Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East

by Jared Cohen

  The Kurdish students are proud of the place in society they have earned. The president of the union told me that “in our history we have a lot of student victims who sacrifice themselves for the sake of their country. As you see there are many politicians, famous Kurdish politicians and leaders of the Kurds, that were members of this union, including Jalal Talalbani, the president of Iraq, and Mr. Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan Region.” He reminded me of my friend Ruzwana, who had served as president of the Oxford Union and would always note that seven British prime ministers had begun their illustrious careers in this office as well. The students of the youth union were duly proud of the group’s history and present-day influence on Kurdish affairs.

  During that first meeting, I sat with about twenty members of the union in a gigantic room. I still felt uncomfortable about my attire, but I hoped they wouldn’t notice or acknowledge the difference. As I was pondering this question, a group of youth walked in with a television camera and said that they were going to film the meeting for the student television network.

  Where it exists in the Middle East, youth media is very influential. Young people don’t trust politicians and they don’t trust the older generation. They do, however, trust one another. I was told by Kurdish students in Iraq that they didn’t watch Al-Jazeera, Al-Manar, or CNN; they instead relied on their own student media.

  As I stared at the camera, one of the students sitting next to me made a comment, “I see you dressed smart for us.” He was hunched over and his thick mustache made him look much older than his age. He wore a yellow-striped shirt and pants. Everyone gave an uncomfortable chuckle. Was he insulting me or just being funny? I started to apologize, but I was quickly waved off by the student union president, who told me my underdressing wasn’t a big deal.

  I began my questioning by asking whether as a youth organization they felt engaged by the government. One of the students explained to me that they have an excellent relationship with the government and expressed a firm belief that as a student union they were shaping events in their country. He wore light pants and a white T-shirt with a couple pens in his pocket. He looked like the kid in the front of the classroom. He was referring to the drafting of Iraq’s first constitution, which was taking place at the time. The constitution was on everyone’s mind. With Saddam Hussein gone, what role would Kurds play in the new Republic of Iraq? Would the Kurds be part of a federalist system? Would they maintain their autonomy? What positions would they get in the new government? All of these questions were unanswered and the Kurds were on edge. The students were fully in tune with the issues.

  “The government has seminars and workshops with us so that we can give our input,” the young man continued. “Even on the issue of the constitution, the government notices that the students are a sensitive part of the nation and that we need to be consulted.” Youth empowerment was very important to these students. In Iran and Syria, the youth hadn’t embraced their role as the majority of the population. In Lebanon, the youth had experienced their influence during the Cedar Revolution, but their role as a political influence was still nascent and not entirely united. But in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, the youth understood their role, embraced it, and utilized it. Through their own effort, self-realization, and trial and error, young Kurds understood how to be influential. They united, expanded, and honed their message. They learned the politics, the needs, and the methods for making their voice heard. It was an example to be followed. I was intrigued and wanted to know more.

  I asked the group what they do if they want to influence their government. This time, the student union president answered. His name was Bahar. He wore thick glasses, a blue dress shirt with short sleeves, and a striped pink tie. He described several ways that they influence the government, noting media, the Internet, and formal letters as their primary mode of advocacy. The letters particularly got my attention and I asked them if the government ever responds. I was surprised to hear that the government actually does respond to these letters. I heard stories of ministers coming to their seminars and engaging in roundtables with the youth. The students admitted that sometimes the conversations are useless in terms of substance, but do present them with an opportunity to remind the ministers that if they neglect the youth there will be consequences. He told me the story of a letter they wrote about a need to change the school curriculum. After months of waiting for a response, the student union organized a demonstration to show their demands to all of Iraqi Kurdistan. In the end, the curriculum was changed.

  More than anything else, the students want to be a presence. They want their faces on TV, they want their rallies in the streets, and they want their opinions published. These students are very strategic; they pick and choose their battles. With all of the larger questions that the government is facing, the students are aware that issues like school curriculum cannot be responsible for bogging down a still-forming government. Aware of the potential for easy but meaningful victories, the young people push for reforms on apparently marginal issues. When they win, it is a display of their strength. It is an incredibly effective tactic.

  The government wisely uses the student union as a way to keep this majority demographic engaged. In Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the disconnect between youth and their governments leads to rumors and discontent that get exacerbated by word-of-mouth networks. In Iraqi Kurdistan Region, the student unions and the government have a mutually beneficial relationship. The students know what is going on and can properly channel their demands, and the government moderates a potentially disruptive portion of the population.

  I asked them what they want for the future. I looked around the room, waiting to see who would answer. I noticed that the girls never spoke; they didn’t even look like they wanted to speak. Not surprisingly, another one of the male students spoke up.

  Their aim was clear; they wanted a Kurdish state and described this is as the overall aim of the Kurdish people. But they also stated that this aim will never be a reality without America standing behind them. The students proudly described how fourteen years of self-management and self-administration has been accomplished by the Kurdish people. They saw themselves as one of the world’s best experiments ib self-made democracy.

  Kurdish youth often referred to themselves as a “successful experiment.” They look around their neighborhood, including their own country, and they see violence, corruption, and autocracy. They see their peers either in quiet submission or rebelling quietly and underground. When they look at themselves, they see something different and they are proud of this.

  It is this pride in what they have achieved since 1991 that makes Kurds hesitant to view themselves within the larger Republic of Iraq. Iraqi Kurds are among the most democratic people in the entire Middle East, but there is one thing about Kurdish society that deviates from this democratic momentum: Young Kurds do not want to be part of the Republic of Iraq.

  They tore down their statues of Saddam Hussein in 1991, they’ve already had their civil war in the mid-1990s, and they’ve already had their first elections. Joining the Republic of Iraq is, for many Kurdish youth, a setback, a return to the past. This point came up often, so I asked them, “What does it mean for you to have a Kurdish president of the Republic of Iraq?”

  One of the students, a young man named Havîn, jumped right in to say that while they are pleased the president is Kurdish, this is not the most important thing to them. Pressed further, he confessed that the current political situation leaves them no choice but to be with the central government. However, this is not what they ultimately want, which is independence and their own Kurdish state. Havîn paused for a moment to take a sip of his orange soda, and then spoke again. He seemed optimistic about the prospects of an independent state, almost too confident that this would happen.

  After hearing repeated claims that they wanted their own state, I asked why they had no interest in being part of a unified Republic of Iraq. One of the students, a rather articulate and
well-dressed boy named Qeşem, suggested that it is not natural for them to be part of Iraq, but this is the wish of the neighboring countries and the international community. He expressed a fear that as a minority group, the Kurds will have their future determined and shaped by the larger Arab demographic. Qeşem and his peers believed this to be an ominous legacy of the Ba’ath Party and felt that the Iraqi people still view society through the Ba’athist lens.

  Qeşem then reminded me that the Arab nation, the Arab parts of Iraq, are part of a larger Arab nation, but the Kurdish part is part of the Kurdish nation. The Kurds want the authority to work with the establishment, but not be forced into a situation where they are required to work with the religious and Islamic ummah. From the Kurdish perspective, they have their own flag, they have a parliament and government, and they have experienced self-administration for fourteen years. With all of these things, they believe it only makes sense for them to eventually have their own state. Qeşem reminded me that they have lived and died for this right, telling me, “We have a river of blood and victims that led to the success of the Kurdish experiment. Now that we almost have it, we don’t want to relive history.”

  Qeşem had touched on the fundamental contradiction of contemporary Kurdish political culture: Young Kurds were adamant about being prodemocratic, but they were wholeheartedly against majority rule. They wanted Iraq’s wealth equally distributed among Kurds, Sunni, and Shi’a and they wanted a commission independent of the parliament to be in charge of this disbursement. It was important to them that the Shi’a not control the nation: One student warned that “America should take care of this point that the authorities should be equal among the nations. America must not give the rights of one nation to control another nation. We are a land of Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen, Shi’a, Sunni, and Christians.” Most of these youth looked down on Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis as primitive in their thinking because they have only recently come to know life after Saddam.

  One of the other impressive student organizations I encountered was the Kurdistan American Society, or KASFA. The goal of this civic group was to connect young Kurds to the outside world. Such an organization is significant: Rather than helping young Kurds move to the outside world, it seeks to make Kurdistan part of the outside world, integrating the young population into a global civil society. Unlike in most of other parts of the Middle East, young Kurds don’t want to leave home. They see the Iraqi Kurdistan Region as a success story and they want to be around to benefit from the fruits of their accomplishments. They want to invest in Kurdistan, they want to be part of it, and they want to enjoy the freedoms they have. This mentality completely changes the psychology of the youth. The high level of seriousness among the youth is probably directly related to the fact that they see themselves as professional brokers in every aspect of Kurdish life.

  The young leaders of KASFA expressed sympathy for Jews in Israel and appreciation for the American government, two stances rarely found in the Middle East. Revealing their sophisticated understanding of international politics, however, the young men made clear to me that their support was primarily practical: They knew that Americans and Kurds (and to some extent Israelis) shared common objectives and, more immediately, common enemies. They were well aware of the American abandonment in 1991, and recognized that most transnational alliances were based more on shared missions than on any sense of unconditional loyalty. They know that the United States has use for Kurdistan, and they know that they have use for the United States. And though this mutual affection may find its roots in realpolitik, the Kurds are indeed Iraqis who like us.

  There was noticeably less partying in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region than in other parts of the Middle East I had been to. Their social gatherings are more tame and conservative, at least the ones I saw. An academic friend of mine had put me in touch with the boys of KASFA, who, in addition to sharing their NGO with me, also insisted on planning what they described to me as a typical Kurdish evening. While the events began at sundown, the preparation started long before that. After I met with them one afternoon for a typical interview over a can of orange soda, the two founders—Honar and Aram—insisted that we needed to go to the local market. Honar was in his late twenties. His head was shaved and he had a very round face. He had one of those pushing-young-adulthood bellies and a big smile. His colleague Aram was a bit taller, darker-skinned, and had a stylish part in the middle of his head. He sported some scruff, but on the whole, he was fairly clean-shaven. Both of them dressed in khaki pants and collared shirts. This seemed to be the Kurdish youth uniform.

  We hopped in a taxi together and within ten minutes arrived at the market in downtown Arbil. From the road, it was difficult to see the sheer size of and congestion in the souq. But peering into the market through a narrow open way, I could begin to see we were about to enter into organized consumer chaos. As we walked through the busy rows of shops, which looked more like organized tables, I began to ponder why we had actually come here. Honar and Aram seemed to be on a mission, which I soon learned was a quest to find me Kurdish attire for the evening. As we navigated through the crowded shops and tables of clothes, watches, utensils, spices, and other knickknacks, we finally arrived at a place that looked like a store, as it actually had a door and walls. It was a clothing shop with different color clothes on gigantic rolls. The shopkeeper took my measurements, cut me some cloth, did some sewing, and gave me what seemed like a Kurdish kit. There was a head wrap, a gray shirt, large gray pants that looked like they were for a five-hundred-pound man, a random long piece of cloth, and a red-and-white string. Honar and Aram went with me back to my hotel, told me to come down at seven P.M., and asked me to bring my “Kurdish kit” to the hotel lobby, where they would help me make my transformation.

  I became impatient and insisted on trying to dress myself. I had seen enough traditionally dressed Kurds with their baggy pants and cummerbund at stomach level to assume that I knew what I was doing. Confident that I had pulled it off, I walked down the stairs from my hotel room to the lobby. Almost in unison, the entire hotel staff—dressed in their cleanly pressed white dress shirts with extra starch and black bowties—burst into a fit of laughter and flocked toward me. They clearly felt I was a disaster or the Kurdish version of a fashion nightmare. I was like a race car in a pit stop as a whole crew of hotel staff fixed me up.

  Honar and Aram were impressed when they saw me, but they were unaware of the frenzy that had preceded their arrival. They intended for the evening to be a surprise and took me thirty minutes outside of Arbil to the town of Salahaddîn.

  There was no hot spot as I had expected. This was not an underground party and it was not a street party. Instead, it was Aram’s home. He lived in a small white house, decent-sized, with a large cement patio and large windows. Aram led me inside and showed me to the dining room, where, rather than being one of many individuals dressed in Kurdish attire, I was alone in this. The children—Aram’s brothers and cousins—loved it and got a kick out of taking my head wrap off my head when I wasn’t looking.

  This was a different kind of dining room. There were no tables and no chairs. Thin and faint white curtains concealed the one window in the room. The only furniture was a small wooden stand with a fifteen-inch color television with the sound blasting. But it wasn’t Al-Jazeera or a local prayer channel; it was Nic Robertson reporting for CNN from Baghdad. Ten of us sat around a white sheet that was virtually covered in oversized portions, bottles of soda, and utensils. This was a feast.

  There were over a dozen bowls of food, each with a mixture of something a little different. There were rice dishes, lamb, beef, kebabs, greens, and assorted vegetables. Some of the smaller bowls had a white creamy yogurt, while others had dip that looked more like hummus. This was enough food to feed a small army.

  The substance of our dinner conversation began with an elaborate description of all the fine dishes I saw on the white sheet. From there it quickly moved to the Iraqi insurgency, but mostly because I pr
obed them on this. It wasn’t that they were reluctant to talk about the violence in the Sunni region, but they didn’t view this as anything that had to do with them. As far as they were concerned, this was an Iraqi problem and they were Kurds. They view cooperation by integrating themselves into the Republic of Iraq as a mere formality. We exhausted this topic and after enough conversation, there is only so much you can get out of a people who don’t identify with what is going on in their own country. So we talked about Kurdish music, and the kids around the table played me their favorite tunes.

  Traveling to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region was like traveling to an oasis of peace and stability in the middle of a bloody war zone.

  CHAPTER 12

  WAKING UP IN THE INSURGENCY

  IRAQ, 2005

  Leaving Kurdistan, I drifted off to sleep in the car. Even in the hours before the sun has risen, the scorching heat of the Iraqi desert is unbearable. During the summer, just breathing is a difficult task. Still, it didn’t take me more than five minutes to fall into a deep sleep. My visit to Iraq had been fruitful and less dangerous than I had anticipated and I was satisfied with the trip. For once heeding the severe travel restrictions imposed by the American government, I had shown rare restraint and avoided the war zone that most of Iraq had become. Though traveling alone throughout the Middle East is never without its anxieties, I was able to sleep soundly, knowing that I was as safe as I’d been in months. When the afternoon heat finally woke me a few hours later, I blinked open my eyes and tried to focus on the Ibrahim Khalil border between Iraq and Turkey. There was one slight problem: It wasn’t there.

  I had entered Iraq at this crossing, but now I saw nothing around me that resembled the route I had taken to Iraq, and was planning to take out. I no longer saw the beautiful hills of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. The buildings were dilapidated and there was a turned-over and burnt-out car on the side of the road. These were not typical sights for northern Iraq. It looked like a war zone, the Iraq I had so wisely avoided visiting. I leaned to the front seat to ask the driver where he’d taken me.