With museums and art galleries closed, we had spent part of the day cajoling our way into the courtyard of Amna Suraka, Saddam’s nightmarish Red Prison. On each side of the black, gutted entry, three columns of dirty white brick ran ground to cornice, overlaid and capped with rows of heavy orange-ish concrete, every inch pockmarked with bullet holes. As one of the city’s major tourist attractions, the prison was closed, too, so we did not see the prison chambers themselves, or the famous hall of mirrors, where each of 182,000 shards of glass remembers a victim of Saddam’s genocidal al-Anfal campaign.
“My cousin is there,” Rebaz told us. “He was executed. His portrait is there.”
Targeting mostly Kurds, this place for political torture, interrogation and unending imprisonment was the northern headquarters for the Iraqi mukhabarat, the secret police. During the fight for Kurdish independence in 1991, the Peshmerga put an end to the operation for good. Our lenient soldier guide, keeping an eye out for superiors, led us around back to where tanks are parked rusting in straight lines, adorned with chains that say “Made in China.”
Rebaz had just finished a biology degree and was looking for work. He initiated us in regional history like he was catching us up to date with a TV show. “It’s a bit tough in this region, like, all the guys around us. For Kurds, they just consider them an enemy—all of the Kurds living under the tyranny of Arabs, Farsi, Turks. Like when you talk to any Kurdish people, they say they are Kurdish. They are not proud to be part of Iraq.”
While Erbil is the political capital of Kurdistan, Suly is its cultural heart, at the frontlines of the fight for Kurdish independence, and so it was unsurprising that we had arrived so quickly at the topic of Kurdish statehood that popped up so frequently in conversations around the country. I was probably stirring them up by reflex—everywhere I was fascinated by identity and nationality and language. I often thought of nations like people, butting heads and saving face and connecting just like we individuals did; territorial constraints on the national identity, then, were like an affront at the most personal level—a restraint on the freedom to define oneself.
Since the failure of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres to establish a contiguous Kurdish state from the remains of the Ottoman empire, Kurds have been divided; there are majority Kurdish regions in Iran, Syria and Turkey, none of them autonomous as they are now in Iraq. Almost everywhere, Iraqi Kurds answered with the same patience and detachment to the question, What should Kurdistan be? It had two prongs: Should you leave Iraq? Should you join with other Kurdish regions?
Ali said it: “It’s impossible.” He had just come home from his job in Baghdad. He described the regular bombings in the capital, sounding more annoyed than anything, worn out but good-humored in a c’est la vie kind of way. During just one week a month earlier, there had been 250 casualties of suicide and roadside bombs in Baghdad. (“Sometimes I feel it in the morning and it wakes me up,” he said.)
“It’s impossible right now, but it’s our hope, right?” said Rebaz.
Ali spoke of independence activists obliquely: “They just want to get rid of the country. It’s not logical right now to do that. I mean, you don’t have order in some places, like—we don’t have sea, we don’t have friends. All we have is the United States, our only supporting country.”
It was true that Iraqi Kurdistan was not ideally situated to be its own nation; American support, too, has never been a guarantee. When the United States and Israel first encouraged the Peshmerga to fight Saddam in the early 1970s, and then changed their minds, collapsing support drove a wedge between two factions. Conflict between the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) still undermines nationalist unity.
“The vision is that it should be the great Kurdistan, all parts going together,” Rebaz reported, never adding his own opinion. It’s impossible, after all, so who cares what I think? Almost everyone invoked the vision. I wondered if Iraq’s three million Kurds felt they were supposed to dream of the day when the world’s thirty-five million Kurds would live in a united country—as if it were the more noble ideal—but didn’t really want it, or care.
“We are surrounded by enemies, man,” Rebaz said. “They don’t want Kurdistan to be a—union country. It will be the most powerful country in the Middle East, because of petrol.”
I noticed the whir of central air. “They say maybe Kurdistan is going to be a kind of Second Israel in the—you know, man?” As Rebaz said this, his face looked willing to try it out. “The US can stay here and do some foreign policy,” he said vaguely. “But it still needs working.”
Both Ali and Rebaz spoke clear English; Ali worked with foreigners in the bomb-ridden capital; they had traveled. And it was clear that through these exposures, opinions had been revised. Rebaz had lived for a short time in India, where he reacted first to surprising linguistic communality between Hindi and Kurdish. Rega meant street for them both; “Panka means ‘fan,’ parda means ‘carton,’ ” he said, grinning as he taught.
“Before going to India, no—I said, ‘I’m a Muslim.’ Only me who is being in God, not even Christian or Jewish. But after going to India, no, I said ‘No: humanity. Then religion.’ ”
“I have friends online from Israel,” he said. “I have three, four friends, they are coming here.”
Like most in Erbil, Sulaymanians speak Sorani, Central Kurdish, written in a variety of Persian script. When I asked what its influences might be—Sanskrit, Persian, Turkish, Arabic?—Rebaz reacted with an uncharacteristic jolt, “No no no no, no Arabic.” Rebaz took a terse sip of tea, as if to wash away the mere hint of a suggestion of an aftertaste of Arabic. Kurdishness was clarified faintly for what it was not.
Syria, before it was a government slaughtering its people, had its fault lines drawn along religious borders. The Kurdish population is predominantly Muslim, so the conflict is portrayed as an ethnic one supported by ancestry. Rebaz narrated a variation on a familiar story while Ali nodded affirmation behind his glass: “We are from different roots. The beginning of the story is one old man had three guys, three sons from different tribes. Sami is Arab ancestor, Hami is European ancestor, Ari is our ancestor. They are calling them ‘Hindo-European’; this part is Kurdish people, Persian people, even Pashto—Pakistan and Afghanistan—part of the Soviet Union, now Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan—all they come through same ancestor.”
His retelling outlined the story of Noah’s three sons, known in the Abrahamic tradition as Sham, Ham and Japheth. Sham (Sami) is the mythological father of the Semitic races; he is Abraham’s great great great great great great great grandfather; in Persian and Arabic, Sami means “Semite.” In Arabic, it also means “supreme.”
Biblically, Ham is the son who moves into Africa, while Japheth relocates toward the Mediterranean. Rebaz had forgotten about Africa, but with one minor change the story matched: Ari was Japheth, the forefather of Indo European peoples. “Our ancestor is called Ari—in Kurdish language, in Sanskrit language, it means ‘fire.’ Born of fire. Because we have even our own prophet and our own religion, which is called Zardasht, Zoroastrian. They are worshipping, they respect fire.”
In Sanskrit, arya means “noble.” These are the world’s Aryans. And in the words I could see the migrating populations: Zoroastrian Aryans brought fire temples to Persia, giving Iran its name. Later, when Zoroastrians moved into South Asia, they were dubbed Parsi—the word Persian in Persian. The word for the people became the word for the place. Then, the word for the place became the word for the people.
Nationality invoked a mythical lineage and language evolved to support its supremacy. Words and identities and religion aged in constant feedback with one another, and soon, the seams of this social stitching were cloaked in imagination and history.
“It’s not about belief,” Rebaz said. “It’s about story.” But, he admitted: “Even I don’t know much about it because I’m into science more!”
Kurds consider themselves the indigene
s who survived Islamic conquest, even though the Islamic influence stuck. Rebaz described a familiar case: “My uncle is Muslim but he believes Zoroastrian religion more than Islam.”
Whatever Rebaz’s uncle called himself, he was a marvelous proof of how impossible “Kurdish” or even “Iraqi Kurdish” tradition was to simplify. He was a true citizen of the country that didn’t exist yet, a landlocked nation both separate and linked, Iraq and not-Iraq, a piece of Greater Kurdistan and standing-on-its-own-Stan. Against the backdrop of ten millennia of visible history, everyone was free to construct his own narrative—and to redact it at any moment. The narrative was being constantly written and read, and spoken and heard, and remembered and reremembered and forgotten. It was as if he could change his mind in an instant. And it was beautiful to see borders between identities collapse, but then . . . the absurdity . . . what were we? I was back in the Emirates Palace, flitting about the golden seats, pretending I was anyone I wanted to be. Was I anything but the story I told myself?
The more Iraqi Kurdistan became this and this—not this or this, or this but not this, or this and maybe someday this—the more it frightened me with the excitement of a world blown open.
FOR REBAZ, LEARNING SOME Hindi helped blur the fences he had drawn around himself. After the linguistic wall fell, others followed.
“When you go, when you read, when you deal with them you come to know they have a great story behind them, this worshipping—it’s not just statues right? They have amazing stories.”
I LOOKED UP FROM our table and saw that we were the only ones left in the room. The café was closing.
“Shall we make moves?” Rebaz said.
We scuttled back into the cold car and thought of sleep, of tiptoeing back into the home of Rebaz’s parents. We would never meet his mother and father, whose approval he’d solicited for our sleepover. Individuation came late here in all its forms.
But before we snuggled up for tea, we fired up the heat and followed Rebaz’s directions to an idea for the night’s last stop. “Whenever I get upset or have tension after reading, I want to get relaxed, I go there. I have my own place that I’ll show you.”
The road climbed up into Azmar Mountain, past the land and gardens and new houses owned by Saudis who weekend in Suly during the summers. Ali thought he saw a wolf dart through the headlights. Suddenly, there was no more hillside to block the view, and we saw Suly as if from a plane landing.
“Whoever comes here, I just take them to a prison—maybe they had an idea about those places,” Rebaz said. “Finally I take them to the mountain to see Suly and they say ‘Wow, we should have come here at the beginning!’ ”
We stood on the exposed hillock of the Goyja panorama, or squatted for survival by a small log fire someone had left. But we bore the cold for beauty: in the darkness we couldn’t even see the mountain we were standing on, and I felt as if we might fall off the planet, and yet we could look down on the gold and green lights of the entire city without so much as a neck swivel. The bright outline of the highway wrapped around all of Sulaymaniyah.
A native of nearby Halabja, Rebaz didn’t seem to mind the lunar cold or the wind whipping up over the mountain’s shoulders.
“During my bachelors, my nickname was Tarzan because I used to shout same as him.”
“When you were happy?” I asked.
“Anytime. Even when I was sad.” The wind had made our eyes wet, and Rebaz’s caught the light of the fire.
He howled.
JUST AFTER DAWN the next morning, we drove east as early haze baked off under the sun. The road is straight; the scenery marries geometric power lines and autumn streaks. Leaving Suly, the hills were burnt red and smooth, growing taller and greener as we shot toward Iran and the fringes of the white Zagros Mountains.
The first glimpse of Halabja is the hundred-foot-tall sloping cone of its major monument, topped with the struts of an angular orb curled around a wire sphere. The base is a single-story circular building, with the outer rim layered in giant fake pebbles. I thought the cone looked like giant forearms stretching skyward, wrists pressed together with the fingers making a protective shell, or housing an offering. Two modest Kurdish flags flank the driveway, those stripes of red, white and green with a bold yellow sun in the center.
On the evening of March 16, 1988, Saddam’s Iraqi planes conducted a dozen bombings over five hours. First came the rockets, the shelling, the usual. And then something different—silent, smoking bombs filled with chemicals that killed instantly upon inhalation, or slowly and torturously. Others, as a university student named Hewa said in 1991, “died of laughing.” Many thousands were injured, and five thousand civilians were killed in an act of genocidal madness.
Some say the bombing of Halabja was disguised as a wartime attempt to drive out Iranian forces. (On March 16, 1988, no Iranian troops were in Halabja.) During the Iran-Iraq war, many Iraqi Kurds did side with Iran, as Iranian Kurds sided with Iraq. Each group had good reason to reject its own state. But this made it clear: whichever identity Kurds chose, they would lose friends even among their own. These are people with a history of abandonment and they have a saying to prove it: Kurd dosteki naya ghayri chaya, “Kurds have no friends but the mountains.”
Compensation from the Iraqi government was more symbolic than useful, and targeted families only of the deceased. Survivors are very often delayed victims of the long-term effects of chemical weaponry: respiratory diseases, deformities, miscarriages.
The golden Halabja Memorial, built in 2003, fifteen years after the attacks, offered no more solace than it did a solution. The first building the regional government had constructed in a decade, the monument stuck out like a trophy for broken promises. Foreign and domestic aid for local reconstruction was funneled and misfunneled through aid agencies to corrupt politicians, and Kurdish representatives leaped to exploit solemn occasions. Visiting diplomats who made this first turn off the highway never witnessed the destruction in the town itself. Iraqi journalist Mariwan Hama-Saeed was clear: “They were paying a visit to the dead people, but neglecting the living.” In 2006, townspeople revolted in riots that left a boy dead and others injured; the memorial was burned but didn’t fall. (The building has been reopened, but the exterior is plain metallic silver now; they didn’t repaint it in gold.)
In the entryway, leafy plants spring out of upended rockets that have been poetically repurposed. Black and white pictures show the town in its heyday: a parade for the last king of Iraq in 1956, dancing primary schoolers, mustachioed soccer players—“The strongest team in Halabjah in 1970s.”
The next room is a brutal diorama. Visitors to the museum walk through a re-creation of the March 16 evening. Papier mâché corpses lie on the floor with blood trickling out of their mouths, lips blue or black as they were reported. A famous photograph is modeled here, of an old man shielding his grandson in vain. Over the loudspeakers, an eerie soundscape.
A friendly guide met us at the door leading out of the room, where a sign reads in Kurdish and Arabic and Persian and English: LIFE AND VICTORY FOR ALL NATIONS / DEATH FOR ALL KINDS OF RACISM.
He led us pleasantly to the next hall, where the museum takes another turn for the unsparing. Here, there are real pictures of the dead, collapsed, frozen, in piles. He pointed out members of his family. He repeated something I had read, something that became a twisted trademark of the Halabja massacre—that the smoke that came and the death that followed were coupled with “the smell of sweet apples.”
Charlotte courageously followed him through toward the TV screen showing footage of the immediate aftermath; I slumped onto the floor, staring across at a wall of pictures that blurred into abstract colors. Red, white and green curtains hung from the tip of the spire above the central hall. Names were engraved in white on reflective black stone like a small, circular Vietnam Memorial, grouped together in families. The man identified his relatives again, distantly running his finger along their names. He was used to this. He seeme
d gratified, almost contentedly showing us through the museum and sending us off with gifts of literature and a grim pamphlet, smiling and shaking our hands. We signed the guestbook, and took the turn toward town.
HALABJA LOOKED LIKE many other small towns along these roads outside Kurdistan’s major cities, assuredly smaller than it once was. Scaffolding stuck to the side of a mosque painted gray, and children rode Big Wheels by the walls of houses. A sign was fixed to a telephone pole at the entrance to the cemetery in Kurdish, Arabic and English: BAATH’S MEMBERS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER.
In this last resting place of the victims of their genocide, it seems understandable that supporters of Saddam’s party (banned in Iraq in 2003) would not be welcome. The Halabja attacks were a piece in the “anti-insurgency” al-Anfal campaign of the late 1980s in which an estimated hundred thousand or more Kurds, and significant numbers of other ethnic minorities, were murdered in systematic bombings, firing squads and concentration camps. The murders targeted able-bodied men. Almost no village in Iraqi Kurdistan was spared Saddam’s attention; the name al-Anfal, “loot” or “spoils of war,” was borrowed from the title of the bellicose eighth chapter of the Quran. The word derives from a root that means, “to do more than is required by duty or obligation.”
A wide brick walkway curves around the plots with green-brown hills as a backdrop, whitecaps farther away. There are mass graves here, for as many as fifteen hundred bodies each, under short, white marble monuments. And there are thousands of tombstones, most written upon, some engraved, some with prayers, some with no names, some colored blue or pink, some decorated with the flowers and greenery they say is in paradise. There are spaces where sharp stones appear scattered on the grass, but serve as markers nonetheless. There are many aboveground tombs with a tall headstone and footstone, and a layer of soil along the length. We met Fatima at one of these, picking out weeds from the soil.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 18