by Jared Cohen
I extended my hand. “My name is Jared.” I didn’t know how else to respond. I had not expected to hear this while I was in Iraq, let alone have it be the very first thing said to me.
“I am Safeen,” he said proudly. Our conversation was cut short as I heard my name called loudly from inside the customs office. It had been brief, but this interaction with Safeen led me to believe that much of what I would see in the Kurdish part of Iraq would differ from my initial impressions of a country at war.
I was escorted to one of the offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, where I found myself sipping tea and relaxing on a comfortable couch. Within minutes there were several Kurdish officials there to greet me. They had known I was coming and had been expecting me. It was at this moment that one of the officials sitting in front of me took his blue Nokia cell phone and placed it on the table. He pushed it toward me and said, “You should call home.”
CHAPTER 11
IRAQIS WHO LIKE US
IRAQ, 2005
The Iraqi Kurdistan Region was physically breathtaking, and with each turn in the road came an even more magnificent landscape. When I first crossed the Tigris River into the Fertile Crescent that once harbored the world’s most magnificent civilization, it was easy to bask in the glory of the Mesopotamian fantasy.
Besides the picturesque setting, just being in Iraq was enough to sustain a feeling of constant excitement, and I wanted to photograph everything and anything. This was a feeling I hadn’t experienced since the first time I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Back then, I was collecting dirt in film canisters, taking pictures of fences, and relishing everything about being in such a place. My driver laughed as I took pictures of objects as banal as signs and cones on the side of the street; he even opened the sunroof so I could stick my head out and get clearer shots. In the first fifteen minutes alone, I photographed an advertisement, a truck, and other trappings of the peaceful, everyday life that I hadn’t expected to see in Iraq.
“I think you are very happy to be in Iraqi Kurdistan,” my driver said to me with an air of pride. He was a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and he seemed very proud to be driving me. He was slender and he wore a suit that was far too big for him. I think he either thought I was older than I was or that I was a representative from some important organization. It was doubtful that he knew I was just a graduate student who had wanted to go to Iraq.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “It doesn’t seem dangerous here. Is it safe for me to stick my head out the window and take pictures?”
“Here in Iraqi Kurdistan, everything is safe. You will feel most welcome.” After these reassuring words, we did not speak much. There were a lot of smiles, but his English was minimal and he spoke Kurdish, not Arabic. I found that people in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region often downplayed their knowledge of Arabic. During the time of Saddam Hussein, they had been forced to speak Arabic instead of Kurdish, making memories of this language all too reminiscent of the Ba’ath Party. Though they are Muslims like most people in the Middle East, the Kurds are not Arabs; their status as an ethnic minority is of far greater significance to them than religious identification.
Consisting of the northern third of Iraq, the Iraqi Kurdistan Region contains high-value oil fields in Kirkuk and strategic borders with Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Home to some of Iraq’s most aesthetically pleasing landscape—large canyons, gorgeous mountains, and impressive waterfalls—many of the Sunni and Shi’a from other parts of the country come to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region on tourism. The waterfalls at Geli Eli Beg, the famous natural wonder once depicted on the Iraqi dinar, are among the region’s most popular sites for Sunni and Shi’a from other parts of the country. The Bexal Waterfall is another popular destination, where Iraqis from all over the country come to enjoy the riverside bazaars, outdoor cafés, and magnificence of the view. Once known primarily for their beauty, the resorts of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region have become popular refuges for those who can afford to take extended vacations from the sectarian violence that plagues the rest of Iraq.
The Iraqi Kurdistan Region is by no means home to the world’s largest Kurdish population, but the Kurds living there are the most pro-American and pro-Israeli people in the Middle East, possibly even in the world. I was not so naïve as to assume that the Iraqi Kurdistan Region represented the whole of the Republic of Iraq. I knew that the overwhelming praise for the American government and its undertaking in Iraq was unique to the region; things were most certainly different in the Sunni Triangle in central Iraq and in Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shi’a stronghold in the south. But the “amount” of support and love for America and Americans in Kurdistan was still surprising.
At the time of my trip in northern Iraq, there was an insurgency in the Sunni-dominated center of Iraq that had killed forty-five Americans in just the last ten days of my trip. There also continued to be violence in the Shi’a south, including the shooting in the head of one Western journalist. When I was in the north, however, I saw no hint of an insurgency. Instead, I saw signs of democracy, freedom, and liberty; I saw a thriving culture of socially and politically entrepreneurial youth who had carved themselves a place at the table.
The modern Iraqi Kurdistan Region dates back to the aftermath of the Ba’ath Revolution in 1958, when Iraqi Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani returned from exile to establish the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Three years later, Barzani led a revolution for self-determination and autonomy of the Kurds. The violent revolution lasted until 1971, when the Iraqi Kurdish leaders reached an agreement with then Iraqi vice president Saddam Hussein. The agreement promised the Kurdish people of the north autonomy, but Saddam failed to hold up his end of the bargain. As a result, life changed very little for the Kurds and by 1975, the agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
Since the Kurdish Revolt, the shah of Iran had been funneling money into Iraqi Kurdistan to help destabilize Iraq through the Kurds. Needing to find some way to cut off the Iranian funding to insubordinate sections of northern Iraq, Saddam sought to rid himself of the Kurdish predicament. Preoccupied with the need to consolidate his power and pressured from the West, he met with the shah of Iran to draft the 1975 Algiers Accord. Under the terms of the Algiers Accords, Iraq would hand over the Shatta al-Arab region of Iraqi Kurdistan to Iranian control and Iran would in exchange effectively cut its funding to the Kurds.
No longer challenged by a Kurdish revolt that had Iranian money—which in those years meant American money as well—behind it, Saddam moved back into northern Iraq and began “Arabizing” the Iraqi Kurds. For Kurds, this was a brutal lesson in realpolitik, one they would never forget. Despite their overwhelming support for the United States, the Iraqi Kurds consider the 1975 Algiers Accord the first chapter in a saga of abandonment by the West.
The Kurds were in sustained revolt for almost the entirety of the Iran-Iraq War, but Saddam used the violence of the conflict as an opportunity to use excessive brutality against the insurrectionists. During the war, massive amounts of Kurdish land were destroyed, as the eastern flank of Iraqi Kurdistan became a battleground that would take years to repair. I visited several of these cities, and they looked as if they had never quite recovered.
Almost three years after the Iran-Iraq War ended, Iraq was once again at war. In August 1990, Saddam invaded and annexed Kuwait, Iraq’s small, oil-rich neighbor. Within six months, the Iraqis had been driven out of Kuwait by American forces. As the war ended, President George H. W. Bush publicly encouraged Iraqi Shi’a and Kurds to rebel against the apparently vulnerable Saddam Hussein. Drawing on Bush’s rhetoric for motivation, the Kurds staged a rebellion in the north, while the Shi’a responded with an uprising in the southern cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Basra. His encouraging words of support notwithstanding, President Bush chose to remain on the sidelines for both uprisings, with bloody results for the Shi’a and Kurds alike.
As the Shi’a attempted to oust the Ba’ath government from southern Iraqi cities,
Saddam’s forces initiated a brutal crackdown that left thirty thousand Iraqi Shi’a dead. The Kurdish uprising met equally violent resistance but was nonetheless successful in its ultimate objective. During the 1991 Kurdish uprising, the statues of Saddam Hussein came down, the posters and murals were defaced, and the Kurdish flag with its pronounced sun in the center replaced the Ba’ath Party flag. Kurdish autonomy became a reality as United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 declared the Iraqi Kurdistan Region to be a safe haven for the Kurds. The UN Resolution was carried out by Operation Provide Comfort, where the Kurds were encouraged to come back from Iran, Syria, and Turkey to a newly autonomous Kurdistan region under the protection of a UN no-fly zone.
While the Kurds were relatively protected from Saddam by the UN no-fly zone and Resolution 688, the early years of Iraqi Kurdistan were not easy. With the common enemy appeased for the time being, the tensions that had been simmering between the KDP and the Public Union of Kurdistan (PUK) began to surface. These tensions were exacerbated by new economic and political challenges. While autonomous, Iraqi Kurdistan was still technically part of Iraq and therefore also subject to the UN embargo that followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In addition to withdrawing all of his troops, Saddam had also withdrawn all funds and resources, contriving his own domestic embargo on the newly autonomous region. This led to economic strangulation on both the international and the domestic fronts. Making matters worse, the Kurds had been banking on acquisition of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, but Saddam was not so anxious to relinquish control of this important city. Without oil money, central government revenue, or the opportunity to attract international investment, the Kurds were left with mere customs and border taxes as their primary source of public revenue. Meanwhile, the KDP and PUK feuded over resources and territory and the political tensions escalated into an all-out civil war. The violence got so bad that KDP officials actually appealed to Saddam to intervene in the civil war, and the Iraqi dictator happily sent thirty thousand troops to seize PUK areas.
By 1997, with Saddam reestablishing a foothold in Iraqi Kurdistan and the conflict expanding to include Turkey, it became clear to both the PUK and the KDP that if the conflict were to continue, the only losers would be the Iraqi Kurds. After a ceasefire agreement was reached, American secretary of state Madeleine Albright helped broker a deal that led to de facto reunification of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. Ultimately, the disputes between the KDP and the PUK were internal and political; in reality, the rival parties had the same approach to the Kurdish national question and ideological differences between the groups were insignificant.
United and autonomous, Iraqi Kurds continued to live in fear until March 2003, when Saddam finally fell. While Saddam had withdrawn his troops from the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, he had continued to sponsor terrorist attacks against Kurdish establishments. Saddam was a malevolent threat to Kurdish autonomy; only the end of his regime would bring peace and comfort to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region.
On my first day in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, I was excited to explore. Still not fully aware of the extent to which Iraqi Kurdistan was a world removed from the turmoil in the rest of the country, however, I was cautious. For my first few days in Iraq, I took taxis everywhere—even to cross the street. Taxi drivers laughed at me when I would pay them five dollars to go fifty feet, but they didn’t complain.
In those first days, I kept waiting for something to frighten me. Where I expected to stumble upon insurgent training grounds, I found kids playing soccer; where I foresaw hatred toward Americans, I found individuals who wished to embrace me. This was not the Iraq I had seen on the news. Then again, how frequently is the Iraqi Kurdistan Region actually given attention in the mainstream media?
I began my exploration of Iraq in Arbil, the regional capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. The city, believed by many to be the oldest inhabited city in the entire world, was surprisingly urban, consisting of busy markets, a vibrant downtown, and a tremendous citadel that dates back to 7000 B.C. Once one of the most important cities in ancient Mesopotamia, Arbil fell under the control of various empires and modern regimes, ultimately evolving into the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. In front of the ancient citadel stood a shrine of one of the city’s former leaders, as if the rock statue of this spiritual figure were guarding the walls of the ancient city.
I learned that the ancient city was comprised of three quarters: Takiya, Topkhana, and Saray. The walled city, or the Qalah of Arbil, as it is known, has “witnessed all epochs of Mesopotamian history and prehistory from 7000 B.C. until the present.”* In 705 B.C. it became not only the religious center of the Assyrian community, but also the primary source of water for the region. Its magnificent twenty-two-kilometer aqueduct was one of the most impressive structures of its time. Today, however, the Qalah is a dirty and run-down community for some of the poorest people in Arbil; the citadel is home to as many as five thousand Iraqi Kurds, who continue to struggle in a quest to rebuild the lives they lost under Saddam Hussein.
It was isolated, with garbage-strewn streets, and sheltered from the new developments of the city center. It was an Iraqi slum located within an ancient treasure. Yet as I’d seen in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, even the slums in the Middle East are connected to the world at large. Amid the squalor and poverty, I saw street children walking around with cell phones and I saw satellite dishes on top of every single home.
I asked a couple of people to explain to me how these homeless children could afford a cell phone. They told me that groups of children share a single phone. Obtaining old cell phones is neither particularly expensive nor difficult, especially since there are young “businessmen” who steal them from the crowded markets and then sell them for a cheaper price. The only challenge is obtaining the SIM card to make the phone work, but several of these poor young people will pool their resources to buy one for their shared phone. In truth, these street children don’t really have anyone to call. Then again, that is not what the phone is for. It is about having something modern to play with; it is about having something that they have control over. It is a toy for them and a way to learn. As soon as one of these boys gets a SIM card, he immediately learns new tricks with the phone and learns its features; he is free to explore new avenues for communication. Despite the limits of their own lives, these kids know how wide the channels of communication span. They are free to dream of another world and another life.
And now that Saddam was gone, satellite television was not only legal but also readily available. The standard price was a hundred dollars for a thousand channels, similar to the rate in Syria. If one were a good bargainer or found a good black-market distributor, it was possible to do better. There were also several young men who had made a nice career out of programming satellite dishes for their technologically inept elders.
Young people in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region loved their satellite television. They watched everything from Al-Jazeera to CNN, BBC, FOX News, and all the major stations from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Lebanon. And of the thousand channels, I think at least a hundred must have been pornography. In the words of one Kurdish couch potato, “We went from a life of prison to satellite. Now we look at everything, X-rated films, American movies, this is all new to us. It is a shock for us. It is like jumping from the sauna into a cold pool. Imagine, before all of this, fundamentalists would kill people for watching a movie or going to a bar.”
People in Iraq never turned their televisions off. When they weren’t at home, their television stayed on. When they ate dinner, the television blasted. Even when they had guests over, their television stayed on. Even at the most formal dinners I attended at people’s homes, the television never went off. For these Kurds, television is a symbol not of wealth but of freedom. A television that never goes off serves as a reminder to these once oppressed Kurdish people that they can think whatever they want and that they are free from the ruthless grasp of the Ba’ath Party.
I also saw a ton of Internet cafés in the s
lums of Arbil. They are springing up all over northern Iraq; young people there certainly have enough time on their hands to become acquainted with using the Internet. The mechanisms of civil society and democracy may be in place in Iraqi Kurdistan, but the economy remains too slow to provide young people with jobs. Consequently, many of them spend hour after hour on the Internet. I learned more about new programs on the Internet from Iraqi youth than I had from friends at Oxford. They taught me how to use messenger services and Internet phone services I had never even heard of. What I had already heard of, they showed me how to really take advantage of.
The Arbil slums were an interesting place to see the far reach of communications technology, but I found most of the people there to be rather apathetic about politics. Now that the Kurdish civil war is over, they don’t bother much with politics. As for the war in Iraq, well, it might as well be taking place in another country.
My next stop in Arbil was Salahaddîn University, the Iraqi Kurdistan Region’s most famous educational establishment and one of the best in Iraq. Founded in 1968 and originally located in the eastern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, Zankoy Selaheddîn moved to Arbil just over a decade later and has grown into an internationally recognized university with eighteen different colleges. There were a few notable buildings that really gave the university its character. I wasn’t exactly sure of their function, but they were beautiful stone structures. There was a contrast between segments of the university that looked brand new and parts that seemed dilapidated and as if they hadn’t been refurbished in over a decade.