A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 12

Other men took off their shirts and, one by one, plunged long gleaming swords through the sides of their torsos with no apparent pain or blood, although another man felt for soft spots first and pressed the wounds with his thumb afterward. Initially, the men performed their feats slowly, giving me time to take photos. Then, all at once, skewered male torsos seemed everywhere. Someone directed me to climb onto a low table, where I began clicking so fast that all I could see of the darkened room was what lay directly before my camera's lens. The chanting rose to a crescendo, and arms and hair whipped through the air as I turned left to right to left, trying to control my awkward abeyya, suddenly aware that the frenzied believers might decide to initiate me into their rite with a dagger or sword thrust. Still, I felt no real fear until Othman pulled me down off the table. He firmly held my hand as he rapidly escorted me out of the room and into the car without stopping for my shoes. "You are not safe," was all he said as we climbed inside, then he sent our companions back to look for my shoes.

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 superst.i.tious 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 anch.o.r.ed on a major thoroughfare that ran from the outskirts of the city into the downtown, past a straggly line of offices, hotels, Internet cafes, 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-gla.s.s 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 b.u.mped 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 s.e.xes 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 gla.s.s. 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 a.s.serting 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 Kurdistan.

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 Ma.s.soud 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 a.s.syrian 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 gla.s.ses, 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 a.s.signed 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 fire. 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 gla.s.ses, and an irrepressible smile. Jemal Aziz walked with a limp, due to a 1994 a.s.sa.s.sination 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."

"I decided then that even if they killed me, I would not confess about how I helped the peshmerga," Jemal said in crisp, British-inflected English as he escorted us into the compound. "If I confessed, I would have to give them names and then I would be lost." His voice caught. "I prefer my own death to this, to bringing friends of mine into this kind of h.e.l.l."

Entering one of the deserted buildings, Jemal led us into the former interrogation room. All the room's furnishings and lighting were gone, but three rusting and surprisingly small meat hooks still hung from the ceiling. "Sometimes they tortured three men at once." Jemal nodded at the hooks. "To torture one man was not enough for them. . . . They had a technique, to take us right to the moment of death, but not to cross over. They regarded it as an art."

He led us deeper into the dark, cold, miserable building, showing us the communal cell in which he had been imprisoned with ninety other men, and the solitary confinement cells, each measuring about four by six feet. The communal cell had only one tiny window high up near the ceiling, the solitary confinement cells no windows at all. We pa.s.sed by a midsized room in which women and their young children had been imprisoned, and by the site of a shed, since torn down-by the irate mob? I wondered-in which women had reputedly been raped and thereafter killed.

"I was luckier than most." Jemal paused in one of the dark hallways. "Because at least my family knew where I was. A student recognized me when the guards took me to the hospital one night. . . . The Iraqis never told the families when they arrested someone. And no one was allowed to approach the security building to ask about a person who'd disappeared. Sometimes people tried to bribe the soldiers for information. Sometimes they sold everything they had for that little bit of information."

As we toured the complex, Jemal's eyes were leaden and at times filled with tears, but as soon as we left, they started dancing again, and his irrepressible smile returned.

AT THE UNIVERSITY of Suleimaniyah, I met with professors who told me more about life under the Baath regime. Saddam Hussein was especially harsh on the city because of its rebellious history and many peshmerga supporters, they said. In Suleimaniyah, more than Dohuk and Erbil, the Baathists frequently cut off public services, imposed curfews, arrested civilians, and killed "saboteurs" in cold blood on the street, often burying them where they fell and making their families pay for the bullets. "It became a familiar sight to see a group of officers standing in a circle with a shovel," English professor Kawan Arif told me. "The families had no right to claim the bodies. They had to come back for them secretly at night."

Kawan's stories reminded me of another I'd heard, from a thirty-something Suleimaniyan named Zerrin Ibrahim. When Zerrin was in intermediate school, she had a teacher who tried to "brainwash" the children with constant tales about the greatness of Saddam Hussein, she said. The peshmerga warned him many times to tone down his message, but when he persisted, they murdered him. The Baathists responded by gathering the children in a circle in the playground, arbitrarily choosing eight or ten boys, putting bags over their heads, and killing them on the spot. "I was sick for a week," Zerrin said.

In contrast to the older generation, most of the students at the University of Suleimaniyah, who had been children when the Baath forces withdrew from Kurdistan, spoke to me not about atrocities, but about their desperation to leave Iraq. Kurdistan offered no jobs, no physical security, and few social freedoms, they said. "I want to go to a nightclub-there are no night-clubs here," one male student elaborated. "And I want to go to the beach and ride a bicycle, wearing shorts and listening to a headset. But you can't do that here. People will say you are not normal, you are rude and crazy, they will call you bad names."

How difficult it must be to live bombarded with images of the pleasure-seeking West while being confined to a boxed-in, traditional country like Kurdistan. It was no surprise that many young people were emigrating illegally, and often under dangerous conditions; the students told me of one friend who drowned in the Aegean Sea and of another who lost both legs to frostbite crossing snow-covered mountains. But how terrifying the whole process must be for their parents, left behind with no news of their children for months. And how different these young Kurds' concerns were from those of many older Kurds. All it takes to forget is one generation.

THE WOULD-BE BICYCLE rider's worry about being thought "rude and crazy" echoed other sentiments I'd heard. Kurds of various ages and both s.e.xes had told me that they avoided drawing undue attention to themselves because others might make fun. It had something to do with sherim, which translates into "shame" but is more akin to stage fright, I learned months later. A group-created concept that children learn at an early age, sherim is a powerful form of social control that helps to hold the communal society intact. Sherim contrasted sharply with the image of the Kurds that I'd had for years-that of a courageous and rebellious people willing to risk all they had for freedom and independence. But, in fact, both sets of attributes applied, and now that I thought about it, there was really no reason why they should be mutually exclusive. Perhaps only in the Western mind are the words "rebel" and "loner" regarded as synonymous.

SHALAW ALI ASKARI was a tall, lithe man with a deep tan dressed in a cream-colored shal u shapik, black b.u.t.ton-down shirt, and dark c.u.mmerbund, no turban. His father, Ali Askari, had been among the first to restart the Kurdish revolution in 1976, postAlgiers Accord, and Shalaw himself was a member of the PUK high command, overseeing the peshmerga in the Suleimaniyah region. He was also one of the few Iraqi Kurds I met who did not favor a U.S. attack on Saddam. "I think the status quo is best for the Kurds," he said. "In this situation, we are getting stronger and Saddam is getting weaker, because of sanctions. But if Saddam goes, things might get worse. A weak Saddam is better than many other alternatives."

One morning Shalaw took me to a narrow valley beneath the grim, awe-some Pira Magrun mountain range, a wall of seemingly impenetrable rock, with many peaks leaning far in one direction as if being blown by a fierce wind. Here, his father and a group of peshmerga had lived in a large cave- Shalaw pointed it out-from which they conducted clandestine operations between 1976 and 1978, when they and eight hundred other men headed north to the Turkish border to pick up an arms delivery. Tensions between the KDP and PUK were then at a high, and the PUK leader Talabani gave Ali Askari written instructions to wipe out any KDP bases he encountered along the way. Askari apparently intended to ignore the order, as he had a working relationship with the KDP, but a copy of Talabani's instructions fell into KDP hands, and the PUK force was ambushed by seventy-five hundred KDP troops. After suffering heavy losses, Askari surrendered, to be shown no mercy. He and his commanders were summarily executed, on the order of Sami Abdul Rahman, who at the time of my visit was deputy prime minister of the KDP-controlled zone.

It is upon hundreds of such incidents, carried out with equal intensity by both sides, that the bitter animosity between the KDP and PUK is built. "You don't forget such things," Shalaw said wearily, as I studied the cave, wondering how I would react if my father were killed under similar circ.u.mstances. It is easy for outsiders to condemn the Kurds for their inter-tribal and political violence, but quite another to be a victim of that violence, and still another to rise above its murderous cycle.

Behind the valley in which Ali Askari had once lived, on the other side of the Pira Magrun range, spiraled the hauntingly beautiful Jafati Valley, an isolated hideaway of terraced fields and goat paths winding around jade slopes, villages nestled in the ravines below. With mountains protecting it on all sides, the Jafati Valley had served as a natural fortress for the PUK in the 1980s, and so had suffered the first major Anfal attack, waged between February 23 and March 19, 1988. The PUK region suffered seven of the eight major Anfal attacks; it bordered Iran, and its peshmerga had been preeminent in aiding the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War.

Shalaw's family had deep roots in the Jafati Valley region, and, from Pira Magrun, we traveled on to the village of Shadala, where his ancestor, Shaikh Abdul Kerim, had founded the Haqqa religion around 1930. A small splinter sect of the Naqshbandi order, now all but died out, the Haqqa had attempted to create a semi-utopian community based on social equality, communal ownership, and greater freedom for women, some of whom became religious leaders. "But the Haqqa do not believe in free s.e.xual relations, as some of our enemies have claimed," Shalaw's cousin, Abdul Kerim Hadji, informed me soon after we arrived at the sect's humble headquarters.

A sect of the poor and oppressed, the religious movement had grown rapidly, spreading to about three hundred villages in just a few years. Anyone could join, including the wealthy, and several powerful aghas had done so, but only after burning their fine clothes and "putting ropes around their necks and running like donkeys" to prove their new humility, Abdul Kerim said.

The Haqqa's growing power, nonconformity, and refusal to pay taxes led the British to arrest Shaikh Abdul Kerim and imprison him in Kirkuk in 1934. In response, thousands of Haqqa believers put on burlap sacks, emblematic of their vow of poverty, took up walking sticks, and marched on the city, forcing his release. "It was like Gandhi," Abdul Hadji said. "Our demonstration was completely peaceful, but we frightened the British and they let the Shaikh go."

If only such an approach could work today, I thought, while also remembering the quasi-utopian community reputedly established by Shaikh Ahmad of Barzan and the once-widespread popularity of the non-worldly Naqshbandi and Qadiri Sufi orders. Was there something in the Kurds' character that had attracted them to such idealism, or had they turned to it more as a means of escape from a difficult world?

SHALAW AND I traveled on to Goktapa, largely built by his grandfather, an influential man with four wives. Perched on a high bluff, the village boasted a splendid setting overlooking the cobalt blue Lesser Zab River, hills neatly terraced with orchards, and a valley patchworked with light and dark fields. But to one side of Goktapa stood the empty ruins of Shalaw's grandfather's former mansion, while to the other rose a steep hill topped by a ma.s.s grave and a white sculpture of screaming human and animal forms ent.i.tled Shouting.

Saddam's attack on Goktapa had come at about five-thirty P.M. on May 3, 1988, during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. The women were outside baking bread for the evening's meal, the children playing in the river, and the men, socializing or working in the orchards. Four or five planes appeared, but the villagers paid little attention-the region was always being bombed. The first plane dropped pieces of paper, to see which way the wind was blowing. Then the bombs fell, softer than usual and releasing a strange odor of garlic and apples-the smell of chemicals. One bomb fell in the river, instantly killing all the fish for miles upstream and down, and others. .h.i.t the orchards and fields. The panicking villagers fled in all directions, some collapsing as they ran, others expiring days later, and the rest were herded off into camps and prisons. About 150 people died in the attack, including forty-nine of Shalaw's cousins.

ONE EVENING, I MET with Safwat Rashid Sidqi, a lawyer affiliated with the Kurdish Human Rights Organization. Founded by a group of Kurdish intellectuals in 1991, the organization was almost unique in Kurdistan; it was independent of all political parties, with what little funding it had provided by its members. The group's aim was to monitor human rights abuses committed against Kurdistan by its surrounding states, and to look into abuses within Kurdistan itself, first by contacting the accused party, in the hopes of redress, and then, if that was not successful, through legal investigation.

In a dark, upstairs office, Safwat filled me in on the human rights record of the semiautonomous state. On the positive side, the 1992 elections had for the most part been democratic and fair, and since then, both the KDP and PUK had succeeded in establishing police and court systems that worked relatively well. His organization had unrestricted access to officials, and a moderately good relationship with both Barzani and Talabani, who sometimes responded to their concerns, sometimes not.

During the internal war, from 1994 to 1997, both parties had committed every atrocity in the human rights book-"killing POWs, confiscating property, firing each other's employees, even mutilation, you name it," Safwat said. "The only thing we didn't hear a single incident of was rape." However, over the last five years, with the growing peace between the parties, the situation had much improved.

Nonetheless, both the KDP and PUK were still missing peshmerga from the internal fighting, who were perhaps being held secretly as POWs. Under Iraqi law, the governments could legally arrest suspected spies through a "special investigation judge," and hold them in isolated prisons. Each party also had its own internal intelligence apparatus and talked more about human rights abuses than they took action against them.

In addition, tribal law still reigned in the more remote villages, with even murders often settled within the tribes. "The parties encourage this," Safwat said. "They each have Social Bureaus that try to solve things outside the courts. . . . Why? Because it allows them to gain strength with the tribal leaders and be in control."

Safwat's words reminded me of Agha, Shaikh and State by Martin van Bruinessen, a cla.s.sic work in Kurdish studies, based largely on fieldwork conducted in the 1970s. One of van Bruinessen's central arguments was that the Kurdish tribe was sustained by the state, with the state aiding and using the power of the aghas to control huge segments of Kurdish society. The Ottomans and Saddam Hussein had been experts in this arena, and now it appeared that the PUK and KDP were following suit.

Safwat went no further in discussing human rights abuses, but one week later, I met with other professionals who expressed a more negative outlook. Speaking off the record, out of fear of repercussions-"rightly or wrongly," they said-the professionals described a land in which "whoever is not with the party [the KDP or PUK], is against it." Employees who protested party decisions too strongly were fired; nonparty members had virtually no chance of reaching senior civil service positions or landing government business contracts, and even the United Nations consulted with the parties before hiring employees, they said. Great distrust between the KDP and PUK continued, the possibility of fresh violence between them was still very real, and neither party wanted to hold another election, as they were afraid of losing power. Underneath, too, both sides were opposed to independent human rights groups, and many Kurds thought twice before joining the Kurdistan Human Rights Organization. Concluded one of the professionals, "On the surface, we are free and democratic, but in the details, we are not."

Many of these inbred political problems could be solved if Kurdistan had a serious free press, I thought. But it did not. Although a free press was in principle encouraged by the semiautonomous state, all publications that existed were directly or indirectly supported or controlled by the parties; there were few sources of independent financing in Kurdistan.

Several Kurdish journalists told me that, over the last two years, they had been speaking out with increasing openness about various social problems, including the formerly taboo subject of honor killings. However, when it came to criticizing politicians or the parties, they still proceeded with caution. "There are some red lines that we cannot cross," said Asos Hardi, editor-in-chief of Hawlati, the region's most independent paper at the time of my visit. "Usually, we can find a way to talk about everything, but we don't do so directly," and the paper seldom named names.

Many Kurds I met, including some party officials, openly acknowledged the daunting power of the KDP and PUK-a good sign, I thought. Yet many also partially excused that power, saying that the vulnerable position of Kurdistan, coupled with its lack of a civil rights tradition, made the problem a th.o.r.n.y one to solve. The parties had to watch their backs at every minute, they said-threats from the Baath regime, the Islamists, and the surrounding states were constant and very real, and the parties could not afford to be infiltrated with spies or otherwise lose power or control. In addition, the Kurdish people themselves, so new to democracy, were still inept at using their new inst.i.tutions for the common good. Building a civil society took time.

The arguments made sense. Perhaps it was still too early to expect fullfledged human rights, watchdog organizations, and a free press to operate in Kurdistan. Abuses of power had ravaged the country for centuries; to end them was no simple matter. On the other hand, if a system of accountability was not established now, then when? "I think when Kurdistan and Iraq are free of Saddam Hussein, we will solve all these problems," said the Hawlati editor. I fervently hoped he was right. Against all odds, and to the Kurds' great credit, democracy had taken root in Kurdistan, but its shoots were still tender and green.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

Judgment Day AS IF THE CITY OF HALABJA HAD NOT SUFFERED ENOUGH in 1988, losing over five thousand souls in a single day of chemical bombing, it was now under threat of attack by an Islamist terror group, Ansar al-Islam, or Supporters of Islam. Thought to number about five hundred or six hundred, Ansar al-Islam had seized control of about a dozen villages in the valley between Halabja and Iran, and controlled the main highway east of the military road. Ansar al-Islam had killed at least forty-two PUK peshmerga in one incident the previous September, ma.s.sacring over half in cold blood after they'd surrendered, and attacked the PUK's Halabja headquarters several times that same fall. Ansar al-Islam was hostile to Westerners, and the PUK always provided foreign journalists visiting Halabja with a heavily armed escort, while most foreign aid workers had ceased to visit the city altogether, saying that the risk was not worth it.

Journeying with me to Halabja one early June day were the two American journalists I had traveled with to the Qara Dagh, Kevin McKiernan and Ginny Durrin. They were in Kurdistan to film a doc.u.mentary on weapons of ma.s.s destruction that Ginny was producing for Ted Turner Doc.u.mentaries. Kevin, who was working as her cameraman, was a journalist and doc.u.mentary filmmaker in his own right, best known for his award-winning film Good Kurds, Bad Kurds; he had been covering the Kurds since 1991. Accompanying us was our translator, Dildar Majeed Kittani, a strong, outspoken woman of about forty who had lived in the mountains with her peshmerga husband in the 1980s.

Ansar al-Islam was a young organization, formed only about eight months earlier, in September 2001, from several splinter groups that had previously broken away from the more moderate but still fundamentalist Islamic Movement in Kurdistan (IMK). Once the third-largest political party in Kurdistan,2 the IMK had received 5 percent of the vote in the 1992 parliamentary elections. After unsuccessfully contesting that vote, the party split off from the Kurdish regional government to operate largely independently in an area bordering Iran. Headquartered in Halabja, where it received strong support from Iran, the IMK had its own separate administrative and political infrastructure, and its own militia. For most of the period between 1992 and 2001, the IMK ran Halabja-enforcing the veil, building religious schools, banning cinema and music, and requiring mosque attendance, but not publicly endorsing terrorism or the harshest strictures of sharia. Then in late September 2001, the PUK stormed the city, forcing the clerics from power, and reinst.i.tuted secular control-much to the anger of the city's more radical Islamists.

Our escorts en route to Halabja The militant Ansar al-Islam was fiercely opposed to the IMK's more moderate approach and policy of cooperating with the secular PUK and KDP. The splinter group called for the strictest application of sharia, including the barring of women from education and employment, and for harshly punishing those who failed to comply. Among its members were Arabs and Kurds who had fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the early 2000s, fleeing to Kurdistan after the Taliban's defeat. The PUK accused the group of having links with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. Prior to the Iraq war of 2003, the United States contended that Ansar al-Islam was also the connecting link between the Baath regime and Al Qaeda, thus necessitating invasion. But this claim was never credibly proven, and the unsophisticated nature of the group's recovered doc.u.ments call the allegation into serious question. Ansar al-Islam was routed from Kurdistan, as least temporarily, during the Iraq war of 2003, when about two-thirds of its members were killed or captured and the rest escaped into the mountains.

At the time of our visit, however, the Islamist group was still a significant threat, and peshmerga-filled Jeeps, one with a mounted antiaircraft gun, protectively flanked our sedan at either end as we drove toward the city. Around us were low hills patched with blond fields, pink wildflowers, and flocks of sheep. All was silent, with the promise of a hot day on its way.

Descending the hills, we came to a bright blue river, where we climbed out to wait for a flatbed ferry, now on the other side. The river flowed south to the Darbandikhan Lake and Dam, a strategic point much fought over in recent years, as it provided Baghdad with most of its water supply. While we waited, I snapped photos of our peshmerga, all impeccably dressed in pressed camouflage uniforms, despite hours spent traveling in dusty open Jeeps. The men carried a large a.s.sortment of weapons, including Kalashnikovs, AK-47s, hand grenades, and a thirty-plus-year-old rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG-an antique anyplace else in the world. But in the hot morning sunlight, in a land of blond fields and plump sheep, none of the weapons seemed quite real.

The ferry came, and we crossed, to arrive a short time later at Halabja, its entrance marked with a statue of a p.r.o.ne man in traditional dress lying protectively over a small child. The figures were based on one of the most famous photographs of the March 1618, 1988, attacks, when Halabja was smothered with a concoction of mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and perhaps VX. The man's gesture had proved futile; both he and his grandson were already dead when photographed.

Downtown Halabja centered on a few commercial blocks. Men and a handful of women, their heads tightly covered, wandered from shop to shop, but the atmosphere felt guarded and subdued, as if everyone was waiting for disaster to strike again at any moment. A Land Cruiser packed with bearded men sailed by, making me wonder about the citizenry we were pa.s.sing. Although Halabja was now ruled by the PUK, it remained a conservative, religious city. If there were any Islamist spies among the ordinary believers-waiting, perhaps, for an unforgivable breach in Islamic law- they would be hard to pick out.

Outside the immediate downtown reigned a large new green-and-white mosque with a wide dome, followed by neglected street after neglected street, all flanked with blank walls, half-destroyed homes, and piles of rubble. Fourteen years after the bombings, much of the city still lay in ruins, due to a lack of funds and to inertia caused by depression and fear. Although the city had received some foreign aid in the early 1990s, that aid had ended abruptly in 1994 when the internal fighting began, with the IMK siding with the KDP. Then had come problems with Iran and the rise of the Islamists. One or two aid organizations had returned to Halabja in 1999, but their activities were limited.

I tried to imagine the city as it once had been. For Halabja, and the surrounding Shahrizur, one of the world's richest agricultural regions, had no ordinary history. Throughout the Shahrizur rose hundreds of unexcavated mounds, some dating back to the a.s.syrians, others to the Sa.s.sanian Persians, who developed trade in the area from the 200s until 637, when Islam arrived. The Arabs a.s.sociated the Shahrizur with Saul and David of the Bible, suggesting an early Jewish presence, while the Ahl-e Haqq-the "cult of the angels" faith-believe that the valley will be the site of the Last Judgment; "on the threshing floor of the Shahrazur, all the faithful will receive their due," say their holy scriptures.

In the 1700s, about fifty thousand Jaf, one of the largest, oldest, and most powerful of Kurdish tribes, moved into the Shahrizur from Persia. Known for their fierce independence, arrogance, and un-Kurdish-like ability to work together, the Jaf had had a violent falling out with their Ardalan rulers, who had slain their agha. The Suleimaniyah pasha offered the Jaf protection and the right to graze their animals in the region, while the Jaf chieftains took up residence in the area's villages and towns, including Halabja.

During much of the twentieth century, Halabja was a center of trade, learning, and enlightenment, home to many merchants, poets, scientists, and religious scholars, and a by-then thriving Jewish community. One elderly Halabja native I met remembered that in his boyhood, the city boasted near-weekly celebrations and festivals, large public gardens encircling the entire town, and many intellectual gatherings, during which the literate had read fat histories to the nonliterate on long winter evenings. Some of Kurdistan's most famous twentieth-century poets were from Halabja.

Much of the credit for Halabja's cultural flowering goes to Adela Khanoum, or Lady Adela. Born into the Ardalan dynasty, Adela Khanoum moved to Halabja around the turn of the twentieth century, after her marriage to Osman Pasha, a Jaf chieftain and the Ottoman-appointed governor of the Shahrizur. Halabja was then still a dusty, unsophisticated town, but the well-cultured, aristocratic Adela Khanoum set about re-creating the life she was accustomed to in Persia. She built two fine mansions, many woodsy Persian-style gardens, and a large bazaar of her own design, then invited old Persian friends to come for extended visits. Halabja's fame spread, attracting both merchants and learned Kurds to the growing town.

Adela Khanoum also built a new prison, inst.i.tuted a court of law over which she ruled, and, after her husband's death in 1909, governed the entire Shahrizur district, to reign until her own death in 1924. She hired the Englishman Ely Bannister Soane, traveling through the region disguised as a Persian, as a scribe for six months in 1909. Perhaps because of his influence, she sided with the British against the rebel Shaikh Mahmoud in 1919.

What exactly Soane was doing in the region disguised as a Persian is not known. He had worked for a British bank in Iran for some years, but then set out on his odd journey, described in his memoir, To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise. It is possible that his trip had some official purpose (the British did hire him six years later for his expertise in Kurdish affairs), but he had a deep love for the Middle East, living there most of his life and converting to Islam. I prefer to think that he undertook his trip purely out of curiosity and the desire to lose himself utterly and completely in another world. I also marvel at his linguistic skills, as almost everyone he met, including Adela Khanoum, took him to be what he claimed: a Persian from Shiraz.