The Trump White House’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria and clear the path for neighboring Turkey to attack Kurdish fighters is a short-sighted error. And a betrayal.
The Kurds showed great courage in the fight against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for two generations and Kurdish militias have fought with nobility and remained loyal to the U.S. in the Iraq War and the war against ISIS, despite a pattern of abandoning them when they needed support the most.
Slideshow: The survivors of the Halabja chemical attack, 15 years later.
On March 16th, 1988 a chemical attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja, Iraq killed over 5,000 Kurds. Zubayda Sadiq mourns at the site of a mass grave where 11 family members who died during the atrocity are buried on the 15th anniversary of the attack on March 16, 2003. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
60-year-old Omar Ali Muhammed and his wife Bahja Fath were both victims of the chemical and nerve agent attack. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
60-year-old Habasa Graib makes her way through the rubble-strewn streets of Halabja. Much of the town still looks the way it did on the day of the attack on March 16th 1988 (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Dr. Bakhtiar Faiq made his rounds, struggling for another day to treat a daunting list of patients suffering from blindness, painful sores, cancer, and birth defects – afflictions that linger 15 years after the name of this Kurdish village became synonymous with the horrific
potential of Saddam Hussein’s regime.This young boy suffers from neurological damage . He was 1 and 1/2 years old when Halabja was gassed. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Dr. Bakhtiar Faiq reaches out and touches a patient who suffers from depression. Dr Faiq plays this game with patients to see if they can touch his finger. Depression is one of the main symptoms that plague the survivors of Halabja. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Dr. Bakhtiar Faiq on a home vist to see patient Tara Jamil, 19, who is suffering lymphoma cancer from exposure to the Iraqi regime’s chemical attack on Halabja when she was a four year old child. Unable to receive chemo therapy at a hospital in Baghdad because of the looming war, Dr. Faiq fears that she will die within months. He is studying x-rays of her left arm where he fears the cancer may be metastasizing in the bone. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
15-year-old Payman Azizz was 2 months old when the chemical and nerve agents were dropped by Iraqi warplanes. She was exposed and suffers from tumor development on her chest. Every day she has to endure the painful routine of her mother, Mana Azizz, treating an open sore on her chest by irrigating and bandaging it. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
In the Kurdish-controlled village of Halabja, Dr. Bakhtiar Faiq treats 15-month-old Azad Karaman who was born without feet, a birth defect believed to be as a direct result of his mother’s contamination during the Iraqi regime’s chemical attack on Halabja in 1988. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
60-year-old Habasa Graib is blind in her right eye as a result of the chemical attack on Halabja. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Patients with extreme medical needs are left to languish in the Halabja Martyrs Hospital. This patient who suffers from lung cancer from the attack in Halabja was on an IV drip of saline, when she should have been receiving chemotherapy. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
During the 2003 war in Iraq, the Kurds in Halabjad did not have gas masks and were left to fashion crude protective masks out of rags layered with charcoal and crushed stone. The only advance warning system they have are canaries sold in the marketplace – birds that would die quickly in any attack. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
37-year-old Aras Abid Akram lost 37 of his relatives including his parents,3 brothers and 7 sisters. Every day he visits this mass grave where his family is buried in the main Halbja Cemetery. He now works for Kurdistan Save The Children and Anti Chemical Weapons Society of Kurdistan. (Photo by Richard Sennott/GroundTruth/Minneapolis Star Tribune)
A growing, bipartisan chorus of military, political and intelligence officials are viewing what Trump has set in motion and the great fear of a pending slaughter of Kurdish fighters by Turkish troops as equally disheartening and dishonorable.
This decision, reportedly made by President Trump against his advisors’ counsel and likely based on his personal “friendship” with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, could become a catalyst for not only the suffering of our allies, the Kurds, but the resurgence of our shared enemy, ISIS. Analysts fear the decision will throw Iraq into further chaos and create a new wave of refugees across the region, not to mention the potential consequences for the alliances we have with groups in other parts of the world.
As I argued in an interview this week on Boston Public Radio, we find ourselves in this situation once again because of our inability to understand the complexity of the Kurdish people, their desire for statehood and the differences between the different groups spread across borders in the Middle East.
Bilal Ali, 20, kisses a picture of President George Bush while cheering “you are our father” on April 09, 2003 – Kurds came out by the thousands to celebrate the fall of Baghdad and Saddam Hussein’s regime. (Photo By Richard Sennott/GroundTruth)
I traveled with Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq in 2003 as the U.S. invasion of Iraq got underway. As a Boston Globe Middle East correspondent, I watched legendary Kurdish fighters like field commander Tariq Gogja up close as they took the fight to Saddam’s forces and Islamic militant groups that clustered in hillside encampments that looked like hornet’s nests. I went to the hospital in Halabja where people were still suffering from wounds from Saddam’s campaign and chemical attacks against them in the 1980s. I went to their military funerals, and sadly attended the funeral of Tariq, a story I shared in this narrative piece, which I worked on with my brother, Rick, a photographer and GroundTruth’s photo editor.
Together, Rick and I documented the stories of Kurdish families. We were told of their suffering and got to see their joy when they triumphantly returned to the city of Kirkuk, which looms large in their history and culture.
I returned to northern Iraq in 2014 and traveled with an Iraqi Army Commander Hussein Mansour, who showed me where his Kurdish fighters were working in coordination with U.S. forces in the fight against ISIS and we did a short video on a small battle in northern Iraq, and how it unfolded across the borders drawn in the aftermath of World War One. Just a few months after I spent time with Commander Mansour, he was reportedly killed by a sniper on the frontlines.
I’m thinking of all the courage and commitment and complexity I saw among the Kurds – particularly their fallen fighters like Mansour and Gogja, who I had the honor to know – as I watch this latest, disastrous decision by the Trump administration unfold. It reads like one more chapter in the history of betrayal and tragedy for the Kurds.
