Driving away, Himdad, his colleagues, and I talked at a feverish pitch. How had the men done it, why had they felt no pain, who was that handsome man with the waist-length hair, what had really been going on between the two shaikhs? And Himdad and his friends applauded my performance—you were so brave, you never hesitated, no Kurdish woman would have behaved the way you did, they said. But I didn’t feel at all brave, just wildly elated and a little foolish. Had I really been in danger? Had I behaved naively? And what exactly had my friends meant by their comparison of me with Kurdish women? Was it a compliment, or not?
At the Kesnazan tekiye
In contrast to the rest of us, Othman was almost silent. He had close ties to the tekiye, and had seen the ceremony hundreds if not thousands of times before. “In the morning I am on the Internet with my daughter, and in the afternoon, I talk with my wife, who is a biologist,” he said gloomily. “But in the night, I must come here, into this superstitious world. I wish for it to end. The time for such things is past.” I understood what he meant, and guessed that he might be feeling defensive, but I also thought that when the time of the Qadiri ceremony is truly past, something astonishing will have gone out of the world.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the Land of the Babans
EVERYWHERE I WENT IN IRAQI KURDISTAN, PEOPLE RAVED about Suleimaniyah. It is the most liberal and open of Iraqi Kurdish cities, with a long tradition of arts and culture, they said. It is filled with gracious, charming people who love to socialize, but who are also tough and always at the forefront of the Kurdish struggle, they said. And for the most part, they were right. In Suleimaniyah, I felt the urge to stroll the streets, poke into shops, go out at night—an urge that had been lacking in Dohuk and Erbil. In Suleimaniyah, troubling subjects such as honor killings, the power of the parties, and the lingering strength of tribal law were discussed more frankly. Suleimaniyah also had an intangible romantic quality, though I was hard put to say exactly why. It wasn’t an especially beautiful or well-planned city, or even an old city, as its famed Baban princes had moved their capital to its present location only around 1785. At the time of my visit, it wasn’t an especially safe city either. Islamists had tried to assassinate Barham Salih, the PUK prime minister, one month earlier, and although he had survived, five of his bodyguards had been killed. Peshmerga also periodically blocked off strategic streets, in response to Islamist bomb scares.
Suleimaniyah was anchored on a major thoroughfare that ran from the outskirts of the city into the downtown, past a straggly line of offices, hotels, Internet cafés, a large Shiite mosque said to have been built to please neighboring Iran, and a towering silo begun by the Russians before the uprising but never completed. At the city center was a park with the busts of four Kurds martyred after the fall of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, a traffic circle flanked by a mural of the 1920s rebel Shaikh Mahmoud, a bazaar selling everything from live chickens to tourist handicrafts, and the luxury marble-and-glass Palace Hotel. On par with upscale hostelry elsewhere in the world, the Palace was booked solid throughout my stay with Iranian businessmen, conventioneers, a few fellow Western journalists, and, at one point, some of my writer friends from Dohuk, in the city for—what else?— a writers conference, which had attracted about eighty Kurdish scribblers, including twenty-odd women, many from Iran. As I bumped into my old friends in the lobby, I felt as if I were somehow being woven into the warp and weft of Kurdish society, that I was indeed a “friend of the Kurds,” that warm phrase by which many introduced me. Whenever I heard those words, they both heartened and saddened me, as they seemed to connote a people so neglected by history that any outsider who bothered visiting was, ipso facto, a friend.
In Suleimaniyah, many women wore slacks, fewer men wore baggy pants and turbans, and the sexes socialized together a bit more easily than they did farther north. But the difference between the regions was far less than I’d been led to expect; what looms large in the eyes of local citizenry is often much less distinct to the outsider.
Only on the outskirts of Suleimaniyah did some of the reason for its magic became apparent. The city sat in a gentle bowl, once the floor of a primordial lake, which in the early summer seemed to be bathed in a near-luminescent light, protected on two sides by mountain spurs.
At one end of the city beckoned Sarchinar, a leafy pleasure land built around a natural spring lake. Sarchinar held dozens of open-air restaurants and teahouses, some catering to families and some only to men, in which patrons dined on kebabs and rice dishes, drank beer and araq (a kind of anisette), and smoked the hubble-bubble, the large water pipes made of candy-colored ceramic and glass. At night, the park blazed with hundreds of globes of colored lights, bobbing gently between eaves and trees, as laughter, gossip, singing, and political discussions rang out.
I joined one such celebration one evening, a weekly gathering of a group of middle-aged professional men, no women, though all were married. A table had been set up in an isolated area, well away from the restaurants, and the men brought along appetizers and libations, with kebabs delivered later. One of the men also had a daf, a tambourine, and midway through the evening brought it out, as the others joined in to recite dramatic poems and sing haunting songs. Looking around at my pot-bellied, gray-haired companions, singing with longing about unrequited love, youth, and loss, I felt astonished and moved by the endless surprises of the human heart.
On the western edge of the city, near a refugee camp, rose Hero’s Rock, an unimpressive black stump where the legendary Shaikh Mahmoud had been wounded. Of the Qadiri Sufi order, Shaikh Mahmoud had been appointed governor of Suleimaniyah by the British in 1918. As shaikh, he had widespread influence over many different tribes, and the British awarded him the position in expectation of receiving loyalty in return.
Shaikh Mahmoud overlooks Suleimaniyah
But Shaikh Mahmoud believed himself to be the region’s rightful ruler with or without the British. In 1919, with the help of tribal followers, he raised a Kurdish flag—green, with a red crescent in the middle—and imprisoned all British personnel. The British responded with an attack that left the shaikh defeated and exiled. Three years later, however, as the Turks gained influence in the region, the British called their old enemy back to unite the Kurds against the intruders. Again Shaikh Mahmoud lost no time in asserting independence, this time forming a Kurdish government, issuing postage stamps, publishing a Kurdish newspaper, and declaring himself King of Kurdistan. The British then bombed Suleimaniyah, forcing Shaikh Mahmoud and his forces to retreat to the mountains, from where they carried out raids against the British until 1927.
During his lifetime, Shaikh Mahmoud did not have overwhelming Kurdish support. Many of the Suleimaniyah townspeople resented his rule, other powerful tribes offered to help the British suppress him, and he was accused by some of surrounding himself with sycophants and incompetent relatives. But the shaikh was an early proponent of Kurdish nationalism and, as such, has since metamorphosed into a full-blown hero, his shortcomings faded into the wash of time.
Tucked high into the mountains above the other end of Suleimaniyah reigned Qala Cholan, or “Castle of Green Almonds.” The headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Qala Cholan had been the first home of the Baban princes. One of the most influential of Kurdish families, the dynasty was founded in the seventeenth century by Baba Suleiman, said to have been the son of a young “Frank” woman warrior named Keghan, captured during battle by the Ottomans but saved from death by the Baba’s father, Fakih Ahmad. As the story goes, Fakih Ahmad took Keghan to Kurdistan, where she bore him two children and, one day when he was away, single-handedly defeated an enemy tribe, putting four or five hundred to flight and killing many others. Thereupon, Keghan declared her debt to Fakih Ahmad for saving her life repaid, and she returned to her city. But lovelorn Fakih Ahmad followed her there, to rescue her once again, this time from marriage to a brute who beat her for being “dishonored,” and the twosome happily returned to Kurdist
an.
A fractious family, the Babans were often at war with each other and with their rivals, the Ardalans, who lived on the other side of the Zagros Mountains in today’s Sanandaj, Iran. Yet the Babans were also responsible for transforming Suleimaniyah into a cultural capital, thanks to Abd al-Rahman, who ascended to the Baban throne in 1789—to be deposed by various usurpers five times before his death in 1813. Abd al-Rahman had spent much time in the Ardalan court, where he greatly admired his rival’s cultural patronage system. Importing architects, scientists, and religious scholars from Persia, he built mosques and schools, and he encouraged poets and minstrels to compose in the region’s Sorani dialect, as opposed to the Gurani dialect encouraged by the Ardalans. Sorani then rose to become the Kurds’ literary and intellectual language. The first Kurdish press was established in Suleimaniyah in 1920, and over 80 percent of all Kurdish books published in the twentieth century were in Sorani. The city’s cultural history was a source of great pride to its citizens and to all Iraqi Kurdish intellectuals. One major reason why many early intellectual revolutionaries looked down on Mulla Mustafa was because he spoke Kermanji, not Sorani.
In 1850, the Ottomans dismissed the Babans from power, and the Kurdish emirate system came to an end. But the Babans live on in the imagination of the Suleimaniyah people. Writes the nineteenth-century poet Shaikh Reza Talabani in “The Baban Land”:
I remember Sulaimani when it was the Capital of the Babans;
It was neither subject to the Persians nor slave-driven by the House of Usman.
Before the palace gate Shaikhs, Mullas and Ascetics stood in line;
The place of pilgrimage for those with business was the Gird-i Seywan . . .
Arabs! I do not deny your excellence; you are the most excellent; but
Saladin who took the world was of Baban-Kurdish stock.
SULEIMANIYAH WAS ALSO HOME to Jalal Talabani, the round, talkative, and charismatic president of the PUK. Involved in Kurdish politics since the late 1950s, Talabani, like Massoud Barzani and his father before him, had near-total control over his party. He and the PUK central committee made all the territory’s regulations and approved the appointment of its cabinet of ministers. Talabani’s photograph, like the Barzanis’ farther north, was prominently displayed everywhere.
Serving directly under Talabani, and appointed by him, was PUK Prime Minister Barham Salih, whom everyone called “Dr. Barham.” An urbane and well-spoken man who had never fought with the peshmerga, Dr. Barham represented a new generation of Kurdish leaders. Born in 1960, he had been arrested twice in his youth but had left Iraq in 1979 to study in England, where he received a Ph.D. in statistics and computer modeling from the University of Liverpool. After graduation, he served as a PUK spokesman, first in London until 1991, and then in Washington, D.C., until 2000. He became PUK prime minister in January 2001.
On the day of my arrival in Suleimaniyah, I was invited to an intimate cocktail party at Dr. Barham’s home, along with other foreign journalists who had started arriving in the region to investigate reports of possible links between Al Qaeda and the Baath regime. This was followed by more invitations to join Dr. Barham and his entourage at more functions, including an all-day excursion into the countryside.
On the morning of our outing, dozens of politicians in neat dark suits, peshmerga in crisp khak, and two other American journalists and I in wrinkled T-shirts and pants, piled into waiting Land Cruisers, Jeeps, and sedans—a cavalcade that would wax and wane as the day wore on, sometimes growing to over twenty vehicles, sometimes shrinking to five or six. We headed south to the Qara Dagh or “Black Mountain,” a region of extraordinary beauty, bordered to the southeast by a straight-as-an-arrow chain of sharp, serrated peaks, framing valleys plush with vegetables and grain. The region was also known for its ancient history, with Assyrian carvings sprinkling its mountains, and for its modern tragedy. The Qara Dagh was the site of the second major Anfal campaign, waged March 22 to April 1, 1988.
Throughout the morning, our cavalcade made many stops, to be greeted by enthusiastic crowds and groups of schoolchildren singing Kurdish folksongs. Dr. Barham, tall and balding, with a round and open face, large glasses, and the Kurdish mustache, gave speeches, met with mayors and shaikhs, listened to citizens’ complaints, and posed for photo ops. Then we wended our way through miles of increasingly isolated farm country, cloud shadows drifting around us, to arrive at a sleek knoll-top guesthouse owned by Diller Mustafa Ali. One of the region’s wealthiest landlords, he had invited our whole party—now numbering well over one hundred—to lunch.
An imposing-looking man in traditional dress, Diller welcomed everyone at his door—our removed shoes swelling into a dark pool around him— and then joined us in an octagonal, air-conditioned room complete with a marble fireplace and a twinkling chandelier. Cold drinks were served, and our host took a few moments to tell us foreign guests his family’s story.
His forefathers had been shaikhs and wealthy landowners for generations, he said, while his father, Mustafa, had been a PUK martyr and man of vision who’d built the region’s first school. In that year, 1951, the king had promised every village three kilos of tea and three hundred meters of cloth, as the country had been suffering from severe economic depression and many villagers were going hungry. But Mustafa, as the region’s agha, refused the offer, requesting a school instead. The impressed king complied, while also awarding the village five kilos of tea and four hundred meters of cloth. The new school had educated both boys and girls; Diller himself had a daughter now studying law.
Our host, Diller Mustafa Ali
Diller was trying to follow in his father’s footsteps, he said. He’d forbidden villagers to cut down trees, kill animals, and smoke indoors. This last decree, which he’d issued five years before, had been met with widespread resentment at first, but now the villagers were thanking him, telling him that their health had improved. An interesting mix of feudal lord and modern health advocate, I thought.
Dr. Barham came over to check on us and to answer a few questions. We asked first about the recent Islamist attack on his life. It had taken place outside his home, and he had survived only because he stepped back inside at the last minute to take a phone call. He acknowledged that Kurdistan still had some way to go before becoming a full democracy, but he also spoke about the Kurds’ hope to be at the forefront of building a more perfectly democratic federated Iraq. When asked about an Islamic school that we had visited that morning, Dr. Barham replied, “We need these schools to help us counter the influence of the extremists. Their graduates can help us build the kind of tolerant society we want.”
As Dr. Barham spoke, rarely stumbling over his words, I was struck by his ease, apparent openness, and charm—both genuine and calculated, I thought. As an astute politician who had spent many years in the West, he knew the advantage that lay in courting journalists—and most especially at this juncture, American journalists. The Iraq war of 2003 was then still ten months away, and the PUK desperately wanted the United States to attack the Baath regime.
Lunch was laid out in several adjoining rooms, with our guards assigned to the back rooms, the rest of us up front. Long tables groaned with kebabs, stews, and rice dishes, some delicately flavored with pomegranate juice, a popular Kurdish ingredient. Afterward, we all retired outdoors to sit on a rug-covered cement platform, almost as big as a basketball court, beneath a roof of thatched grape leaves. Servants padded about pouring tea, and a soft breeze blew as Dr. Barham, his entourage, and our host bantered about this and that, all the while keeping a close eye on their foreign guests to make sure that our every need was being met. I could only be in the Middle East, I thought as I luxuriated in the gracious mix of ancient and modern hospitality, and in the seamless sense of peace that our hosts had created in their troubled land.
IN DOWNTOWN SULEIMANIYAH stood the old Central Security Headquarters, a monstrous gray compound of four or five cavernous, empty edifices pockmarked with artillery fi
re. The compound had once housed Iraqi intelligence and a secret prison, into which an untold number of Kurdish civilians had disappeared. And although overall the Kurds had exercised surprising restraint during their 1991 uprising, allowing most Baathists to retreat from Kurdistan unharmed, a mob of civilians had slaughtered some four hundred Baath party members and intelligence officers there, purportedly using everything from knives to iron saws.
Several other visitors and I toured the compound one afternoon with Jemal Aziz Amin, a small and elegant man with a raspy voice, bright eyes that twinkled behind thick rimless glasses, and an irrepressible smile. Jemal Aziz walked with a limp, due to a 1994 assassination attempt by Baathist agents. Though he had never been a major politician or military leader, as head of the PUK’s foreign bureau in the early 1990s, he had escorted many foreign delegations through Kurdistan, thus enraging Saddam.
Jemal had also been imprisoned in the Central Security Headquarters for ten months in 1990. Then working as a teacher, he had been preparing to leave his school one day when several men seized him, threw him into a car, and pulled his jacket up over his head, blindfolding him. Taking him into an interrogation room in the security building, they punched and kicked him, handcuffed his hands behind his back, hung him up by the handcuffs on a meat hook, and applied electric shock to his toes, tongue, ears, and “other places.”
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 25