Chapter Thirty One

Sulaymaniyah

Sulaymaniyah was founded by Emir Ibrahim Pasha Baban in 1784, a relatively new city on the block. It is the capital of the Governorate of Sulaymainiyah, home of Talabani’s PUK. Tectonically Sulaymaniyah is at the epicentre of a number of fault lines and is very prone to earthquakes. They occur at least weekly and have an average strength of between 3 and 4 on the Richter scale. When these rumbled our staff there used to leave their houses and sleep in their cars at night.

The UN Fort at the top of the hill.

Photo source: Twana Sadiq Mardokhii.

The first UNDP/UNDESA office was halfway up a steep incline leading to the UNOCHI office that was located in a large fort on top of the hill dominating the city. Whenever we approached the gate there we were stopped by UNOCHI guards who inspected our papers and gave the vehicle a thorough going over, using a large mirror to inspect the chassis. It was the HQ, initially of Max Gaylard (now UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator of Israel and the Palestinian Territories) and then Siddarth Chatterjee. I used to attend one of our six-monthly budget meetings there at least once a year. The second six-monthly budget meeting of the year would be held in Barzani’s fort at Sari Rush north of Erbil. These budget meetings, where the opposing Kurdish sides faced each other across the table were very acrimonious as their civil war had ended in the Autumn of 1998. Dennis Halliday, and afterwards Hans von Sponeck, the UN Humanitarian Co-ordinators for Iraq, used to come up from Baghdad to attend and to chair the meetings. As the venue would be home turf for one side it would be an away game for the other. The visiting delegation would have a very heavily armed security contingent and would be met at the border by the home side with an equally ferocious security team. The combined convoy would then enter town and business would begin. The fact that the building housing the meeting was surrounded by armed Peshmerga of both sides, then in an uneasy truce, was inclined to focus the minds of those of us trying to reach consensus inside. Each final budget meeting was the culmination of a series of meetings with each side each of them quite contentious. To exacerbate the situation the minutes of each meeting would be referred to the Political Committees on both sides and their reaction would form the first item on the agenda of the following meeting so we had to dig ourselves out of yet another engineered impasse before we could proceed.

Due to work expansion we relocated our UNDP/UNDESA office to larger premises at the bottom of the hill, just off Selim Street. This is the main street of Sulaymaniyah, not 100 metres from our old office and across the road from a new mosque. This mosque, donated to the city by one of the oil-rich Islamic States was the scene of many armed clashes at the time, usually involving members of the Islamic Movement in Iraqi Kurdistan, a band of fundamentalists who had a camp in the east of the governorate, and PUK Peshmergas. Colin Powell tried to establish a link between this group, al Qaeda and Saddam when making a case for war with Iraq. In fact, fundamentalism was anathema to Saddam.

This was a slide used by Colin Powell to demonstrate that there were links between Saddam and al Qaeda by linking Kurdish fundamentalists with them. The camp is in fact in Sargat and was opened to journalists to prove it had no connection to poison or Al Quaeda. Ansar Al Islam, whose camp it was, is a breakaway group from the Islamic Movement in Iraq. The Camp was bombed to smithereens by US B-52 bombers during the Allied invasion.

Our UNDP/UNDESA office had the usual guard house in front and I used often chat with the guards who were usually university graduates earning their dollar a day.

One morning I was working in the Sulaymaniyah office when the building was rocked by an explosion. I rushed out the door and ran to the site of the bomb blast. ‘Ran’ was a misnomer as I felt it was more and more difficult to move my legs the nearer I got to the site of the explosion. I was scared at what I would find there and worried at how I would react to the potential carnage. When I finally arrived I discovered that the bomb carrier, whose target was the Selim Street mosque, had mistimed his detonator and as it counted down he grew afraid and tossed the bomb into a derelict site as he made good his escape, so the new mosque escaped yet again.

Hoger Shalli was the UNDP/UNDESA office manager in Sulaimaniyah who also acted as our Liaison Officer with the Sulaimaniyah government. Hogar was a grave man of presence and was very deliberate in his speech being serious where Azziz of Erbil was ebullient. He was very hospitable and frequently hosted formal meals in the University Club or its equivalent in Sulaymaniyah. I was told that his family were a highly respected segment of the local tribal aristocracy. This was reflected in the people who waited for an audience with him in the large hall. It was similar to the Audience Chamber in the Tatar Khan’s Palace (the Hansaray) in Bakhchisaray (in the Crimea), and the Shaiks waiting in the anteroom of the manager of the Electricity Company in Basra.

Hogar had great sadness in his own family. His house was near a notorious Iraqi barracks in Sulaimaniyah called the Red Security and was a place of terror to the Kurds. When the Kurds rose in rebellion, the remnants of the Iraqi Army and establishment made their last stand in this bastion of torture and death. No Iraqi came out alive from the carnage; 800 of them perished there. During the vicious gunfight Hogar’s little girls were terrified in their bedroom and his wife went to comfort them. She had one daughter clutched to her bosom and said: “Hush, my darling you are safe here.” As she cradled her child the back of her head was blown off by a ricochet bullet. Hogar was remarried to a gentle Kurdish lady who produced a little family of her own. I visited his home a number of times which was within sight of that awful citadel of death. Here his new wife had a loving relationship with him and his children by his first wife. Hogar never forgot his lost love: “Dan, I remember her every day,” he told me and shed many a tear when he spoke to me of her. However, he also dearly loved the lady who restored his girls to a happy family circle.

The entrance to The Red Security.

I visited the barrack where the fighting took place. It was called the Amna Securita (The Red Security). Inside this building the Mukhabarat had cruelly tortured, burned, raped, starved and murdered the Kurds captured in the Anfal campaigns. When the Kurds rose in rebellion in 1991 the barrack was their first objective. After four days of fierce fighting it fell and over 800 Iraqis inside were killed.

The large cells were 20 feet by 30 feet and each one held 100 prisoners. The torture cells (also used for solitary confinement) were smaller and had small windows through which their captors pushed faeces and bloody underwear of raped relatives of the prisoners. A metal bar ran across the cell near the ceiling. Hooks were welded to it and the misfortunate victims had their hands tied behind their backs and were suspended from the hooks by their wrists for long periods when their torturers tired from their onerous physical work. The Barrack is now a museum with wax figures used to demonstrate the various methods of torture. The photo below illustrates the method of hanging victims by their wrists with their hands pinioned behind their backs. In the tableaux the prisoner has electric wires clamped to his ears. When the electricity was turned on the pain must have been horrific as the current surged through his brain, eyes and ears.

Electric Shock Torture.

Photo source: Zirguesi PD.

Another torture used extensively was the Bastinado where the soles of the feet are exposed, tied to a beam, and whipped with a cane, rod or whip. It is extremely painful due to the number of nerve endings and small bones in the soles of the feet. Its popularity for interrogators is that it leaves few marks. I have seen a video where Uday Hussein used it to punish unfortunate Iraqi conscripts in front of paraded ranks of their peers. Our old friend Tahssin Qadir, the assistant Minister for Energy, was tortured there but he never spoke of his treatment. I took some hurried photos before a caretaker approached us and informed us that photography was forbidden.

When I returned to the office I met some of the local staff and I remember well a young lady from Manchester who had returned to Iraq. She was divorced some time later and as is the practice in Moslem societies custody of the children was given to her husband. She was a very sad figure as she played with the children of colleagues at some of our family parties in Sulaymaniyah. Another lady that I remember well was Shawne; she had been Head of Distribution Department (33 kv networks) in the Sulaymaniyah Electricity Authority (SEA) before she worked for the UN. Her brother had been picked up in a random street checkpoint by the Iraqis in the 1980s and was never heard from again. Three years later her family got a note from the Iraqis to say he had been executed. Shawne had previously been linked with Salam, former head of the SEA but it had not worked out and he married Jalal Talabani’s (presently President of Iraq) daughter. Towards the end of my time in Kurdistan Shawne had to take her mother to hospital in Baghdad for a gall bladder operation. This was performed by surgeons from Amman who used to go to Baghdad and operate on a regular basis. She brought her mother home within days, travelling hundreds of miles to the north as there was no air-conditioning in the hospital in Baghdad, and in the over 400C temperatures there, infection was a real danger. When her mother had fully recovered Shawne announced her engagement to a Kurd working in Frankfurt. She was preparing for her trip to Germany when I left Iraq. Shawne had a thing about shoes and I often accompanied her during lunch break as she scoured the souk for yet another pair.

We used to frequent the four-star Ashti Hotel on Selim Street. The restaurant was quite modern and clean and the food was excellent. Its menu card, in common with the Hotel Babel in Baghdad and the Erbil hotels was imaginatively phonetic. Like Baghdad, the waiters used to sleep in the restaurant during the night or sometimes on the roof under the stars. Tahssin Qadir recommended their beer and peppered steak that I found excellent and I was not put off when occasionally I could see mice scurrying along by the skirting boards. It was conveniently situated across the road from the Local Electricity Authority offices and just down the street from the government offices.

When the hotel was full we used the government guest house in the suburbs. This was next door to a municipal park with a lively night life where fast food was readily available and could be consumed in the park at family picnics. There was a zoo of sorts there where monkeys shared their cage with a moving carpet of mice. The poor monkeys were obviously very distressed and were rocking back and forth in depression. The guest house itself was most impressive with over-spacious marble-lined bedrooms whose balconies overlooked the large garden. This garden had tables scattered around the central fountain where we often had some beer before our meals. At night the place pulsated to the sound of hundreds of frogs as their mating calls continued late into the early morning.

I well remember one night when I was attending a banquet hosted by the PUK Prime Minister when towards the end of the night I was approached by Amer Sahinovic, one of my engineers, who requested me to go with him to Mountain One’s house and that she wished to meet me. I made my excuses and left the banquet and went off with Amer. When we got to Mountain One it was obvious that I was being used as a buffer by Amer after some misunderstanding with Mountain One and he was trying to repair the breach. In any case he succeeded and all was quickly light and beautiful so I was redundant and returned to the guest house. My colleagues were still at the banquet so I had the place to myself. Before long I was joined by a number of young Kurds and some wild-looking ruffians from the mountains. These were the bodyguards of a high level Turcoman delegation who were also at the banquet. I noticed that they were very casual when handling their arsenal of AK47s, submachine guns and loaded Surface to Air missiles. Soon I was at the centre of the group and found that they were very interested in Ireland and its history that was similar to their own. A question and answer session ensued and I was like Christ in the temple ‘hearing them and answering them questions’. Eventually we broke up and I went off to bed. Shortly after, there was a knock on the door and I opened it to see a young man in the hallway. “Mr Dan” he said “I love you and would like to stay with you.” I reeled and pulled back in shock and he repeated his offer. This time he said that he would like to sleep with me. By this time I was gathering my wits and prevaricated a bit. He then said that he would call back at 3 o’clock in the morning as he had to visit someone else first. I told him that I felt honoured by his attention but I was of the other persuasion. In fact, I was married and had a family and I was not really into this type of activity. He eventually departed and I barricaded the door before I went to bed. I was unsure if he was working in the guest house or was with the Turcoman group but I spent an anxious few days before I booked out in case I would bump into him again. I had only one other such experience and that occurred in my 11th floor apartment in Kiev. The apartment block was built in former times for army and KGB generals as well as government ministers. The security man knocked on the door one night and offered to provide me with beautiful women. He had no English so the conversation was conducted in sign language. I knew what he was getting at so I pointed to an icon of the Virgin in my hallway and pretended that this was what he was offering and I had one already. He departed crestfallen.

Sulaymaniyah was more socially inclined than Erbil and frequent family parties were held after work. It had many picnic areas such as Mount Azmir north of the city as well as the banks of the two large hydropower station reservoirs. Our favourite was downriver from Dokan as it was on our route to Erbil.

One weekend I was en route to Sulaymaniyah with a group of my internationals when we stopped near Dokan for a picnic. This was the real thing and we barbecued a lamb for the occasion. Someone gave me a leg of lamb and immediately someone else took a picture; I was set up. When the photo was developed I looked like the proverbial glutton.

Sulaymaniyah also had its displaced persons. These were housed in the ruins of a high rise building situated right across the Sulaymaniyah Circle Roundabout from the Residence of the President of the University of Sulaymaniyah. It had no glass in the windows and at each landing a floor to ceiling windowless opening was unsecured. A number of toddlers fell to their deaths from these deathtraps. It is now reconstructed as The Sulaymaniyah Palace Hotel that is rated as the top hotel in Sulaymaniyah.

Displaced persons seem to be a feature of many of the places I worked in and a reflection on our civilisation. The Tatars in the Crimea, Serbs in Serbia, Bosnians in Bosnia, PUK in Sulaymaniyah and PDK in Erbil all had their displaced persons’ camps where they must have led incredibly harsh lives. Strangely transmission substations were havens to them in each of the areas I worked in. In some cases their sheep and goats grazed among the high voltage equipment support structures in the sub stations.

Although a relatively modern city Sulaymaniyah Governorate has many old Zoroastrian tombs. This was the religion of the Persian Empire from the 6th Century BC onwards. It was based on the teachings of Zarathustra, also called Zoroaster. His teaching recognizes the ongoing war between good and evil and is recognized as the first monotheistic religion that adored the sun and the fire. It was the religion of Babylon when the Jews were captives there. The symbol of Zoroastrianism and also the Median Empire was the Faravaher.

All the Sulaymaniyah tombs are, empty and yield little information.

Zoroastrian tomb with the Farvahar in Sulaymaniyah Governorate.