Let me
confess that I have a soft spot for the Kurds. They are generally considered
the world’s largest nation without a state: thirty million or more of them are
distributed across southeastern Turkey, northeastern Iraq, western Iran, and a
sliver of northeastern Syria.
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| Kurdish man |
Their
history is a litany of invasion, betrayal, and genocide. Turkey’s 1930s-era
campaign against its Kurdish minority killed tens if not hundreds of thousands.
Successive Turkish regimes refused to recognize a Kurdish ethnicity, instead
defining Kurds as “mountain Turks.”
When
Kurdish nationalists rebelled against Turkish oppression in the 1980s, they
sparked a counterinsurgency that turned the southeast of the country into a war
zone. The conflict simmers and erupts into major clashes to the present day. In
Iraq, a Kurdish insurgency supported by the Shah of Iran prompted Saddam
Hussein to view the Kurds as a “fifth column” during the war with Iran. The
result was the genocidal “Anfal” campaign of February-September 1988, in which
at least a hundred thousand Kurds were killed. The murder by chemical weapons
of five thousand Kurdish civilians in the city of Halabja in March 1988 was
separate from Anfal as such, but part of the broader pattern of anti-Kurdish
extermination.
Iran’s
Kurdish population, mercifully, has experienced no such slaughter—whether under
the Shah (though he betrayed his Kurdish allies in the 1970s by cutting a deal
with Saddam), or since the founding of the Islamic Republic. This is despite
the fact that most Iranian Kurds are Sunni, in a country where Shias are
hegemonic. The millions-strong Kurdish population is widely distributed
throughout the west of the country, divided into several groups that speak
sometimes mutually incompatible tongues.
In a
little over a year, by coincidence and design, I have traveled in all three of
the major population concentrations of the Kurdish “nation.” During travels
with Griselda in southeastern Turkey in summer 2011, we explored the ancient
city of Diyarbakir, where Kurds are in the majority. A fresh wave of Kurdish
political agitation and Turkish military repression followed. I will not soon
forget sitting out a thunderstorm by the Iranian border with a couple of Kurds
who proudly proclaimed their allegiance to the PKK—the principal Kurdish
guerrilla group operating on Turkish territory.
Also in
2011, I was invited by the Kurdistan RegionalGovernment
(KRG) in Iraq to participate in a conference on the Anfal genocide, held in the
city of Erbil, in the long sliver of northeastern Iraq that the Kurds won as a
state-within-a-state following the First Gulf War (1990−91). Their
quasi-independent status was strengthened after the fall of Saddam in 2003. The
Kurdish zone is the lone part of Iraq that has not descended into catastrophic
violence since that Second Gulf War. Supplied with a driver and logistical
assistance by the KRG and a couple of crucial NGO connections, I was able to
travel widely throughout the zone, including to Halabja and its many moving
sites and memorials connected to the 1988 chemical attack.
From
the start, I was struck by the inordinate hospitality of the Kurds I met, and
their personal vigor. Mahmood is fond of them, too. “I had many Kurdish friends
when I was doing my military service,” he says as we drive from Takab toward
Sanandaj, the heart of Iranian Kurdish culture. “They are serious people. If
they say they will do something, they do it. And they grow up with a gun, a
Kalashnikov, as their companion.”
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| Kurdish woman in traditional dress |
That
military prowess certainly imbues the Kurdish men I’ve met, who frequently seem
to have stepped straight from a film set. Kurdish women, too, have a public
charisma not often found among Muslim females in the Middle East. Their
traditional dress is wildly colorful, and they’re often very beautiful, with
the strong jawline and penetrating eyes of their menfolk.
We are
on the road from Takab by 8:30 a.m. I alternate between mid-morning snoozing
and a perusal of Jack Weatherspoon’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the
Modern World. We pass through countryside of adobe villages blending
imperceptibly into parched yellow hills and red, recently-tilled soil. There
are verdant wheat fields, their fronds rippling in the wind that washes across
this austere plateau. The occasional turbaned Kurdish farmer moves through the
wheat, scythe in hand. Teenage Kurdish boys hitchhike in little knots at the
roadside.
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| Combination mosque/convenience store/ petrol station, en route to Sanandaj |
We
arrive in busy Sanandaj around noon, and Griselda and I beg off from our guide
to stroll the streets on our own. On every block we are greeted in a friendly
way, whether by Kurd or Persian: “Hello, how are you, my dear?” is a typical
salutation (directed to me). There are striking Kurdish women in brashly
form-fitting clothes. It’s remarkable what a difference a belt makes,
accentuating the hips and bust. There are dresses for daily wear in the shops
that have necklines, and I notice much henna-treated hair. Among the
young men, there are cool dudes with rooster-comb haircuts, looking like South
Korean or Japanese pop stars.
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| Kurdish women's fashions in bazaar, Sanandaj |
The
streets are packed with commerce, especially agricultural produce: luscious
tomatoes, fresh lettuce, watermelons the size of late-stage pregnancies.
Griselda is inspired to photograph a few of the Kurdish vendors—all male—and I
find myself piggy-backing on her initiative. It’s easier for a woman to
ingratiate herself with a female subject, but the men seem positively charmed
by her—allowing me to sneak in for follow-up shots.
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| Elderly Kurdish vendor on street, Sanandaj |
We
lunch at the Jahan Nama restaurant, a glitzy place full of antique swords and
pistols and gramophones. Mahmood tries to contact a Kurdish friend of his, so
he can join us – another tour guide. But the friend just returned from leading
a tour to Armenia. I express surprise—do a lot of Iranians visit Armenia?
“Yes!” Mahmood asserts. “Iranian tourists go to Armenia, India, Turkey,
Malaysia, sometimes Russia.” Making the most of their limited options, in other
words. I imagine many Iranian women abandon their hejab once they cross
into these countries, while many men head for the pub.
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| Interior of Jahan Nama Restaurant, Sanandaj |
It’s on
for one last, long push into the heart of Iranian Kurdistan. The initial
stretch out of Sanandaj is slow going. The road is choked with trucks belching
black fumes in our faces. Most are headed for Iraq, and many bear Iraqi license
plates. Trade is booming between the two countries—a reminder of the ironic
outcome of the 2003 Gulf War, which basically gifted Iran with the Iraqi sphere
of influence that Saddam had denied it. Our driver negotiates his way around
the obstacles. Soon the road begins to clear, and the vistas open up.
“The
Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” It’s perhaps the dictum closest to
the Kurdish soul, and entering the precipitous ranges of westernmost Iran, it’s
easy to see why. Samad steers us up a frighteningly slender ribbon of highway
into a flinty fortress of peaks and valleys. “I took this road once by night,”
Mahmood remembers. “At about two kilometers an hour. One mistake and it’s game
over.” The road, though, is a real triumph of engineering, and it’s in
excellent shape. I am confirmed in my estimation that Iranian roads are, on
balance, better than Canada’s—and their engineers confront many of the same
geographical and environmental challenges.
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| Scenery en route to Orumanat |
Only in
such a mountain fastness, in fact, could the Kurds establish settlements that
were relatively immune to the destructive zeal of their tormentors. Our
destination is one of the most remote: Orumanat. When I finally find it on the
map (thrown, at first, by its transliteration as Howraman), I experience a
small shock of recognition. Orumanat lies barely ten kilometers from the Iraqi
border, as the crow flies. Another ten or fifteen kilometers further on is
Halabja. So these mountains are the same ones I glimpsed from the Iraqi side a
year or so ago—the same ones that desperate Kurdish refugees fled towards as
Saddam’s chemical munitions rained down on them. More than a million Iraqi
Kurds found refuge in Iran during the 1980−88 war—welcomed and sustained by
their kin, and by the Iranian regime and Red Crescent. This massive dislocation
and humanitarian response was barely noted in the West. Only when Kurdish
refugees flooded into Turkey in 1991 did the “CNN effect” take hold, pressuring
the US and other governments to establish the “no-fly zone” that forged the
Kurdish quasi-state in Iraq.
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| Village of Orumanat |
The
scenery is spellbinding as we near Orumanat—ancient terraced hillsides, deep
valleys with patches of lustrous green, groves of walnut and apple and
pomegranate trees. We arrive at our hotel exhausted and exalted.
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| Kurdish mother and child Orumanat |
Thanks for sharing your lovely photos, memories, and travel story. It looks so much like some of the areas of Turkey my husband and I visited last year.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the likes. Will drop by from time to time.
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