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Despite the success of the Iraqi elections, unrest
continues. But the history-rich Kurdish north,
reports Bartle Bull, may offer a preview of better
things to come
I have a photograph from Iraqi Kurdistan that I
sometimes hope might appear in my memoirs above the
caption, "Birth of the Iraqi tourist industry." It
shows two men, Kanan Mufti and Ken Herwehe, looking
over the plain of Gaugamela, where,2,336 years ago,
Alexander won his third and decisive victory against
Darius. Gaugamela, with its turreted elephants and
scythed chariots, had always been one of my
favorites among Alexander's battles. It was the
first great clash of East and West in Mesopotamia.
Kanan is head of antiquities in Iraq's Arbil
governorate, and Lieutenant Colonel Herwehe was at
the time one of the senior U.S.commanders in the
region. I had introduced them at Herwehe's
headquarters in Arbil, hoping that together we could
find the site of the battle. Kanan provided 11
sources, ancient and modern, rolled up in scrolls or
pressed flat in large folios, to help us. Herwehe
contributed a large table and a U.S. military
aviation ground escape map.
A couple of hours of gluey tarmac and jolting
riverbeds and back roads took us to the base of the
Jabal Maqlub, where Alexander had camped overlooking
the huge plain Darius needed to accommodate his army
of hundreds of thousands. Features described by the
ancients—mountain passes, hill flanks, and the great
plain—stood suddenly revealed before us, all in
their proper places, as the Mesopotamian geography
yielded its secrets like a dusty cuneiform. I wanted
to visit the ridge from which Darius had lost an
empire. But Herwehe said it looked like land mine
country. "Saddam's officers were good at reading the
terrain," he said. "War hasn't changed so much since
Alexander's day."
In Iraqi Kurdistan, a region approximately the size
of Scotland with about 4 million people, a cultural
and historical legacy of global importance coexists
with natural beauty and dicey politics. And if Iraq
settles into some semblance of postwar peace and
prosperity, the Kurdish north will be a traveler's
first destination: this is already today the most
orderly, temperate, and beautiful part of the
country.
Kurds comprise between a quarter and a fifth of
Iraq's population, and the estimated 25 million
Kurds who live in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey form
the world's largest stateless nation. Iraqi
Kurdistan's high mountains provide some of the best
sanctuaries and richest water resources in the
Middle East, and that water sustains the best
agriculture in Iraq. The Kurds are both blessed and
cursed with a strong historical claim to Kirkuk—source
of almost half of Iraq's oil exports.
The Kurds in Iraq have tasted freedom in the 14
years since the United States and the United Kingdom
set up the no-fly zone to protect them from Saddam
Hussein, and now scores of political parties and
dozens of newspapers jostle for attention in Iraq's
three northern provinces. Religion is a personal
matter here, and it is an easy place to drink
whiskey with novelists in a university garden, or to
drink wine with a Chaldean priest.
Even after their strong showing in the January
elections, Iraq's Kurds are not convinced that their
Sunni and Shiite Arab countrymen can guarantee an
arrangement that does not excessively abridge the
freedoms they have enjoyed since 1991. Meanwhile,
Iran, Syria, and Turkey want to prevent the
emergence of an example that would encourage
inconvenient aspirations among their own Kurds. And
there is no shortage of homegrown threats to the
Kurds of Iraq: their own region is split into two
administrations that fought as recently as 2001.
Iraqi Kurdistan's uncertain future and fraught
political present often seem no less eternally
Kurdish than the region's snowy peaks, green
valleys, and archaeological riches.
Iraq's history is everywhere in its people. The
Medes who fought for Darius at Gaugamela were the
forefathers of today's Kurds. In Iran, Kurds
explained to me that the Medes and Persians had been
united under the Achaemenid dynasty that ended at
Gaugamela; that they had ties of kinship, language,
and history with the Persians; and that Iran's Kurds
are comfortable within the Persian state—where they
have been for more than 4,000 years—as long as they
are treated fairly. Kurds in Iraq, however, will
quickly remind you that they have no such history
with the Arabs, no sharing of origins or language,
no millennia of living within the same borders.
Modern Kurdish history has been one of cyclical
repression, revolution, and opportunity wasted in
naïveté and internecine conflict. A variety of
Kurdish princes launched dozens of revolts against
Persian and Ottoman rule through the 19th century.
When the British formed Iraq after World War I by
combining the province of Mosul with the Arab
provinces of Basra and Baghdad, the Kurds acquired
new enemies. Through the 1920's, 30's, and 40's they
fought the British, and from the 1950's until 1991
they fought the Iraqi state—first the monarchy, then
the junta of generals, and then the Baath Party and
Saddam Hussein.
Kanan grew up in the citadel of Arbil, the Iraqi
Kurdish capital. Arbil sits 100 feet above a flat
plain, and every inch of its height is accumulated
human history: it is the oldest city on earth, 8,000
continuous years of civilization—dust on bone on
refuse on old mud walls—piled high in the middle of
a hot brown plain where the Land Between the Rivers
meets the mountains. Kanan does not remember for
exactly how many generations his family lived in the
Arbil citadel, but he remembers that their courtyard
houses, with fountains and stairs going up to
timbered galleries, were sacked and burned three
times under Saddam. Even after more than a decade of
freedom for the Kurds, the sooty scars of
destruction are there today among the weeds and
abandoned porticoes. Saddam's cousin "Chemical Ali"
Hassan al-Majid once told a brother of Kanan's that
the Iraqi army and security services had killed more
than 100,000 Kurds between the spring and autumn of
1988. Under Saddam, almost every single one of the
country's 4,000-odd Kurdish villages was razed.
Kurds were shot, strafed, bombed, gassed, and forced
into concentration camp cities.
Iraqi Kurdistan's second city, Sulaymaniyah, is cool
and green for this part of the world, at the start
of foothills that climb to the mountain border with
Iran. There is a pretty walk under mulberry trees,
and a grassy park with wide rose borders where
students pace barefoot, mouthing formulas and
Kurdish poems during exam season. On the roof of an
academic building, the university's late president
installed a café that men are not allowed to visit
without women. He hoped to break the cycle of
separation whereby fathers and husbands leave their
families at home and unmarried couples are afraid to
be seen in public. Others in Sulaymaniyah boast of
at least five or six places in town where young men
sip Pepsis with girls in tight jeans. It is the only
city in Iraq where this happens.
On the way from Sulaymaniyah to the Barzan Valley,
an area that has been a center of Kurdish
insurrection since the 1920's, there is a café by
the Great Zab river. Fried fish is served under the
oak trees, and canaries and nightingales sing
through the sound of rapids downstream. In the
evening there is a smell of hay in the valleys. If
you walk in the hills above, the descent is like
powder-skiing, with the daisies and the
white-topped, thigh-high thistles gently brushing
your legs.
In Barzan I spoke to an old man who basks in the
name Abdulsalam Sheikh Sulaiman Sheikh Abdulsalam
Barzani. On an acre near the center of town, he
tends shady rows of figs, pomegranates, almonds, and
apples. Around his plot were others—less profuse,
but rich. Farther away there were sheep and cattle
in pastures. All around us were hills where mountain
oaks, which once blanketed the landscape, were
coming back to a country denuded by Saddam with fire
and chemicals. With the trees, birds and deer and
wolves are also returning.
I wanted to walk for weeks in those hills, where the
oaks made a pattern like leopard skin on the gold
grass. But the mayor of nearby Mergasur, whose
grandfather was hanged by the Ottomans in 1914 and
who lost 37 cousins to Saddam, had warned me not to
go too far or too high, or to spend time in the
hills at night. The PKK—one of the deadliest
guerrilla groups in the Middle East,
Kurdish-Marxists, whose main struggle is in
Turkey—is active in the high Iraqi border country
from Syria to Iran. Other Kurds, who live near their
camps in those lush valleys ringed by snow, are
scared of them. Looking out at his own village and
over the Barzan Valley, Abdulsalam said to me in
English: "You see this beautiful place, so green and
rich, the farmers, the merchants, all so full of
optimism—yet every individual has a tragedy.
Mothers, brothers, sisters killed. Torture,
refugees." Barzan had been razed in 1983. Eight
thousand Barzani men disappeared in a single night.
Abdulsalam lost two brothers, an uncle, cousins.
"So much promise, so much pain," he said, as he sat
cross-legged on the dark earth under one of his
apricot trees, waving an arm over the valley. "This
is Kurdistan."
BARTLE BULL has written about Iraq for the New York
Times and the Financial Times.
www.travelandleisure.com
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