The Last Years of Mustafa Barzani

[DRoshani]

by David A. Korn, Middle East Quarterly, June 1994

David A. Korn, a former Foreign Service officer, is a writer and
consultant on Middle Eastern and African issues. He is the author of,
most recently, Assassination in Khartoum (Indiana University Press,
1993).

The recipients of U.S. arms and cash were an insurgent ethnic group
fighting for autonomy in a country bordering our ally. . . . Documents
in the Committee's possession clearly show that the President, Dr.
Kissinger and the foreign head of state hoped that our clients would
not prevail. They preferred instead that the insurgents simply
continue a level of hostilities sufficient to sap the resources of our
ally's neighboring country. . . . Even in the context of covert
action, ours was a cynical enterprise.

--Excerpt from a classified House Select Intelligence Committee
report, published in The Village Voice, February 16, 1976.
For the Kurds of Iraq, October 6, 1993, was the closest thing to a
national holiday they had yet known in the brief and tenuous existence
of their unproclaimed statehood. Besieged by the Ba`th government in
Baghdad, barely tolerated by their Turkish neighbor, embargoed by the
rest of the world, shunned even by their American and Western European
protectors, short of food, fuel, and medicines, and suffering every
kind of hardship, they nonetheless gathered on that day in every city
and village of the Kurdish region to celebrate. The remains of Mullah
Mustafa Barzani, the man who had led them through earlier decades of
struggle, were being returned in triumphal procession from a grave
across the border in Iran for burial in the land he had fought to
liberate.

Among the Kurds, Barzani was a figure of mythical proportions. His
life had become the stuff of legend. Although called Mullah Mustafa,
he was not a mullah--a religious dignitary--but a man born and bred to
fight and to lead others in war. His revolts, his feats of arms, his
twelve-year exile in the Soviet Union, his glorious return, and his
long championship of Kurdish rights had given Kurds everywhere--not
just in Iraq but in Turkey, Iran, Syria, the Soviet Union, and abroad,
in Western Europe and the United States--a sense of pride and of
nationhood such as they had never before felt. He had reached very
high, but he had misjudged his base and then he had fallen. The
movement that he had built in over four decades of struggle had
collapsed, and he and those who joined him in it had lost everything.

Mustafa Barzani's triumphal posthumous return to Iraqi Kurdistan was
the culmination of a journey whose final leg, it might be said, began
on a steamy early August afternoon in 1975, at New York's John F.
Kennedy Airport. His arrival in the United States that day on an Iran
Air flight from Tehran was a closely guarded secret. He and his three
companions had made the trip in the comfort of the first-class cabin
of the Boeing 747 airliner. Now they were to be spared the tedious
scrutiny of U.S. immigration and customs officials to which their
fellow passengers would have to submit. As they stepped from the ramp
to the tarmac, they were met by two men attired in business suits,
white shirts, and ties. These two, obviously Americans, led the
visitors to black unmarked cars that stood not far from the aircraft,
their motors running. The party bundled into the cars and was sped out
a side gate onto the expressway toward New York City.

Barzani walked slowly and with a limp, though without apparent fatigue
from the trip. The business suit he wore fit him poorly, and his tie
was badly knotted. Everything about him said that this was not his
usual dress and that these were not his usual surroundings. But even
at the age of seventy-two and ailing, he presented a striking figure.
It was not his height that distinguished him--he stood no more than
five feet six inches tall. But the extraordinary breadth of his
shoulders and his big-boned, strongly muscled limbs gave him an aura
of great physical power. His large head, covered by short, thinning
black hair interspersed with grey, was set squarely upon his torso as
though without intermediary of a neck. An eagle's beak nose jutted
from his face, and bushy black brows were set over eyes that seemed to
be lit by a fiercely blazing fire. It was the eyes, in fact, that
everyone saw first, that extraordinary piercing light in them that
foreign correspondents who over the years had made the hard and
perilous trek to Barzani's mountain headquarters in Kurdistan had
written about.

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