“I told you I knew Ako Agha well,” Dildar said as the two of them exchanged glances, and I wondered about all the other possible personal interconnections swirling around me in Kurdistan.
A servant came in to spread out a plastic tablecloth on the floor for lunch. The conversation turned to Hamid and the Bilbas. A confederation of six tribes that straddled the Iraq-Iran border, the Bilbas were at least as numerous as the Ako.
But the Bilbas no longer had a paramount powerful agha. Maryam’s father had been the last.
“We went the other way, the educated way, and left the tribal behind,” Hamid said in passable English, thanks to several years spent in London. “My stepfather started this when he graduated in law from the University of Baghdad in 1948. Now we still have some small aghas, to help with small problems, but for killings and other big problems, we go to the courts. We believe in the justice of the courts.”
I looked from Hamid to Ako Agha and back again. Both were about the same age and of high standing within their respective tribal groups. But one had stuck to the traditional ways, and the other had been modernized through education. Ako Agha was by far the more romantic character, but Hamid personified the inevitable way of the future. Earlier, Ako Agha had told me that he was planning to send his children to college. He was, in effect, the end of the traditional Ako agha line. I was witnessing the twilight of an era.
THE DIWAN WAS not the only safe haven in Kurdistan. Women fleeing from abuse and the wrath of their families had another as yet limited but growing option: women’s shelters, which I at first simplistically viewed as a new and enlightened idea coming from the West. Only gradually did it dawn on me that the shelters had in fact arisen to fill the gap left by the shrinking number of diwans. The shelters were not so much an improvement on traditional Kurdish society as they were a replacement for a once-integral component of that society, now disappearing due largely to exposure to the West.
At the time of my visit, there were only two official public shelters, both in Suleimaniyah. Plans were in the works to open others in Dohuk and Erbil. Some organizations, including the women’s branch of the Iraqi Workers’ Communist Party, also took in women in need on a more informal basis.
The more easily accessible of the two official shelters was the Nowah Center, located in a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. A well-kept place enclosed by a high wall, it could accommodate a total of about twenty women. To the right of the entrance was an education and handicrafts area where the women took literacy and other classes, and in back was a communal kitchen.
The center’s director, Bayan Mamoud, an energetic woman with sparkling eyes and lustrous black hair, told me that the shelter had been founded in 1999 by seven women’s organizations. Most of its funding came from a German nongovernmental agency, and the shelter also received a small stipend from the PUK. The average shelter stay was three months, and rooms were usually half to fully occupied. Most of the clients heard about the center through outreach programs in their villages, on television, or on radio.
When a client arrived at the shelter, the staff quickly contacted her family. If her family were unaware of her whereabouts for any significant length of time, and especially overnight, her life would be placed in danger. Women whose lives were in danger did not stay at the Nowah Center, but were sent to a safe house run by PUK’s Women’s Union.
Bayan and her all-woman staff, which included lawyers, social workers, and her sister, next met with the woman’s family, sometimes in the shelter, but more usually traveling to her village. “The process is very difficult,” Bayan said. “In the beginning, the families do not hear us and are very angry. And sometimes we must meet with an agha or shaikh, and we are very afraid. We have difficulties with our car—it is very old—and in winter, the day is short. We sit with the agha or shaikh and many men, just two ladies—I often go alone with my sister—and we don’t feel safe until we are back in Suleimaniyah. We don’t bring the police, because if we did, the family would become even angrier.”
I felt astonished at the women’s courage: two young, unmarried, and well-educated outsiders meeting with large groups of angry and probably uneducated men.
“Often we must go back to a village many times, sometimes it takes ten visits,” Bayan said. “But usually, we are successful. The families calm down, we find a solution, and they sign a contract, which we can use later in court if anything happens. We always follow up on the women after they leave here.”
Most women came to the shelter because of marital problems, often due to arranged marriages, the taking of second wives, or the common Kurdish practice of jin ba jin, or “woman for woman.” Prevalent among poor Kurds, the practice involves two families exchanging women as brides in a reciprocal marriage arrangement—usually, two daughters exchanged to marry two sons. In this way, the onerous bride-price, traditionally paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s, is avoided, and a double wedding can also be arranged. When no eligible daughter is available, a family might pledge a niece, cousin, or much younger child instead, to be wed upon reaching puberty. And, in a potentially heart-wrenching twist—luckily dying out—if one couple divorces, the second is expected to follow suit.
Bayan introduced me to some of the women at the shelter. Two were in their forties, but everyone else was disconcertingly young—most well under twenty. All were villagers, a fact that even I, after nearly three months in Kurdistan, could tell at a glance. The young women had a simple, direct, and capable way about them that spoke of hours spent toiling in the kitchen and fields, along with an air of puzzled watchfulness, as if working hard every moment to understand the urban world around them, so different from what they were accustomed to.
One of the girls, wearing an orange-and-white dress with a blue-and-white scarf and a fake diamond ring, told me that she was in the shelter because of jin ba jin. She didn’t know exactly how old she was, but guessed fourteen or fifteen, she said as she nibbled on her fingernails, chipped with a deep red polish. She hadn’t wanted to marry her husband, and when he took her home, he and his family “did nothing for me—no gold, no home, no furniture,” she said, reminding me of how young she was. Instead they all lived together in a crowded house, and when she complained, her husband beat her and shouted, “Go to your own home if you don’t like it here.”
So she went back home, where her uncle and grandfather beat her even harder, saying, “If you were a good woman, why did they send you back? We don’t want you here.” Her uncle locked her in a closet, to drag her out later and beat her again. Three months pregnant, she lost her baby, and, after hearing an announcement on the radio, ran away to the shelter. Now she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to return to her husband or her father’s home. But she had no other options.
I traveled on to the safe house, the Aram Center. Also founded in 1999, the Aram Center had admitted sixty-seven cases in the last three years, all but three of which had been resolved. However, life at the shelter, whose location was kept strictly confidential, was very difficult; most of the women and their children didn’t dare go out on the streets.
One of the unresolved cases involved a rape victim. In her early twenties, she wore denim leggings, plastic sandals, and a black T-shirt printed with a rose and a letter written in English that read: “Darling . . . When are you coming back to me? I’m waiting.” She couldn’t stop crying as she told me her story.
Her brothers had been in prison when she was raped, but as soon as they came out, they began threatening her with talk about her “betrayal,” she said. They found the man who assaulted her and forced them to marry, but still, it was a bad situation, and she was afraid she might be killed. Then her brothers did kill her father-in-law. She was pregnant by that time, but she managed to keep it hidden until she gave birth, when a kind judge helped her and her baby escape to the shelter. Now, her family said they wanted her home, but she didn’t trust them, and she couldn’t see any future for herself or
her son, age two. “We can’t even go outside. How will he go to school?” she sobbed.
Another unresolved case involved a woman in her late twenties, dressed in a polka-dot blouse and black pants. She and her husband had married against her parents’ wishes, running away to Dohuk to wed, and then to Iran, where they lived for ten years. Money was exchanged between their families, and, assuming they were safe, they returned to their village. But ten days later, someone entered their house at night and shot them in their sleep. Her husband was killed, her son shot in the legs, and she was shot in the back, legs, and hands.
I listened in horror to the gut-wrenching stories. I’d been hearing occasional similar tales all over the country, but some had seemed like hearsay and others had just been statistics. It felt completely different to be hearing the painful details from the victims themselves. How could a part of Kurdish society, no matter how small, not only condone this kind of behavior, but glorify it under the name of “honor”?
One easy but highly unsatisfactory answer is that a cruel and seamy underside exists in cultures everywhere, differing in its particulars, but seemingly an inevitable part of human existence.
The number of honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan is believed to have been holding steady or on the decline prior to the uprising. It spiked dramatically in the early to mid 1990s, and is believed to be on the decline again. Experts blame the spike on a variety of factors, including economic and social dislocation, the rivalry between the two parties, the Kurdish government’s near-complete failure to address women’s issues up until recently, the rise of Islamists, and the influence of the violent Baath regime. High unemployment rates, not enough schools, collective towns in which people are crowded together with nothing to do but gossip, and the mores of a deeply entrenched patriarchal order struggling to regain control over a chaotic new world undoubtedly contributed to the rise as well.
Activists estimate that since 1991, some four thousand women were victims of honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan—a number that is impossible to verify, and one that may be grossly inaccurate, as some honor killings are disguised as accidents on the one hand, and different types of murders have been passed off as honor killings on the other, in the hopes of lighter sentencing. Whatever the numbers, most Kurds agree that the practice started increasing dramatically immediately after the establishment of the semiautonomous zone, when the political parties apparently killed women suspected of fraternizing with the Baathists and Arabs who’d previously worked in the region.
Only in 2001 did the PUK and in 2002 the KDP seriously address the issue of honor killings by finally repealing the Iraqi laws that allowed for the killings under mitigated circumstances and that sentenced its perpetrators to no more than three years in prison. By the time the Iraq war of 2003 began, honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan were finally being treated like all other murders, putting the enclave in a far more humanist position than the rest of Iraq, where the repressive laws still stood. Increasingly powerful Kurdish women’s groups, publications, and conferences abroad had also been instrumental in drawing attention to the practice, and some believed that such vigilance had already paid off impressively. The Suleimaniyah’s Independent Women’s Center, for one, estimated that the number of honor killings in the region decreased to 47 in 2001 from 171 in 1991.
If I wanted a negative example of how trauma affects a society, I thought, remembering the questions I’d had before arriving in Iraq, I would be hard put to find anything more dramatic than the 1990s spike in such murders. Publicly, the Kurds had accomplished a superhuman amount in their decade of semi-independence, making it appear as if they had passed through their recent horrific past more or less psychologically unscathed. But insidious disturbances were at work, created by wounds that will take many years, if not decades, to heal. For some at least, the Kurdistan “safe haven” had been safe in name only.
ONE MONTH AFTER I left Iraq, I was again vividly reminded of the precarious nature of life in the safe haven. Sitting snugly cocooned in my New York apartment one morning, I received a call from Zerrin Ibrahim, whom I had met in Dohuk. A lively, intelligent, and outspoken woman in her thirties, Zerrin worked for the United Nations, helping Turkish refugees who had fled to Iraq.
Zerrin had terrifying news. She had been imprisoned by the Baathists while on a routine U.N. visit to Mosul and now, back in Dohuk, had good reason to believe that she was on Saddam’s hit list. The Iraqi regime had a history of sadistically murdering former prisoners after releasing them.
Zerrin was contacting me in the hopes that I could help influence the U.N. to transfer her to another post outside Iraq as quickly as possible. With thousands of miles between us, I felt both far removed from her sickening ordeal—how could it be real?—and fraught with helplessness. All I could think to do was make a few ineffectual phone calls. The situation was only resolved several weeks later when the Dohuk governor assigned Zerrin full-time bodyguards, who remained with her until the end of the war.
Zerrin had given me garbled details of her imprisonment over the phone and later sent me a detailed written report. She had gone to Baathist-controlled Mosul on June 1, 2002, to renew her passport, as did all U.N. local staff once a year. Parking outside the appropriate building, she proceeded to the second floor, where an officer said she needed to visit his boss’s office regarding a few routine details. Two men would take her there.
Leaving the building, Zerrin felt a pistol in the small of her back. She was taken to the Mosul Intelligence Office. Three and a half hours later, a tall, bulky man with dark skin and an infected eye arrived. Accusing her of spying for the United States, Britain, Israel, and Turkey, he said that she had fifteen minutes in which to confess. If she cooperated, she could go back to Dohuk the next day. If she did not, she would be sent to Baghdad, where she would be executed. She asked what evidence they had against her, and he said that she was being uncooperative and would be sent to Baghdad.
Eight hours later, at 3 A.M., Zerrin heard a car arrive. Two men shoved her out of the detention room and into the car’s backseat, covered with dried blood. They drove to a prison outside Baghdad, where she was forced into a cell on the building’s fourth floor. Measuring about three by two yards, the room was painted dark red and was completely dark, except for a dim light above the door. Insects were everywhere.
A knock came, and a moment later—eyes blindfolded, wrists tied— Zerrin was taken to the first floor for her first interrogation of many. The guards never guided her on the way down and laughed whenever she fell.
Inside the interrogation office, six men waited. One accused Zerrin of being a spy for four enemy states, starting with Israel. His proof? Zerrin’s department head, who worked in the Baghdad office, was a French Jew. Zerrin said that she had not known that he was Jewish and did not believe him to be a spy, but if they believed he was, they should be interrogating him, not her. The men slapped her so hard that her mouth filled with blood. Then, saying that that was enough for one day, they sent her back to her cell.
More interrogations followed, each targeting Zerrin’s alleged connections to a different enemy country. Her contacts with an English aid worker and American researcher were brought up, as was her work with Turkish refugees. And whenever she did not provide the answers that her interrogators were looking for, they hit her.
Back in her cell, Zerrin was unable to eat. Her right side felt leaden, as if she’d had a stroke, and one horrific day was spent listening to the screams of another woman on her floor. The woman was in labor and kept crying out for a glass of water, but no one responded as she delivered her baby alone in her dark, dirty cell.
Finally one day, Zerrin was handed a letter calling for her execution and taken to a court within the prison. The “trial” lasted only fifteen minutes, during which time a judge read the accusations against her and said that she would be executed.
Two days later, Zerrin was told that she was being released. She fainted. Guards handed her back her clothes an
d drove her to the house of a Baghdad relative. One hour later, she left for Kurdistan. She arrived home at 7:30 P.M. on June 15, two weeks and a day after her arrest.
Just what had been the reason for Zerrin’s arrest? Had the Baathists truly intended to execute her? Had they really believed her to be a spy? Or had her arrest been meant as a warning—both to her and to the United Nations?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Syrian Interlude
ON MY WAY IN AND OUT OF IRAQI KURDISTAN, I TARRIED nearly two weeks in Syria, home to about 1.5 million Kurds, or 9 percent of Syria’s total population of 17 million. After the heady freedom of Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria came as a shock. Gone was all celebration of things Kurdish. In its stead were the secrecy, uncertainty, and fear of a people living under a repressive, strong-armed regime.
For thirty years, between 1971 and 2000, Syria was ruled by President Hafez Assad, a shrewd, authoritarian, and at times brutal Middle Eastern leader known for his Arab nationalism and opposition to Israel. Assad allowed the Syrian people considerable cultural and religious freedoms— he himself was of the minority Alawite faith—but few political ones, and he was responsible for various human rights atrocities, most notoriously the 1982 massacre at Hama, during which ten thousand to twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered. When Assad died in 2000, many were hopeful that his successor, his soft-spoken son Bashar, would usher in a gentler, more open, and less corrupt era. Some improvements have occurred, but overall Syria has changed little since the elder Assad’s death.
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