Tears roll down her cheeks, but she brushes them away impatiently and shrugs off the murmurs of sympathy around her.
“I memorized this history so it will never be forgotten,” she says fiercely.
“They took us to a camp outside Erbil, and thirteen days later, they came and said, ‘Oh, do you know what happened to your men? They have been killed, buried alive.’ I had four children with me then, and I was pregnant with my last son. I named him ‘Be Kas,’ ‘without anyone,’ because I didn’t have anyone then. I had already lost a daughter in earlier attacks.
“During the uprising, my children and I climbed the mountains to Iran. We walked on foot for eleven days. One man helped us for a few miles, but mostly we were alone with other women and children.
“After the uprising, we came back and lived in Nizarkeh castle for many years. The situation there was very bad, very dirty, and, in the beginning, there was blood everywhere. Two years ago, we came here. I am very thankful. We have two rooms, and a kitchen with a stove and refrigerator, and bathroom with a shower. I never had a bathroom before. I work a little in the fields, and I get a martyr’s salary for my husband from the government. We get a food basket. We have peace. Our lives are very good.”
IN THE AMADIYA district, about forty miles northeast of Dohuk, is the “village” of Gizeh. Before the Anfal, Gizeh stood on Gara Mountain, the towering black peak whose summit once held one of Saddam’s castles. Security issues made Gizeh difficult to rebuild, however, and after the uprising, the villagers—almost all widows and children—were resettled on the outskirts of another mountain settlement, Kani, which is, technically speaking, their new address. Nonetheless, the villagers still call their new home “Gizeh.” In Kurdistan, a village is as much a concept of community as it is a place.
From afar, Gizeh looks poorer than many villages, with huts built of clay and cement, and tall mounds of dark sticks—some animal huts, others, piles of firewood. But as our car turns off the main highway and enters the settlement, the place becomes cozy and welcoming in feel. Roosters and goats are strutting about, narrow paths are winding intimately between homes, and women are sitting on porches, gossiping. Fat clouds float like balloons through the air.
Parking the car, our driver wanders off for a smoke while my interpreter and I enter the house of the mukhtar, or village chief. On one wall hangs a mirror and several photos, including one of Mulla Mustafa. In a corner is a small, handmade cage holding a lovely gray kau, a plump bird of the partridge family. The Kurds keep kaus as pets, treasuring them for their melodious, full-throated song.
Smiling broadly at our request to speak alone with Anfal widows—a meeting only for women!—the mukhtar rounds up five women, all dressed entirely in black, and leaves the room. The widows sit down closely together. In the darkened room, in their dark clothes, their bright eyes flash like hot coals.
Pleasantries are exchanged, and I propose talking to the women one on one. They glance nervously at one another. They want to tell their story together.
Begi, Halimah, Fatma, Auminah, and Rakia all start talking at once. Teenage girls serve a simple lunch of flat bread, cheese, yogurt, and fresh honey still in its honeycomb.
“We were in our village when the airplanes came,” the women say. “We ran away to the mountains. But the Iraqi army followed, surrounded, and captured us. They took our men away in closed trucks. We never saw them again.
“They separated the women into two groups, one to stay in Dohuk and one to go to Suleimaniyah, and then the soldiers said they would take away the girls. But we would die before we would let that happen. So we put a small child with each girl so it would seem as if she was married. . . .
“During the uprising, we climbed the mountains to Iran. We went all together, and when we came back, we settled here. We were just widows living alone at first, with no men, but then our children grew up and got married and now we have a village again.
“The organizations built our houses, and we took care of our children by ourselves. In the springtime, we went to the mountains to pick greens and sell them. We had no other work. But we helped one another. That is how we survive, by helping one another.”
None of the women has remarried, and none wants to remarry. Their husbands might still be alive, they say. Then one of the women takes us to her home to show us a small shrine dedicated to her husband’s safe return—one of hundreds of similar shrines all over Kurdistan. Candlelight flickers over a faded photograph of a man with a bushy, unkempt mustache. Tucked into the photo’s corners are fresh wildflowers.
PEACE WINDS JAPAN (PWJ) is a small nongovernment relief organization that targets Kurdistan’s most vulnerable groups, those whose needs are not being met by larger organizations. PWJ’s core service is providing mobile medical care to isolated villages, usually on a two-week rotation basis. Except for one Japanese coordinator who shuttles between Dohuk and Suleimaniyah, all of the PWJ staff is Kurdish.
Heading one of Dohuk’s mobile units is Dr. Saadi Namaste Bamerni, a compact man with alert black eyes and close-clipped dark hair. Compassionate and passionate, he is deeply committed to Kurdistan and its people. Several of his siblings live in Europe, but he has never considered leaving. “To be in one’s own country is best,” he says.
One day, I accompany Dr. Saadi into the Kurdish countryside. With us are several medical assistants and a young man in a dark, well-fitting suit. He resembles an upwardly mobile businessman but is a bodyguard, armed with an American-made pistol, for which he carries a permit—the law in Kurdistan.
Our spanking-white Land Cruiser sails through the Doski subdistrict, past one reconstructed village after another, some pastel in color, others white with bold-colored roofs and accents. Drifting out of the radio is the voice of Şivan Perwer, a Kurd from Turkey who is the most popular of all Kurdish singers. For years, his songs were banned in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey—which still bans all but his love songs—and one of his most famous songs is a haunting, unforgettable dirge about al-Anfal. “From the air comes the sound of planes, and everything is on fire, fog and dust. From the land comes the sound of crying children,” Dr. Saadi translates.
We pass through Mangesh, an ancient Christian village and one of the two Doski villages—out of sixty-three—not destroyed by the Baathists. Mangesh, which means “touch” in Syriac, the language of the Assyrians, may be named after “Doubting Thomas.” One of Jesus’ twelve disciples, Thomas would not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead until he could touch Him for himself, and is said to have passed through the area on his way to teaching the Gospel in India.
Beyond Mangesh, we turn off onto a dirt road that bumps its way through wide valleys toward lemon-lime hills and a smoke blue mountain range. The landscape is devoid of people and villages, and the few trees in sight are all scrub oaks—small, black, and twisted. The Iraqi government destroyed most of Kurdistan’s larger trees during the Anfal, as they once provided coverage for the peshmerga.
We arrive in Navashki, home to twenty-two families. Navashki was flattened in the Anfal, but the villagers rebuilt it themselves after the uprising, with materials provided by the KRO. To one side is a breeding pen of skinny black sticks, housing a half-dozen newborn lambs. To another are a neatly swept henhouse and traditional outdoor oven, where young women are baking nane tanik, a traditional flat bread. For each piece, they roll out a ball of dough into a circle large as a pizza, drape it over an iron mound, and place the mound on top of coals. They hand me one of the crisp breads, warm and delicious.
While Dr. Saadi treats his patients, a young man invites a PWJ assistant and me into his cozy home, complete with a television. Though too isolated to be on the country’s electricity grid, the resourceful Navashki villagers combined their finances a few years before to purchase a small generator, which they turn on only at night.
“We are very happy to be back in our village,” our host says as he pours out glasses of tea. “We lived in the city after the Anfal and never want
to go back—life is ugly there. But I am worried about my children. There is only a primary school here, and I want them to study more. Maybe we will move to Dohuk in winter, so my children can go to school, and come back in spring to farm. It will be very expensive—we will have to rent a room. But I don’t want my children to suffer, to have my kind of life. I want them to be part of the new Kurdistan.”
BALAVA, GOHARZEH, AND BARCHI are three neighboring reconstructed villages near the city of Amadiya. Like all the forty-seven villages once surrounding Amadiya, they were destroyed in al-Anfal.
Balava-Goharzeh-Barchi is another regular stop for PWJ, and one that Dr. Saadi would prefer to make daily, rather than biweekly, as many of the villagers have serious medical problems. In 1988, the area was bombed with chemicals, and its citizens are still suffering the aftereffects. Dr. Saadi treats cases of heart disease, skin disease, thyroid toxikosis, and congenital malformations, mostly cleft palates, all unusual diseases in rural Kurdistan. He also encounters an abnormally high number of miscarriages.
We pull up in front of the Balava clinic, serving all three villages, where a long line of women are quietly waiting, their green-and-gold, red-and-gold, and blue-and-black dishdasha shimmering in the molten rays of the sun. Glued to many hips are small children. The PWJ team pulls a long wooden medicine box out of the van and hurries into the clinic, while the Balava mukhtar, Abdul Jelil Khalid Rashid, a trim, educated man in steel blue khak and turban, tells me his village’s history.
“This is not the original site of Balava, the original site is on that hill.” He points to a spot several miles away. “We moved here because after the Anfal and the chemical bombs, there was no life—no plants or animals—in the old village area.
“The first time our village was attacked was in 1975, after the Kurdish revolution collapsed. The Iraqi government forces surrounded the town, they shot and bombed, but we escaped and fled to Iran. We came back in 1981 and stayed until 1986. Then the government informed us we had to move to a collective town.
“The planes started flying over six times per day, each time two planes— Mirages, MiGs, helicopters. Then in 1988, ten planes came together, and we knew it was the last chance for us. At dawn, we moved the village to the mountains, and the TNT and chemical bombing began. People felt drowsiness, but only three died, I think because of good luck—the wind was blowing down from the mountains. But all the animals died, and the village was destroyed.
“After the uprising, the KRO helped us rebuild. We have thirty-four houses now, and a water project. Our children go to the new school in Goharzeh, one-two kilometers away. It is a good school with many classrooms and a basketball court. But we don’t have enough teachers, and it is hard for the children to walk there in the snow.”
Nahman Selim Othman, the director of the school, arrives and elaborates on the area’s history. A heavyset, balding man in a tan Western suit, he appears to be much older than his forty years.
“In the beginning of the Anfal, helicopters would come and circle the area in the night,” he says. “No one could sleep, there was panic. And some nights, we could hear bombing nearby. Then the bombing started in our area, and we fled the village. The first sign that the bombs were chemical was a shortness of breath, and we smelled a bad odor we couldn’t identify. We fled higher up the mountains with just our clothes, we were very afraid.
“After some time, we started toward Turkey. On the way, we spent one night in a valley, and that night, that valley was bombed, again we were very afraid.
“When we reached the border, the Turkish government refused to let us enter. But the Kurds of Turkey helped us, and we forced our way in. The soldiers put us in a refugee camp, but there weren’t enough tents, and they treated us very bad, kicking us, accusing us of being terrorists. So after one-two months, we fled to Iran and stayed there four-five years. Iran wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad. All the village went together, around a hundred families. After the uprising, about forty families came back, and more are still coming.
“When the Iraqi forces occupied this area, they shot people first, asked questions later. One of my relatives was shot coming home from his fields in the evening. This happened all the time. We didn’t have any rights. We couldn’t travel between villages easily—checkpoints were everywhere. They took our crops and our animals. That’s why we became revolutionaries.”
ONE WEEK LATER, Dr. Saadi and I rendezvous again, to travel to Koreme, a village in the Doski subdistrict that was destroyed during the Anfal through massacre, deportation, and bulldozing. Human Rights Watch/Middle East conducted an early, in-depth case study of the Anfal here in 1992, which led to other studies elsewhere, and to the conclusion that the Anfal was a genocidal campaign. The HRW report initially brought some attention to Koreme, but now the small, reconstructed village feels isolated and forgotten, its moment in history passed. Accessible only by a poor dirt road, impassable in bad weather, it has no electricity or running water.
Entering Koreme in the pouring rain, the skies cracking apart with thunder and lightning, Dr. Saadi and I head to the home of mukhtar Hadji Mustafa Othman. Despite the tumultuous weather, he comes out on the front porch to welcome us. Dressed in baggy pants and a turban, he is one of the only middle-aged men left in the village, as he was in jail when the massacre occurred.
We enter a room furnished with thin carpets, a kerosene heater, and a picture of Mulla Mustafa. As we settle in, the front door begins creaking open and shut, open and shut. The room fills up with old men and young boys, all in traditional dress, and the men in red-and-white turbans, until it seems as if the whole village sans females is arriving. The old men’s faces are tan, wrinkled, and worn, while the boys’ cheeks shine pink with excitement—Koreme receives few visitors. One young boy pours out glasses of tea, another washes more glasses to accommodate the crowd, and the rest nudge one another and stare. Prayer beads go click, click, click.
“Since the Kurdish revolution began in 1961,” the mukhtar says, “Koreme has been destroyed and rebuilt four times. The worst time was the Anfal on August 28, 1988.
“Before the Anfal started, the villagers knew something was going to happen. There were many soldiers in the area, and some of the villages nearby were being bombed. So on the morning of August 27, most of the Koreme families tried to flee to Turkey with their animals. But they couldn’t get across. The Turkish soldiers closed the borders.
“The villagers started back to Koreme and reached the village early the next morning. It was surrounded by soldiers. The men and boys put their hands in the air, and everyone was arrested. The soldiers took the animals away, and divided the villagers into three groups—women and children, old men, and boys and men. The first two groups were taken to refugee camps. The third group was divided again, and thirty-three boys and men were taken to a field behind the village, where they were shot.”
A few days later, I would speak to two of the survivors of the shooting, Qehar Khalil Muhammad and Abdul Kerim Naifhassen, who would describe being lined up and marched single file out of the village. Once in the field, they were ordered to stop, turn around, and kneel shoulder to shoulder. The Iraqi soldiers fired three rounds; none of the victims were blindfolded.
“When we returned to our village in 1993, there was nothing,” the mukhtar goes on. “Everything was destroyed—the soldiers even poured cement over our springs. First, we lived in tents, but then the KRO brought us materials, and we rebuilt our houses.
“Before the Anfal, Koreme had more than one hundred families, or seven hundred people. Our soil is good, and we had many orchards and animals. Now we have only twelve families, or seventy-five people. Not all those people were killed, some didn’t want to come back.”
The tea glasses empty, the mukhtar offers to show us the place where the massacre occurred. Outside, we discover that the rain has stopped, dark clouds pulling back to reveal a glorious spring day. A half-dozen villagers accompany us as we traipse across a sloshy field to the edg
e of a gentle incline, now glistening with a velvety sheen. Quietly, the villagers point out the spots where the massacred once knelt, where the soldiers once stood, and where the bodies were once buried, before being moved to a cemetery. Everything is now overgrown with new grass. Birds are swooping, and rainwater drops are twinkling. Nothing indicates that anything out of the ordinary ever happened here.
CHAPTER FIVE
Disturbances
IN THE CENTER OF DOWNTOWN DOHUK STOOD THE INSTITUTE of Fine Arts. From the outside, it was a forbidding-looking place with a yawning entranceway manned by guards. Inside, the vestibule and corridors were damp and dark, but then the building opened up to reveal a lovely sun-dappled courtyard filled with flowering bushes, a vine-covered arbor, dozens of students, and music. Brightly colored murals—of a Studebaker, of fighters with flags—danced on the walls, and white sculptures stood here and there. Three young women in long tight skirts were playing the violin, their sheet music propped up on spindly stands. Two young men in leather jackets were looking cool. Through an open practice room, another young man was assiduously practicing Bach, his notes floating up to cup the scene like a protective umbrella.
The artists Sirwan Shakir and Amin Yousif, and I were “taking a stroll.” Both men taught at the institute, and both spoke English. Amin, an intense, dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, was fluent. Sirwan, a kindly looking man with wavy hair just starting to gray, could make himself understood. Both men effusively welcomed me. You cannot understand Kurdistan without talking to its artists, they said.
Like the University of Dohuk, the Institute of Fine Arts had been founded after the 1991 uprising, and charged no tuition, scraping by each month on a small stipend from the KDP government. The school offered classes in music, the visual arts, and theater, with most of its curriculum focused on the Western artistic tradition. As we toured, we passed a drawing class sketching still lifes beneath reproductions of the old masters, and an orchestra class rehearsing Beethoven. Among the musical instruments that the students studied or had studied were the violin, piano, accordion, flute, and cello, although the school did offer a few Eastern music classes to juniors and seniors.
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