Suleimania, Iraqi Kurdistan—Washington paranoia came to Kurdistan the other night. American correspondents here received bizarre calls at three in the morning after the CIA alarmed our respective Washington bureaus with news of a top secret intercept. American journalists were in imminent danger of attack. Prime location of said assault, it seemed, was the Suleimania Hotel. One problem, I mentioned to the ABC news desk when it woke me: no such hotel exists. And I put down the telephone.

Alas, the news desk called back to say that ABC’s Pentagon correspondent had checked and found that the target was the Palace Hotel. There was a Palace Hotel. And I was in it. So too were my crew. Get out of there now, a desk man ordered, and go to Erbil. Having driven here from Erbil only 12 hours earlier, I had no desire to revisit the ragged capital of the Kurdish Autonomous Region.

Eyes closing, I was nearing the edge of slumber when the telephone rang again. This time, it was my producer upstairs. He has not been in Kurdistan before, and he is young. The desk had just called him, and he wanted to leave. I suggested we wait until morning—not to leave, but to think about it.

No journalist worth his weight in erasable ink stays awake for long when sleep beckons. I read and slowly, slowly dropped off until the muezzin called from his minaret. In Suleimania, there must be hundreds of them, singing less in unison than in their own keys and at their unique tempi. In Arabic, they chant, “Awake! Awake! Prayer is better than sleep.” Perhaps it is. Not that I recalled what sleep was by that time. When the muezzins went silent, early morning traffic started. Truck brakes screeched at red lights. Was one of them driven by a suicidal fundamentalist intent on ramming the hotel and detonating a ton of dynamite? The prospect of losing the management of this badly managed hostelry did not disturb me, but I would miss my friends, my crew and, well, my life.

By about 8 a.m., I gave up on sleep and went down to the lobby. There, a horde of red-eyed hacks questioned one another, “Did you get the call? What are you going to do?” All I wanted to do was have breakfast, but the morning fare at the Palace is so execrable that tea was enough.

Hacks and hackettes alike discussed the 3 a.m. warning. No one believed it. The Agency did not say who threatened us or why, but the implied villain was a relatively new group called Ansar al-Islam, Arabic for “Companions of Islam,” about whom Colin Powell spoke in February back at the UN. They were allegedly some Kurdish fundies and a few Arab Afghans who escaped the American onslaught on the Taliban and are holed up in eastern Iraqi Kurdistan near the border with Iran. Maybe they don’t like us, maybe they hate the hotel food, maybe they disapprove of the drinking in the bar upstairs or of the women mixing with men. (There is far too little of the last.) One young female reporter from a prominent American newspaper said the Pentagon told her editor to withdraw his correspondents from Baghdad. The networks have heard the same plea from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who was concerned for the safety of American journalists during the upcoming “Shock and Awe” air campaign.

We all suspected another possibility. If the Pentagon forced the hacks out of Baghdad and the CIA moved the rest out of Iraqi Kurdistan, the only American journalists in the country during the war would be those “embedded” with the American armed forces. Their rules of engagement prevent uncensored reporting and free movement inside Iraq. Could it be they want us out of the way, not of the bombs of Islamic fundamentalists, but of the inevitable by-products of an Anglo-American invasion?

Philip Knightley wrote about this in the coverage of wars from the Crimea to Yugoslavia in his excellent The First Casualty, a book I recommend to all young journalists. A few weeks ago, I mentioned the Pentagon warnings to Paul Friedman, an ABC vice president and first-rate newsman who is suddenly no longer with the network. He said, “The Pentagon hates any coverage it can’t control.”

Most of the press corps in Suleimania ignored the warning and stayed on in the hotel. ABC, however, was adamant, and my producer obeyed orders—up to a point. With stories to do and contacts to meet in Suleimania, we did not want to waste another day on the Erbil road and more days in Erbil itself. We compromised by taking seven rooms in a mountain-top hotel outside Suleimania. It turned out to be a delightful place with a glorious view of the city and the magnificent Kurdish plain. Its staff shamed the grumpy Palace’s with good manners and willingness to meet all our unusual demands. And the food was excellent. That night, we had a big feast in the main dining room while Kurdish families, who seemed to keep their children up as late as Italians, danced and sang to the music of a local band. As bedtime approached, the heavens unleashed their glorious fury, perhaps a portent of what the American military has in mind for this country. Thunder rattled the skies, and a gale blew up the valley to rock the whole hotel.

In the morning, we went down to see a parade of soldiers from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan celebrate the 12th anniversary of the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein. For those of you who have forgotten it, after the fall of Kuwait, Bush the Elder called upon the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow the dictator.

As it happened, they did. Shi’ite Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north demolished Iraqi torture centers, captured troops, and came close to converging from north and south on Baghdad. Then Bush changed his mind. It seemed he was hoping for a little rebellion that would scare the Iraqi army into killing Saddam. But Iraq’s senior staff was not about to overthrow the man who had put them all in their places and with whom they shared the guilt of a million crimes. Rather than see a rebellion turn into a revolution and set an example for American clients in the Mideast (read: Egypt and Saudi Arabia), Bush gave his permission to the Iraqi army to fly its helicopters, many of them sold to Saddam by Hughes and Bell after Donald Rumsfeld opened the way to American arms sales in 1983. And fly they did: to drop bombs on rebels, to destroy towns, to reconnoiter battlefields, and to deliver airborne assault troops to Kurdish and Shi’ite towns and cities. The rebellion collapsed. When Kurds here talk about betrayal, they mean 1991 and its precursors: 1975, when Henry Kissinger stabbed them in the back and let Saddam Hussein annihilate them; and 1988, when the U.S. helped to hide Saddam’s poison gas murder of civilians at Hallabja. Most Kurds were wondering how Washington might betray them this time. Now they are finding out: the U.S. is allowing Turkey to occupy a patch of Iraqi Kurdistan for a time. Last time, Turkey stayed for 700 years. If Johnny Turk treats Iraq’s Kurds with half the brutality it has used on his own Kurdish population, Iraqi Kurdistan can expect massacres, refugees, and torture to rival the Saddam era.

Near Kirkuk, an old Kurdish man in a settlement for people expelled by Saddam was afraid to tell me his name. His house was under Iraqi artillery on a ridge less than a mile away, and he believed the Americans might let Saddam return again, as they did in 1991.He said, “We do not trust America. We have suffered a lot. Why are you foreign journalists coming now? Where were you when we were suffering?” Another man did give his name when he said, “I have a question for you. Do you think the British and Americans are going to do anything to protect us?” When I shook my head, he said he didn’t think so either.

The Kurds can be forgiven their paranoia. American journalists have some explaining to do. CNN and Fox have turned their living areas in Erbil, hundreds of miles from Ansar al-Islam, into fortresses. The CNN compound’s armed guards, sandbag positions, checkpoints, and visitors’ badges scare sources away. Fox, stuck on the fourth story of the Tower Hotel, made do with sandbagging the entire floor and confining its staff to the building for their first four days in town. (Fox’s people fear only one thing more than the Iraqi army and Islamic fundamentalists: Geraldo Rivera. They were celebrating a few nights back when he failed to make it across the border from Turkey. He may yet surprise them.) Both companies make their people travel with armed escorts. None of the other hacks here bother. They, unlike the Terror Alert Networks, meet Kurds and listen to them. I’ll be interested to hear what they say when the invasion begins.  
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