As a peshmerga, Guergis’s expertise lay in land mines. He advanced ahead of the regular forces to deactivate the mines, or followed behind to lay mines for the enemy. The Russian-made mines were the easiest to find, as they were stuck into the ground on nails. American-made ones, buried in the earth, were more problematic.
From 1968 to 1974, Guergis fought in the mountains, and, after the Algiers Accord, fled to Iran. But he never forgot his childhood sweetheart Wargin. For twelve years, they kept in touch by phone and finally, in 1981, married. “Even when we weren’t in contact, I always knew she was waiting for me and never looked at another,” Guergis said, gazing fondly at his wife. As I was discovering, the people of northern Iraq are highly romantic.
Also living with the family was Guergis’s father Yalda, to whom everyone was eager to introduce me. He’s almost one hundred years old, but speaks excellent English, they said—a claim in which I didn’t place much stock. I was always being introduced to people who allegedly spoke excellent English, only to find that their grasp of the language was fair at best.
A tiny man paralyzed from the waist down, Yalda, I soon realized, spent his days sitting largely alone on big, puffy cushions in his sunny bedroom. Blind and almost deaf, he wore a sweater and dapper fedora throughout my visit and kept himself company by praying and singing for hours at a time, his lilting voice rising and falling as the world swirled by. The family was accustomed to the sound, eating and talking in other rooms to its background, but to me it was extraordinary, a harmony to the melody of life.
To talk to Yalda was to interrupt his inner dialogue and penetrate through hoary shades of old age—a challenging task I didn’t undertake until the second day of my visit. Yet when I did, I was astonished to discover that the family was right—Yalda spoke a near perfect British English, using a sophisticated vocabulary far larger than almost anyone else I’d met in Kurdistan. He hadn’t spoken English in many years, but easily fell back into the language. I sensed his excitement at the chance to speak it again. “You came back!” he said to me at one point after I’d left him for several hours.
Born in 1907, Yalda had served with the British levy forces, or conscripted troops, composed of mostly Assyrian soldiers under British officers, employed to help control the unruly Iraqi countryside after World War I. Later, he’d worked intermittently as an interpreter in various military and civilian capacities, including a stint at the front during World War II. Between jobs, he came home to till the soil in Diana.
Yalda was filled with stories of battles and betrayals, which I had a hard time following at first, as I thought he was telling me his personal history. But then it dawned on me that he was reciting the whole sorry twentieth-century history of the Assyrian people, including their 1920s resettlement in northern Iraq from Turkey and Iran, following much harassment by the Turks and Persians, and their betrayal at the hands of the British. The Assyrians had supplied the British with most of their troops during the 1920 to 1932 British Mandate, creating bitter antagonisms between them and their Muslim neighbors. So when the British Mandate ended, the Assyrians requested special protection from Britain or permission from the League of Nations to migrate to Syria en masse. But the British saw no reason to reward their loyalty and left them to fend for themselves under the newly instated Hashemite monarchy. Thereupon the Arab rulers deemed the Assyrian community, despite its small size, to be a threat to national unity. In August 1933, Iraqi armed forces massacred many hundreds of Assyrian villagers. Joining in the fray against the Christians were the Kurds.
Not surprisingly, Yalda had little good to say about his Kurdish compatriots. But, echoing his son Guergis, he made one major exception. “The best Kurds are the Barzanis,” he said. “They are not Christian, but they are kind people, they are educated people. We can work and live with the Barzanis.”
GUERGIS AND I could communicate in Persian and English, but for more serious conversations, we depended on the help of a neighbor, Susan. A pretty and vivacious woman in her thirties, Susan had recently returned from many years spent living in Canada. She had married a Canadian but was now divorced and back to see if she could make a place for herself in the new Kurdistan—although I sometimes wondered why exactly she had returned, as she, too, had little good to say about the Kurds.
One morning, Guergis, Susan, and I set out to explore the Hamilton Road east of Gali Ali Beg. But first, we returned to the dramatic gorge to take a narrow, zigzagging detour up a mountainside to the fortress town of Rowanduz. Diagonal shafts of brown and red fell in striated cliffs around us as we climbed, while on the earth’s floor below, at the junction of the rivers of Gali Ali Beg and a smaller gorge, waters boiled.
We entered Rowanduz, once the thriving capital of the Soran emirate, built on sheer rock cliffs between two chasms and flanked by eight thousand-foot-high peaks. To one side rose gray-faced Hindren Mountain, the site of a decisive 1966 battle in which a few thousand peshmerga had held off ten thousand Iraqis, forcing the government to negotiate with Mulla Mustafa. To another side dropped Kharand Valley, into which we gazed to see birds floating on the winds and a green snake of a river blinking far below. During World War I, when the Russians were fighting the Turks in the area, a squadron of Russian Cossacks charged toward Rowanduz at dusk, unaware of the gorge, and fell to their deaths, Guergis said.
Rowanduz itself, for all its splendid setting, felt poverty-stricken and neglected. In its center lay a bereft square equipped with a cannon, which had been made by one Wastah Rajab for his emir, Mir Muhammad, the one-eyed prince who ruthlessly captured Amadiya and much of the surrounding region in the 1820s and early 1830s, slaughtering thousands along the way.
Rejoining the Hamilton Road, Guergis, Susan, and I continued east. The way was dotted with poppies and caves, some of which Guergis had lived in as a peshmerga. He told war stories as the landscape flashed by—the Iraqis had bombed here, a KDP hospital had stood there—and seemed to know everyone manning the checkpoints we passed. Watching him wave to the grizzled guards, their baggy pants flapping in the wind, I got the sense of a huge net laid over the land, with everyone and everything connected.
Here and there erupted the occasional dark brown tents of the seminomads. Usually, two or three were clustered together—rectangular shapes with open sides and whipped peaks, supported by sticks. Goats and sheep and children sometimes gamboled about out front.
The tents were made by women, who wove strips of goat’s hair, each about three feet wide by fifteen or more feet long, and sewed them together. The goat’s hair was waterproof, but it still let in the light, and the average tent lasted six or seven years. There were both winter tents, which were permanently pitched near towns and villages, and much smaller summer tents, made for carting up mountains.
We reached the village of Berserin, marking the end of Gali Berserini, another steep, shadowy ravine. On the lam somewhere within it had once lived Ismail Simko Agha, the handsome, daring, and ruthless chief of Iran’s Shikak tribe, from the Urumieh plains in northwest Iran. In 1921, Simko led a successful revolt against the Persians, proclaiming autonomy, and was subsequently driven over the border, into Iraq.
Simko had been a notoriously cruel leader, of the kind that has given Kurds a bad name. He once obtained the surrender of rebellious underlings by promising to spare their lives and grant them their freedom. He then had their right wrists smashed and neck tendons slashed, leaving them technically free, but with their heads rolling.
Not being as familiar with Simko’s history as I could have been, I made the mistake of mentioning his name to Susan, who responded with a rush of invectives. One of Simko’s most treacherous acts had been to invite a delegation of Assyrians, including their spiritual leader Mar Shimum Benyamin, then over ninety, to meet to discuss a possible alliance during World War I. Simko then ambushed the party, killing every one of its members, and drank Benyamin’s blood in a rage.
Hamilton Road continued, with snowcapped mountains rearing to the ri
ght and the left. At times, high hills hemmed us in on both sides; at other times, we shot up inclines to see waves of green and blue ridges lapping in all directions. We were nearing the Iranian border, a wild region that had often been entirely under peshmerga control. We passed the small towns of Nowperdan, once a KDP political center, and Choman, where my lugubrious friend Dr. Shawkat had spent his early revolutionary years. Thereafter soared Halgurd Mountain, the highest mountain in Iraq, a 12,250-foot-high peak standing in magnificent isolation, wrapped in a mantle of snow.
As we drove, Guergis continued telling his peshmerga stories, praising the valorous Kurdish movement at every turn. Susan was telling stories now, too—about how the brutal and ignorant Kurds had ruined the country. Guergis could not understand Susan’s English, and she paid little attention to what she was translating, making me feel like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing back and forth between two widely divergent opinions. And in the end, though my sympathies lay with the Kurds, all that mattered were the heart-stopping mountains.
On the slopes beyond Halgurd Mountain, red flags flashed. Between them crawled space-age men in heavy helmets and plastic face shields. The flags marked land mines, which the men were defusing. An estimated 12 to 15 million mines riddle Iraqi Kurdistan, especially near its borders, making it one of the most heavily mined regions in the world. Most of the mines were laid in the 1970s, when the Iraqi army used them against the Kurds, and during the Iran-Iraq War, when they were laid by both countries. Between 1991 and 2002, over thirty-six hundred people had been killed and over six thousand maimed by the mines, and civilian casualties continued at the rate of ten to twenty people per month. Between 1993, when demining began, and 2002, only about a hundred thousand mines, or less than 1 percent, had been destroyed.
Hamilton Road ended in Haj Omran, a scruffy border town where Mulla Mustafa had once had his headquarters. Clinging to a mountainside, the town overlooked a wide valley, making it a strategic lookout point that the Iraqis had been furious to lose to the Iranians, with the help of the KDP, at one point during the Iran-Iraq War.
“Mulla Mustafa’s house was down there near that spring,” Guergis said.
“Tourists used to come here to ski before the Kurds destroyed it,” Susan said.
Haj Omran centered on one windswept street lined with dusky storefronts and dingy eateries. Jostling shoulders in the thoroughfare were dozens of dark men in bulky jackets and straight-legged trousers, few baggy pants and no turbans. There were also no women, or, at least, none in sight. Haj Omran existed for trade, not for living.
The tradesmen in town operated legally, Guergis said—though I had my doubts—while smugglers operated down below. He pointed to a spot in the valley far away where I could just make out dozens of men and horses moving about in a square-shaped camp.
I remembered a popular joke I had heard. God pushed the Kurdish people out of heaven and into hell because they were making too much noise with their dancing. But Satan didn’t like the noise either, so he sent the Kurds to purgatory. Passing by one day, God noticed that things were suspiciously quiet. What’s happening? Why isn’t anyone dancing? he asked a young boy. Oh, everyone is too busy to be dancing! the boy said. They are all out smuggling people between heaven and hell.
NORTH OF HAMILTON ROAD lay the valley and village of Barzan, the heart of Barzani tribal territory and birthplace of Mulla Mustafa. The region was best explored with a member of the Barzani confederation, as they are a notoriously insular and private people. I headed north with Mr. Saleh Mahmoud Barzani and Jula, a translator. Mr. Saleh was an impeccably dressed older gentleman in crisp khak crisscrossed with a shiny leather pistol harness, a double-tiered red-and-white turban, and a soot black mustache that I suspected was dyed. Many Kurdish men are quite vain, and to dye one’s hair or mustache is not at all unusual. Jula was a slender young woman who’d recently returned to Iraq from Iran. She was not happy to be back. Previously pursuing a career as a filmmaker in Iran, a country known for its many fine directors, she saw no future for herself in Iraq.
When we reached Barzan, I was surprised to find myself in a wide valley dotted with dark green scrub bushes and trees. I’d heard Barzan described as “hardscrabble” and “rocky,” but in the late spring at least, the region was an idyllic retreat, with the village clinging to a slope at one end, the Greater Zab River roaring with melted snows at the other, and brightly colored birds flitting between. More birds, wild animals, and plants can be found in the Barzan valley than almost anywhere else in Kurdistan, as Mulla Mustafa’s older brother, Shaikh Ahmad, outlawed hunting and the use of vegetation for firewood in the 1920s—one of the many unusual actions of the Barzani family.
Heading north to Barzan
The village of Barzan was surprisingly small, with less than two thousand people. The valley seemed to echo with emptiness. More than any other region in Kurdistan, Barzan has suffered endless assault. Only one house in the village dated back to before 1991, and the village center was not a square or marketplace, but a prominent graveyard in which Mulla Mustafa, his son Idris, and other famed Kurdish revolutionaries were buried.
The origins of the Barzani confederation are unclear, but it probably dates back only to the early nineteenth century when a newcomer to the valley, a man named Taj ad-Din, was initiated into the Naqshbandi Sufi order. This first Barzan shaikh and his successors soon acquired many followers in the isolated region, then inhabited by a simple but fierce pastoral people living on the edge of Zibari tribal territory. The shaikhs had a reputation for utmost piety and integrity, and, by the late 1800s, believers were touting the Barzan valley as a quasi-utopian community in which land was held collectively, and refugees of all tribes and religions were welcome.
Mulla Mustafa was born in 1904, the son of Shaikh Muhammad, known for his religious mysticism, and younger brother of Shaikh Ahmad, an eccentric and rebellious religious leader at least thirteen years his senior. The Ottomans imprisoned Mulla Mustafa and his mother for nine months when he was less than two years old, and hanged his oldest brother Abd Al-Salam II in 1914. His father may also have been hanged by religious fanatics in 1908. Mulla Mustafa studied for ten years in Barzan, and later furthered his education in Suleimaniyah. Always a secular leader, “Mulla” was his proper name, not a religious title.
In 1931, Shaikh Ahmad apparently instructed his followers to eat pork, perhaps to symbolize the link between Christians and Naqshbandis, infuriating a powerful neighbor, Shaikh Rashid of Baradost, who attacked the Barzani villages. The Iraqi government, already soured on Shaikh Ahmad for his refusal to obey various decrees and pay taxes, used the violent outbreak as an excuse to march on Barzan, only to be soundly defeated by the small and poor, but tough and valiant Barzani confederation. The government then called on the help of the British Royal Air Force, who bombed seventy-nine Barzani villages, destroying over thirteen hundred homes. Shaikh Ahmad and Mulla Mustafa escaped to the mountains, but they were eventually caught and exiled, first to southern Iraq and then to Suleimaniyah.
When his exile ended in 1943, Mulla Mustafa returned to Barzan and began building the Kurdish resistance movement in earnest. His first revolt failed, forcing him and about twelve hundred fighters into exile in Iran, where they joined the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. When Mahabad was defeated in December 1946, Barzani was offered the chance to surrender, but refused. Instead, he and his forces, hotly pursued by the Iranians, fled to Iraq, Turkey, back to Iran, and finally to Russia, in a heroic retreat legendary among Kurds. “We marched for fifty-two days,” Barzani once said. “In the high mountain passes the late spring snow was six to twelve feet deep. We fought nine encounters, lost four killed and had seven wounded.”
Living in exile in the Soviet Union for almost twelve years, Barzani learned Russian and studied economics and science, but never became a Communist, saying that good Muslims could not become Communists. Returning to Iraq in 1958, after Brigadier Qassem’s coup d’état, he fiercely continued the Kurdish struggle unti
l 1975, when the Algiers Accord forced him into exile again—at first in Iran, but later in the United States, where he was diagnosed with lung cancer. By then a defeated man, stranded far from his aerie in the land that had betrayed him, he spent his last years writing letters to Washington politicians, trying to raise interest in the Kurdish cause. He died on March 1, 1979.
UPON OUR ARRIVAL in Barzan, we were met by Dr. Abdullah Loqman, a tall and lanky man with salt-and-pepper hair, originally from Dohuk, who had moved to Barzan in 1991 to provide humanitarian medical aid. At that time, there had been almost nothing left standing in the entire region, he said to me in good English as we walked through the village. Only in 1997, with the help of the oil-for-food program, had relief come to the valley, in the form of reconstructed villages, paved roads, schools, and a comprehensive health program. Dr. Loqman now oversaw the region’s health services and worked with a German aid organization that had built a nursing school in the valley.
Dr. Loqman took us to visit a half-dozen Barzan widows, living in reconstructed homes interspersed with animal huts on the edge of the village. Greeting us with wide smiles, the women ushered us into a spare, whitewashed room, with thin rugs and cushions, where a teenage girl prepared tea. All of the women appeared to be in their late forties and fifties, and were dressed in a distinctive style, with long black dresses and two hennaed locks of hair framing their faces. The rest of their hair was tucked away, under two thin black scarves, one of which was tightly drawn and tied in back, and the other of which was looser, its skinny ends knotted together and either thrown over the back or left to hang in front.
In 1975, after the Algiers Accord, not all of the Barzanis and their followers fled to Iran. Many remained behind in their villages, or returned home from Iran a few months later after a general amnesty. That fall, while they were out collecting their harvest, thousands of Iraqi soldiers arrived to surround and eventually destroy some eighteen hundred mostly Barzani villages. Helicopters whirling overhead to prevent escape, the soldiers brutally shoved the villagers into vehicles and bused them to the southern deserts, where they lived in desperate conditions for almost five years.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 23