Boston.com / News / Rebuilding Iraq

CHAMCHAMAL, IRAQ

A survivor wages his final battle

By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff, 3/31/2003

ariq Gogja, a respected brigade commander of the Kurdish forces, knew that the battle against the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam would be a fierce offensive. So he did what he always did through 20 years of fighting for the opposition against the regime of President Saddam Hussein -- he wrote out his will. Gogja, 38, was a generous man. He extended his kindness by allowing a Boston Globe reporter covering front-line battles to stay in his home for much of the last week. But Gogja didn't have much to give away.

In his will, Gogja gave his AK-47 assault rifle, which had always been by his side, to his oldest son, Mohammed. He is only 3 years old but when he comes of age, Gogja wrote, it should go to him. His pistol would go to his son Hiwa, only 4 months old.

It was at least the sixth time Gogja had written his will, his family said.

He had been shot 19 times in his years as a fighter for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, in skirmishes he fought against Hussein's forces through the mid-to-late 1980s and in the battles he led to liberate the strategic, oil-rich city of Kirkuk in 1991 before the uprising was brutally crushed by the Baghdad regime's elite Republican Guard.

He survived them all. But on Friday morning, in a fierce firefight in the mountainous village of Zardahal, Gogja was hit by sniper fire from one of the fighters of Ansar, which Washington has linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. He had just killed two Ansar fighters and was exiting the trench to advance when the bullet struck him in the right abdomen.

The attack on Ansar was coordinated with US airstrikes and US special forces in Humvees with mounted heavy-caliber machine guns providing support. But it was up to the PUK forces to take the villages. Azad Latif, 23, his cousin, was by his side. He said that Tariq fell and crept back to the trench. He fell back against the dirt amid gunfire and kept saying, "I'm not going to die. I'll be back to fight," Latif recounted.

But Gogja did die. He was rushed to a hospital near the front line but had suffered too much blood loss to be saved. Yesterday he was buried in this village where he lived. In the village mosque, a mournful version of the Muslim prayer for the dead was chanted. The clacking of Muslim prayer beads mingled with the metallic clicking of rifles on shoulders as the mosque filled with hundreds of PUK fighters known as peshmerga, or "those who face death."