EDITOR'S NOTE: Mark Gorman, who lives in Sitka, was a first-hand witness to the devastation of the Kurdish people in the U.S. interventions in the Middle East prior to the one now under way.
By MARK GORMAN
The war now unfolding in Iran is the latest chapter in a long and brutal history of conflict in that part of the world. How it will end is impossible to know. What is certain is that many lives will be lost and new grievances will be seeded for generations to come.
In a corner of our study sits a battered poster of Saddam Hussein.
The paper is creased, stained, and torn nearly in half. I found it in May of 1991 on the floor of an abandoned clinic in northern Iraq while serving with the International Rescue Committee. I had been assigned to coordinate medical relief operations for hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees who had fled into the mountains after the Gulf War’s Operation Desert Storm.
In recent days the images have already begun to accumulate: apartment buildings collapsed by missile strikes, families digging through rubble, and the bombing of an Iranian school that killed dozens of children. In wars like this the headlines quickly become strategy and territory. The human cost moves quietly in the background.
The clinic stood near a Kurdish village that had been gassed by Saddam’s forces three years earlier and later bulldozed into the earth. The poster had once hung on the wall as a declaration of loyalty. Now it lay in the debris.
The crisis unfolding in the Kurdish mountains did not emerge in isolation. Only two years earlier Saddam Hussein had ended an eight-year war with neighboring Iran, one of the bloodiest conflicts of the late twentieth century. Iraq emerged from that war economically shattered but still heavily armed. In 1990 Saddam turned that army south and invaded Kuwait, triggering the U.S.-led coalition war launched by President George H. W. Bush to expel Iraqi forces. The Kurdish refugee crisis I witnessed in 1991 was one of the many aftershocks of those overlapping conflicts.
Northern Iraq had become the center of one of the great humanitarian crises of the early 1990s. Nearly half a million Kurdish civilians fled into the mountains along the Turkish border. The United States and its allies launched Operation Provide Comfort, an emergency effort to protect the refugees and deliver aid.
The next morning, I boarded a Black Hawk helicopter heading toward the mountain camps near the town of Cukurca. As we crested a ridge, the valley opened beneath us. From the air it looked as if an entire city had been dropped onto a barren mountainside. Tens of thousands of people crowded together under makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting, parachutes, and scraps of canvas.
Entering the camp was overwhelming. The density of human suffering pressed in from every direction. I made my way to a Doctors Without Borders field hospital where a cholera ward had been hastily erected. Children lay in rows on specially cut cots designed to allow the relentless stream of diarrhea to drain through holes in the canvas into waiting buckets.
There was a father sitting beside a dying boy who looked about the same age as our older son back in Sitka. Watching him, I felt a wave of anger and confusion. What determined that this child would die on a mountainside while another would grow up safely half a world away?
At that time, I was interviewed by a Newsweek reporter. In a piece published that May he described the unfolding intervention as “a kinder, gentler quagmire.” In the same article he quoted me saying that unless the threat of Saddam was eliminated, the terror of his reign would continue to be visited upon the land.
Thirty-five years later, that phrase still lingers in my mind.
Today the region once again sits at the center of a widening conflict. Air strikes, missiles, and proxy forces are reshaping the landscape in ways no one can yet predict. In Washington and other capitals, discussions are already underway about possible new fronts, including whether Kurdish groups might again be drawn into the fight.
The DNA of those earlier conflicts is still present in today’s war with Iran. The grievances, alliances, and unfinished struggles of the past rarely disappear. They simply resurface in new forms.
History in that region rarely unfolds the way planners expect.
I keep the Saddam poster mounted on that board. Next to it is the Newsweek clipping from 1991 and a page from my old journal describing those weeks in the Zagros Mountains of Iraq, reminding me how easy it is, from a distance, to talk about strategy, alliances, and leverage.
On the ground, the story is always real and often terrible.
It looks like a crowded border crossing flooded by terrified refugees.
A field hospital filled with sick and wounded civilians.
A bombed school where parents search for their children in the rubble.
The spawning of new hatreds that will carry down through the generations.
Be-medaled generals boasting of Star Wars weaponry.
Nattily dressed diplomats and their leaders prognosticating on our screens.
It leaves little confidence that the next intervention will prove wiser than the last.
History in that corner of the world begs for caution.
