Some of the Kurds from the towns didn’t have a clue about basic sanitary procedures, such as: You don’t crap upstream and then draw your drinking water downstream. The Special Forces troops saved thousands of lives simply by educating people about adhering to proper sanitary conditions.
The end of the snow cover also meant the end of most of our water supplies. It was clear that we would soon have no water in the hills — a truly dangerous situation. There was only one solution to both the disease and the water problems: We had to move the refugees down from the mountains. We couldn’t keep them up there. Since it was clear that they weren’t going to be allowed to move farther north into Turkey, there was only one direction we could safely take them — south.
The initial plan we worked out with General McCarthy was to make an incursion into a valley in northern Iraq and set up huge refugee camps there.
By that time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had set up a liaison office with our JTF. Because they are used to dealing with refugees, they proved to be enormously helpful. Right away, they tossed cold water on the idea of creating refugee camps. “Don’t build them,” they warned. “They become miserable, and you’ll be running them for years. These people have to go home.
“If you have to make camps, make them austere. They should only serve as transient facilities.”
Since Washington was not ready to make the political decision to take over northern Iraq, we began to establish a few camps as an interim measure as we worked on plans for a more permanent solution.
After centuries of oppression, the Kurds had learned how to be tough survivors and to keep stoic through their suffering. But, fearing Saddam, they refused to leave the apparent safety of the Turkish border and go down to the new camps. We took videos and showed the Kurdish leaders how they’d have greatly improved quality of life and security in our new camps. They still balked.
But after much persuasion, we convinced them to send a delegation down to check out what we were building.
They didn’t like what they saw: We were building the camps like military camps, with everything lined up in lines, grids, and squares. “We can’t live like that,” they said. Their communities had a very different kind of structure from our “straight line” military alignment. “We build our communities around clusters of cul-de-sacs. We like to have several families facing inward.”
They then insisted on redesigning the camps, to make them more reflect their community structure, and on actually taking part in their construction. This was a good idea. It not only gave them the kind of environment they were comfortable with, it let them buy into the whole process. At the same time, it made us realize that the UN was right about the camps. They weren’t going to work as a long-term solution.
So then we thought, “Okay, we’ll stretch out a little bit more and take part of northern Iraq. At least we can get some people into camps and others into their villages.”
In several stages, we took the northern part of the Kurdish areas, stretching to the provincial capital of Dohuk (sixty kilometers south of the Turkish border) and out toward Iran. (There were thousands of Kurdish refugees across the border in Iran, whom the Iranians were taking care of. These refugees also wanted to come back home.)
But the UN was persistent: “If you’re going to get a little bit pregnant, get all the way pregnant. Take them all home.”
They were right again; and we made an assessment of what it would take to move them there.
Once the decision was made to enter Iraq, we knew we would need additional forces. We also had to expand our own organization in order to control these new forces and coordinate our operations with those of the UN, the NGOs, the aid and security forces from other nations, and the agencies of our own government that had joined the humanitarian relief effort.
The JTF became a CTF (Combined Task Force), with the inclusion of forces from twelve other nations (including Great Britain, France, Spain, and Italy). Lieutenant General John Shalikashvilli (General Saint’s deputy at USAREUR, and, later, as a four-star general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) was sent to command the CTF; Jim Jamerson became the deputy commander; and I moved to chief of staff. Shali (as everyone calls him) had the command until June. Then Jim and I resumed our original billets.
A subordinate JTF (JTF Alpha) under Dick Potter’s command was responsible for the refugees in the mountain camps and getting them back into Iraq. Another JTF (JTF Bravo) was formed under Major General Jay Garner, U.S. Army, to enter Iraq and secure the Security Zones we were establishing. The Air Forces component was under the command of Brigadier General Jim Hobson. A Civil Affairs Command was formed under Brigadier General Don Campbell; and a Combined Support Command (CSC) for logistics under Army Brigadier Hal Burch. We also put in place a Military Coordination Center (MCC) under Army Colonel Dick Nabb, to work coordination with the Kurds and the Iraqis. There was a DART (Disaster Assistance Response Team) team led by Dayton Maxwell,[49] and over sixty NGOs and PVOs (Private Volunteer Organizations) were also working with us.
The allied contributions to Provide Comfort were significant. The French, under the command of Major General Maurice LePage, a superb French Marine paratrooper, provided mobile combat teams that cleared the routes from the mountain camps back down into Iraq. The Royal Marines, under General Robin Ross, whose units had just returned from Northern Ireland, provided an excellent force for initial entry into the cities in the Security Zone. The Italians, under Lieutenant General Mario Buscemi, provided elaborate hospitals. The large brigades contributed by the French, British, Italians, and Spanish allowed us to give them each a sector of the Security Zone. General Shali ran this coalition brilliantly, with few (if any) written agreements.
We pieced together this highly nontraditional, ever-evolving organization on the go. Though some of its components were first-time structures, they met the task. Even so, these strange new structures bothered many older officers. This made me come to realize that nontraditional operations like ours were best handled by younger, more innovative officers who could think outside the traditional and rigid wartime doctrine with which the older officers had grown up.
General Shalikashvilli, a highly intelligent and capable senior officer and a real internationalist, was extremely effective dealing with the Iraqis and the thirteen-nation coalition. I learned a lot from watching him do that kind of business — persuading people, coordinating at that level. But when it came to the technical, tactical, and operational side of things we were trying to put in place, he was very traditional. He liked to follow standard Army doctrine.
For example, when we were looking at how to handle the Security Zones in Iraq, I said, “We’ll create a joint task force, we’ll stick it out front, with Jay Garner and Dick Potter in charge.”
“No, wait a minute,” he protested. “You’re going to put a joint task force under a joint task force? Is that doctrinally correct?”
“General Shalikashvilli,” I said, “who gives a shit? It’ll work. We should not worry about doctrine here.”
And when we started to change the refugees’ transition camps to reflect the Kurds’ cultural needs, he was skeptical. “What’s wrong with the way we built them?” he laughed… In time, he came to accept the need for cultural sensitivity (which I thought was essential; we constantly emphasized this in our briefs); but I felt he didn’t think it was really all that important.
Our area of operations was roughly the size of Kansas, encompassing 83,000 square miles of rugged mountainous territory, with little infrastructure. The biggest challenge after the initial crisis was to establish a logistics distribution system in this austere and rugged environment. The transportation system was frail, it was austere; the road networks were extremely limited.
Normally, the services provide logistics support to their own service components, while each nation similarly provides their own logistics to their own components. That’s an okay system under normal circumstance. But it did not reflect the realities we faced — an omnium-gatherum of nations, services, and agencies all trying to force their stuff through the fragile infrastructure, all at the same time. We had major humanitarian and
