potrero view

August 2009

Going to War

By David Matsuda

Iraq and the countries that surround it are in the midst of a drought.  In response to worsening agricultural conditions, Syria and Turkey have husbanded water within their borders and limited the southward flow of river water into Iraq.  Bountiful water no longer spills from the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates onto once fertile flood plains.   Without riverine irrigation and rainfall runoff, the Fertile Crescent’s soft, rich earth is being transformed into high salinity topsoil that’s poisonous to cash crop agriculture.    When unfiltered water does seep into bedrock, its high saline and mineral content contaminates well water – the last option for many Iraqi farmers – making it too toxic for agricultural purposes.  Reminiscent of Midwestern United States during the dust bowl era, and current challenges in parts of California’s Central Valley, the lack of water has led to vanishing greenbelts, and left Iraq prone to baboob, or silt storms.   

Honoring the Security Agreement (SA) between Iraq and the United States, combat troops departed from urban areas last month.  Before that occurred I left Victory Base Complex (VBC) on what my Army friends affectionately call a “Doc About,” to take in as much of the country as possible before being denied access to what the SA designates as “cities, villages and localities.”

At “show time” – usually two hours before lift off – the helicopter flight was put on weather hold.  The silt storm passed, and it was rotors skyward at 1 a.m.  Intermittent baboob caused us to skip some stops, leaving dozens of travelers waiting for a ride stranded, and to have to swing around engine damaging silt storms to touch down at Camp Desert Fox at 5 a.m.  At 9 a.m. I learned that my flight to Irbil had been cancelled, but I could get closer to the Kurdish capital by, weather permitting, flying as far north as possible.  

After a three hour helicopter flight across barren agricultural fields, we landed in Mosul City.  Unfortunately, my luggage got off several stops before.  In addition to interviewing members of the Iraqi Security Forces and local government officials about how to involve tribes in security and development projects, I had to restock at the Post Exchange.  As a result I wore the same uniform over the next two weeks.  Flight after flight to Irbil, leg three of my journey, were cancelled due to wave after wave of silt storms.  But having made friends with the flight officer, I managed to get ahead of my contacts by flying farther north to the border between Iraq and Turkey.  

I met the Multi-National Corps-Iraq Kurdish Team at Habur (pronounced Harbor) Gate, the main overland trade route between Iraq and Turkey.  Administered by the powerful Barzani family – leaders of Iraqi-Kurdistan’s most powerful governing party, whose political platform includes a semi-autonomous Kurdish homeland – millions of dollars in trade goods come through Habur Gate daily.  I walked half way across the bridge between Turkey and Iraq.  Beneath me the river coming into Iraq from Turkey was well below its previous high-water marks. In front of me an endless stream of trucks passed in both directions carrying goods to the far reaches of each country and beyond.  The next morning, I conducted interviews with Chaldean Christians, Turkmen and Yezidi’s along the Syrian border and, later that day, met with Kurdish Regional Government Officials in Dohouk Province to discuss how to direct aid to these internally displaced peoples.  On my last day in the Kurdish region I interviewed locals in Irbil coffee shops about upcoming Kurdish elections, and visited what some claim is a 7,000 year old Citadel.  

I then took a midnight supply convoy to Kirkuk city.  Arriving at 5 a.m., I was met by the brigade commander, who said that a massive truck bomb had exploded in the Kirkuki Turkmen suburb of Chai.  In response, the Army was preparing to send Meals Ready to Eat (MRE, otherwise known as Meals Rejected by Everyone).  I suggested instead that they buy food and medicine from Turkmen relatives living in Kirkuk, and pay them to transport the supplies to their grief-stricken relatives.  In addition I recommended that the Army go to Chai and buy relief supplies from the locals  High marks from the local population, another day in the life of the MNC-I Cultural Advisor.  

Baboob kept me grounded on my first attempts to return to VBC.  But because of my status as a member of the Command Group, I was slotted to fly home on a general’s personal aircraft.  I attended several town council meetings in the morning, and arrived at the airfield just as a medical evacuation plane from Turkey was taking on some of the wounded Turkmen from Chai.  The escort on the general’s plane – a luxurious Cessna-like aircraft – told me that I’d be sharing space with a casketed disembodied arm; what was left of a soldier who’d been killed by a massive deep buried improvised explosive device.  “Was I alright with that,” she asked?  “Whoever the soldier was she or he had earned a ride home,” I replied.  We took off into clear blue skies, and in a fitful sleep my mind tried to attach the arm to one of the several hundred soldiers I’d met or seen through the constant silt storms on my Doc About.

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