Monday, 2 November, 2020 , 14:53
Najmaddin-Karim
Najmaldin Karim, then the provincial governor of Kirkuk, visits Kurdish and Turkmen Shiite forces on the front lines after they recaptured the northern Iraqi town of Bashir from the Islamic State in 2016.
(Marwan Ibrahim/AFP via Getty Images)
Washingtonpost.com | By Harrison Smith
Najmaldin Karim, a Kurdish neurosurgeon and political activist who served as a bridge between the United States and his native Iraq, promoting Kurdish interests on Capitol Hill before returning to his war-ravaged hometown as provincial governor of Kirkuk, died Oct. 30 at a hospital in Olney, Md. He was 71.
He had pancreatic cancer, said his son Shwan Karim, and had moved from northern Iraq to the D.C. area after his health began to decline last fall.
Dr. Karim devoted nearly all his life to the dream of a united, independent Kurdistan, a long-sought home for millions of Kurds across Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq. As a young doctor in Iraq, he abandoned his medical career to join the peshmerga, the Kurdish military force, then became the personal physician to its flamboyant leader, Mustafa Barzani, during an unsuccessful revolt against Iraqi forces.
When Barzani went into exile in the United States in 1976, seeking medical treatment for lung cancer, Dr. Karim went with him. He completed a fellowship in neurosurgery at George Washington University and later treated patients such as White House press secretary James Brady, who survived being shot in the head during a 1981 assassination attempt on his boss, President Ronald Reagan.
Dr. Karim went on to spend more than two decades in private practice while beating a path to the offices of diplomats, policymakers and think-tank officials, urging them to back the Kurds in their campaign for self-determination. He launched the nonprofit Washington Kurdish Institute, serving as its founding president, and successfully championed the creation of a Kurdish language service at Voice of America.
“I don’t know when he slept, because if he wasn’t at the Kurdish Institute he was doing neurosurgery,” said Jonathan Randal, a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post.
In a phone interview, Randal credited Dr. Karim with literally “saving my neck” in a 1984 surgery, and described him as “a one-man lobby for the Kurds at a time when nobody had heard about them in the United States, and nobody in the American government wanted to hear about them,” for fear of antagonizing Iraq, Turkey and Iran.
Dr. Karim helped turn the tide while bringing a slew of Kurdish leaders to Washington, including Jalal Talabani and Hoshyar Zebari, a future Iraqi president and foreign minister, respectively. He helped arrange meetings with politicians such as then-Sen. Joe Biden, the current Democratic presidential nominee, and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1990 on Saddam Hussein’s attacks against the Kurds, presenting a list of thousands of villages that Hussein’s troops had destroyed in northern Iraq.
“He really is proof of what one person can do,” said Peter Galbraith, a former Senate staffer who became U.S. ambassador to Croatia and an adviser to the Kurdish regional government in Iraq. “The Iraqi government was spending hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars on their representational activities in Washington. And Najmaldin, who was a volunteer, was much more effective.”
Dr. Karim won the trust of policymakers in part “because he was factual, candid and nice,” Galbraith added, and became known as “the person who can explain the United States best to the Iraqi Kurdish leadership,” including Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani, the longtime president of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region.
After the Persian Gulf War, Dr. Karim became increasingly involved in opposition politics, traveling to Vienna to join other dissidents in the Iraqi National Congress. In the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he visited the country several times and decided he could “do more.” He moved to Kirkuk in 2009, was elected to the Iraqi parliament the next year and was sworn in as governor in 2011.
Dr. Karim took charge of a city and surrounding province home to one of Iraq’s most lucrative oil fields, as well as about 1 million Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrians and Kurds with competing claims to the city.
He was forced to travel the streets by armored car, and the only house deemed secure enough for his residence was a villa once occupied by a cousin of Saddam Hussein, who was nicknamed “Chemical Ali” for launching poison-gas attacks on Kurds.
During his six years in office, Dr. Karim was credited with tightening security, clearing sewage from the streets and increasing electrical service. “There may just be a light at the end of the tunnel,” Iraq analyst Michael Knights wrote in a 2013 dispatch for Foreign Policy magazine, praising Dr. Karim for setting the city on a path toward reconstruction.
While trying to quell ethnic strife in Kirkuk, Dr. Karim continued to press for Kurdish autonomy. Peshmerga forces took control of the city in 2014, amid battles with the Islamic State, and three years later Dr. Karim angered the federal government in Baghdad when he raised the Kurdish flag alongside the Iraqi flag over official buildings.
Later in 2017, he also threw his support behind a Kurdish independence referendum spearheaded by Barzani, which asked voters in Kurdistan and disputed territories such as Kirkuk whether they favored an independent Kurdish state. The effort triggered strong protests from Baghdad, Turkey, Iran and the United States, which feared that it would further fracture the country.
More than 90 percent of voters said “yes” to independence, according to official results, but the referendum dramatically backfired. Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed militants moved into Kirkuk and forced Dr. Karim to flee to Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Dr. Karim said he left his home after being tipped off that Iraqi forces were coming to capture or kill him, and he blamed members of his own Kurdish political party for selling out the city.
“I really think that was the day part of my dad died,” Shwan Karim said by phone.
In an interview with NPR a month after fleeing to Irbil, Dr. Karim said he feared for his life, and accused European and American forces of “hypocrisy” for not helping the Kurds in their independence effort, given the peshmerga’s role in battling the Islamic State. An Iraqi court later issued a warrant for his arrest, on what Dr. Karim characterized as politically motivated corruption charges.
“What happened in Kirkuk,” he told NPR, “was treachery and treason.”
Najmaldin Omer Karim was born Aug. 12, 1949, the third of 13 children. His mother was a homemaker, and his father was an imam whose Kurdish nationalism helped spark Dr. Karim’s work in the Kurdish student union and peshmerga.
He later recalled that at age 13 he saw Iraqi soldiers publicly execute Kurds, including the father of one of his best friends, and hang their bodies in the streets. “I still see that face — all those faces — right in front of me,” he told the New York Times in 2017. By then, some of his friends and relatives had also disappeared or been killed under Hussein, including a brother-in-law and nephew who were gunned down by an Iraqi helicopter.
Dr. Karim received a medical degree from the University of Mosul in 1972. Three years later, he married Zozan Al-Qadhi, the daughter of a peshmerga general. After they came to the United States, Dr. Karim became a founding member of the Kurdish National Congress of North America, an advocacy group that he led as president in the 1990s.
In addition to his wife, of Silver Spring, Md., survivors include four children, Shwan Karim of New Rochelle, N.Y., Sierwan Karim of Miami, Carwan Karim of Sydney and Aveen Karim of Washington; six brothers; two sisters; and four grandchildren.
His son Shwan said that Dr. Karim’s will specified that he be returned to Iraqi Kurdistan and buried there temporarily, “until the day Kirkuk is free from occupation.”
