The Kurdish region is religiously diverse, with many other Kurds belonging to one of three small religious groups—the Yezidis, Ahl-e Haqqs or Kakais, and Alevis—whose faiths combine pre-Islamic and Islamic beliefs; some scholars classify the Ahl-e Haqqs and Alevis as Muslim. Non-Kurdish Christian groups such as the Assyrians and Chaldeans (a Catholic branch of the Assyrians) also live in the area, as do evangelical Christians and a few Armenians, though most Armenians left the region following the Turks’ massacres of their communities in the 1890s and 1915. A large Jewish Kurdish community once lived in Kurdistan, but departed the area after the founding of Israel.
The 1200s and 1300s brought disaster to the Kurdish lands. First came waves of Mongol invasions headed by Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, destroying many Kurdish villages and major towns. Then came the invasions of the emperor Tamerlane and his son, who, after capturing Baghdad and Damascus, again sacked hundreds of Kurdish settlements.
But by the sixteenth century, the region was again flourishing. Under the reign of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, which rose to power in Turkey and Persia respectively in the early 1500s, Kurdish princes ruled over emirates with such romantic-sounding names as Bahdinan, Bitlis, and Jazira bin Umar. Often only loosely controlled by their Turkish and Persian overlords, the princes had powerful militias—composed of nominally allied tribes—at their command, and courts filled with musicians, poets, scientists, and religious scholars. A complex social and political order was maintained, as the Kurdish princes, Kurdish tribes, Ottomans, and Safavids successfully balanced power among them for about three hundred years.
With the passing decades, however, cracks appeared in the system. The importance of the Silk Routes declined, the rule of the empires became more oppressive, and quarrels among Kurdish princes and tribes turned into wars. Plagues devastated the region, and, by the mid-1800s, Kurdish high culture had again all but collapsed. Entire tribes were eviscerated or deported, and the Kurds’ sedentary agricultural communities gave way to their more traditional nomadic lifestyle, already in existence for thousands of years. A chaotic tribal order, with an economy based on raiding, emerged. European travelers passing through Kurdistan in the nineteenth century wrote of meeting ruthless bandits and warring tribes, adding more fuel to the Kurds’ by-then well-established reputation for ferocity. “It is better to fight than to sit idle”; “One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name,” go two old Kurdish proverbs.
Many Kurds today downplay their tribal heritage, fearing that it portrays them as a primitive people. But to many outsiders, it is part of their distinction. There are dozens of tribes, and hundreds of subtribes, some of which date back centuries. In the past, many tribes had their own distinct dress, folktales, music, and social customs. Some were known for specific characteristics, such as red hair, broad builds, boorishness, or courage. Tribal affiliations united as well as divided people and, though much diminished in importance today, are still central to many Kurds’ identity and to Kurdish politics. There are also many nontribal Kurds, living primarily in the cities and on the plains. The nomadic tribal lifestyle has all but disappeared. Only “seminomads” remain, living in villages in winter and in goat-hair tents in summer as they move their flocks between their lowland and mountain pastures.
After World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds came close to achieving national independence. The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres recognized their political rights and left open to possibility the establishment of an autonomous Kurdistan. But the treaty was never ratified, and, three years later, with the rise of Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, another treaty was negotiated. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne recognized a new Turkish republic; paved the way for the new British Mandate of Iraq to acquire the oil-rich Kurdish province of Mosul; and made no mention of the Kurds, then in a state of political disarray, torn apart by tribal loyalties. Shortly thereafter, the Western powers finalized the modern international borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq—new countries carved out of the old Ottoman Empire—while reaffirming those of Iran, then known as Persia. In a few short strokes of the pen, Kurdistan—never more than a vaguely delineated land divided among many tribes—was literally erased from the map and the Kurds were parceled out among four nation-states.
Then a foreign concept to the Middle East, the nation-state is still an idea with which the entire region struggles. Many Kurds have never really accepted the West’s imposed borders, which in some places severed tribes and even families in half. “A thousand sighs, a thousand tears, a thousand revolts, a thousand hopes,” goes an old Kurdish poem about the Kurds’ determination to be masters of their own lands. Meanwhile, the erstwhile nation-states, desperate to establish a national identity based on a unified culture, have marginalized and persecuted the Kurds.
Yet the Kurds have also been their own worst enemy. Their history is strewn with gut-wrenching tales of infighting, brutality, and betrayal. One recent definitive instance occurred in 1996, when the Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani turned to Saddam Hussein—the Kurd’s most lethal modern enemy—to help him defeat his rival Jalal Talabani, who had earlier solicited help from another traditional Kurdish enemy, the Iranian government. Saddam had been instrumental in manipulating the two leaders’ actions, which occurred in the wake of a failed CIA-backed coup attempt to oust him from office, and the events enhanced his standing internationally while diminishing that of the Kurds.
Just what is it about the Kurds, I thought as I read about one revolt after another, that gives them their courage, determination, and cussedness? What is it that makes a people a people? And, conversely, why haven’t the Kurds been able to establish their own state? How does a people evolve into a nation?
Some of the answers to these questions must lie in the mountains, I thought. Mountain people all over the world—Scotland, Appalachia, Afghanistan, Chechnya—are a notoriously independent, stubborn, rebellious, and proud lot. Isolated in their craggy fortresses, they are accustomed to taking care of themselves, and don’t cotton well to being told what to do. There’s a reason why one of the first great rebels of all time, the Greek god Prometheus, “guilty” of bringing fire to man against Zeus’ wishes, was banished to a mountain in the Caucasus.
And some of the answers must lie in the extraordinary repression the Kurds have suffered—and survived; as the hackneyed saying goes, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. In the last two decades alone, the Kurds have endured multiple aerial bombings and lethal chemical attacks, the ruthless destruction of thousands of their villages, the assassination of their leaders, killings and kidnappings, torture and inhuman prison conditions, crippling economic conditions, the banning of their language and culture, and the deprivation of that most basic right of all: the right to call themselves “Kurds.”
This last violation occurred in Turkey, one of the most democratic of Middle Eastern countries, between 1924 and 1991, during which time Kurds were declared to be “mountain Turks who have forgotten their language.” Anyone who said otherwise risked arrest and torture. In contrast, modern Iran and Iraq, despite their repressive regimes, have never denied the Kurds their identity. Up until 1975, Saddam Hussein even made regular visits to Kurdistan, posing for the cameras in Kurdish dress, while Iran’s Islamic government has always granted the Kurds some basic cultural—though not political—rights.
How do a people function after such a horrific history? How do they rebuild after attempted genocide? How does trauma shape and filter lives?
The Arabs have an old term for places such as Kurdistan—bilad es-siba’, meaning “land of lions”—i.e., land not controlled by central government. Once applied to the most inaccessible areas of the Middle East, including its mountains, deserts, and marshes, the term connotes regions inhabited by isolated peoples who listen more to their hearts and traditions than to “civilization.” Some scholars even once posited a kind of division of labor “between the tame and the insolent, the domesticated and the indep
endent” with the rebels keeping “the urban civilization of the Middle East refreshed and in motion.” But in our age of telecommunications and cyberspace, urbanization and globalization, it’s questionable how much longer such lands will exist—if indeed they still do. Once remote Kurdistan, for one, is now in the throes of rapid modernization, with the Internet, satellite dishes, and supermarkets making their arrival. How are the Kurds coping with jumping one hundred years in the space of a decade, maintaining a sense of self as their traditional world tips, whirls, and shudders around them?
I wanted to travel to Iraq to explore these questions. I wanted to find out more about these mysterious, stubborn, seemingly inextinguishable people called Kurds. And the world needs to know more about them, too, I told my friends and editors—the Kurds are important; they’re central to the future of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria, and hence to the whole Middle East.
But I also had a more personal reason for wishing to travel to Kurdistan: I wanted to return to the Middle East. I had loved Iran—not for its politics, but for its complex people, its paradoxical culture, its rich history, and, most of all, for the way in which it had challenged every last one of my Western assumptions.
MUCH OF THE MODERN Western world first became aware of the Kurds at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, when President George Bush encouraged the Iraqi Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein, in the hopes of destabilizing him. They did so in good faith, retaking many of the areas they had lost in the 1980s, when Hussein attacked his own citizens with chemical weapons and destroyed over twelve hundred Kurdish villages in the infamous Anfal campaign. When the Gulf War ended, however, the United States failed to follow through on its promise of military aid. Fearing more attacks, panicked Kurds fled to neighboring Turkey and Iran by the hundreds of thousands. Journalists covering the enormous migration— thought to comprise at least 1 million people—brought the world’s attention to the Kurds’ suffering for the first time in modern history. With a refugee crisis on hand, a shamed United States, along with other Western powers and the United Nations, set up a “safe haven” in northern Iraq, to which the Kurds could return without fear.
This safe haven was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, pending a final settlement of the whole Iraq question. But by the time of my visit to the region in the spring of 2002, the safe haven, by then also known as the “northern no-fly zone,” had evolved into an extraordinary, quasi-permanent experiment in democratic self-government. Guarded by the U.S. and British air forces, and relatively flush with aid from the United Nations “oil-for-food program,” northern Iraq—the size of Swit-zerland—was flourishing with three universities, fifty-odd newspapers and magazines, two satellite TV stations, satellite dishes, Internet access, “kurdicized” school curricula, small factories, social programs, and leaders regularly received by foreign states. Prosperity hadn’t exactly come to Iraqi Kurdistan, but these northern provinces, which until 1991 had been among the most backward regions of Iraq, were now much better off than those under Saddam’s control.
Although fewer Kurds live in Iraq than in either Turkey or Iran, I focused my travels on Iraq both because it represented an extraordinary chapter in Kurdish history—the first time the Kurds had governed themselves since the 1946 Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, Iran—and because Iraq was the easiest country in which to do research. From what I could ascertain while in the United States, neither Iran nor, especially, Turkey welcomed foreigners snooping around into sensitive Kurdish affairs, and although I also intended to visit both those countries, I wasn’t sure how deeply I’d be able to penetrate their Kurdish cultures. As it turned out, both Iran’s and Turkey’s Kurdistan, which I visited on a second trip to the region the following autumn, proved easier to explore than I’d initially thought. Nonetheless, neither country was anywhere near as accommodating as northern Iraq—a land filled with both officials and ordinary people eager to show off their experiment in democracy.
Since Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime did not generally grant visas to foreigners wishing to travel to northern Iraq, I had to enter through one of its bordering countries—Turkey, Iran, or Syria—using a crossing permit issued by that country in conjunction with one of the two political parties then ruling Iraqi Kurdistan—the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) or Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Syria, I was told, was the easiest of the three countries to work with, while Turkey, once relatively open, had since the mid-1990s become the hardest. I therefore applied through Damascus, to which I flew one cloudy afternoon in mid-March, and took the overnight bus to Qamishli, a Syrian border town. Arriving just as a pink dawn stole down wide muddy streets flanked by rough cement buildings, I slept for a few hours on the floor of the home of an Arab English teacher I’d met, surrounded by his six lightly snoring children. Then came a Jeep ride past fields flush with new wheat and barley, and solitary oil derricks bobbing against the horizon like hungry black crows picking at seed. The ride ended on a dirt road leading to an isolated military outpost, where an official, boredom rimming his eyes, wordlessly checked my papers and pointed me down a hill to the river below.
On the banks waited a handful of burly men in red-and-white turbans, and two creaky wooden skiffs equipped with outboard motors. One of the men tossed my suitcase—suddenly too new looking, though it was at least five years old—into one of the skiffs, another pulled me aboard, a third started the motor. We sputtered away from shore. Dead ahead was Iraq, and to the east was Turkey, followed by Iran. To the immediate west lurked the forces of Saddam Hussein, and to the northeast was the spot at which the Greek mercenaries had defeated the “Karduchoi” in 401 B.C. Below flowed the Tigris River, its mythical waters high now with the rush of early spring, but not high enough to hide huge mounds of pebbles rising from its current like beached whales.
A few moments later, our skiff grated against the Iraqi shore at Fesh Khabur. “Welcome to Kurdistan,” said a lean young man in perfect English. WELCOME TO KURDISTAN read a sign in English behind his back. And “Welcome to Kurdistan” nodded an unsmiling guard armed with a Kalashnikov as I retired to a reception room for my first glass of Kurdish tea.
CHAPTER TWO
Arrival
FROM FESH KHABUR, I TOOK A TAXI HEADING SOUTH TO Dohuk, the northernmost of the three largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Beneath a smudged gray sky, the road slipped through a dreamy landscape, jade knolls in the foreground and gaunt peaks in the distance. We passed miles of belching oil trucks headed toward Turkey, and isolated, still-life villages built of clay and cement. Few people were about that morning. The world seemed watchful, waiting.
Dohuk was tucked between two steep, boulder-strewn mountains, rising from the country’s high plateau like crumpled hats. On the outskirts of town presided a ten-foot-tall, golden bust of Mulla Mustafa Barzani, father of the Kurdish liberation movement, and a row of mansions that had once belonged to Baath Party officials and now belonged to their Kurdish political counterparts. We passed a modern supermarket of an odd violet-blue color, and various faculty buildings of the University of Dohuk. Signs for nongovernmental relief agencies were everywhere: UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), WHO (World Health Organization), WFP (World Food Program), KRO (Kurdistan Reconstruction Organization), PWJ (Peace Winds Japan), Diakonia (Swedish), Help Age International (British).
Turning up a short hill, we arrived at the Jiyan, or “Life,” Hotel—my home for the next few nights. Originally meant to become a Sheraton, the Jiyan was the hostelry of choice for foreign aid workers, journalists, politicians, and businessmen passing through town. In the rain that was now streaming from the heavens, however, the hotel had an almost abandoned feel. The “good afternoons” of the two smartly uniformed young men who greeted me in English as I came in were swallowed up by the silence of the dark lobby beyond. The electricity was out.
From my eighth-floor hotel window, I looked directly across the town to a mountain ridge spiked with conical pines. In the valley below, empty street
s skirted clumps of cement-poured buildings, most two or three stories tall. The skies churned with dark clouds spitting out sheets of rain, while dense clots of black smoke from burning tires rose here and there. Today was the day before Newroz, or New Year’s, and the streets had been emptied and the tires lit in celebration.
All in all, a dismal scene. I wondered, not for the first time, if I really knew what I was doing here. I was more interested in culture than in politics, in society than in the machinations of a possible new war, which thanks to President G. W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, naming Iraq a worldwide pariah just two months before, suddenly seemed frighteningly imminent. My nebulous project involving—what? Attempting to understand how the Iraqi Kurds had reinvented themselves, seemingly overnight, from a fractured tribal people into a fledgling democracy? But whatever my questions or reasons for being here, they suddenly seemed woefully inadequate now that I had finally arrived in this land that was neither country nor state, both united and divided, bristling with hostilities directed both externally and internally.
CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE central Iraqi government and the Kurds erupted almost immediately after British rule was established in Iraq in 1920, following the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Although the British made some early promises of self-government to the Kurds, these were quietly forgotten as they struggled to control the artificial nation cobbled together out of three distinct and hitherto unrelated groups—the majority Arab Shiites, the minority Arab Sunnis, and the minority Kurds, also Sunnis. The British had selected the Arabian Emir Faisal to be king of Iraq after their mandate ended in 1932. But while Faisal claimed direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad, he was Sunni Muslim, which angered the majority Shiites. He had also never been to Iraq before, which angered others, including most Kurds. Why how familiar, I thought months later of the U.S. struggle to control Iraq postwar, with history repeating itself right down to the Pentagon’s initial endorsement of Ahmed Chalabi, a former banker who had spent most of his life outside Iraq (and was wanted for embezzlement in Jordan), as the country’s interim leader.
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