...Mustafa smirks when he tells me he is a “secularist” who does not pray and boasts about enjoying whiskey, drugs and prostitutes. He is a Sunni who does not mind working for Shia, provided the pay is good. And far from being a patriot, he betrayed his country to work for Iran. Finally, his story shows that the terrorists are not supermen who are able to walk like ghosts through layers of security. At the street-level they are petty criminals who can be caught. What makes Mustafa’s story important is that it reveals the human side of the insurgency. It’s a tale of dirty cops, rivalry, revenge, recruitment and control that climaxes in a fireball in Halabja, Iraq in June 2005...

...He explains that Iran tries to hide its involvements with “layers and layers of intermediaries.” While this might fool the CIA, the Kurds are not misled.

He too faults America’s catch and release program. After months of holding someone without evidence, the Americans inevitably release him. But they do not get the evidence because their interrogation methods make success virtually impossible, he says. He is very clear that the Kurds do not torture.

“Our facilities are up to international standards. The Red Cross visits our prisons. The prisoners get more than their required daily allowance in calories. We follow the Geneva Convention. We videotape all of our interrogations. Our judges are independent. They do not care about religious sects or the party line,” he says. Judges regularly set prisoners free. But the American rules are too restrictive for us, he insists.

“What is wrong with the American rules?”

He answers by telling a story. Once he went to an interrogation in Baghdad run by Americans. He was told that he could not yell at the prisoners or trick them by saying he had evidence he did not have. (The classic lie: Your accomplice confessed and told us what you did.) In other words, he could not act the way most big-city police departments do in the U.S. “If the prisoner says he has a headache [in Baghdad], the interrogation must stop and an ambulance is called. Here we just give him an aspirin” and keep questioning him. No wonder the U.S. releases people for “lack of evidence,” he said.

After that experience in Baghdad, he said: “I am never going back.” It was pointless...