The authority of the agha in Iraq began to decline in the 1950s, due to the growing power of the central government, agrarian reform laws, and the mechanization of agriculture, which made the chieftains and their villagers less interdependent. Nonetheless, and despite what many people told me, the time of the agha, like the time of the tribe, was far from over in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though many aghas no longer had any real power, even the weakest among them still garnered much respect and brokered disputes, both between members and between members and the state. Some aghas also retained considerable wealth and sizable militias, meaning that they were heavily courted by the powers-that-be.
By far the most impressive agha I met in Iraq was Ako Abba Mamand Agha, chieftain of the Ako tribe, who lived in and around Raniya, a town surrounded by craggy peaks about an hour and a half north of Suleimaniyah. One of the most tribal regions left in Kurdistan, the Raniya area was also home to the Bilbas people, allies of the Ako. Next door lived the Pizhdar, a oncefierce but now much weakened tribe, who were the Akos’ traditional enemy. The town of Raniya was also where the 1991 uprising began, on March 5, triggering a revolt that almost overnight swept throughout Kurdistan.
Ako Agha lived in a simple compound of new, low-slung buildings on the edge of Raniya. Dildar, the translator who had traveled with my companions and me to Halabja, first took me to meet him one night at about eleven P.M., after our drive up from Suleimaniyah, dinner, and a nap. I wondered about the wisdom of arriving at such a late hour, but Dildar, whose husband was from Raniya, assured me that she knew Ako Agha well and that it would be no problem. We arrived to find him sitting outdoors on a cement patio splashed with yellow light, surrounded by about twenty other men and teenage boys in baggy pants. A tall, charismatic, and powerfully built man in his mid-forties, with a thick black mustache and dark observant eyes, Ako Agha was himself dressed in a resplendent white shal u shapik and a black-and-white turban.
He did not smile when we were introduced. For a moment, I wondered if Dildar had misjudged things and he resented our intrusion: two women breaking into this comradely all-male gathering. I also doubted that he would say much of interest. Most aghas I met seemed guarded, perhaps unsure of their footing with a foreign woman. Ako Agha surprised me.
Two of the men vacated their seats, and Dildar and I sat beside our host. She and he caught up for a few moments, while I looked around, suddenly realizing that we had arrived in the middle of a traditional evening at a diwan, or guesthouse. I had been in many diwans—most recently with Karim Agha—but never at night.
The diwan was a quintessential element of traditional Kurdish life. At one time, every leading family had one, a special room or house to which male villagers went to socialize, do business, and consult their agha regarding social and legal matters. Women sometimes went to the diwan for advice during the day as well, but the guesthouse was a predominantly male preserve. Boys began attending the diwan in their early teens, and it was here that the traditional tribal ways were passed from one generation to the next. All men were expected to attend the diwan every evening.
In earlier eras, many diwans also functioned as inns for travelers, and in return, the travelers provided the villagers with a much-hungered-for commodity—news of the outside world. The most famous of diwans were celebrated in Kurdish folksongs and folktales, while many wealthier aghas had their own residential minstrels. Wandering dervishes and dengbej, or traveling storytellers, stopped by from time to time as well.
Like most of the aghas I met, Ako Agha maintained a formal indoors diwan, furnished with spotless white armchairs and couches, in which he and his visitors usually convened. But during the summer, he moved his court outdoors, onto the patio, where fireflies danced arabesques over the lawn in front and black mountains hulked protectively behind.
“The Ako have lived in Raniya for more than nine hundred years,” Ako Agha said, turning his attention to me. “Our territory stretches north into the Erbil governorate and east to Iran. We are a strong and powerful tribe, with many subtribes. . . .”
At this, he reeled off twenty-five names without hesitation and without repeating himself, and said that he, like all Ako aghas before him, was of the Bash-aghayi subtribe. His father had owned tens of thousands of acres of land pre–land reform, but Ako owned less than forty, and supported his family mostly through business contracts and trade.
“The Ako are famous for offering refuge,” he went on. After the fall of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in 1946, some Iranian Kurds had escaped to Raniya, while both Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani had at times hidden in the inaccessible Ako mountains. In fact, during the “thick-headed” internal war, Ako Agha himself had tried to reconcile the two parties. At the height of the hostilities, he and Dildar’s husband, who I now learned to my surprise was a Bilbas leader, made sure that “not one shot was fired in Raniya.”
To offer refuge, especially to those fleeing the wrath of their own aghas, was an important role of many traditional tribal leaders. But the host agha’s hospitality was not altogether altruistic. In return for providing the fleeing refugees with protection, land for a new home, and other necessities, he expected labor and loyalty.
A servant brought out large glasses of chilled du, the Middle Eastern drink made of yogurt, followed by trays heaped high with ripe apricots, watermelon, and small sweet cucumbers. Served with the cucumbers were plastic salt shakers, one neatly parceled out to every two people.
“Because I am agha,” Ako Agha said as we munched on the fruit, watermelon pits flying around us, “I also help the poor and resolve many different kinds of conflicts.” One constant source of trouble was the arena of love and marriage, of course—about which I would learn more the following day—and another concerned land disputes. “But the most difficult problem to resolve is murder,” he said.
“How often does that happen?” I asked, startled that he had voluntarily brought up the subject.
Ako Agha shrugged. “Sometimes I resolve two or three killings a month, sometimes only one a year. The people come to me, and I try to reconcile their two families, with offers of money, or land, or women. I try to find a link between them, so that they will settle and no more blood will flow.”
“So you don’t go to the police or courts?” I asked
He laughed. “No. We love our government, but we don’t want to tire them out.”
Many aghas preferred to settle killings intertribally, and the process did make some sense, the Kurdish Human Rights Organization notwithstanding. The legal system in Kurdistan was still slow, and many villagers, remembering the Baath regime, feared dealing with state authorities. The agha was the power that they knew, trusted, and obeyed.
The killings were often resolved with “blood money,” usually ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 dinars (about $5,000 to $15,000), with accidental deaths costing less, and premeditated ones more. Promising an eligible daughter in marriage to a man in the victim’s family was also a common solution, especially among the poor. And when no eligible daughter was available, a younger child was sometimes promised instead.
To be avoided at all costs was a “blood feud,” which began between the two families when no peaceful solution could be found. Once a serious problem in the region, the blood feuds could last for generations. In earlier decades, it scarcely mattered whether the original murderer was killed or not, what mattered was that the collective honor of the group be restored by killing an enemy of at least a comparable social status. In the modern era, the prevalence of blood feuds has greatly diminished, but I did meet one man in Suleimaniyah who had fled his village because of a blood feud.
“To resolve a killing takes much time and patience,” Ako Agha said. “One killing took me six years, another eight years. The killing that took eight years happened between two subtribes, and before it was finished, eight people were killed and five people injured.”
THE NEXT MORNING, Dildar, Ako Agha, and I climbed into his shiny Land Cruiser for a tour
of the Ako valley, a narrow opening between two mountain ranges. With us were two armed peshmerga, and Ako Agha brought along a video camera.
Quickly leaving Raniya behind, we headed west and then north along a flat dirt road, lined with pretty clay homes, neat stone walls, symmetrical piles of firewood, and gardens beaming with sunflowers. Many of the homes had electricity, harnessed from a river below, but nowhere in sight were the ugly electrical wires that blighted other parts of Kurdistan. The region had a settled and peaceful feel.
“Was the Ako valley attacked in the Anfal?” I asked Ako Agha, already all but knowing the answer.
“No, we were with the government at that time,” he said, and my stomach sank a little. “But before that, we were in the mountains. I spent most of my first twenty-five years in the mountains. Our valley was bombed in the 1960s, because my father supported Barzani, and again in 1976, when they destroyed our family’s house and the only Ako school.”
The road stopped abruptly. The Ako valley had ended, while to either side extended two new valleys, one leading to Rowanduz, the other to Haj Omran. We climbed up a small hill to view the countryside.
“Why did you support the Baath regime?” I asked our host, summoning up my courage.
“We didn’t really support them,” Ako said. “We were really helping the peshmerga by letting them pass through our mountains. The Kurds needed a few tribes to be with the government in this way.”
“So you were a kind of double agent?”
“Yes.” Dildar answered the question herself, without translating. “And there were no hard feelings because of this. Everybody loves this man.”
“During the Anfal, the Iraqis controlled all the area around our mountains,” Ako Agha said. “But over eight hundred peshmerga were hiding in safety here. Some stayed in my house, and some I took in my car through enemy lines.”
“And the Iraqi government didn’t know?”
“Not for a long time. But on January 31, 1990, the Iraqis finally arrested me and thirty-three others. They’d heard some reports. They held me ten months and twenty days, and I was taken to the Revolutionary Court in Baghdad three times. Six among us were executed, twelve sentenced to life, and the rest freed.”
On our way back to Raniya, I asked Ako Agha what he thought would be the future of the tribes and aghas in Iraqi Kurdistan.
“It will depend on the situation of the government,” he said. “If there is conflict between the parties, the aghas will still have much power. During the internal fighting, the aghas grew stronger. But if the government is settled, the aghas will lose power, and then I think the power of the tribes will be finished in another fifteen, sixteen years.”
“Would that be good or bad for you?” I wondered what it felt like to contemplate losing the powerful position that one’s family has held for generations.
“I would prefer for the government to be settled,” he said. “Because if the government is settled, then my life will be settled, too.”
BACK AT AKO AGHA’S compound, we were met by two strutting male peacocks, fanning their shimmery tails, and by the younger of our host’s two wives, a tall and handsome woman of about thirty, who whisked Dildar and me behind the winter diwan to the women’s quarters.
Like the rest of the compound, the women’s quarters were spartan, composed of several large rooms furnished only with red carpets and thin green-and-gold cushions. In one corner stood a traditional Kurdish cradle, covered with a floral sheet, under which the youngest of Ako Agha’s nine children slept. Built in a style that dates back to the thirteenth century, and still widely used in Kurdistan, the traditional cradle is made of wood, with rockers on the bottom and a handle for carrying spanning the top. The child is strapped in with cloth strips, with a urine pipe attached, so that the mother can go about her chores, but cannot flex its legs, which can lead to medical problems. Hip dislocation is common among young Kurdish children.
As Dildar and I took seats, a wizened but still beautiful woman with round dark eyes joined us. Dressed in black from head to toe, she looked to be over seventy years old, but her hair was still dark and shiny, thanks to dye and henna, and woven into five or six braids in back, with open tresses framing her face, as was the Bilbas custom. The tresses reminded me of the ones worn by the Barzani women I’d met earlier, and when I commented on this, the woman agreed, but said that the braids were exclusively Bilbas.
The woman was Maryam Swara Hammad Agha, Ako Agha’s mother and a local legend. Although the lowly fifth and last wife of Ako’s father, Ako Abbas Mamand Agha, whom she married when she was a teenager and he middle-aged, Maryam had garnered the utmost respect in his household, often serving in his place when he was away. “Abbas Agha loved her a lot, she could do what she wanted, and he never did anything without asking her first,” Dildar told me.
When Maryam and Abbas Agha fell in love, their tribes, though usually allies, were feuding. And her father, the Bilbas chieftain, had promised her to another. But Maryam refused to obey her father’s wishes and after years of stubborn resistance and admiring Abbas Agha from afar, finally got her way in 1951, when they wed. “My husband was the most handsome and most powerful man I ever met,” she told me, still much in love though Abbas Agha had passed away decades earlier. “He was taller than Ako—over two meters—and had big and beautiful eyes. He couldn’t read or write, but he was very wise.”
One of Maryam’s main duties as a wife had been caring for her husband’s many guests. In those days, much more than now, throngs of people were always stopping by. One time, during the Barzani revolution, she fed nine hundred people on only a few hours’ notice.
However, the most strenuous part of her job had been caring for the many couples who took refuge in the diwan. As her son Ako Agha had told me the night before, the guesthouse was not just a meeting place and inn, but also a hideaway for runaway lovers. Young men and women who had fallen in love against their family’s wishes came to the diwan, where no one dared touch them, to live until their case was resolved. The couples stayed in the diwan for as long as it took to negotiate peace, sleeping strictly separately, of course, until they were married. Ako Agha himself had a perfect track record, never failing to reconcile the lovers’ families.
So here is a much-needed safety valve, I thought as I heard of the custom—a way for at least some lucky lovers to escape the horror of honor killings.
“We have two couples staying here now,” Maryam said. “One has been here for two years.”
“Two years!” I said.
“Two years is nothing!” Maryam said. “Two couples is nothing! Sometimes, we had ten, twenty couples staying here. Some got married and still stayed here. Some were married when they came and had to wait to get a divorce and get married again. One stayed five years.”
“Five years!” I said.
“Yes, it was like a free hotel,” Maryam said, with a smirk. “And sometimes, those who came didn’t listen, they didn’t help, they didn’t work. They just took advantage.”
Shaking her head in exasperation, Maryam rose to say her midday prayers, while Dildar and I went out back to find the runaway couple who had been at the diwan for two years. The wife, Adiba, was too busy cooking to talk, but her husband, Khalid, agreed to take a stroll with us around the garden, now wilting in the noonday sun.
“We come from a village near Koya, many miles away,” he said. “I first saw Adiba when I was seventeen and she was fifteen, and we loved each other right away and wanted to marry. I asked her family, but they refused, and so we ran away. We don’t have any tribes or diwans in Koya, but we knew about Ako Agha and how he helps people, and so we came here.”
As we were talking, I realized that Khalid had, in Kurdish terminology, “kidnapped” Adiba. Throughout my travels, many Kurds had mentioned the “kidnapping” of women to me, a phenomenon that seemed to happen quite often. Until now, I had never really understood what it meant, as further questioning usually revealed not a true kidnapping, b
ut a kind of elopement in which a woman voluntarily leaves her home to follow a man.
Though not always. In the past especially, some women had been kidnapped against their will, sometimes by rival tribes. I would meet one such woman in Turkey. She had been abducted at age fourteen, while out in the fields, and had cried herself to sleep at night for years. But over time . . . She shrugged. She was middle-aged now, with a comfortable home and four children of her own.
“Adiba and I married last year, and have a son, but still we cannot go back,” Khalid said. “Maybe in another one, two years . . . I talk to my family sometimes, but Adiba still has not talked to hers. They are still very angry, even though I paid them 50,000 dinars [about $2,500].”
How ridiculous of Adiba’s parents, I thought. Khalid seemed like an honest, hardworking man who sincerely loved their daughter. And he had already paid them a significant amount of money. What more did they want?
BACK INSIDE THE women’s quarters, Ako Agha, freshly returned from brokering a settlement over a traffic accident, and Hamid Kak Amin Bilbas, Dildar’s husband, had arrived for lunch. A compact, gray-haired man of about fifty, dressed in baggy Kurdish trousers and a button-down shirt, Hamid was a lawyer, a profession that ran in the family.
Hamid’s stepfather and Dildar’s father had gone to law school together, which was how Dildar and Hamid had met. Yet throughout their courtship, Hamid had never told her about his deep involvement with the PUK, and in 1986, she was astonished to find herself fleeing with him to the mountains to join the peshmerga. “I couldn’t believe it!” she said, shaking her head and laughing.
“Dildar is a very brave woman,” Hamid said. “During the chemical attacks, she was the only one who went out of the shelter to get wet blankets to cover our faces.”
“I was always sticking my head out, trying to see what was going on,” Dildar laughed, amazing but not surprising me.
As it turned out, Hamid and Dildar had survived not one, but two, chemical attacks. And twice, Dildar had been forced to travel through enemy territory almost completely on her own. One trip was due to a medical emergency that necessitated treatment in Baghdad. The other was the death of her father in Dohuk. For four days, she traveled by mule and foot from Suleimaniyah to Raniya, where, with the help of Ako Agha, she slipped secretly through enemy lines and over mountains to her father’s home. On her way back, she collapsed in Ako Agha’s diwan for a week or two, numb with grief and exhaustion.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 29