Author: gcaw

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Weekly Standard

The Nazino File

The Weekly Standard

Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag
by Nicolas Werth
Translated by Steven Rendall
Princeton, 248 pp., $24.95

As a general rule, a name like “Cannibal Island” spells doom for property values. But Nazino, in western Siberia, is so naturally awful that even the grimmest name can’t make it sound much worse than it really is. An account from the early 1930s described the region as “an immense marshy plain . . . covered with an impenetrable tangle of brush. As for the rare meadows, they are under water until mid-July.” The summers, though a brief deliverance from the subzero winters, brought dense clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies. Malaria was endemic, and among forced settlers in 1932, infants died at a rate of 10 percent per month, compared with 10 percent per year in Somalia today.

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American

A Bout of Moral Ambiguity

The American (online)

Review of Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun.

Two journalists, in their new book, profile a key figure in the global arms trade.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of two Soviet technological triumphs: The maiden flight of the Antonov-12 transport plane in March 1957, and Sputnik’s launch the following October. Sputnik burned up in the atmosphere three months after its launch, but Antonovs—in many cases now patched with duct-tape and scrap metal—are still flying today. As one of the workhorses of the Soviet fleet, the An-12 has carried untold tons of cargo to remote airstrips where a daintier plane would have crunched its landing gear or smashed a propeller. Its wide loading-deck and rear door make it a favorite for carrying cars, passengers, and irregular cargo. But its most notorious payloads have been guns.

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Jane's

Iraq Awaits the Fight for Kirkuk

Jane’s Foreign Report

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Atlantic Monthly

Breaking Away

The Atlantic, May 2007. With a map by Ryan Morris.

With time, Arab Iraq is looking less and less like a country, and Kurdish Iraq is looking more and more like one. Since 2003, Kurdish negotiators have quietly compelled Baghdad to acknowledge the Kurdish parliament, ministries, and 100,000-strong peshmerga army—in effect, to let the Kurds be Kurds first and Iraqis second, if at all.

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02138

Still Standing in Iraq

02138, May/June 2007

On the day I crossed the Iran-Iraq border in February 2004, you could get through immigration twice as fast if you were a Shiite zealot. Thousands of Iranian pilgrims were surging into Iraq to observe the anniversary of Imam Hussein’s martyrdom in Karbala. Saddam had barred them from Ashura for more than 25 years, but now the dictator was on the lam, and Iranian triumphalists flooded in to inaugurate a new  period of Shiite dominance. On the Iranian side, I glommed onto a pilgrimage group and told the immigration officer I was Karbala-bound. He let me through without a hitch.

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Atlantic Monthly

Iran: A Minority Report

The Atlantic, December 2006. With a map by Ryan Morris.

Iran’s ethnic minorities are not at all happy with their Persian-dominated central government—not, at least, if you go by the number of riots incited, state buildings bombed, and Iranian soldiers slain over the past two years. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election as president in 2005, Iranian Turks have rioted in the northwest, Baluchis have kidnapped and beheaded government officials in the southeast, Arabs have blown up oil pipelines in the southwest, and Kurdish guerrillas have sniped continually at Iranian soldiers in the mountains bordering Iraq and Turkey.

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Jane's

The Militant Kurds of Iran

Feature profile of PJAK, the Iranian branch of the PKK, in Jane’s Intelligence Review.

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Slate

Iran Bombs Iraq

Originally appeared in Slate.

Iran Bombs Iraq

Meet the Kurdish guerrillas who want to topple the Tehran regime.

QANDIL, Iraq—The very large potential bombs being built in Iran, as well as the somewhat smaller real bombs detonating in Baghdad, have distracted attention from the pitiless barrage of medium-sized ones that Iran lobbed into Iraq last month. In the first week of May, the Iranian military sent hundreds of artillery shells and Katyusha rockets whistling over the mountaintops into Iraq’s Qandil region. As soon as the blasts began, most of the local villagers jumped into Land Cruisers, pickups, and tractors and fled for the nearby cities of Qala’at-Diza and Raniya. They came back a week later and found many of their sheep blown up or starving to death.

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