Salah al-Din Ayyubi was born into a prominent Kurdish family in Tikrit in today’s Iraq in 1138, but grew up mostly in Baalbek (Lebanon) and Damascus, as political circumstances forced his family into exile. At age fourteen, he joined his uncle in military service to Nur al-Din of the ruling Zangi dynasty, and so impressed the Syrian governor that he was appointed administrator of Damascus at age eighteen. In 1171, he became ruler of Egypt, and then succeeded in uniting the hitherto warring Muslim territories of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and northern Mesopotamia. The founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, which governed Egypt and the Red Sea coast until 1250, Salah al-Din died of malaria in 1193, three months after signing a peace treaty with Richard the Lionhearted.
Salah al-Din is buried in the Old City of Damascus, in a modest mausoleum adjoining the Umayyad Mosque, one of the most magnificent buildings in the Islamic world. Several hours north of Damascus reigns the well-preserved Krak des Chevaliers, or Krak des Kurds, which Salah al-Din recaptured from Reginald of Chatillon just prior to his successful siege of Jerusalem.
And yet for all the accolades heaped upon Salah al-Din by both the East and the West, he is not especially appreciated by the Kurds, many of whom seem to believe he betrayed them by paying more attention to his Muslim rather than his Kurdish heritage. “If Salah al-Din had been a better Kurd, we would be ruling the Middle East today,” was typical of the comments I heard. An unrealistic fantasy, I mused, given all that could have gone wrong between then and now.
WHILE IN DAMASCUS, I met a prominent modern-day Kurd living in exile: Karim Khan Baradost, agha of Iraq’s powerful Baradosti tribe. Originally from Iran, the Baradosti are a fabled people, celebrated in one of the Kurds’ most famous epics, the battle of Dem Dem castle.
Karim Khan was an imposing-looking man, dressed in a cream-colored, three-piece suit. We met in a four-star hotel over a welcome lunch organized by the PUK. The party’s prime minister, Dr. Barham Salih, was in town to talk to Syrian politicians. Both the KPD and PUK had a good relationship with Syria and offices in the capital.
At the luncheon, I sat across from Karim Khan and next to his twenty-something son, Sidqi, who spoke good English and translated for his father. Educated in the United States, Sidqi helped to run an apparently highly successful family business that involved selling surge protectors throughout the Middle East. Another example of the Kurds’ amazing ability to adjust to change, I thought as I listened to Sidqi’s accounts of twenty-first-century capitalism with one ear and his father’s accounts of the epic of Dem Dem with the other.
As the tale goes, Shah Abbas I, the Safavid king who ruled Persia from 1588 to 1629, once had a close alliance with a Baradosti prince, who supported the shah in many battles. During one, he lost his hand, which the shah replaced with a hand of gold, leading to the prince’s nickname, Khan Lepzerin, or the “Prince with the Golden Hand.”
The shah and the khan had a falling out. The shah invited the khan to his palace to discuss the matter, but the khan, fearing a trap, refused to go, and declared independence. The shah then laid siege to his headquarters in Dem Dem castle, situated atop a mountain south of Urumieh, Iran. The Baradostis put up a fierce resistance, fighting off their enemy for a year, but finally, the shah’s army shut off the castle’s water supply and the tribe knew that defeat was inevitable. Rather than wait for the end, the khan led his forces into battle, while the women of the royal family committed suicide, holding hands as they jumped off the castle’s battlements. The khan and many warriors were killed, but one of his sons and the rest of the tribe escaped to Iraq, where they took up residence in Sidakan, near the Barzan Valley.
The Baradostis’ modern history was also dramatic. In 1931, when Shaikh Ahmad, Mulla Mustafa’s eccentric brother, apparently instructed his followers to eat pork and burn the Quran, it was the Baradosti religious leader Shaikh Rashid who led the attack against the Barzanis. This in turn led to a rout of Baradosti territory by Shaikh Ahmad, who forced Shaikh Rashid into Iran. Shortly thereafter, the Baradostis returned, and, a decade later, joined the Iraqis to force the Barzanis into Iran.
So it went throughout the rest of the twentieth century, as the Baradostis sided first with King Faisal, then with Brigadier General Abd al-Karim Qassem and, finally, with Saddam Hussein against their traditional enemy. King Faisal II was an especially close friend of the tribe, arriving on horseback with his retinue every year to spend a few days in Baradosti territory, known for its pristine lakes and mountains.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the Baradostis provided the Baathists with many troops, and Saddam Hussein awarded Karim Khan six medals in recognition of his tribe’s efforts. But when the war ended, Saddam betrayed the tribe by demanding that they abandon their traditional lands, as they border Iran. “I gathered the tribe together and told them the matter,” Karim Khan said, “and they said, we fought Iran for eight years, and now we are ready to fight the government. So from that time, our relationship with Saddam was cut.”
Joining forces with the PUK, Karim Khan remained in Iraqi Kurdistan until 1996, when the Baath forces entered the region during the internal war. “That was the most dangerous time for me,” he said. “I was in a very bad situation. I was in Erbil when the Iraqi army arrived, but fortunately I had seven hundred fighters with me and no one attacked. Saddam said, ‘Stay, I will help you and give you weapons.’ But I didn’t trust him and I escaped, first to Iran and later to Damascus.”
One year later, after the Iraq war of 2003 ended, I was in touch with Sidqi via e-mail. His family’s exile was over; they were back in Iraq. “My father sends his best regards, he is very busy with the people of our tribe, and is very happy,” wrote Sidqi, reminding me of an old Kurdish proverb: “Damascus is sweet, but home is sweeter.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Of Politics and Poetry
DEEP IN THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN IRAN RISES A SMOOTH-SIDED peak. In mid-May it is the green-blue color of flies’ eyes, but by mid-September it has become gray and dark. The roads that skirt the peak to the east are narrow but paved, lined with clay homes sprouting ladders leading to roofs, and fields peppered with crackling mounds of harvested hay. Orchards spill small green apples out onto the street so that drivers must proceed with caution. The top of the mountain is bare, but to one side is a drop-off cliff, over which the women of the royal family are said to have jumped in the epic of Dem Dem. Up until the 1980s, when the Islamic regime cracked down on the Kurds, parts of the legendary castle still stood, and, in more recent years, the PKK used the mountain as a hideout. Now though, all is quiet atop the majestic peak, as it awaits the next chapter of its storybook history.
Less than an hour north of Dem Dem lies Urumieh, Iran’s largest northwestern city, cut off from the rest of the country by a vast salt lake, its edges encrusted with lines of wavy white. Only the most primitive of fish can survive in its highly salty waters, but the lake attracts thousands of migrating waterfowl, including flamingoes, whose pink bodies bob upon its shiny surface like pieces of origami for a few weeks each year. Part Azeri Turkish, part Armenian and other Christians, and part Kurdish, Urumieh is said by some to be the birthplace of Zoroaster, the prophet who founded the Zoroastrian religion between 1000 and 700 B.C.
All around Urumieh stretches a fertile plain, once known as the “Paradise of Persia.” Here, Ismail Simko, the Kurdish rebel who ambushed and drank the blood of the ninety-plus-year-old Armenian leader, staged his revolt against the Iranian government in the 1920s. The plain was also the battleground of what may have been the first revolt in the name of Kurdish nationalism. In 1880, Shaikh Ubayd Allah, a spiritual leader headquartered in Hakkari (Turkey) ordered his followers to invade Urumieh because the Persian authorities had harshly punished local aghas without first consulting the region’s Kurdish governor. Sending a message to the British consul-general in Tabriz, Shaikh Ubayd Allah made an early call for Kurdish autonomy: “[The Kurds] are a nation apart. We want our affairs to be in our own hands.”
The shai
kh’s Hakkari troops were joined by numerous Persian Kurdish tribes. With eight thousand men, the shaikh laid siege to Urumieh, while one of his sons—leading fifteen thousand men—captured Mahabad farther south. Still others marched on Tabriz, but were badly defeated by the vastly superior Persian army, who went on to end the siege at Urumieh. Thousands of Kurdish troops and civilians fled to Hakkari, but many were massacred on the way. The Ottomans exiled the shaikh to Mecca, where he died a few years later.
During the siege of Urumieh, the Kurds had taken care to keep one population safe—the American Christians who had established the first Presbyterian mission in Persia in Urumieh in 1834. Though in general there was no love lost between Kurds and missionaries—hostilities at times erupting into massacres of the intruders—the shaikh owed the Urumieh mission a debt. Six months earlier, a Dr. Cochrane had saved him from a severe bout of pneumonia, remaining in the Hakkari mountains for ten days until the Kurdish leader was cured. Thus, Shaikh Ubayd Allah contacted the doctor before attacking, asking for the location of his residence and those of his people, so that no one connected with the mission was harmed. Honor takes many different forms among the Kurds.
I ARRIVED IN Urumieh one midmorning in September, traveling by plane from Tehran. What once must have been a beautiful town was now bursting from overpopulation, as is much of urban Iran.
At the Urumieh airport, I met Jaleh, a pleasingly plump, heavily made-up, Iranian-English Kurd, back in Iran after twenty-odd years of living in England, due to a second marriage. Her husband was away at the time of my visit, and, delighted to meet a fellow English speaker, she invited me to stay with her for a few days, to deluge me with stories about how much she missed England and hated Iran. Some of her complaints sounded legitimate: her neighbors ridiculed her for driving a car, and she’d had much trouble finding a live-in maid, as the Kurdish women couldn’t stay away from home overnight. Others were more suspect: she’d heard of “many” Iranian stepmothers burning the babies of their husbands’ earlier wives. Jaleh had had a difficult life, as she’d been forced to flee Iran at age sixteen, due to her brothers’ political activities. In England, she had married a man who abused her for ten years. After finally breaking away, she’d become a dental hygienist and raised a son, now a college student. She was happy in her second marriage, but lonely; her husband was often away on business. The word love, encircled by hearts, was writ large in Magic Marker all over her bedroom walls.
Jaleh took me to the Kurdish village of Band, just outside Urumieh, where “people live like they did a hundred years ago,” she said, clucking over the villagers’ simple dress and homes. Like many who have left earlier worlds behind, Jaleh had something to prove.
Beyond Band stretched hundreds of round hills bristling with tan grasses cut evenly as a crew cut. Between them meandered a river framed with poplar trees and grazing cattle—a yawning vista that made me yearn to keep traveling along the empty highway before us, to roll on into oblivion, or at least Iraq.
That evening, Jaleh and I ate dinner in one of Band’s outdoor restaurants, draped with multicolored lights and overlooking a small stream clogged with trash. Joining us was her cousin, a twenty-five-year-old civil engineer interested to hear that I’d been to Iraqi Kurdistan. He hoped to visit there himself one day, he said.
He had some bitterness toward the Iraqi Kurds. “The Iraqi Kurds have had many good chances, many more than the Iranian and Turkish Kurds,” he said, “but the Barzanis and Talabanis have thrown them all away. They think only about their own pocketbooks. They are weak and corrupt.”
Jaleh nodded in agreement, though I doubted she was paying much attention. She was much more interested in when her husband was coming home, and in whether she could convince him to move to England. “If I can’t, I might go without him, or else take along this cousin,” she said, making eyes at the young man as she openly poured us all another round of beer.
I glanced around nervously. We were in the conservative Islamic Republic of Iran, after all, where the consumption of alcohol can lead to arrest. I’d already noticed the inhabitants of a nearby table looking at us askance, and had double-checked my head scarf and long black raincoat— they or something similar required wearing for all women in public in Iran—to make sure that no illicit body part, such as a knee, was showing. Jaleh pooh-poohed my worries. “They’re drinking, too,” she said. “And they’re only giving us looks because they think we shouldn’t be out alone with a young man.”
“Jaleh says you’re going to Mahabad,” her cousin said. “You must be very careful. Three people were killed there last month for smuggling a carton of cigarettes, and four people were killed in a demonstration last week. They have an eleven-thirty curfew. It is a very dangerous city.”
This was the first I’d heard of possible danger in Mahabad, and his words rattled me a little. However, when I arrived in Mahabad a few days later, the atmosphere was calm and quiet. Three people had been killed for smuggling a carton of cigarettes, but that was unusual; smugglers were usually fined or imprisoned. And during a demonstration protesting the killings, shots had been fired in the air, but no one injured or killed. Mahabad did have a curfew, but then so did Urumieh, and neither was enforced.
As I’d learned during my first visit to Iran in 1998, Iranians love conspiracy theories and related plots, often embroidering simple facts and rumors until they become complex tales filled with ulterior motives and nefarious misdeeds. Part of the tendency has to do with Iran’s history—the Iranians have been betrayed many times, with some conspiracy theories turning out to be true—and part of it has to do with living under a regime that is repressive but also inefficient and unpredictable in its enforcement of that repression. In Iran, people never know exactly where they stand. “We have a red line that we cannot cross, but no one knows where it is,” goes a popular saying.
MANY THINGS WERE different in Iranian Kurdistan as compared to Iraqi Kurdistan. The place felt more settled, less raw. In Iran, there were few signs of recent war and many signs of a long-functioning, sophisticated society at work—one into which many Kurds, numbering about 6.5 million out of a total population of 68 million, were comparatively better integrated. For all the problems that the Kurds have had with the Iranian government—almost as many as the Iraqi Kurds have had with their government—they have much in common with their compatriot Persians. Kurds and Persians share a similar language, a similar tolerance, a similar independence of spirit, and a similar outlook toward the Arabs, who conquered both their lands in the name of Islam in A.D. 637.
Iranian Kurdistan is not as isolated from the rest of Iran as the Iraqi safe haven was from the rest of Iraq, and many parts contain not just Kurds but large concentrations of other ethnic groups. Between a half million and a million Iranian Kurds also live in Tehran, where they go about their business much like any other Iranians, often unable to speak Kurdish, and often more concerned with issues that affect all Iranians—economics, for one— rather than just the Kurds.
Indeed, a major difference between Iran and Iraq, as well as between Iran and Turkey, is its considerably more heterogeneous population. Iran is only about half ethnic Persian, and holds many major minority groups— including Azeri Turks, Baluchis, Qashqais, Turcomans, Arabs, and Kurds. In contrast, in both Iraq and Turkey, the Kurds are the only sizable minority and make up a much larger proportion of their respective country’s total population—about 23 percent in Iraq and 20 percent in Turkey, as compared to 10 percent in Iran. The Iranian government has therefore immediately cracked down on the separatist movements of all its minority groups, as the autonomy of any one group could lead to the breakup of the entire state. The sort of semiautonomy offered to the Iraqi Kurds in 1970 has not occurred in Iran. Conversely, the Iranian government has seldom felt quite as threatened by its Kurds as has its neighbors, and in recent decades has offered Kurds more cultural rights—though not political ones—than has Iraq or Turkey.
There are important historical dif
ferences as well. As early as the 1300s, much of Iranian Kurdistan was already a quasi-state, ruled by the Ardalan dynasty, whose territory reached far into today’s Iraq. Later, with the rise of the Safavids, who ruled Iran while the Ottomans ruled Turkey and Iraq, the shahs used the Kurds to defend their territory, but never allowed most Kurdish princes the free rein that the Ottomans granted. After the Qajar shahs came to power in 1794, they replaced the region’s Kurdish governors with their own administrators, a tradition that continues today with most of Kurdistan administered by non-Kurds—Azeri Turks in the north and Persians in the south.
When Reza Khan, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, came to power in 1923, his first priority was uniting the many different Iranian peoples. This meant the enforced settlement of tens of thousands of nomads, including many Kurds. The shah’s settlement policies were ruthless and disastrous, sometimes resulting in the near extermination of entire tribes. The Lurs, closely related to the Kurds, were decimated, while nearly ten thousand Jalalis, a Kurdish tribe, died following deportation to central Iran. Nonetheless, the government’s policies toward the Kurds and others were never completely successful, as various unruly chieftains managed to retain their power, some through their cooperation with the regime.
Once the tribes were settled, they became easier to control and assimilate into society. Taxes became easier to collect; conscription into the army became easier to enforce; and trade across the frontiers became forbidden, forcing the Kurds to conduct more business with the central government, and erasing much of their previous self-sufficiency.
The power of the tribes revived somewhat in the 1940s and early 1950s, as the central government weakened during the turbulent World War II years. It declined again in the 1960s and 1970s as land reform broke the stranglehold in which the aghas had once held their constituents. A developing domestic capitalism and massive migration to the towns and cities also contributed to the breakdown of the tribe, leading the Iranian Kurdish leader Abd al-Rahman Qassemlou to say that by the 1970s, “Kurdish society in Iran can no longer be considered as a tribal society.” Nonetheless, many tribes continued to exist and to exert considerable influence. Members of powerful tribal families still play leadership roles in Iranian Kurdistan today, and in some border areas, armed tribes are still used as government patrols.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 32