“Kissinger,” Mr. Saleh spat out as the women related this story. He then glared around the room, his hawklike features catching the light from the window.
In 1980, the women went on, a convoy of army trucks rolled up to their camp to take them away again—this time to the collective town of Qushtapa, near Erbil. Qushtapa had no real facilities either, but at least it was in Kurdistan, for which they were grateful—until, that is, about three-thirty A.M. on July 30, 1983. Hundreds of soldiers surrounded the camp. Moving in a tightening band from house to house, rooftop to rooftop, they arrested all men and boys over age twelve.
“It was just before daybreak when I saw the soldiers on the roofs, in the helicopters, everywhere,” said one woman. “My husband looked at them and said, ‘Now is our end, these are not ordinary soldiers.’ They shot everyone who tried to run away, and they searched every house, every cupboard, every WC.”
The other women and we listeners sighed deeply—a reaction that I had noticed often before during the telling of tragic tales. The sighs seemed to alleviate some of the stress building up inside the room.
By noon, about nine hours after the operation had begun, it was over. Between five thousand and eight thousand Barzani men and boys had been captured in Qushtapa and three other collective towns, to be loaded onto buses and driven away. Like those who disappeared five years later during the Anfal, they were never seen again. A decade later, Saddam Hussein left little doubt as to their whereabouts. “They betrayed the country and they betrayed the covenant,” he said in 1993, “and we meted out a stern punishment to them, and they went to hell.”
In accusing the Barzanis of betrayal, Hussein was referring to a specific event. Shortly before the Barzani men were abducted, the KDP had helped the Iranians capture Haj Omran, the scruffy border town I had visited earlier. The men were taken in retribution. The absence of any international outcry following their disappearance may well have encouraged Hussein to use the same technique again, on a larger scale, during the Anfal.
After the buses rolled away, the Qushtapa camp was sealed and its electricity and water supply cut off. “We remained alone, only women,” said a younger woman, starting to cry. The room fell silent. “We had no more men, we had lost them all. We went to the river to try to get water, but the soldiers chased us and hit us with stones. And at night, we were very afraid, maybe they would come back to rape us. We didn’t dare sleep alone, we always slept six or seven together, with big knives.”
Everyone was crying now, even Mr. Saleh and perhaps, I thought, Dr. Loqman. Though they had all lived and relived this story thousands of times, it was impossible not to.
“Others have cried, too, hearing our story,” a woman said, watching me, “but why is the world listening only now? This happened many years ago.”
THAT AFTERNOON AND the next day, Dr. Loqman took Mr. Saleh, Jula, and myself on a driving tour. We visited a small carpet factory and drove along the Greater Zab, lush with poplar trees and flanked by jagged peaks, in which once had roamed a kind of leopard and still roamed wild boar, wolves, and bear. Reaching the top of one crest, we came upon a tiny village of twenty-two families recently returned from Iran. The village had no electricity or running water, but it did have the kind of views that would cost millions many places in the world. The village mukhtar was a handsome, educated young man with a fashionable haircut and leather jacket.
Northeast of Barzan was Bedial, an ancient Christian settlement. Driving along a well-paved mountain road, we saw it sitting by itself on a grassy mountaintop across a valley, surrounded by red peaks. Reaching the village was a different story altogether, however, as we had to drive down one steep mountain and up another, on rocky dirt roads pockmarked with deep muddy holes. It was astonishing to hear that after Bedial was bombed in 1975, the villagers rebuilt their beloved church—sixteen hundred years old, they said—entirely by hand and on foot, hiking up and down the surrounding slopes with the necessary building materials. There had been no road then.
We traveled on, to an even more ancient site, the Shanidar Cave. Between 1951 and 1960, an American archaeologist named Ralph Solecki excavated the cave, to find nine Neanderthal skeletons, the oldest dating back forty-six thousand years. One of Solecki’s more startling discoveries were the flowers that he found buried with the bodies. “With the finding of flowers . . .” he writes, “we are brought suddenly to the realization that the universality of mankind and love of beauty go beyond the boundary of our own species. No longer can we deny the early men the full range of human feelings and emotions.”
Solecki’s discovery reminded me of the Kurds’ own love of flowers—and dance, song, poetry, and love stories. Despite a relentlessly cruel history, at times self-inflicted, the Kurds are in many ways a gentle people.
To reach Shanidar from the road was a forty-minute walk along a trail that headed up a small crest, dipped, and swung up again to the dark triangular cave. Along the way was evidence of an old Assyrian road, built by King Sargon II to carry out expeditions against the Kurds—an earlier version of the Hamilton Road.
The mouth of the cave was about eighty feet wide by twenty-five feet high. Inside, the shelter expanded out to about twice that size, with dust motes spinning in the air and black soot hanging in thick threads from the ceiling. During the winter months, villagers kept their sheep and goats in the cave, much as they had done for centuries. Padding about on the loamy dark earth, hidden from sunlight, I wondered about all the generations that had once lived, loved, and had dreams and secrets here. The only evidence of Solecki’s dig, which had descended some fifteen feet, was a shallow indentation in the floor.
THAT EVENING, AFTER a multicourse meal served by a bevy of Barzan widows, Dr. Loqman, Jula, and myself settled down in the living room to interview Mr. Saleh. Born in Barzan, he knew and had experienced much, or so I’d been told, and I wanted to hear his personal story. But that proved to be all but impossible. Although Mr. Saleh had enthusiastically agreed to be interviewed, he did not want to talk about his life, but rather about the larger Kurdish story. No matter how much I, with the help of Dr. Loqman, tried to encourage him to talk about himself, he forged ahead with a detailed and accurate impersonal history of the Iraqi Kurds. I had had other similar encounters, especially with older Kurdish men, and I wondered how much of it had to do with the Kurds’ emphasis on the communal rather than the individual. I couldn’t imagine interviewing any American about his or her life, and hearing details about U.S. foreign and domestic policy rather than about careers, families, personal highpoints, and low points.
Interviewing was often tricky in Kurdistan. Sometimes, as with Mr. Saleh, there were gender- and age-difference issues. Often, as with many villagers, there was the literacy issue. Before traveling to Iraq, I had thought of literacy primarily in terms of whether a person could read or write, but, in Kurdistan, I realized that it extends further than that. Literacy gives a person reference points, the ability to reach beyond his or her immediate world, and an acquaintance with the logic inherent in reading and writing. During my early interviews with villagers, especially, conducted with the help of eager but inexperienced translators, who often added yet another layer of obfuscation to things, I frequently came away befuddled by stories that followed no timeline, had murkily related causes and effects, and names that meant nothing to me. It wasn’t a matter of the villagers’ intelligence, but their way of ordering the world.
Furthermore, there were cultural issues. Although I’d read as much as I could before traveling to Kurdistan, in-depth anthropological studies of the Kurds, as opposed to political ones, are limited in number, especially in English, and I had few guidelines to go by when formulating certain kinds of questions. How to find out about centuries-old customs and rituals when I didn’t even know exactly where to look? Much of traditional Kurdish culture was dying fast, I knew, as the younger generation was more interested in the Internet and satellite TV than in their grandparents’ old-fashioned ways, but re
aching out to record some of it was no simple matter.
I was able to coax a few personal facts out of Mr. Saleh that evening, however. Mulla Mustafa had been his uncle, and after his own father had been killed when he was very young, Mr. Saleh had been raised by Mulla Mustafa’s family. Later, he had worked for the Kurdish leader, serving in his guesthouse and looking after his children while they were all living in the mountains.
“What was Mulla Mustafa like?” I asked.
“He was a simple man, he never thought about anything but the Kurdish cause,” Mr. Saleh said. “He would say, ‘I am only the servant of this nation.’ ”
What little Mr. Saleh told me corresponded to what I’d read. Mulla Mustafa was said to have focused all his energies on the Kurdish struggle. A man of average height but imposing build, he was reputedly tough, charismatic, and courageous, of quick intelligence, shrewd instincts, and good judgment, despite a limited education. Usually dressed in shal u shapik and a two-tiered red-and-white turban, with a double cartridge belt around his waist, he liked to talk cryptically and often conveyed his ideas through fables. He regularly found the time to pray and to receive all kinds of visitors, from diplomats to peasants. However, he was also said to have been autocratic, egotistical, shortsighted, and naive in the ways of the outside world, and to have had a ruthless side.
Mr. Saleh had been with Mulla Mustafa in Haj Omran in 1971, during a famous attempt on his life. The Baath regime’s head of security had sent five imams, or religious men, to negotiate with Mulla Mustafa, giving one of them a tape recorder, which, unbeknownst to them, was also an explosive device.
“Mulla Mustafa welcomed the imams, and they took seats and a servant came in with tea,” Mr. Saleh said. “The imam turned on the tape recorder, and it exploded, but Mulla Mustafa was not killed because the servant was between him and the imam.”
The imams’ cars were also rigged with explosives—the men were not meant to return alive. In those days, the Baath Party did little to hide its disdain for Islam.
RETURNING TO ERBIL the following evening, I went directly to the family home of Othman and Kanan Rashad Mufti, two brothers in their fifties whose father, Rashad Mufti, had been a famous Qadiri religious leader and judge. Othman and I had a date to attend a ritual ceremony in a local tekiye, or religious meeting place, an excursion that he had already prepared me for by showing me graphic photographs of long-haired dervishes plunging swords and daggers into their bodies.
The Qadiris and Naqshbandis, to which the Barzanis belonged, are the two great Sufi orders of Kurdistan. Like all Sufi orders, they are mystical Islamic sects whose members work to achieve a personal, ecstatic communion with God. The Naqshbandis do so through quiet meditation, the Qadiris through ritual ceremony. Both orders’ spiritual leaders, the shaikhs, have at times played extremely powerful roles in Kurdistan, forming alliances with wealthy aghas and leading mass rebellions. Kurdistan’s earliest nationalist movements were led by shaikhs, and the Barzani family could not have reached the prominence that it did without its standing in the Naqshbandi order. Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK party, also came from a shaikhly family, of the Qadiri order. Both orders transcend tribal loyalties, however, and once counted many tens of thousands of Kurds from many different tribes among their followers.
The Qadiri order arrived first in Kurdistan. Founded in the twelfth century by Shaikh Abd al-Qadir, originally of Gilan in Persia but later of Baghdad, it spread to southern Kurdistan around 1360. The Naqshbandi order, founded in the fourteenth century by Baha ad-Din Naqshband in Bukhara, in today’s Uzbekistan, arrived in Kurdistan only in the early nineteenth century, but spread with much greater rapidity, largely because of its charismatic Kurdish leader, Mawlana Khalid. However, since the rise of the modern nation-states and the Kurds’ growing awareness of the outside world, the influence of both sects has precipitously declined. Today, many educated Kurds scoff at the old-fashioned ways of the shaikhs, whose most dedicated followers remain the uneducated, powerless, and poor.
Arriving at the Mufti family home at about eight P.M., I found its front porch crowded with visitors, most older men in baggy pants and turbans, visiting in a carryover tradition from the former Rashad Mufti’s religious leadership days. Neither of Rashad’s sons was a religious leader—Kanan ran Erbil’s archaeological museum, and Othman was director of the Ministry of Islamic and Religious Affairs—but because of their family’s notable standing, dating back centuries, many believers still visited their home every evening, some coming for advice, others to socialize. The crowd made me wonder when the two brothers ever got a chance to rest.
Joining me at the Mufti family home were my English professor friend Himdad, and several of his friends. Himdad had agreed to serve as my translator that evening, and his friends had asked to come along. None of them had ever been to a Qadiri religious meeting before, and there was an escalating buzz of excitement among us as we waited to depart. Rezan, the woman translator who had shown me around Erbil, had also wanted to come, but because the ceremony was held at night, her attendance was impossible.
Finally, it was time to go. Othman’s wife lent me her abeyya, the black tentlike garment that covers everything but the face, and we set off, heading to the Kesnazan tekiye in one of the darker and older sections of town. As we drove, Othman expressed some last-minute reservations about bringing me along. I would be the only woman there, he said, as the ceremony was only for men, and although he’d cleared my attendance with the local shaikh, some believers might resent my presence. I didn’t take his words to heart; I’d been hoping to attend a Qadiri ceremony ever since arriving in Kurdistan.
As we neared the tekiye, the street around us became crowded with cars and men, while, at the end of the block, an entrance door blazed silver-white in the darkness. Parking, we headed toward the sound of drums and a chanted prayer, or zikr, which is a recitation of the divine name. The sea of men parted neatly, chanting all the while, and we passed into a foyer, where we took off our shoes, to add them to the hundreds already puddled all over the floor.
We entered a well-lit, rectangular room, where lines of men in baggy pants or caftans sat cross-legged against the walls and in a neat double row in the center. Some wore white or embroidered caps, and all were chanting “Ya, Allah” over and over. On the walls above hung banners embroidered with the names of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, while up front sat a round, white-bearded shaikh in a bright green turban, a dagger at his waist, leading the zikr through a microphone. We joined the shaikh at the front and watched as believers filed steadily in until every inch of the floor was covered with perhaps three hundred cross-legged men. “You are the strongest, You are Almighty, stop this oppression,” said the shaikh in a prayer as the chanting continued.
The men stood up, and recited the Islamic shahada, or confession of faith, “La elaha ella Allah”—There is no God but God. As they chanted, the men rhythmically moved their heads up and down, slowly at first but then faster and faster, as their breaths became shorter and punchier, and the shahada gave way to Allah, Allah, Allah. Three men entered thumping dafs—large tambourines—and some of the chanters took off their caps to let loose long cascading hair that they swung up and down with ever increasing speed until I could hear them crack. One man pointed at the sky, shouting “Allah, Allah, ” then collapsed into a faint, to be pulled out of harm’s way by his colleagues.
Another shaikh entered, this one dressed in a green-and-gold cape and turban, followed by a dozen believers. The shaikh beside us took a few angry steps forward. This was his tekiye!, the new shaikh was intruding!— perhaps, Othman said, because he’d heard of my presence, which seemed to be eliciting more curiosity than disapproval. Someone brandished a sword, sending a ripple of fear and excitement through me, and the first shaikh became angrier than ever. Apparently, he had commanded his followers to refrain from using swords that night—at Othman’s urging for my sake, I suspected. But the new shaikh was protesting that decision, with my s
ecret encouragement.
The lights went out, and we all sat down while the shaikhs negotiated. The room grew hotter, the chanting louder. A man came up to me in the semidarkness, munching on a tea glass and pointing at my camera, and I dutifully took a picture of his mouth, miraculously devoid of cuts. Then the believers stood up again, and suddenly the swords and skewerlike daggers came out, by the dozens it seemed. The first shaikh had lost the battle, and the men were in a frenzy to begin. The chanting and drumming grew louder, more men pointed at the ceiling and collapsed, hair flashed. One man approached me with a dagger, crouched down, and pushed the skewer through one cheek and out the other, followed by another man who did the same with a skewer pushed through his lower jaw. The men walked around the crowd for several minutes, making sure I took their pictures, before pulling the skewers out again and pressing their thumbs against the wounds.
Other men took off their shirts and, one by one, plunged long gleaming swords through the sides of their torsos with no apparent pain or blood, although another man felt for soft spots first and pressed the wounds with his thumb afterward. Initially, the men performed their feats slowly, giving me time to take photos. Then, all at once, skewered male torsos seemed everywhere. Someone directed me to climb onto a low table, where I began clicking so fast that all I could see of the darkened room was what lay directly before my camera’s lens. The chanting rose to a crescendo, and arms and hair whipped through the air as I turned left to right to left, trying to control my awkward abeyya, suddenly aware that the frenzied believers might decide to initiate me into their rite with a dagger or sword thrust. Still, I felt no real fear until Othman pulled me down off the table. He firmly held my hand as he rapidly escorted me out of the room and into the car without stopping for my shoes. “You are not safe,” was all he said as we climbed inside, then he sent our companions back to look for my shoes.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 24