HIMDAD ABDUL-QAHHAR, an English professor at the University of Salahuddin, invited me to speak to some of his classes. We had exchanged e-mails before I left New York, thanks to a mutual contact, and by the time we met one afternoon in a dimly lit university corridor, I found him brimming with plans for my visit.
It was through Himdad and others at the University of Salahuddin that the intense hunger of the Iraqi Kurds hit home to me. This was a people desperate to learn more about the world, to devour knowledge that had so long been denied them. Every time I stepped foot on the campus, I was instantly besieged with throngs of students and teachers, all of whom wanted to talk. It had nothing to do with me personally, and everything to do with my foreignness: I represented a conduit to the wider world.
One popular topic of discussion among the students and teachers was how democracy was affecting Kurdistan.
“After the uprising, when people first were free, some threw litter on the street and said, ‘I am free, I can do what I want!’ ” said a teacher. “They didn’t understand what freedom is. They didn’t understand that freedom means responsibility. We still need much education.”
“Our society is changing too fast, and this is a danger,” said a student. “Some who are younger than us have lost themselves. They don’t care about Kurdistan. They only care about material things, like people in the West.”
“We still have many problems,” said another. “The parties have too much power. We don’t have real democracy yet. But these problems seem like nothing to us because of our history.”
Others wanted to discuss the role of the United States in the developing world.
“We like what America stands for—freedom and democracy—and the way that politics are run inside your country,” said one student, whose beard gave away his political Islamic leanings. “And we hope to one day have a system like yours. But we don’t like what America is doing to the rest of the world. You are trying to control everything, and make every society like you. But we are not Western, we are Muslim.”
“Religion is a strength for us, and we must use it,” said another student. “Islam is very important to our future.”
“There are some who abuse our religion, like Iran—they say they are good Muslims but they are not,” said a woman in a head scarf. “Others have lost their religion, like Turkey, and still not joined the West. We don’t want to be like them.”
The students’ comments surprised me. I’d grown accustomed to speaking with Kurds who couldn’t praise the United States highly enough, while often blaming political Islam for Kurdistan’s woes. I wondered how much of the students’ opinions were due to their more contemporary education, how much to the resurgent interest in Islam among the young everywhere, and how much to the fighting between the KDP and PUK, which had caused some disillusioned Kurds, and especially young Kurds, to give up on traditional Kurdish politics. I also thought, both then and after the 2003 Iraq war, that for all the pro-U.S. sentiment running rampant in Iraqi Kurdistan, it could not be taken for granted.
ONE DAY, HOZAK, the younger Rozhbayani son, took me on a tour of the College of Dentistry, at which he was a student. Only seven years old, the college was housed in one of the university’s more run-down buildings —though a new home was in the works—and, like many faculties, had a shortage of instructors and up-to-date periodicals and books. Of the college’s 170 students, over half were women.
As we toured the campus, Hozak pointed out that most of the university’s male students “don’t know how to dress.” By this he meant that most were too formally attired, in dark suits and ties, or well-pressed pants and shirts. Only Hozak and a handful of others wore the Western uniform of jeans and sneakers. And as for the women, could I tell the difference in their hejab, or Islamic covering? he asked. I shook my head, though I was aware of a wide variety of clothing styles, including many in Western dress.
The women wearing the formal suits with calf-long skirts came from religious families and, though conservative, could usually be approached by male students, Hozak said. But the women in the ankle-length dresses and tight head scarves were more Islamic and couldn’t be approached. Those attired in loose head scarves and Western-style clothes wore the hejab just for fashion, while those in tight pants, flattering coats, and loose head scarves were refugees from Iran. These last two groups could also be approached by men, but the students from Iran tended to stick to themselves.
Hozak’s comments fascinated me. As I’d been told in Dohuk, gender relations did seem to be slightly less rigid in Erbil than they were farther north, but still, the whole area was a minefield through which both men and women moved with extraordinary caution. Many were also quite circumspect in what they said to me.
A few students at the University of Salahuddin, and at the University of Suleimaniyah, which I visited a few weeks later, did have a boyfriend or girl-friend. All the other students knew about these couples and watched them with what seemed to be a mix of jealousy and protective surveillance; the university felt like a hideaway apart from the harsher gaze of Kurdish society at large. However, even within the university, these young couples were bound to certain codes. Their relationships were expected to be platonic and to lead to marriage. If a relationship did not lead to marriage, a girl might be able to escape condemnation the first time around, but not the second, and the boy’s reputation could also suffer.
The year before my visit, a “great catastrophe” had occurred at the school, a medical student told me. A student caught a couple kissing and reported them to the dean, who wanted them expelled. Talk and protest erupted all over campus, until the issue was finally resolved with the suspension of the “guilty” students for three days.
“The whole thing was very stupid,” the medical student said. “Our dean is very conservative. But even among married people in Kurdistan, there is no kissing or hugging in public. It is shameful. Only holding hands is okay. But if a boy and girl are not married, they cannot touch at all. Not even with the finger. It’s something very bad. The boy will feel guilty and feel for the girl. So a boy will not approach a girl unless he thinks it is serious. It’s too much trouble, and when he approaches, he approaches very slowly.
“In a relationship, a boy and girl can talk about everything, even sexual things. But if they kiss, they must marry. If not, it’s a disgrace, and the girl will not have another chance.”
“There’s much sexual repression in Kurdish society,” a well-educated thirty-something woman told me a week or so later, “but some of it comes out in talk—and in our songs, which are very sexual, maybe the most sexual in the Middle East. And once women are married, they talk about sex a lot—they love to tell dirty jokes on the telephone and send dirty e-mails. It’s as if they’ve joined a secret club.”
One that men have undoubtedly entered at a far earlier age, I thought, wondering, as I often did, at all in Kurdish society that was hidden to me, and would remain hidden.
Yours is a pair of perfect pears;
Your bosom is a garden in Merivan.
Those two pears on your bosom, I am afraid of touching them.
I fervently wish I could be a button on your dress
So that I could watch your bosom and breast.
—Kurdish folk song from Erbil region
ONE OF MY FAVORITE STUDENTS at the university was Sherin, who drew me aside one day to tell me a secret, although I never quite figured out what it was. Mostly, she seemed simply to want to talk, and we met on several occasions. Delicate and very pretty, with streaked hair, Sherin usually wore neatly pressed blue jeans, feminine blouses, and open-toed sandals. She also spoke much better English than most of her peers. She’d learned by watching American movies—her favorite actors were Kevin Costner and Bruce Willis. In fact, she loved all things American, and sometimes seemed beside herself with excitement when with me, simply by virtue of my nationality.
But despite her modern clothes and Western interests, Sherin came from what sounde
d like quite a traditional family. She had originally hoped to become a translator, but couldn’t because of her father, who didn’t want her meeting so many foreigners. She also couldn’t talk with boys at school, let alone have a boyfriend, as it might get back to her father. In fact, once when she and I were alone in a taxi together, she refused even to talk to the driver, as it was against her father’s precepts. Sherin said she was interested in creative writing, but she never wrote about love—her father might find out.
Still, Sherin loved her father “so much,” she told me on many occasions. “He is very strict, but he is very good,” she said. “And I am not the owner of myself. Everything I do, I must think of my sisters, I must think of my family, I cannot act alone. Sometimes this makes me nervous because I am not free psychologically. But it is necessary.”
And this, I thought, was an important crux to understanding the relationship between the sexes and much else in Kurdistan. Having a love affair wasn’t about following one’s heart, or even about lust. Having, or rather not having, a love affair was about loyalty, both to the family and, by extension, to all Kurdish society. Acting inappropriately meant deeply betraying the family and perhaps causing its ruin. To follow one’s heart had the potential to destroy all that one loved most.
LEYLA, A SLENDER, athletic-looking woman in pants and a black jacket, had invited me to spend the night at her dormitory, one of a half-dozen cheery utilitarian buildings clustered around walkways and gardens, enclosed by a high wall. Leyla’s friends joined us in the gardens soon after my arrival, and we spoke about many topics, including Saddam, American music, and the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iraq, which everyone favored. Then we focused in on personal stories. As usual, everyone had one.
One woman with curled hair and eyes framed with mascara said that she had been promised “from the cradle” to a grown man of a neighboring tribe because her uncle had killed one of the man’s family—a common practice in tribal Kurdistan. But by the time she reached puberty, the man was forty-six, and she refused to marry him. He agreed to let her go if she paid him 100,000 dinars—an enormous sum. But then she got lucky. The man ran into financial difficulties and agreed to let her go for only 15,000 dinars. “Now I am studying to be a teacher and every day I thank God for my good fortune,” she said.
Another woman, dressed in a tight black sweater, had also been promised “from the cradle” to an older man. But when she was in her second year of high school, she told her family that she would never marry him. She wanted to continue her studies, perhaps become a doctor or journalist, and although “the man was beautiful, he was empty in the head.” Her father had been angry at first, but he loved her and eventually relented.
A third woman pulled me aside to tell me privately that she was the daughter of a man who had two wives. “My friends don’t know, please, please don’t tell,” she said urgently, making me promise. Her mother was the unfortunate first wife, who had borne only five daughters, no sons, and so her father had married again, to a woman who’d given him three sons and two daughters. As a businessman, he was rarely home, but when he was, he stayed exclusively with his second family—the student hadn’t seen him in years. Why did the man bother having so many children if he wasn’t going to stick around? I wondered, moved by the student’s distress and need to tell me her story.
That evening, after a simple dinner of cracked wheat, yogurt, and tea, Leyla took me around the dormitory to collect more stories. I spoke with students whose villages had been destroyed in the Anfal, students whose fathers and brothers had disappeared, students who’d been forced out of Kirkuk, and students who’d survived the devastating chemical bombing of Halabja. I listened and took notes until I couldn’t listen or take notes anymore. There were just too many stories, and after a certain point, they all sounded the same. I felt weighted down, to perversely—and guiltily—perk up only when a story was especially gruesome.
At the same time, I felt in awe. Here were all these hundreds of young women—just a tiny fraction of young Kurds everywhere—who were not only putting their indescribable past behind them, but gamely moving forward into a modern and, to them, completely foreign new world. Who knew what these women could do, where they might go, what Kurdistan might become?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Along the Hamilton Road, with Side Trips
IN 1928, A BRITISH ENGINEER NAMED ARCHIBALD M. HAMILTON set out to build a road through one of Kurdistan’s wildest and most inaccessible regions—a land about an hour north of Erbil, filled with jagged mountains, deep-cut gorges, rushing rivers, and sheer rock cliffs. The ostensible purpose of the road was to enable trade between Iraq and Iran, hitherto difficult because of the many mountains. But an equally important by-product of the project was to gain control over the fiercely independent Kurdish tribes who lived in the region. As Hamilton writes in Road Through Kurdistan, quoting the director of the project, “ ‘You know that all great nations, past and present, have found roads essential for maintaining law and order. Once highways have penetrated a region the wildest people are pretty sure to become peaceful simply by copying civilised modes of life. . . .’ ”
Hamilton Road, as it became known, begins at Spilik Pass, just east of the town of Harir. When Hamilton started work, Spilik Pass was infamous for its marauding brigands, who for centuries used the lookout point to watch out for caravans traveling between Arabia and Persia. The engineering party was itself under constant threat of attack.
Beyond the pass, Hamilton Road turns a bend to reveal a blinding vista of blue-white peaks marching toward the horizon, before starting a twisting descent into dark, mysterious Gali Ali Beg, a skinny, ten-mile-long chasm. Canyon walls rise on both sides, as slopes striated with diagonal slabs of rock flash by, turning the world into a tilting whirligig. Glittering patches of streams appear, to end in a thick, fast gush of water—Gali Ali Beg waterfall—shooting out of the mountainside like a fat tongue.
From the falls, Hamilton Road enters the valley proper, its entrance marked by a twenty-foot-high column of twisting orange-and-white rock. With sheer walls rising on both sides, the road nudges its way forward, winding in and out of shadows. Alongside rushes the chasm’s river, above which hide caves once used by the peshmerga, and small waterfalls bursting out of rock, silver sunflowers. High above, striated cliffs resemble castle battlements, keeping watch over all who pass below.
In the spring, grasses and wildflowers erupt all over the gorge, dashing drops of color everywhere. “When spring comes to Gali Ali Beg,” writes Hamilton, “the barren country of Kurdistan, with its rugged mountains and grey rocks, bursts suddenly into extraordinary beauty. . . . The mists lift, and it is as if a veil that for months past had hung over the eyes of the beholder, were suddenly withdrawn. . . . One realizes then why men have fought and slain each other during so many centuries for possession of these apparently useless lands.”
JUST BEYOND GALI ALI BEG was a turnoff for Diana, where I had an invitation to stay with an Assyrian family. Perhaps descendants of the ancient Assyrian Empire—a subject of much debate among scholars—the Assyrians are not Kurds, but a separate Christian people, also known as Nestorians, who broke with the Western church in A.D. 431. Their community once extended as far east as China and Siberia, but they suffered horrific slaughter at the hands of the Mongols, shrinking to a tiny population centered in southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran until after World War I, when many moved to northern Iraq. From the 1920s until the Anfal, Diana was predominantly Assyrian, but now housed only about eighty Assyrian families amid a much larger Kurdish refugee population.
The road into town meandered past a marketplace selling carpets, couches, and cabinets, all sitting outside in the dust. At one end was the Diana Prosthetic Limbs Center, and at the other, a bridge leading into the older, quieter, prettier part of town, where the Assyrians lived. Passing over the bridge, the atmosphere on the streets immediately felt strikingly different from anything I’d yet experienced in Kurdista
n, though I would encounter it again in Ainkawa, a Christian town just outside Erbil. People were dressed in T-shirts and jeans, men and women were casually socializing, and inviting cafés were open for business. It was the freer Christian culture that did it, some Muslim Kurds later ruefully told me.
In a walled compound across from Diana’s main church lived my hosts—Guergis Yalda, his wife, Wargin Issa, and their three children. Out front stretched a garden and porch, while inside, their home was spacious and airy, furnished with Persian carpets and baroque-style chairs. On the walls hung several religious plaques and photographs of Guergis as a peshmerga. A tall man dressed in khak and a turban, he had joined the Barzani revolution in 1968, at age seventeen.
Like Guergis, many rural Assyrians joined the Kurdish resistance early on, fought alongside them for decades, and passionately supported the current Kurdish leadership. In contrast, many urban Assyrians kept well away from the revolution, and harbored deep resentment toward the Kurds, both for historical reasons and for more recent grievances, primarily over land claims. When setting up the semiautonomous zone, the Kurdish government made equal rights of minorities a founding principle, and the Christians had five representatives in parliament, many more than their small population warranted. Nonetheless, relationships between the two groups were often strained.
One of the most famous of the Assyrian peshmerga was a woman commander named Margaret George, whose name was frequently mentioned to me as an example of Kurdish tolerance toward both women and Christians. But Margaret George, much distinguished in battle in the early 1960s, was a poor and ironic exemplary choice. Not only had she been one of few women fighters in the Iraqi Kurdish revolution, she had also been murdered in 1966, probably by a jealous lover.
Guergis had joined the Kurdish revolution “to protect my family from the Iraqi government,” he said. “And because I liked Mulla Mustafa. All Assyrians liked Mulla Mustafa, and he liked Assyrians. He trusted us more than he trusted his own Kurds.”
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