Dialogues: Iraq and Al-Qaida
dialogues
Iraq and Al-Qaida
By Warren Bass and Jeffrey Goldberg
Updated Monday, March 25, 2002, at 1:08 PM ET
From: Jeffrey Goldberg
To: Warren Bass
Subject: Reason Enough?
Posted Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 10:24 AM ET
Dear Warren,
I must say, I'm looking forward to this exchange; it's not every day that I get to have a discussion with a genuine, AAA-approved, USDA-certified foreign-policy establishment pooh-bah, which is what you are, yes?
You've been doing great work, even if you've been doing it for the Man.
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A Reporter at Large: The Great Terror
In the late morning of March 16, 1988, an Iraqi Air Force helicopter appeared over the city of Halabja, which is about fifteen miles from the border with Iran. The Iran-Iraq War was then in its eighth year, and Halabja was near the front lines. At the time, the city was home to roughly eighty thousand Kurds, who were well accustomed to the proximity of violence to ordinary life. Like most of Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja was in perpetual revolt against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and its inhabitants were supporters of the peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters whose name means "those who face death."
A young woman named Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad was outside her family's house, preparing food, when she saw the helicopter. The Iranians and the peshmerga had just attacked Iraqi military outposts around Halabja, forcing Saddam's soldiers to retreat. Iranian Revolutionary Guards then infiltrated the city, and the residents assumed that an Iraqi counterattack was imminent. Nasreen and her family expected to spend yet another day in their cellar, which was crude and dark but solid enough to withstand artillery shelling, and even napalm.
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Prisoners
