North: Death on the Road

April 17, 2009, 6:41 pm

By Campbell Robertson
First Lt. Ryan Yaun speaks to the Iraqi police about a murder near Zumar.Stephen Farrell/The New York Times First Lt. Ryan Yaun speaks to the Iraqi police about a murder near Zumar.

ZUMAR–We passed a crowd. Men were standing in solemn clusters on the side of the road, eyeing our convoy of Humvees as we rode slowly by. The police later told us what had happened. A local businessman had been shot by the side of the road. It was the first killing here in a long time.

Zumar, a region of Nineveh province spread across the green foothills leading into Kurdistan, is a quiet corner of Iraq, largely unstained by the bloodshed of the rest of the country. Arabs and Kurds here live side by side peacefully; checkpoints fly both the Kurdish and Iraqi flags.

My colleague Stephen Farrell and I were brought here by Apache troop, of the 6th Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment. We had been staying at a base in Tal Afar, taking one and two day trips to every place we could in Nineveh province, to the little towns that lie along the deserts to the south and the muddy villages in the north, where cell phones switch over to the Turkish network. Zumar was interesting because it was a place where Kurds had rolled in after the invasion but Arab-Kurd tensions had never really simmered.

Our first stop was a tiny village of mud houses and itinerant chickens called Tibat ar Riyah. The afternoon was chilly and overcast, and our boots were coated in mud as soon as we stepped out of the Humvees. We entered what appeared to be the one concrete house in the village, a long pillow- and rug-lined hall that served as a meeting place, and drank tea with the brother of the muqtar, the village chief. The brother, Khalaf Hassan Abdulrazzak, and First Lt. Ryan Yaun, a boyish-looking 30-year-old from Freeport, Ill., talked water pumps, schools and power plants.

On the whole, Tibat ar Riyah, despite its near medieval poverty, had few complaints. Lieutenant Yaun asked if they had any problems with the imposed curfew. Mr Abdulrazzak said no one had any good reason to be outside his house after dark anyway.

We left to go see the sheik, a tribal leader who controlled about 20 villages in the area.

Along an otherwise empty stretch of highway, we came across the crowd. Cars were parked on either side of the road. The men stood in groups. A car accident maybe. Or a not very fun picnic. We pulled over and the platoon’s interpreter asked what was going on. That was when we learned that there had been a murder.

The sheik lived a couple of miles away, behind a police station in a town called al-Hudgha. There did not appear to be much to the town other than the station and, on the top of a hill across the road, a 400-year-old graveyard. Dozens of men, family members of the murder victim, were gathered on the road between the station and the graveyard. Lieutenant Yaun approached the local police commander to ask what happened.

“Thank you very much, we can handle everything,” the commander said. “We don’t need your help.”

His tone was friendly but the message was clear. Lieutenant Yaun said he would be happy to offer any support but was just curious what had happened. The victim was from a nearby town and was returning from the district capital, where he had a shop, the commander explained. The bad guys did it, he said, ending the conversation.

Nearby, next to one of those peculiarly camouflaged Iraqi Humvees, Col. Qais Chako, an army officer, had his own theory.

“Two days ago we had a meeting and we talked about the situation,” the colonel said. “It’s going to become very dangerous here. A lot of bad guys are coming to this place, coming from Mosul to here.”

We returned to the Humvees and rode around to the back of the police station, parking in front of two homes that overlooked the surrounding countryside. They belonged to Sheik Massoud Suleiman al-Sadoon, who had the wry smile and imposing stature that is practically a requirement for Iraqi tribal leaders.

The sheik sat on a sofa with his brothers and, over tea and cigarettes, explained that the victim was a member of his tribe. He said that the violence would get worse in Zumar, blaming it on the newly elected Sunni Arab leaders of the province, who, he said, were closely tied to terrorist groups.

He began talking of the rumors he was hearing from others in the area. Killings like this will start happening all over Nineveh province, he said.

After talking for about an hour, we thanked the sheik for his hospitality and left for the long drive back to Tal Afar. Insurgency spreading to a quiet place like Zumar, we said to each other in the back of the Humvee. If true, that presages all kinds of bad things.

It is hard to know what to make of these conversations. Rumors spread quickly in Iraq and tend to gather hyperbole as they travel. But it is also hard to argue with a corpse. That dead businessman on the side of the road seemed to bear out the theories of both the sheik and the army colonel, that the insurgents—the bad guys–were heading north.

A week later, after we had returned to Baghdad, we called the sheik.

The murder case was closed, he said. The businessman who was killed had harassed a woman. Her husband, a local policeman, had killed him in retaliation. The husband was arrested after some witnesses reported spotting his car at the crime scene. He soon confessed. It was a run of the mill crime, cop show stuff. It could have happened anywhere.

“The situation is quiet here now,” the sheik said.


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Old Order Is Back in Northern Iraq

Riding a wave of resentment against the Kurds -- and openly touting influence with insurgents -- Sunnis came to control Iraq's second-most-populous province in their first election.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/playlist/world/middle-east/1194811622215/index.html#

He sent us his best regards.