In general, the Kurds of Syria have not suffered from persecution as extreme as that inflicted on the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey, or Iran, and Syria today is more tolerant of its Kurdish population than are Turkey and Iran. Nonetheless, Kurdish has never been recognized as an official language— though it is allowed on the streets—and Syrian Kurds cannot legally publish, study, teach, or write in Kurdish, or hold Kurdish concerts. Books published in Kurdish must be sold surreptitiously, although their possession is allowed. Kurds suffer discrimination in the workplace, and while some Kurds have risen to high levels in government—including membership in parliament—their influence is limited. Kurdish political parties are technically speaking illegal, but some are informally recognized and allowed to operate in what is basically a one-party system run by the National Progressive Front (NPF), a body of allied parties dominated by Syria’s Baath Party.
Worst of all, over two hundred thousand Syrian Kurds, or one-sixth of its Kurdish population, are denied full citizenship. The Syrian government claims that they are foreigners, or descendants of foreigners, who immigrated illegally into the country from Turkey starting in the 1920s. Never mind the fact that most of these “foreign” Kurds were born on Syrian soil and have no other nationality; they are denied such basic rights as the right to vote, run a business, work as a doctor or engineer, hold a position in the government, possess a passport, be admitted into a public hospital, or register marriages. Furthermore, “illegal” Kurds cannot own real estate or an automobile without the help of an intermediary who is a full citizen. “Foreign” men are not allowed to marry women who are full citizens.
The Syrian Kurds live in three separate geographic pockets in northern Syria: the northeastern part of the Jazira, a fertile plain, where most of the “foreigners” live; the northwestern part of the Jazira; and the Kurd Dagh, the only mountainous Kurdish region in Syria. Many Kurds also live in Damascus, which has had a large Kurdish population since the Middle Ages. Many Damascus Kurds have long been assimilated into Arab culture. And with few mountains to offer them protection and a community that is dispersed geographically, Syrian Kurds have never waged the sort of full-scale war against their government that has at times torn apart Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.
WHEN I ARRIVED in Qamishli, the Syrian border town, on my way back from Iraq, my host family was waiting for me. We had spoken only briefly on the phone, and I had never met our mutual contact, but in true Kurdish fashion, the family showered me with gracious hospitality. They had turned their cheery children’s room into my guestroom, prepared an elaborate welcoming meal for me, and arranged to take time off from work to provide tours of the area. Before I left them five days later, they would also insist on taking me out to dinner several times, buy me a half-dozen CDs and a ring to remember them by, purchase my plane ticket from Qamishli to Damascus, and give me money for the taxi ride between the Damascus airport and my hotel. No amount of protestation on my part would deflect them from these purposes.
The family lived in a modern apartment on a street that was part Kurdish, part Arab. Qamishli was largely developed after the discovery of oil in the Jazira in the mid-1900s, and was inhabited by a mix of Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Assyrians, Armenians, and Syrian Orthodox. Portraits of President Assad, past and present, hung everywhere, sometimes four or five on one short block, along with dozens of statues of the father. The city had more than its share of slums and unpaved streets, but also housed luxury apartment buildings and upscale shops, including a United Colors of Benetton.
After lunch, my hosts took me on a drive due west of the city, through a land of wheat and barley fields and pastures teeming with sheep. At first, I took the many shepherds among them to be Arab, as all were dressed in long white jalabiyya, or caftans, and flowing head cloths. Then my hosts told me that, on the contrary, most were Kurdish. Kurdish dress is not allowed in Syria, they said, a statement that I later learned was not altogether correct. During periods of strong Arab nationalism, Kurdish men have been forbidden to wear traditional dress, but during periods of leniency, the male costume has been allowed and is still worn in the Kurd Dagh. Many Kurdish men also began switching voluntarily to Arab dress after World War I. Kurdish women have never been subject to any restrictions regarding dress.
My hosts were reluctant to let me talk to any of the people we passed or, later, to most of their neighbors. It wouldn’t be safe, they said. They also advised me not to take notes, and to destroy all my Syrian Kurdish-related papers before leaving the country, as I could be searched at the airport. When the family arranged for me to meet a Kurdish politician, the event had to be carefully choreographed so as to appear to be a purely social occasion.
We passed by one village after another, all looking much alike: flat, poor nondescript places built of cement and clay brick, with drooping electricity lines. Yet my hosts could tell them apart. “Arab, Arab, Arab,” they said as the apparently newer and better-laid-out villages flashed by.
We were now in the heart of al-Jazira, an Arab word meaning “the island,” that refers to the northern part of the Mesopotamian plain between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. During Ottoman times, the Jazira—today divided between Syria and Turkey—was a giant grazing ground, used by Arab nomads pasturing their camels and sheep in summer, and by Kurdish seminomads herding their huge flocks down from the Anatolian highlands in winter. Uninhabited and remote from central government, the Jazira was notorious for its lawlessness, though relations between its Arab and Kurdish tribes were generally good. Then in the 1920s, an enormous influx of about twenty-five thousand Kurds and many tens of thousands of Armenians and other Christians escaping Turkish massacres poured into the region.
From the beginning, tensions between the newly arrived populations and the older ones flared. At the same time, as the settlers began cultivating the land, it became apparent that the region was highly fertile and could become the breadbasket of the then–newly created state of Syria, carved out of the old Ottoman Empire along with Iraq and modern Turkey. By 1945, the Syrian government was starting to speak ominously of the “infiltration” of Kurds into the increasingly important region, and in the late 1950s, in the wake of growing Arab nationalism, the government began its first crackdown on the Kurds. Those caught with Kurdish music or publications, previously allowed, were arrested, as were over five thousand political “suspects,” many accused of belonging to the illegal Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria. In 1962, the government conducted an unusual census that led to the stripping of some 120,000 Jazira Kurds, and their descendants, of their rights as Syrian citizens, proclaiming them illegal immigrants. Fears of Iraq’s growing Kurdish nationalism and the discovery of oil in the Jazira undoubtedly had much to do with the government’s actions.
The next year, an “Arabization” program similar to the one in Iraq was devised, with a Lieutenant Muhammad Talab Hilal drawing up a twelve-point plan. Among other things, Hilal proposed declaring all Kurdish land deeds null and void; denying Kurds education and employment; establishing a ten- to fifteen-kilometer-wide “Arab Cordon” along the Turkish border that would be completely devoid of all Kurds; replacing Kurdish religious leaders with Arab ones; and enticing more Arabs into the region with land and housing.
Due to the 1967 war with Israel, the “Arab Cordon” and other parts of Hilal’s plan were never implemented. However, forty model Arab villages were built, about seven thousand Arab families imported into the region, some sixty thousand Jazira Kurds expelled or convinced to leave, and the remaining “non-Syrian” Kurds denied full citizenship. The harassment and arrest of the leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria also continued. One politician I met told me that he had lived six years on the lam in the 1960s, staying in a different house every night.
In the early 1970s, the state’s persecution of its Kurdish minority eased, and in 1976, President Assad renounced the replacement of Kurds with Arabs in the Jazira. However, the denial of full citizenship continues to oppress more than two h
undred thousand Kurds, while allowing the state to claim, on paper at least, that the Jazira is predominantly Arab. In addition, about seventy-five thousand of the two hundred thousand “non-Syrian” Kurds are descendants of “illegal” marriages between “foreign” fathers and Syrian mothers, meaning that they have no documentation or rights whatsoever.
“The policy is tragic and absurd,” my hosts said. “The children of the illegal marriages were born here, but can’t even go to primary school.”
My hosts and I had reached Amuda, one of the largest towns in the Jazira. In the 1930s, the mystery writer Agatha Christie and her husband, noted archaeologist Max Mallowan, lived in Amuda, while Mallowan conducted digs in the area. Like Iraq’s Shahrizur, the Jazira is covered with dozens of tells, or artificial hills, some dating back to Roman and Assyrian times, and others to prehistoric man. Christie had a deep appreciation of Syria but little good to say about her temporary hometown. “Amuda is mainly an Armenian town and not, may it be said, at all an attractive one,” she writes. “The flies there are out of all proportion, and the small boys have the worst manners yet seen, everyone seems bored and yet truculent.”
We drove by Christie’s old home—a clay brick house with odd, heavy buttresses—a grim police station with indolent guards lolling around out front, and dozens more posters and statues of President Assad the elder. Then we turned onto a quiet side street lined with high walls, to enter a compound bursting with yellow and orange marigolds, a stately home, protective cypress trees, and a flagstone patio on which several aristocratic-looking women and a man were socializing. Joining them, we partook of tea and sesame-flour cookies, cherries and apricots, Turkish coffee and candy, and gentle conversation and laughter. The scene felt genteel, sophisticated, Old World, and far removed from anything I’d experienced in Iraq, where everything had felt so new and raw. So this is what cultured Kurdistan feels like when it hasn’t been bombed into oblivion time and time again, I thought.
THE NEXT DAY, my hosts and I again traveled along a road heading west through the Jazira. But this time, the Turkish border, dotted with guard towers and strafed with barbed wire and mines, was often less than one hundred yards away. We passed through several villages that straddled the two countries, a wide military swatch in between. In the distance rose the mountains of Turkey, including Mardin, where some of my Iraqi Kurdish friends had lived in refugee camps. From the cassette deck came the voice of Zakaria, whose buoyant music I’d heard everywhere in the semiautonomous zone. I may have felt far from Iraq, but, in reality, we were only about forty miles away.
“Before the 1980s and the trouble with the PKK, the soldiers let the villagers go to the border and shout hello to their families at the end of Ramadan,” my hosts said. “Sometimes they even let them shake hands and hug. But then the fighting started, and now if you get too close to the border, the Turkish soldiers will shoot you.”
The PKK has as difficult a history in Syria as it has in Iraq. Shortly before the 1980 military coup in Turkey, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan and other party members fled to Syria where they were welcomed by a regime hostile to Turkey. President Assad the elder offered the rebel group offices in various cities and a training ground in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon—help that was “crucial to the initial success of the PKK,” writes historian David McDowall.
At first, the Syrian Kurds wholeheartedly embraced the PKK. Here at last was a radical organization fighting for an independent Kurdistan. Young Syrian Kurdish men and women joined the rebels by the thousands, to take up arms and head to Turkey. About seven thousand never returned.
Syrian Kurdish anger toward the PKK grew. Not only were loved ones disappearing, but the PKK was heavy-handedly soliciting funds and services from the Kurdish community. Furthermore, the PKK declared that Syria had no indigenous Kurds of its own, that all Syrian Kurds were in reality displaced Kurds from Turkey who wanted to move back north—a claim that the Syrian regime welcomed, as it was perfectly aligned with their own. But most Syrian Kurds had no desire to leave their homes.
Not until 1998, after eighteen years in Syria, were Öcalan and the PKK suddenly forced out. Turkey had amassed a large force of troops on the border and was threatening to invade unless Syria expelled the PKK. Much weaker than Turkey militarily, Syria complied. Öcalan left, initially to seek asylum in Russia. It was the first step in an exile that would eventually lead to his capture in Kenya and life imprisonment.
My hosts, who had lost a boy and a girl cousin to the PKK, expressed nothing but bitterness toward the guerrilla group. “The PKK killed people who criticized Öcalan,” they said. “Or they cut off noses and ears. And the police knew everything, but said and did nothing. They didn’t care what happened to us.”
Once again, it was all about politics and their ironic bedfellows, I thought. The Syrian government had supported the PKK while repressing their own Kurdish population in much the same way that the Turkish government had supported Iraqi Kurdistan while repressing their Kurdish population. And ordinary people, caught in the middle as usual, paid the price.
DUE WEST OF the Jazira and northwest of the historic city of Aleppo stretches the Kurd Dagh, the only mountainous Kurdish region in Syria. Dense with sleepy villages, rolling hills, olive and cypress trees, and terraced vineyards, the Kurd Dagh has been home to a relatively prosperous Kurdish community ever since Kurdish lords ruled over Arab vassals here in the medieval era. Reminiscent of Greece and other picturesque parts of the Mediterranean, the Kurd Dagh is the sort of place that attracts tour buses with its idyllic vistas, inviting roadside restaurants, pristine lakes and dams, and historic sites.
The Kurd Dagh has not suffered from the kind of abuse that has plagued the Jazira. However, as I toured the picture-perfect hills with a Kurdish politician and his woman associate—who preferred to remain nameless—I heard stories of Kurdish villages at times deliberately cut off from electricity and on-again, off-again road checks that necessitated the payment of bribes. Kurdish farmers were often denied the government subsidies that Arab farmers obtained easily, and Kurdish political meetings had to be held in secret, my companions said. As politicians, they also never knew when they might be arrested.
Their stories reminded me of Muhammad Hamo, a Syrian Kurd I’d met in Suleimaniyah. The former owner of a bookstore in Aleppo, Muhammad had been forced to flee to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2001, after the Syrian authorities had destroyed his shop and home library. Muhammad had been surreptitiously selling Kurdish books in his store for years, with long stretches of time passing during which he’d been allowed to operate in peace. But on three separate occasions prior to his final ouster, something had triggered the state’s ill will and he’d been arrested. Once, he was locked in solitary confinement for six months simply for writing poems about freedom. “Before they locked me up,” Muhammad said, “they asked me, ‘Why do you write about freedom? You already have freedom.’ ”
Which was worse, I wondered as I remembered Muhammad’s story and listened to my companions: constant predictable repression or periods of relative freedom abruptly interrupted by harsh crackdowns?
We spent the night in a small village, arriving at about eleven P.M. via a back road, after evading a Syrian police station in a nearby larger village. “We don’t want anyone to know you are here,” my guides explained as we slunk around the edge of the larger village, to fly through a moonlit landscape, fields on either side, no other signs of human life in sight. “They might make trouble for you and us, or throw you out.” My guides had been making similar comments throughout the day. Each time they did, my heart started to thump and I had to resist the urge to slide down in the backseat.
The village was small, populated by no more than twenty families, some related to my guides. Driving into one of the compounds, we were warmly greeted by a bevy of older women, all dressed in colorful dishdasha. With no idea we were coming and despite the late hour, they did not seem at all surprised to see us and quickly began preparing
a snack while we took seats on the carpeted floor.
“Our lives are good, we have no complaints,” the women told me as they brought out dishes of yogurt, olives, various fresh cheeses, hummus, and baba ghanoush—the latter two dishes a Mediterranean influence, seldom served in Iraq. “Except the usual one. We work too hard! Our men do nothing but drink tea and talk!”
OVER THE CENTURIES, the fabled Syrian capital of Damascus, another of the world’s oldest cities, has served as a place of exile for prominent Kurds. The last powerful Kurdish emir, Bedir Khan, whose family ruled the Botan emirate in what is now Cizre, Turkey, from the 1200s to the 1840s, lived out his last years here and is buried in the Kurdish Quarter, a web of steep streets etching the foothills of Mount Qasyun. The site of Kurdish troop cantonments during the Middle Ages, the Kurdish Quarter was also once home to Mawlana Khalid, the charismatic shaikh who almost single-handedly spread the Nasqhbandi Sufi faith in Kurdistan. Mawlana Khalid fled from Suleimaniyah to Damascus under mysterious circumstances in 1820 and is buried in a whitewashed tomb perched high above the city.
The best known of Damascus’s former Kurdish residents, however, is Salah al-Din, better known in the West as Saladin. A preeminent hero of the Islamic world, Salah al-Din is most famous for having recaptured Jerusalem from Richard I—the “Lionheart of England”—in September 1187 after eighty-eight years of Christian rule. Generally regarded as a man of great integrity, intelligence, and chivalrous behavior in battle—in contrast to the barbarous Crusaders—Salah al-Din has almost as many Western as Eastern admirers. He has been lauded by writers ranging from Sir Walter Scott to Dante, who in Canto IV of the Inferno describes Salah al-Din as “sitting at a distance separately,” in Limbo because although not Christian, he led a virtuous life.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 31