TIME: Dispatches From the
Front
Monday, March 31, 2003
By
MICHAEL WARE /
KURDISTAN
At about 2:45 p.m. Saturday in the Kurdish city of
Gerdigo, in northern Iraq, I heard the thump of a
mortar firing. It was coming from the battle line
held by Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish fundamentalist
Islamic group that's allied with al-Qaeda, with some
support from Saddam Hussein. The round landed in
front of a forward emplacement held by the Kurdish
61st Uprising Battalion, part of the anti-Saddam
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Moments later, a
second round landed even closer. The soldiers
scurried into their foxholes, me along with them,
before they popped back up to return fire with a DShK
heavy machine gun. Then, from behind us, came a whomp
of an explosion that I knew wasn't a mortar. Across a
grassy field, flame and smoke belched up from what
had been a taxicab. With a sickening realization we
knew that a suicide bomber had struck. What I didn't
know until I got to the scene was that one of the
victims was a colleague, Paul Moran of the Australian
Broadcasting Corp. He was the first journalist killed
in Gulf War II. The most likely suspect: Ansar.
The mortar attack had been a diversion. The taxi had
detonated near a Kurdish checkpoint where Moran had
been filming some soldiers. The blast loosed a
fireball, charred the asphalt and left the taxi a
smoking hulk. A roadside stall was set alight. Paul
died instantly. Two Kurdish soldiers were also killed
and five more seriously wounded.
In the Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq, war can be a
two-, three-or even four-way fight. Two main Kurdish
groups, the PUK and the Kurdish Democratic Party,
have co-existed uneasily, even though both despise
Saddam. After Sept. 11, several Taliban-like groups
also emerged. They mostly blended into Ansar, which,
with help from Baghdad, has used brutal tactics to
try to impose Islamic fundamentalism on the secular
Kurds. There are no noncombatants here. One morning,
while in a position being bombarded by mortars for
six hours, one of the local fighters known as
peshmerga told me, "These bombs don't recognize your
identity." Territory shifts frequently. The day
before the blast, the checkpoints were manned by a
local fundamentalist militia, known as Komal, which
is allied to Ansar and protects its northern flank.
This wasn't the terrorists' first suicide bombing,
but never before had they successfully targeted a
journalist. Two soldiers and a civilian were ripped
apart on Feb. 26 in the same region, outside the town
of Halabja, when a taxi passenger strapped with
explosives detonated himself at a checkpoint.
Afterward, Kurdish intelligence sources warned us
that more bombers were aiming for journos and our
hotel in Sulaimaniyah. American agencies also warned
media organizations that intelligence traffic had
picked up a threat against the press pack in northern
Iraq. The Kurdish military increased protection for
us, beefing up troops around our hotel, introducing
stricter registration procedures and logging our
travels more closely.
On the day Paul died, Ansar and its allies were
supposed to be on the defensive. The U.S., which
believes the group has ties to al-Qaeda, had set out
to crush its stronghold in the mountains near Iran.
For more than two hours that morning, Ansar had been
hit by what a Kurdish combat commander described as
"a cocktail of Tomahawk and cruise missiles." As many
as 40 missiles rained down over the snowy Shinerwe
Mountain from U.S. warships in the Red Sea, killing
dozens and destroying an ammunition dump and a string
of the terrorists' forward bunkers.
The missiles silenced the Ansar mortar batteries. One
impudent mortar that opened up a few hours later was
taken out by a U.S. warplane. The peshmerga cheered
the missiles and spent the day sunning themselves on
the grass. Translated literally, their name means
"those who face death." Tragically, I learned this
applies to journalists too.