a legendary resistance fighter), and the other was the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) under Jalal Talabani, who had broken away from Barzani’s group to form his own faction. Each faction had a tribal, political, and geographical base (the KDP — the stronger of the two — had power in the west, while the PUK had power in the east).[47] Each had its own militia; and each had been contending with the other — sometimes violently — for years. They did, however, cooperate during Operation Provide Comfort.
The Kurdish fighters (the militias of each faction) were called “Peshmerga,” which meant “those who face death.” They were tough, battle-hardened guerrilla fighters who’d proved more than a match for Saddam’s soldiers, man for man, but had been no match for the artillery barrages, air attacks, and gas attacks they’d been subjected to during their many years of resisting Saddam.
We also found others in the camps, including Turcomans, Assyrian Christians, Chaldeans, and Arab Iraqis… all fleeing Saddam’s brutal regime. Some were defectors from his own government and personal staff.
During the first week, we were really scrambling. Potter and his Green Berets on the ground were taking an assessment of what had to be done in the camps. We were working to connect with the Turks. NGOs were trying to get in with medical supplies; and the UN had also started to move in some teams. We had to set up procedures for working with both of them. All the while, we were setting up the civil-military operations center. But by the end of the week, we had managed to put all this together and were functioning adequately.
As we were working to stabilize the people in the hills, General Galvin and others were soliciting NATO and international support. Soon we were getting offers of medical, transportation, and combat units.
From April to June, we delivered seventeen thousand tons of supplies to the camps, while Dick Potter’s guys took control of the chaos. They organized the camps and ended the “survival of the fittest” atmosphere.
As time went on, we began to realize that the airdrops were not the most efficient way to deliver supplies to the camps. The airdrops quickly provided emergency supplies to the most remote areas; but they were highly inefficient, and very expensive. Bundles ended up all over the hillsides; and then we couldn’t control the distribution once they were on the ground.
We knew we had to shift increasingly to helo delivery and eventually ground transportation. But that was easier to talk about than to do. The road networks up in the mountains were ghastly. There’d already been serious accidents that had cost us some people. So before we could switch from air to ground, we had to improve the mountain roads and consolidate the refugees in more accessible locations.
Toward the end of April, Ambassador Abramowitz advised us to contract for Turkish food, tents, and transportation. This was wise advice. The change reduced costs by four-fifths — a huge saving. Turkish food was more in line with the refugees’ normal diet (they didn’t like the relatively expensive MREs we’d been giving them). Instead of the military tents we’d been forced to use in the camps (also expensive, and we never had nearly enough of them), we were able to contract with Turk tentmakers who took tarpaulins and other ready-to-hand materials and turned them cheaply into usable shelters. Several thousand Turkish truckers, who’d been put out of work because of the sanctions against Iraq (most drove oil tanker trucks), took the big oil tanks off their frames, turned them into open-bed rigs, and went back to doing what they did best — navigate the tricky and dangerous mountain roads. They moved the food and supplies into the mountains. All of this gave a big boost to the Turkish economy — badly hurt by the cutoff of trade with Iraq — which encouraged Turkish support for all of our programs.
The embassy sent us an excellent liaison team headed by Marc Grossman, the Deputy Chief of Mission. Their excellent advice and close coordination were invaluable.
As winter turned to spring and the snows melted, our problems did not ease. Though we had supplied the refugees with food and shelter, the summer temperatures of up to 120 degrees in these locations would bring diseases and water shortages. The weak and traumatized refugee population — crammed into small areas, drinking, bathing, urinating, and defecating into an already contaminated water supply — was very susceptible to disease. And, sure enough, we began to see cholera, dysentery, and other communicable diseases.[48]
