Iraqi warlord's defeat only hardens his resolve

By Borzou Daragahi

Oct. 14, 2007 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

IRBIL, IRAQ — The Muslim warlord reclines in suburban opulence. He smiles mischievously despite his recent troubles.

Over the last five years, his once heavily armed Kurdish militia has been disbanded, his mountainside base crushed by U.S. cruise missiles, his movement thrown into chaos. He was locked up at Baghdad’s notorious Camp Cropper with his former blood enemies, including former President Saddam Hussein.

But Sheik Ali Bapir, the charismatic 46-year-old leader of a Kurdish organization called the Islamic Group, believes he has come through his travails as a winner.

His bestselling memoir has gone into a second printing and has been translated into Arabic. He leads a large political movement with its own satellite channel, news publications, six seats in the Kurdistan regional parliament and a plush compound on the outskirts of this predominantly Kurdish city.

Even his time in prison wasn’t a waste.

“I took the occasion to study Islam with my fellow prisoners,” he says during a rambling chat with a reporter he first met before the Iraq war. “I held Koranic classes. I succeeded in teaching them to recite the Koran by heart.”

Bapir says he remains every bit the warlord. But he now sees himself as a general waging a battle of ideas against secular forces. His 22-month detention without charge, widely chronicled in the Iraqi press, only hardened his resolve against the West and what he calls its hypocrisies.

“According to their own laws as well as Sharia [Islamic law], it’s not legal to put someone in jail without any evidence. Yet there I was, though I was never charged with committing any crimes.”

He added: “The Americans are very ignorant about us Islamists.”

Bapir fought against Hussein alongside other Kurdish political groups during the 1980s and 1990s. His jovial manner won the admiration of secular Kurdish leaders such as Jalal Talabani, now the Iraqi president.

But Bapir’s cheerful demeanor and piety masked a ruthless core. In 1990, he ordered the execution of his brother, accused of being an informant for Hussein’s regime.

In 2002, he broke away from the Kurds’ main Islamic group. He and his private army of 1,000 fighters set up camp near the Kurdish village of Khurmal in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains along the Iranian border.

Next door was the camp of Ansar al Islam, an extremist group believed to have links to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. U.S. forces struck Bapir’s compound with Tomahawk missiles on March 22, 2003, killing dozens of his loyalists and throwing his movement into disarray just as Hussein’s Iraq was collapsing.

After the war, Bapir pressed the U.S. to compensate families of those killed in the attack. He was invited to talk it over at the U.S. compound near the Kurdish resort town of Dokan. But instead of meeting with officials on July 10, 2003, he and his entourage were stopped at a checkpoint, blindfolded and bundled into helicopters.

Bapir eventually was taken to Baghdad and Camp Cropper, the high-security prison where Hussein was held until his execution in late December. He says he was subjected to physical and mental abuse, including beatings and sleep deprivation.

He stopped eating and lost 30 pounds. An alarmed doctor persuaded his captors to treat him better, he said. A pained expression washes over his face as he discusses those first days.

“I don’t like to talk about this,” he says. “This was a very bad time.”

He was confined to an 8-foot-square cell. For nearly a year, his only human contact was with interrogators from the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and British intelligence, who accused him of planning attacks on coalition forces, of supporting Ansar al Islam and of consorting with violent elements of the former regime.

A British interrogator eventually told him that the Americans in Iraq were convinced that he was innocent of all charges and that he had been detained on false accusations.

“But he said I was being held here because of Washington. I was being held for reasons of ‘national security.’ ”

During tedious days, Bapir read the Koran and prayed, occasionally whispering carefully to other prisoners, fearful that the Americans would eliminate his two daily 30-minute walks outside if he was caught.

After the scandal erupted over prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, prison conditions improved. Bapir was allowed to write letters, speak with his wife on the phone and talk with fellow prisoners. He discovered that many of them were his former tormentors, ranking government officials under Hussein.

One day he caught sight of nine people walking past, one of them limping.

“That’s ‘Chemical Ali,’ ” a fellow prisoner told him, referring to Ali Hassan Majid, the notorious military commander who was convicted this summer for his role in the poison-gas attacks that killed tens of thousands of Kurds in Hussein’s 1988 Anfal campaign.

Bapir approached the former regime stalwarts cautiously at first, but then let them have it.

“You created an idol of Saddam Hussein,” he recalls saying to them. “You were not Muslims! Look what you did to the country! Look what you’ve done to yourselves!”

They told him that Hussein was a dictator and blamed him for never listening to their advice, Bapir says.

“We heard you were his No. 2,” Bapir says he told Majid.

“No one was his No. 2,” he says Majid replied.

“I can say that the majority of them regretted what they had done,” he says. “They criticized Saddam Hussein as obstinate.”

One day, he spotted Hussein being escorted to an interrogation room. But they never spoke.

“I felt happy to see Saddam, a true dictator, in such a situation. But I did not want it to be the hands of the Americans.”

The once-pampered former government officials wondered why Bapir never complained about the food or the living conditions.

“It’s because of you,” he recalls telling them. “You drove us into the mountains, and we didn’t have any food or eat anything. We’re used to it.”

Eventually he won them over and they began addressing him as “sheik.”

In late April 2005, he was told he would be freed if he signed a statement promising not to rejoin Hussein’s Baath Party and to inform the government of anyone trying to subvert it.

Bapir says he scoffed, refusing to sign. “I will continue to do as I was before prison,” he says he told a U.S. officer.

He was released anyway, at the behest of Talabani. Bapir eventually gathered his followers, merging with other Islamist groups. The TV station fired up. His book sales topped 5,000.

He doesn’t regret his imprisonment, which prompted Kurdish Islamists to rally around him.

“My faith became stronger,” he says. “I came to understand my friends a little better.”

He pauses and looks down. He smiles as he looks up. “And I understand my enemies a little better.”

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Daragahi was recently on assignment in Iraq.