Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [1]
Ibrahim thought back to this morning, to words his father had said to them all before they set out.
"Water is life. Control one and you control the other."
Ibrahim knew the history and geography of the region and its water. He had put in two tours of duty in the Air Force. Since his discharge, he'd listened to the old hands talk about drought and famine as he repaired tractors and other machinery on a large farm.
Formerly known as Mesopotamia, Greek for "the land between the rivers," the Syrian land was now called al-Gezira, "the island.'' An island without water.
The Tigris River was once one of the most important transportation routes in the world. It originates in eastern Turkey and flows nearly 1,150 miles southeast through Iraq, where it meets the Euphrates at Basra. The equally mighty Euphrates is formed by the confluence of the Kara and Murad Rivers in Eastern Turkey. It flows mostly southward and then southeast for almost 1,700 miles, surging through great canyons and jagged gorges along its upper course, and a vast flood plain in Syria and Iraq. Where they meet, the Tigris and the Euphrates form the river channel Shatt al Arab, which flows southeast into the Persian Gulf and is part of the border between Iraq and Iran. The two countries have long fought over navigation rights to the 120 mile waterway.
The Tigris and Euphrates in the east and the great Nile River in the west once defined the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of a number of early civilizations stretching back as far as 5000 B.C.
The Cradle of Civilization, Ibrahim thought. His homeland. One third of his great nation, now lifeless and rotting.
Over the centuries, warships came down the Euphrates and tribes were forced to move west. The waterwheels and irrigation canals in the east were neglected as the western part of the country grew--the line of great cities stretching from Aleppo in the north down through Hama, Homs, and eternal Damascus. The Euphrates was abandoned, and then it was murdered. Its once-bright waters were turned brown with industrial and human waste, most of it from Turkey, and not even the melting mountain snows or heavy rains could cleanse it. In the 1980s, Turkey began a massive reclamation project by constructing a series of dams along the upper course of the Euphrates. This effort helped to clean the river and keep Turkey fertile. But it caused the north of Syria and especially al-Gezira to fall further into drought and starvation.
And Syria did nothing to prevent it, Ibrahim thought bitterly. There was Israel to fight in the southwest and Iraq to watch in the southeast. The Syrian government did not want its entire northern border, over four hundred miles, jeopardized by tension with the Turks.
More recently, however, there had been other voices. They had grown increasingly loud in 1996, after repeated, vicious attacks against the Kurds. Thousands of Kurds died in clashes with the Turks in the Hakkari Province near the border with Iraq. Thousands more died when Sadam Hussein used poison gas on Kurds at Halabja. The bloodshed was made worse by infighting among the various Kurdish sects--battles over land, over tradition, over the degree of interaction that would be tolerated with non-Kurds.
Finally, a truce was called by the ailing Mullah Mustafa Mirza, leader of the small but powerful Mirza clan in Iraq. He asked for unity. And the charismatic Walid al-Nasri, leader of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, agreed to help provide it.
Over the past few months, Ibrahim had spent all of his free time in Haseke, a quiet city to the southwest, working with the local patriots in the PKK of which his brother was an officer. As he made sure printing presses and cars were working as they were supposed to, Ibrahim had listened eagerly to Mahmoud's views about establishing a homeland. As he helped carry guns and bomb-making material under the cover