LEAVING ZAKHO, ARJIN and I headed west through a dry, flat land bordered to the immediate north by the elephant-skin mountains that I had seen from her window. We were traveling on a well-paved, four-lane highway and at first encountered little traffic.
As we drove, I tentatively asked Arjin about the tribal affiliations of Zakho’s citizens. Despite my interest in the topic, I’d learned to approach it with caution. Some people reacted quite defensively to the subject, saying that there was no such thing as tribes in Kurdistan anymore and that the old tribal names—Barwari, Zibari, Doski—now referred more to geography than to groups of people. “Is New York a tribe? Is California a tribe? No! They are places, and it is the same in Kurdistan!” one man said to me, shutting me up. But other Kurds I met were as interested in their tribal heritage as was I, and Arjin—I should have known—fell into the latter category.
Although the once-paramount power of the tribe is no more—in that sense, my defensive friend was right—tribal affiliations are still central to Iraqi Kurdish identity, a fact I first learned from anthropologist Diane King, who lived in northern Iraq for a year in 1997–98. However, as King points out, the tribes differ considerably in age, form, and degree of influence over their members. Some tribes are centuries old, others relatively new. Many are based on genuine kinship links, others share a more fictive sense of family. Some number in the tens of thousands, others in the hundreds. A few still wield considerable power, most do not. Many Kurds are also completely nontribal, having either lost their affiliations centuries ago or else descendant from a once-separate group that was never organized into tribes. I would find even more nontribal Kurds in Turkey and Iran, where many have been assimilated into large, non-Kurdish cities such as Istanbul and Tehran.
Even the word tribe means different things to different Kurds. Some Iraqi Kurds, for example, consider the Barzanis, despite their enormous power, to be a confederation rather than a tribe, as they were only formed in the nineteenth century, by a shaikhly family and peasants who defected from neighboring tribes.
The city of Zakho, said Arjin, was a mix of many people. “Most people in Zakho are from the Sindi, Suleyvani, or Guli tribes, or they are Zakholi or Kocher,” she said. By “Zakholi,” she meant people who had lived in the city for several generations and who’d forgotten, or pretended to have forgotten, their tribal affiliations. By “Kocher,” she meant the former nomads of various tribes, settled now for generations, who lived scattered all over Iraq and Turkey. The Sindi were a conservative mountain tribe known for making mistakes—“I would never marry one,” Arjin laughed—and the Suleyvani, a more modern plains tribe known for paying too much attention to appearances. The Suleyvani were more modern than the Sindi because the Iraqi government had conquered their flat lands some twenty years earlier than they’d subjugated the Sindi, who were able to put up a fiercer fight from the mountains.
“What about you?” I asked Arjin. “What’s your family’s history?”
Arjin had been born in Mosul, now in Iraqi government territory, as had all her siblings, she said. Her father had died when she was young, and an older brother joined the peshmerga. Then one day in the 1980s, the Iraqi forces arrested her mother. “You must go to the mountains and tell your son to give himself up,” they said—a common tactic used to pressure the Kurds. Her mother refused and was promptly imprisoned. She’d had brain surgery a few years before and was not in the best of health. But through bribery, Arjin’s uncles managed to smuggle the drugs she needed into her cell.
Some months later, the Iraqis rounded up all the peshmerga mothers in the prison, took them to an isolated region in the mountains, and dumped them out with nothing but the clothes on their backs. “Now, go find your sons and bring them back,” they said.
“How did she survive?” I asked, flabbergasted at the extent of the Iraqis’ harassment and at the thought of Arjin’s fragile mother wandering in the mountains.
“The villagers helped her,” Arjin said, almost nonchalantly, perhaps because she couldn’t bear to remember. “And we hired someone to go look for her. He found her and brought her back.”
I braked suddenly. Intent on listening to Arjin, I had scarcely registered the traffic that was thickening around us. For the past few miles, we had been driving beside a long line of parked oil trucks heading toward the Iraqi-Turkish border. The trucks were transporting diesel fuel and crude oil from Baathist-controlled Iraq through Kurdistan to Turkey. Such trade was illegal under international sanctions, but Turkey was averting its gaze. There was money to be made. Up to $600 million a year, in fact, with Saddam Hussein also profiting by as much as $120 million a year. The United States had objected to the trade but hadn’t forced the issue. After all, the economic sanctions were being erratically implemented throughout the region—another blatant example of noncompliance being the Iraq-to-Syria pipeline, illegally transporting up to two hundred thousand barrels of crude oil a day in the early 2000s.
As one KDP minister later informed me, the illegal smuggling of diesel fuel between Iraq and Turkey had at times provided the KDP government with up to 97 percent of its annual operating budget of $150 million. That put the KDP in a much stronger economic position than the PUK, whose neighbor was Iran, not Turkey, and helped account for the many wealthy denizens of Dohuk, whose province bordered Turkey. However, about a year before I arrived in Kurdistan, Turkey had cut the number of diesel fuel trucks that it was allowing through its border to one hundred a day from one thousand a day. And in the fall of 2002, Turkey formally shut down the illegal trade altogether, claiming that an oversupply of diesel fuel was hurting the country’s economy, already in deep recession. But privately, Turkish officials all but admitted that there was another reason for the shutdown. With war drums beating louder, Turkey no longer wanted to help enrich the Iraqi Kurds, who they feared would encourage the Kurds of Turkey to push for their own independence post-Saddam.
Skirting the congested border crossing, Arjin and I traveled on, into a landscape that grew wilder and emptier as we went. The trucks disappeared, and the asphalt road turned to dirt. In the distance, at the base of a sheer brown mountain, sprouted a lush grove of trees. “That’s where the sister of Nur is buried,” Arjin said as we sailed by.
Only later did I realize that by Nur she meant Noah, of Noah’s Ark fame, and kicked myself for not stopping and finding out more. The story of the Great Flood is still very much alive all over Kurdistan today, with some Kurds believing that the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat in northeastern Turkey, and some believing that it landed on Mount Cudi in southern Turkey, just across the border from Zakho.
According to many historians, an unusually severe flood of Mesopotamia and its environs did occur, sometime around 3500 B.C. The region’s ancient Sumerians obsessively recorded the event, writing of one man, Utnapishtim, who survived the flood, along with his family and the animals and plants that he took on his ark, as instructed by a god. When the prophet Abraham left Mesopotamia for Turkey, he took the Sumerian legend with him, and, in all probability, it later became the prototype for all Near Eastern deluge stories, including those recorded in the Torah, Bible, and Quran.
The most famous of the Sumerian tales is the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest surviving epic, which tells the story of King Uruk, who ruled around 2700 B.C. Shortly before the flood, Uruk’s good friend Enkidu is killed, and the devastated king sets out to search for immortality, voicing the oldest lament of humankind:
Fearing death I roam over the steppe;
The matter of my friend rests heavy upon me.
How can I be silent? How can I be still?
My friend whom I loved, has turned to clay.
Must I, too, like him, lay me down
Not to rise again for ever and ever?
THE NEXT DAY, Imad came by Arjin’s to pick me up. One of Majed and Yousif’s younger cousins, he lived and worked in Zakho but had agreed to take me to the family village of Chamsaida in the Barwari district,
about two hours away. Arjin had hoped to come, too, but she had family obligations; I sensed that she often had family obligations.
Instead, Imad and I took along another companion—a plainclothes bodyguard. Dr. Shawkat had insisted that I stop at the Zakho mayor’s office to request one, as the PKK was active in the Barwari area. He had also nixed my original plan to spend the night in Chamsaida—it wasn’t safe, he said. Once again, I wasn’t altogether sure how seriously to take his warnings, but once again, I decided to err on the side of caution. Arjin refused to express any opinion regarding the matter, but I saw her repress an amused grin as she watched the three of us drive off.
The bodyguard was a hefty young man who didn’t seem at all eager to be spending the day in the country, and I wondered how much help he would be should anything happen. He seemed slow and lethargic, and I had my doubts as to whether he actually knew how to use the pistol fastened to his belt. Imad, slimmer and quicker, seemed the better protector— and also came armed with a pistol.
“Thank you for taking me to Chamsaida,” I said to Imad as we set out.
“It is my duty to help you,” he said, and I squirmed at the words. Other Kurds had also used them, and I didn’t know how to interpret them. For all the generous hospitality I encountered in Kurdistan, treating guests well is one of the tenets of Islam, and I hoped my hosts weren’t acting by that precept alone.
We headed east, on a road that ran parallel to the Turkish border and the mountains. With hazy peaks to one side, flat lands to the other, we passed through miles of fertile farmland, peppered with women workers in reds, yellows, and blues—and few men. Then we entered a sea of hills, descended into a valley filled with fruit trees, and came to Batufa, a huge collective town built well before the Anfal. During the early 1970s, this northernmost part of Iraqi Kurdistan had been a stronghold of the KDP, with the road we were traveling along marking the dividing line between KDP-controlled territory and Iraqi-controlled territory. And after the Algiers Accord, the Baath Party had been ruthless, destroying all the area’s villages and forcedly relocating thousands of people into Batufa, where many still lived. Batufa had become their home, and they could see little advantage in returning to reconstructed villages that might or might not have all the services to which they’d become accustomed. Besides, the villagers were older now, and they had no desire to tend to crops, orchards, or animals. And neither did their children, who, in any case, didn’t know how. Saddam Hussein had won, at least for the moment.
Near Batufa was a small walled cemetery, where we stopped. Inside fluttered two faded green flags, marking the graves of Zembil Firosh and his would-be lover.
Zembil Firosh, whose name means “basketseller,” is the hero of a famous Kurdish folktale. The son of a powerful ruler, Zembil Firosh leaves his comfortable home to seek a spiritual life. Transforming himself into a poor dervish, he wanders the countryside with his faithful wife, surviving by making and selling baskets. One day they arrive in the capital of a Kurdish emirate, where the prince’s wife sees Zembil Firosh and falls in love. Summoning him to the castle, she declares her love and proposes consummation. Zembil Firosh declines, but she presses, offering him many riches. Still, he refuses, and she locks him in the castle tower, from which he escapes. Heartbroken, she dons a disguise and wanders through the town until she finds his home. Lying to his wife, she convinces her to lend her her clothes and leave the house. When Zembil Firosh returns that night, it is dark, and the prince’s wife welcomes him into bed. But a silver ankle bracelet gives her away, and he runs off, closely followed by his would-be lover. When he sees that escape is impossible, he prays to God, asking Him to release him from this world of misery, and God complies. Reaching Zembil Firosh’s lifeless body, the prince’s wife is so heartbroken that she, too, dies. The townspeople bury them side by side.
What a strange and marvelous story, and how different it is from Western folktales, I thought. Kurdologists point out that the story has Sufi overtones, with both protagonists leaving their comfortable lives in order to search for the Beloved.
But how odd, I also thought, that it is the prince’s wife, and not Zembil Firosh’s own faithful spouse, who is buried beside him, as if passion carried more heft than fidelity among the Kurds, when the opposite is so powerfully the case in everyday life. I puzzled over the conundrum for months before coming across an explanation. In a seminal 1954 article, folklorist William R. Bascom writes: “the basic paradox of folklore [is] that while it plays a vital role in transmitting and maintaining the institutions of a culture . . . at the same time it provides socially approved outlets for the repressions which these same institutions impose.”
BEYOND BATUFA, THE landscape grew wilder, with hills turning into mountains, and fields into cliffs of granite, red, and tan. Each bend of the road, rising ever steeper, revealed new vistas. Snowcapped peaks overhead. A hawk circling in a valley below. The curve of a far-off river. Turkish tanks on a mountainside.
“What are they doing here?” I muttered angrily, mostly to myself.
“Don’t ask me,” Imad said. “I am not political. Ask the KDP or the U.S. government. As the English say, if you eat with the devil, you must have a long spoon.”
Back in the valley again, we crossed the Khabur River and passed a half-dozen signs announcing new villages built or being built by the United Nation’s Habitat or other aid organizations. Similar signs were posted all over Iraqi Kurdistan, neatly painted plaques that included dates of construction, number of units, and other figures, in a sort of cool assessment of death and rebirth, sans personal stories and suffering.
Turning off, we bumped down a dirt road, over potholes and patches as ridged as a washing board. We passed more of the black, twisted scrub oaks I’d seen everywhere and a strapping young Kurd wearing a General DataComm T-shirt that read: “The future shines so bright, I gotta wear shades.” A battered truck hung with pots and pans careened by—a sort of modern Zembil Firosh without Sufi overtones.
Coming to a flooded patch, we stopped. Beyond, a clutch of houses beckoned.
“Welcome to my village.” Imad turned off the engine, and I grinned. I loved the way almost everyone I met in Iraq spoke of “my village.” Whether he or she lived in a village now or not—or perhaps had never lived in a village—everyone had one, a place of his or her parents and grandparents, a place distinctly his or her own. And even decades after leaving their villages, many Kurds said that they still dreamed of their old communities. We were happiest in our villages, out in the open air, away from the cities, they said, in an idyllic re-creation of a past that for many was now irretrievably lost, as much through modernization as through Saddam Hussein.
Imad and I walked through Chamsaida, the bored guard trailing behind. Before the Anfal, the village had housed about seventy families, but now held only fourteen or fifteen. Imad pointed out a new schoolhouse and showed me several new houses. All had electricity and looked comfortable. But like many other villages I’d visited, the place felt too empty, too unlived in, too new. Like all reconstructed rural Kurdistan, it needed time.
“I lived here until I was six, and then my family moved to Zakho,” Imad said as we walked on. “But in 1984, the central government put my father in prison, took away our house in Zakho, and told us to return here. My father’s cousin—Majed’s father—was an important peshmerga, that’s why they bothered us.” He shrugged. “This is the life,” he said, using an expression that Kurds speaking English use often.
Imad showed me the ruins of his family’s home, destroyed during the Anfal. Built on a hilltop with splendid views of the valley, dotted with apple orchards, the house had once included a lush garden with flowers imported from Holland and Iran. Imad remembered climbing up a tree that was now a stump, and running down the hill at age six to tell his grandmother that he had a new baby brother.
It had been a different world, and one to which I, too, longed to return.
Climbing the path that led to the orchards, t
he guard huffing and puffing behind, we passed a steady stream of people returning to the village for lunch. The first was a man in a turban with a donkey, coming back from pruning apple trees. The second was a woman in a green-and-gold dishdasha herding a half-dozen lambs who were too young to join the adult flock. The third was a man in extra-baggy pants with a scythe, who had to work alone because all his children were in school.
As each person stopped to talk, I suddenly felt as if I’d fallen into a fable. I was ensconced in a beautiful valley, on a beautiful day, with a stone bridge, a rushing stream, shady walnut trees, and people in fantastic dress. Each person who stopped could tell me something wise and wonderful, drawn from the depths of lives lived close to the earth and to suffering, I thought, if only I could find the right questions to ask.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Cult of the Angels
I FIRST MET KAMERIN KHAIRY BEG IN THE RESTAURANT OF the Lomana Hotel, next door to the Writers’ Union. Majed and Yousif had invited me to lunch, asking me first where I wanted to go. But when I’d suggested finding a popular restaurant serving typical Kurdish food, they’d looked blank—for that kind of meal, they could just stay home. Going out to eat for them meant going somewhere where alcohol was served, and that meant a hotel.
We passed through the Lomana’s dark, silent lobby and into its restaurant, lit only by the diffuse natural light of a rainy spring day. A clutch of bored-looking waiters ushered us past a round table at which six men, dressed entirely in white, were seated.
I barely noticed them because directly behind them, at the only other occupied table in the place, sat an extraordinary-looking man. He had a frizzy white beard with a wide dark streak down its middle, a red-and-white-checked head cloth flowing regally around his shoulders, and dazzling white robes whose fine quality was apparent even from afar. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he looked up only briefly as we came in, and then returned to his meal. His face was deeply tanned.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 15