I nodded. “Did you talk to the governor?” I asked.
Dr. Shawkat had told me that before doing anything or talking to anyone in Dohuk, I had to meet with the province’s governor—it was a matter of protocol and respect.
“No, he is busy right now. A delegation is here from the United Nations.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. Dr. Shawkat had told me that I’d be meeting with the governor that morning—the reason why I’d arrived at his office at nine A.M. sharp.
Dr. Shawkat stared at me intently while I glanced surreptitiously at the clock. It was already ten-thirty.
“When will he be free, do you think?”
“At twelve. Do you want another cup of tea?”
I nodded again. An hour and a half wasn’t too bad. I’d already settled into the slower rhythms of the Middle East.
Dr. Shawkat kept staring at me, and I shifted uncomfortably.
“Do you mind if I take your picture?” he said. “For my files?”
Almost before I could answer, he called to an assistant, who entered a moment later with a camera, obviously accustomed to this request. We posed on the couch, and then Dr. Shawkat returned to what I was discovering to be his favorite subject.
“I had to destroy some of my files when I left Iran,” he said. “I had to leave in a hurry—I only had a few days, and I couldn’t take everything. I divided my letters into two groups—one just personal, the others with information. I took pictures of the personal ones, and then, I had no choice, I had to burn them.” Tears rose in his eyes. “Some of them said nothing, just ‘hello’ or ‘thank you,’ but still I think—that person took the time, bought the stamp, went out to mail—”
His words trailed off, and he drummed his fingers on his armchair.
“What were you doing in Iran?” I said, surprised at his emotion. I thought of all the mundane letters I’d thrown out in my lifetime.
Slowly, that morning and on subsequent visits, Dr. Shawkat’s story came out, as stories came out everywhere I traveled in Kurdistan. They usually began with one simple hint, a sort of string that I tugged at, to open up dark, labyrinthine tales.
The son of an army guard, Dr. Shawkat had started working with the Kurdish resistance in 1961, at age fourteen. Two years later, he was arrested—one of his comrades, tortured by the Iraqi police, had given up his name and those of thirteen others. On the morning of his arrest, he’d been home, eating breakfast with his mother, who was epileptic. His last sight of home was of his mother running after the police car and collapsing on the road in a seizure.
The police first took him to Dohuk’s prison and then to a military camp, located on the site of the violet-blue supermarket that I’d noticed on my arrival. His father, a guard at the prison, had been unable to help his son or express any sympathy when the boy was tortured. To do so would have been to risk arrest himself. After one week, the young Dr. Shawkat and the others were transferred to a prison in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, located just west of the semiautonomous zone.
Eighteen months later, the young Dr. Shawkat was released. He finished high school, studied veterinarian science at the Universities of Mosul and Baghdad, and got married. He was serving a required stint in the Iraqi military when he learned that he was about to be arrested again, due to his continuing underground activities. Escaping to Dohuk by car, he then fled at night on foot to Choman, a village high in the mountains near the Iranian border, where the KDP had established its headquarters. There, he set up a veterinary center, which would eventually grow to include fourteen vets and 150 technicians, operating in ten units throughout the liberated Kurdish areas. His wife joined him shortly thereafter, and gave birth to their third daughter, whom they named Choman.
In 1975, Dr. Shawkat and most of the KDP leadership was forced to flee from Iraq to Iran, due to the Algiers Accord. Dr. Shawkat first lived in a town near Lake Urumieh in western Iran, but in 1979, the KDP sent him to Karaj, just outside Tehran, which had become the party’s new headquarters. There, he worked on behalf of Iraqi refugees and the party until 1995, when relations between Iran and the KDP soured, as Iran supported the PUK during the KDP–PUK internal war. Dr. Shawkat fled again, this time back to Iraq. It was then that he destroyed his personal letters.
Shortly thereafter, his daughter had a medical emergency, and he and his family traveled to Sweden to seek treatment. Following her recovery, his wife and children remained behind in Stockholm while Dr. Shawkat returned to Iraq.
“My children have a better chance for school in Sweden,” Dr. Shawkat said. “And my wife must be with them. But I can’t leave here. This is my life—I’ve been fighting for Kurdistan for forty years. What would I do in Sweden? Eat? Sit? What?”
Later, I learned that his was not an unusual arrangement or an unusual history. Many KDP officials had similar stories.
Dr. Shawkat now saw his wife and children only a few months a year, otherwise living alone with his aged mother in a big, chilly house provided for his use by the KDP. The house had a marble facade, spindly marble columns, and two lovely gardens—one originally built for men, the other for women. Visiting him at his home one day for lunch, I was shown around a dark living room packed with artifacts from the Kurdish resistance movement—photos, paintings, framed poems, the Kurdish flag—along with stuffed birds and foxes. We ate alone at a table large enough to seat at least a dozen. The room was completely silent except for the sounds of silverware clinking against plates and rain dripping off eaves.
“Life is a train—some people fall off, others climb on,” Dr. Shawkat said lugubriously. It was a saying that he repeated often.
I HAD ARRIVED in the safe haven just in time for the Newroz festival. Believed to be Zoroastrian in origin, and thus over twenty-seven hundred years old, Newroz is celebrated on the vernal equinox in various parts of the Indo-Iranian world and lasts a week or more. Small bonfires are often lit on streets and hills, and young and old jump over the flames, in a symbolic leaving behind of the old and embracing of the new. All who can afford to do so dress in new clothes and exchange gifts, while everyone goes on picnics and visits with family and friends.
In Iran, Newroz is a national holiday, celebrated by all Iranians, no matter what their ethnicity or religion. But in Kurdistan, Newroz is the national holiday, celebrating not just New Year’s, but also Kurdish identity, culture, and history. At times, it has served as a political flash point, especially in Turkey, where Newroz celebrations have turned into violent rallies pitting the Kurdish people against the Turkish authorities. In 1992, at least eighty civilians were killed in Newroz celebrations in three Turkish towns, after which the holiday was officially banned until 2000.
No one really knows how Newroz began, but one legend ties the festival to a Kurdish creation myth. It describes King Dehak—or Zahhak, as he’s also called—as suffering from a curious affliction: two snakes grew out of his shoulders. The tremendous pain they caused him could be relieved only by feeding the snakes human brains each day. So every morning, the king had two young people killed. But the palace executioner soon took pity on his victims and killed only one person a day, mixing his or her brains with that of a sheep. He sent the second person away, to distant mountains. The rescued young people grew into a large community, marrying among themselves and giving birth to children. Evading other humankind, they developed a language of their own, built houses, grew crops, raised sheep, and called themselves Kurds. Among them was a poor blacksmith named Kawa, who descended from the mountains one day to kill the cruel king, crushing his head with an anvil. Bonfires were lit all over the mountains in celebration.
The story of King Dehak and the greedy snakes is an ancient Persian myth, first recorded by the great Persian poet Ferdowsi in his Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, Iran’s national epic, completed in A.D. 1010. Over five hundred years later, Sharaf Khan Bitlisi, prince of the Bitlis emirate, also recorded the myth in his Sharafnameh, or Book of Princes, a history of the Kurdish tribes.
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br /> Kurdish culture is closely related to Persian culture. Like the Persians, the Kurds are probably the descendants of the Indo-European tribes of central Asia, who settled and mixed with the original inhabitants of the region’s Zagros and Taurus Mountains about four thousand years ago. The Kurdish language belongs to the Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. Like Persian, it is related to English, French, and German—not Arabic or Turkish.
The Kurds also have another creation myth, completely unrelated to Newroz, that tries to account for the high number of fair-haired, green- and blue-eyed Kurds among them, in an area of the world where most people have dark hair and eyes. “Invented on account of the fear and dread” that the Kurds inspire, according to one nineteenth-century traveler, the myth holds that centuries ago, King Solomon ordered five hundred of the magical spirits known as jinn to fly to Europe and bring back five hundred fair damsels for his royal harem. But on the way back, the jinn stopped in the Zagros Mountains, where they deflowered the damsels. Thereupon, an enraged King Solomon exiled the jinn and damsels to those same mountains, where they became known as Kurds.
I HAD AN introduction to Majed Sayyed Saleh, the mayor of Sumel, a subdistrict of Dohuk. Majed lived with his family on a quiet street not far from the Jiyan Hotel. Like Dr. Shawkat, he was a KDP man. His father had been a guerrilla, or peshmerga—literally, “those who face death”—who had died for the cause. As a teenager, Majed had also been exiled to Iran, along with his mother and siblings. Later, he studied engineering in Czechoslovakia. He spoke some English, and he and his sisters spoke Persian.
I visited Majed and his family on a rainy day near the end of the Newroz period. A dozen or so others were also there, including Majed’s sisters and brothers, two cousins from Erbil, and two other cousins visiting from San Diego, California. Sitting stiffly on dark, velveteen couches, beneath photographs of Mulla Mustafa and Majed’s martyred father, we exchanged pleasantries as rain poured down outside and round after round of treats went by. Orange juice served in golden-rimmed goblets. Sweet milky coffee served with brightly wrapped candy. A large platter of apples, grapes, and cucumbers, served with fragrant, amber-colored tea in tulip-shaped glasses.
Two days later, I received a call. Majed and his family had heard of my desire to stay with a Kurdish family, and they wanted to know if I’d like to stay with them.
And so began what would prove to be a monthlong stay with Majed and his family. More than once I wondered if I had perhaps overstayed my welcome, but the first few times I brought up the subject, it was waved away— if it’s good for you, it’s good for us, the family cried—and after a certain point, it wasn’t possible to ask anymore.
Living in the family’s large, two-story home were Majed and his immediate family: his wife, Huda, and their two young daughters; and his four younger siblings: his sister Zobayda, who worked in publishing; his sister Amal, an accountant; his brother Omran, who worked in the KDP government’s treasury; and his brother Omeed, a college student. Also living with the family was their seventy-five-year-old mother, who’d suffered a debilitating stroke the year before. She needed round-the-clock care, which was provided during the day by Fakhriya, a cousin from the family village near the Turkish border.
The family house, protected by a high wall, boasted a pocket garden, balcony, marble facade, and small porch, upon which we left our shoes before entering, as is the Middle Eastern custom. Inside the front door was a tiny foyer with two doors—one leading to the formal reception room, the other to the family room. The formal side, where I’d first been received, and where the men usually sat, was furnished with sofas, coffee tables, a floor-to-ceiling cabinet, and a television and telephone, both served by satellite dish. The family side, where the women usually sat, was simpler and cozier, furnished only with rugs and a second television. But the rules governing who was received where were flexible. Mixed company, older company, and strangers of both sexes tended to be received in the more formal room, while younger company of both sexes was often entertained on the family side. Whenever both rooms were full, there was usually much traffic between them, while the closest family members were often whisked past the front altogether and into another room, by the kitchen.
At the front of the house was a room where Majed’s bodyguards, provided by the KDP, ate and slept. He didn’t really like having them there, he told me, and had never actually needed them but, between his political position and the region’s general unrest, fears of Saddam Hussein and the Islamists, felt that they were necessary. The bodyguards were big, heavyset men, dressed in the military-style khak and red-and-white turbans. All also had thick mustaches, which are common among Kurdish men everywhere, and worn as a kind of badge of Kurdish honor. The guards’ presence was both reassuring and unsettling.
In contrast to the guards, Majed and his brothers usually wore Western-style clothes—suits or jeans and sweaters—while the women dressed in a variety of styles. Majed’s two sisters leaned toward knee-length skirts or dark pants, often worn with tight blouses or sweaters; Amal had a penchant for makeup and jewelry, Zobayda did not. Majed’s wife, Huda, a beautiful woman with a luminous complexion and limpid brown eyes, usually wore flowing dishdasha, or caftans, as many Kurdish women do in the home, while the village cousin, Fakhriya, wore the long, traditional Dohuk-style dress, which features a long vest, balloon pants, and sleeves that tie behind the back. Except for Fakhriya, none of the women covered their heads either inside or outside the house.
My room was upstairs and held a Western-style bed, as did most of the other bedrooms. But the bathroom down the hall had an Eastern-style toilet—a hole in the floor—and when they were alone, the family usually ate around a tablecloth on the floor.
I soon settled into a pattern, leaving the house every morning with Majed, his guards, and five-year-old daughter Mina, on their way to work and school, to be dropped at the various places I wanted to visit. Whenever possible, I returned to the house by two P.M., in time for the main meal of the day and the typical Middle Eastern postprandial nap. In the late afternoon, I often went out again.
Like most civil servants in Kurdistan, Majed and his siblings worked only during the long mornings, and spent the afternoons with family and friends. This leisurely schedule was a holdover from the ruling days of the Baath Party, which in the 1970s had instituted sweeping social change in Iraq, while also forming a close alliance with the former Soviet Union.
The Baath Party, whose name literally means “resurrection from the dead,” was founded in Damascus, Syria, in 1940 by a Christian intellectual named Michel Aflaq. A socialist and secular party with a pan-Arab agenda, the Baath Party came to power in Iraq in 1968, following their second coup. Run by a small group of military and civilian officials at first, the regime only later developed into a ruthless totalitarian machine controlled by one man, Saddam Hussein.
In 1972, the Baath Party nationalized Iraq’s oil industry, and used the revenues to construct a modern country, building infrastructure, instituting literacy campaigns, increasing the minimum wage, and greatly improving the status of women by revising outmoded Islamic laws. Women became college graduates, entered a wide variety of professions, and largely discarded the hejab, or veil. The Baathists also provided complete job security to large contingents of people—including acquiescent Kurds—and provided free education and health care, even while clamping down on dissent and human rights, in a campaign that would grow to horrific proportions. Some older Kurds I met rued the passing of those prosperous early Baathist days.
During the evenings, Majed and his family often entertained guests, who almost always dropped by unannounced, as is the Kurdish custom. Guests often stopped by during the day as well, and at least one woman of the house was always expected to be home to receive them, with tea, fruit, and candy at the ready.
Also in the evenings, the family and I often gathered in the formal living room, to talk and watch satellite television—Britain’s BBC, Qatar’s Al-Jazeera, and
various Turkish, European, and Kurdish channels. Much of the Kurdish programming focused on music and dancing, and I watched endless hours of Kurds in traditional dress surging forward, ebbing back, bending, swaying, and jumping in tight, rainbow-colored line dances.
Every evening, the electricity would go out at least twice, as the long hand of Saddam Hussein reached toward us. Dohuk’s energy supply did not meet its needs, and the Baath regime had agreed to provide the city with an additional thirty megawatts a day—at a hefty price, no doubt. But Saddam liked to play games, and often sent much of that power through in the early morning, when most people were asleep, leaving Dohuk constantly scrambling for light.
Whenever the power went out, Zobayda or Huda would leave the room to fetch a long fluorescent lamp powered by battery. The cold blue stick would cast pale sheets of illumination over those sitting nearest it, but leave the rest of us in darkness. A kerosene heater—in a country known for its oil—also warmed those sitting nearby, but left the rest of us shivering.
During those evenings, we would talk about the events of the day, personal histories, the weather, politics. Everything would seem to be quite ordinary, until suddenly it wasn’t. A silence would fall, holding within it anxiety, depression, fear. But none of this was ever expressed, and a moment later the conversation would begin again as the electricity went on again, as ordinary and comforting as ever.
CHAPTER THREE
The Little Engine That Could
DOHUK CENTERED ON ONE LONG MAIN STREET THAT ROSE and fell as it ran from the more prosperous end of town, through the commercial center, to the poorer quarters. Much of its way was lined with small gray shops, some of which sported English-language signs: Havrest Hair Salon, Jzery Book Shop, Dohuk Center for Money Exchange, Titanec Hotel. Sparkling fruit juice stores, blenders whirling with bright swatches of color, beckoned from the occasional corner, along with a central bazaar, a few dusky Internet cafés, and several liquor stores, frequented by both Christians and liberal Muslims. Overhead, snarls of electricity wires drooped in the air, heavy black cobwebs.
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