A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 13

Soane described Adela Khanoum as being strong willed, urbane, and "of pure Kurdish origin," with a "narrow, oval face, rather large mouth, small black and shining eyes, [and] a narrow slightly aquiline hooked nose"-a description borne out by his photos of her. When the two of them first met, she was wearing a skullcap smothered with gold coins, gold wrist and ankle bracelets, seventeen rings, and a necklace of large pearls alternating with gold fishes. Soane admired her greatly, and she remains a legend in Kurdistan today.

The last of Adela Khanoum's mansions was destroyed in the 1988 attacks, and Halabja has no more public or Persian-styled gardens, or historic Jaf monuments. But miles away, beyond the southwestern edge of the Shahrizur, rises a grand castle built in the 1860s by the last paramount Jaf leader, Muhammad Pasha, father of Adela Khanoum's husband. Perched on a hill outside the town of Kalar, with sweeping views of the surrounding plains, the palace is one of the few remaining physical testaments to the once-widespread power of the Kurdish tribes.

KEVIN, GINNY, DILDAR, and I went to visit Aras Abid Akram, a tall and thin man in his early thirties, who was dressed entirely in black. Given to quick, jerky movements, Aras was a sort of celebrity in Halabja, as he had lost twenty-two family members, including ten siblings, in the chemical attacks. He had been interviewed over a thousand times, or so he said. None of the interviews had done much good, he shrugged, as the foreign journalists, human rights workers, and aid organizations had all come and gone, doing nothing to alleviate Halabja's suffering. In fact, it had gotten to the point where most people in the town didn't even want to speak to foreigners anymore.

We would be three more guilty parties, I thought, with a pang of helplessness.

Aras lived on a quiet street, in a solid old family home with thick walls, stone floors, and a small garden filled with flowering rosebushes and a huge satellite dish. In his living room hung photos of his handsome parents and a romanticized shot of his many brothers and sisters, the latter wearing long white dresses that seemed straight out of the 1920s. Another photo, also of Aras's family, showed about a dozen disheveled bodies strewn haphazardly down a dirt alley.

The morning of March 16, 1988, had begun calmly enough, Aras said, as his wife served tea. He had gone to a neighborhood hospital to help bury dead soldiers, victims of the Iran-Iraq War then raging around the city. But since the peshmerga had helped the Iranians enter Halabja the day before, he, like most residents, was expecting an Iraqi counterattack. At about ten A.M., he noticed two Iraqi planes circling overhead, and around noon, five more planes arrived, flying low and dropping small conventional bombs. One landed near the hospital, injuring Aras in the leg, and he limped out to take refuge in a neighbor's bas.e.m.e.nt, along with his mother, one sister, and others.

The bombing continued unabated for hours. Then, at about three P.M., a vaguely pleasant smell of garlic and apples drifted into the bas.e.m.e.nt, causing immediate panic, as many knew what it meant and rushed toward the door. Some were vomiting, some felt sharp pains in their eyes as they stepped outside to see animal and human bodies already slumped everywhere. White clouds of chemicals clung to the ground, and people streamed out of bas.e.m.e.nts. Because of his injured leg, Aras stayed behind, along with a few neighbors, one of whom gave him a wet turban to wrap around his face. He hugged his mother and sister tightly before they left, certain that he would not leave the bas.e.m.e.nt alive.

But hours pa.s.sed without further incident, and around eight P.M., Aras and a neighbor wrapped their turbans tightly around their mouths and stepped outside. The neighbor immediately went blind-temporary blindness being one of the effects of mustard gas. Stumbling in the dusk, they slowly made their way forward, tripping over bodies every few feet. Some alleys were so packed with bodies that they couldn't pa.s.s; they had to back up to try another way. They headed toward a village on the outskirts of the city, a trip that usually took fifteen minutes. On that night, it took five hours. Around them b.u.mped other blind people and disoriented animals. Finally, at about one A.M., they reached the village and rested for a few hours, desperately hungry and thirsty. At five A.M., the Iraqi planes returned, flying low and dropping more chemical bombs.

Later, Saddam Hussein would claim that it was the Iranians who had dropped the chemical bombs, a claim initially bolstered by U.S. intelligence reports, which accused both sides of using chemical weapons. But Iran's alleged involvement has never been substantiated, and the thousands of Halabja survivors-like Aras-speak only of seeing Iraqi warplanes overhead.

Hours later, Aras and fourteen other injured civilians were loaded into a car by peshmerga and Iranian soldiers and transported to Iran. He was taken to a hospital where he awoke to hear a baby crying. "That sound was like a shock to me," he said. "I thought, Where are my mother and father? Where are my sisters and brothers? I had to go back."

Leaving the hospital that same day, and back in Halabja the next, he found hundreds of bodies still lying in the street. His house-the same house we were in now-was completely empty, with plates and silverware laid out as if for a meal. A neighbor directed him to a nearby bas.e.m.e.nt. There Aras found his grandmother dead on the stairs, two other family members dead down below. He blacked out and, when he came to again, found himself back in Iran.

Aras couldn't go on. His wife, a large and pretty woman with a big maroon bow perched at the back of her head, had been watching him intently. How can they go through this over and over again, I wondered, as Aras abruptly asked, "Is that enough?" Without waiting for an answer, he left the room.

The silence left in his wake seemed unbearable. As during many interviews in Kurdistan, I didn't know where to put my eyes, or what to do with my limbs.

Later, I asked Aras why he kept submitting himself to the painful process of remembering. "People are scared here, I'm scared here," he said. "I'm wanted by the Iraqi government for talking so much. But I want the pain of Halabja to be heard around the world."

While Kevin and Ginny continued filming Aras and his wife, and our peshmerga picked roses from the garden, happily sticking the big pink puffs into their c.u.mmerbunds, I went out into the street and gazed up and down the dirt thoroughfare. The only signs of life were two bony cows ambling along and a few women gossiping in doorways, their covered heads bent closely together. Keeping a damper on things was the boxy, well-guarded headquarters of the IMK on the corner. Our translator Dildar had pointed it out upon our arrival, and implored us not to make too much noise or otherwise call attention to ourselves. Unhappy that so many foreigners were visiting Aras, the IMK could make trouble for him later.

Taking two peshmerga with me, I went to explore a nearby street that had been especially hard hit in the bombing attacks. Half-destroyed houses filled the otherwise empty blocks-great piles of rubble in which children were playing, amid possible lingering contamination. One of the buildings housed a semi-intact bas.e.m.e.nt, and as I peered down into the claustrophobic s.p.a.ce, filled with rubble and plastic bags blown in by the wind, I felt as if I would gag. It was easy enough to imagine suffocating inside the room now, let alone back then.

BEFORE AND AFTER meeting Aras, I talked to dozens of other Halabja survivors and read a sheaf of autobiographical stories compiled by a doctor some years before. Their accounts of the attacks differed in small ways regarding the timing and sequencing of events, but all described the strange smells, the difficult breathing, the vomiting, the panic, the squealing animals, the ma.s.s exodus, and the countless, countless bodies. One woman spoke of hearing no noise at all when she emerged from her shelter. Another spoke of seeing her entire family blown to bits en route to Iran. A third described seeing dozens of screaming people trapped in a bas.e.m.e.nt, their faces pressed hard against the windows, afraid to come out. "It was like judgment day in the Quran," she said. And many told of losing their sight for three or four weeks, or more, and of losing loved ones to the noxious fumes. "I saw people lying on the ground, fluttering their legs and hands and dying," wrote one man. "And I saw people laughing hysterically," the effect of the nerve gas.

TO LEARN MORE about the long-term effects of the chemical bombings, I visited Dr. Fouad Baban, a pulmonary and cardiac specialist, and one of Kurdistan's best-known doctors. A reserved and thoughtful man of about sixty, Dr. Baban was the Kurdish coordinator of the Halabja Post-Graduate Medical Inst.i.tute (HMI), which was founded in 1999 by a coalition of Kurdish doctors, Dr. Christine Gosden of the University of Liverpool, and the Washington Kurdish Inst.i.tute, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. With initial funds provided by the U.S. State Department, U.K. Department for International Development, and other sources, the inst.i.tute was working to doc.u.ment cases and treat patients affected by the chemical bombs dropped not only on Halabja-by far the most devastated site- but also on about 280 smaller targets in Iraqi Kurdistan. For the Kurdish doctors, such a liaison prior to the Iraq war of 2003 had taken much courage, as they were involved in a project whose findings could be used against Saddam Hussein in a war-crimes tribunal, and his agents could be anywhere.

Welcoming me into his Suleimaniyah home, Dr. Baban spread out a raft of papers on a coffee table, the results of a one-year study, undertaken with funding from the HMI. Traveling by car, bicycle, mule, and foot, about twenty doctors and paramedics had fanned out over the Kurdish countryside, to survey two thousand households. And in those areas where chemical bombing had occurred, the medical team found increased incidents of: (1) eye disorders such as blindness, conjunctivitis, and continuous watering of the eye; (2) skin damage such as constant irritation and patches of deeper or lighter pigmentation; (3) respiratory disorders, including asthma, shortness of breath, and chronic lung fibrosis; (4) gastrointestinal disorders; (5) heart attacks and strokes; (6) neuromuscular disorders; and (7) cancers, including skin, colon, and stomach cancers, and leukemia and lymphoma. In addition, the medical team found increased rates of congenital abnormalities in children born to parents who had been exposed to the chemicals, and increased rates of infertility, sterility, and miscarriages.

"So from this last evidence, it seems that chemical weapons affect DNA, carrying over into the next generation," Dr. Baban said. "These disorders have led to a distortion of the structure of our entire population. Men are divorcing their wives because they can't give birth. The number of our young people is decreasing."

Nearly one-third of the deaths in Halabja were now caused by cancers and less than 10 percent by infectious diseases, figures more in line with industrialized nations than with a rural society, Dr. Baban said. Halabja had fourteen times the rate of miscarriage and five times the rate of colon cancer of Chemchemal, a comparable city nearby that had not been bombed by chemicals. Congenital abnormalities in Halabja were also four to five times greater than in the postatomic populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Dr. Baban estimated that about forty thousand adults and children in Iraqi Kurdistan were in need of prioritized health care due to exposure to chemical weapons and perhaps biological agents, which may also have been used in some attacks. However, little of that prioritized care was being delivered, largely because of the dual constraints of international and Iraqi economic sanctions. The United Nations did not allow Iraq to import advanced diagnostic equipment, as its parts could be used for more nefarious purposes, and Hussein effectively blocked many of the Kurds' medical supply requests, such as surgical gloves and cancer medicines.

"The U.N. is providing all communities with the same medicines, and making no extra provisions for areas with widespread diseases," Dr. Baban said. "It's very disappointing."

Dr. Baban was also disappointed that the Kurdish doctors' study had thus far failed to be published in final form or given the sort of worldwide attention that he felt it warranted. He'd sent the completed research to Dr. Gosman at the University of Liverpool in early 2000, but she was having trouble getting it published, for reasons that were unclear. Perhaps it wasn't rigorous enough? I wondered.

Yet even if that were the case, why weren't more studies being conducted? The paltry amount of international attention being paid to the effects of Iraq's chemical attacks was appalling. After the Halabja bombing, thousands of victims had received immediate treatment in Iran, a nation seldom given credit in the West for that humanitarian aid, self-interested though it undoubtedly was. The Iranians ferried the Iraqi victims across the border, gave them atropine injections to counter the effects of nerve gas, and cared for the sickest in hospitals. But upon returning to Iraq, most of the chemical victims received no advanced health care at all. Until the Halabja Medical Inst.i.tute began its study, no large international research or aid organization had collected data on the bombings' effects or tried to address the medical needs of its survivors. Fourteen years after the fact, the West had finally conceded that the attacks had indeed taken place, but few soil or water samples had ever been taken, and no investigations conducted to determine exactly which weapons had been used or whether harmful agents still lingered in the environment. If for no other reason, such research should be conducted for the world's self-interest, to gain knowledge in the event of possible future chemical attacks.

LEAVING ARAS ABID AKRAM and his wife, Kevin, Ginny, Dildar, and I traveled on to the Halabja Hospital, where we met Dr. Adil Karem Fatah. A naturally elegant man with a gentle if nervous manner, long tanned face, and prematurely graying hair, Dr. Adil had been helping to publicize the city's high incidence of disease since 1996. His efforts had carried a stiff personal price-because of his frequent contacts with foreigners, extremists were accusing him of spying for the United States and threatening his life. Shortly after I left Iraq, the threats got so bad that Dr. Adil fled to Syria to seek asylum, not returning until after the war.

Dr. Adil took us on a tour of the hospital. Built by a Swedish aid organization in 1999, it was simple but multistoried and very clean, painted in greens and whites with shiny floors. It was also surprisingly empty. I had steeled myself for the visit, expecting to see dozens of heartbreaking cases, but for the most part, the victims of the chemical attacks weren't there. They had chronic illnesses that were best treated on an out-patient basis, Dr. Adil explained, reminding me that we were visiting fourteen years after the fact-a detail that I sometimes forgot, as Halabja's suffering still felt so palpable.

We did see one man with painful patches of an angry red skin disease and a young child with a severe cleft palate, who probably wouldn't live out the month. And outside the hospital, we met an older child with a cleft palate who had already had seven operations and still needed two more. His young mother, whose first child had died of the same malformation, hugged her son close as she spoke of neighbors who had advised her not to bother trying to save her child, as he would never make it, they said.

While Kevin and Ginny filmed the patients, Dr. Adil took me to see a different kind of Anfal victim-a young woman whose chest and arms were covered with third-degree burns. She'd tried to commit suicide by setting herself on fire.

"She's luckier than many because she didn't burn her face," Dr. Adil said as he gave her an injection to ease her pain. "But there will be many complications. She will have a hard life-with internal problems, with social ones. Her family might abandon her. Her skin will contract. We have very few plastic surgeons here."

In the last six or seven years, suicide through burning had become alarmingly widespread in Iraqi Kurdistan, he went on. One study, conducted by the Women's Information and Cultural Center in Suleimaniyah, estimated that between 1991 and 2000, about fourteen hundred women had tried to burn themselves to death. The victims were usually young village women suffering from depression, perhaps over forced marriages, cruel husbands, or desperate economic situations-in other words, from traditional tribal customs, coupled with the general breakdown of Kurdish society post-Anfal. And treating burn patients, a long and costly process anywhere, was especially difficult in Iraq. Dressings, ointments, and the mesh necessary for skin grafts weren't readily available, and hospital salaries were too low to retain the dedicated staff needed to care for the victims.

Will it never end? I thought dejectedly. Here it was, fourteen years after the Anfal, and yet the campaign of death was still continuing.

ON A HILL just above Halabja sloped the city cemetery, offering magnificent views of the surrounding plains, valleys, and mountains. Straddling the Iran-Iraq border to the east rose the great wall of the Hawraman range, home to the Hawraman people, known for their distinctive dialect and handicrafts, whom I would visit in Iran.

Ansar al-Islam had seized two Iraqi Hawraman villages, Biyara and Tawela, to use as their headquarters, and desecrated the region's centuries-old Naqhsbandi Sufi tombs and shrines. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Biyara had served as an important religious center, attracting believers from all over the Islamic world. Then, as now, bearded men had congregated in this isolated, stunning land in the name of religion. But the first group had come for peace, the second, for war.

Many of the victims of the chemical attacks were buried in the cemetery, in ma.s.s graves amid thistles and wildflowers, with a never-completed commemorative arch falling apart in the background. One ma.s.s grave, created out of a napalm bomb crater, contained fourteen hundred bodies, and another, eight hundred, of which only two had been identified-Jalal Hussein and Bahar Hussein. Aras Abid Akram's family had its own ma.s.s grave as well, with twenty-two names neatly handwritten in white on black.

BY A LUCKY COINCIDENCE, I ran into British journalist Gwynne Roberts a few days later at the Palace Hotel. An award-winning doc.u.mentary filmmaker, Gwynne had been covering Kurdistan since 1974. In fact, it was his reporting on Halabja that had first brought Dr. Gosden to Kurdistan, which in turn led to the founding of the Halabja Medical Inst.i.tute. Gwynne had also secretly entered Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988, when it was still under Baathist rule, to collect soil samples, which had been a.n.a.lyzed by Porton Down, Britain's armed forces chemical weapons laboratory, to less than conclusive results. He had collected more soil and water samples from Halabja in 2000-a complex process necessitating the help of many others-but these had never been a.n.a.lyzed. To do so was wildly expensive, ranging in cost from $1,000 to $50,000 per sample, and only governments had equipment sensitive enough to measure small amounts of chemical weapons agents. Gwynne had approached the Swedes, the Dutch, the British, and the U.N. Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the Hague for help, but all had turned him down.

Why that was, he and I could only speculate. Did it have to do with the United Nation's refusal to release the names of companies that had supplied chemicals to Iraq-many during the Iran-Iraq War-on the grounds that this would end the cooperation they got from the companies in tracking down Saddam's weapons supplies? Was there perhaps intensive lobbying going on to prevent potential political embarra.s.sment?

By the time the Iraq war of 2003 began, the names of the chemical companies were no longer secret. In December 2002, Iraq delivered a twelve-thousand-page weapons declaration to the United Nation's Security Council that included the names of dozens of foreign companies that provided most of the chemicals and equipment for Iraq's chemical weapons program prior to the 1991 Gulf War. The United Nations insisted that it would not make the list public, but it was leaked to the press. On it were thirty-one foreign major suppliers, including fourteen from Germany, three each from the Netherlands and Switzerland, and two each from the France, Austria, and the United States (Alcolac International of Maryland and the Al Haddad trading company of Tennessee, both now defunct).

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Safe Havens KARIM AGHA, TRIBAL CHIEF, SAT AT ONE END OF HIS LONG summer guesthouse, surrounded by an oval of empty Louis XIVstyle chairs. A tall, thin, and slightly stooped man in his seventies, he was dressed in a dark gray shal u shapik and a black-and-white turban. Prominently hanging behind him was a glossy, poster-sized photograph of PUK president Jalal Talabani.

Jumping up as we arrived, Karim Agha greeted us warmly and escorted us to chairs beside his own. Servants glided in with tea in tulip-shaped gla.s.ses, followed by platters piled high with fruit. One of Karim Agha's sons hovered in the background, to ensure that all went smoothly. As is the custom in many powerful Kurdish families, he never sat down in his father's presence.

"Each tribe has its own way of life," Karim Agha said, settling in contentedly after the initial pleasantries were over. "Each tribe is like a family."

His tribe was the Hamawands, who until about 1925 were the most famous fighting tribe of southern Kurdistan, despite also being one of the smallest. Originally from Persia, they settled in the Suleimaniyah area in the early eighteenth century, where they supported the Babans against the Ottomans until the emirate ended in 1850, and then terrorized the entire region between Baghdad, Mosul, and Kermanshah, Iran.

E. B. Soane, the Englishman who traveled in disguise through Kurdistan in 1909, gives a vivid account of meeting the tribe: [F]rom every gully in the hill-sides hors.e.m.e.n came galloping down. Handsome men these Hamavands. As they rushed along, their silk head handkerchiefs of many colours streamed behind them; their long tunics, covering even their feet, rose and fell with the horses' action. The stirrups of many were inlaid with silver, contrasting with the scarlet upturned shoes. . . . As they approached near, each one ostentatiously opened the breech of his rifle and emptied it of cartridges, then slung it on his back, thereby announcing at once their friendly intentions.

Soane also writes of the Hamawands' alert dark eyes, directness, haughty pride, and "hostile manner that even among friends they cannot always control." All but the latter still applied to the Hamawands today as represented by Karim Agha.

"In 1847, the Ottoman Empire occupied our land, they controlled the whole area," Karim Agha began his history. "We were the only tribe that did not bow down to them-we fought them. But after losing many people, the Turks with the support of other tribes made a large attack against us and we fled to Iran. But still we considered this our land, and we came back in groups of fifteen on horseback to fight them. We disrupted many caravans, we inflicted heavy losses. Finally they sent delegates to make peace, and we came back. But then the fighting began again, and we went to Iran again. Four times we went to Iran and four times we came back.

"A representative of the Sultan came to negotiate. We sent two hundred hors.e.m.e.n to greet him, and after five days of entertaining them, he captured all two hundred. He said, 'All this year, you have broken negotiations, now we will break you.' The families of the two hundred hors.e.m.e.n surrendered-seven hundred people-and they sent some to Adana in Turkey and some to Libya in North Africa. Many became sick and died on the way. . . . The year was 1889.

"My father and his family were sent to Libya. They sent them there to become farmers. But they refused to become farmers. They said, 'We are going back to Kurdistan,' and they escaped from the desert to the mountains.

"The Arab tribes helped them get to Egypt and across the Suez Ca.n.a.l, through the Sinai Desert and Syria. They went mostly at night, by the stars, and fought many battles. It took them nine months, most going on foot. Women and children on foot walking through the desert-Rommel needed tanks and airplanes to make it through! And in 1896, after seven years in Libya, they came back to Kurdistan."

Doc.u.mented by historians, this astonishing story summed up the Kurds' doggedness. Nothing could keep them from the land they loved, which was so central to their ident.i.ty. As one well-educated Kurdish deputy minister said to me, "Whenever we Kurds leave our land, we are lost. Without it, the Kurds are nothing."

Coffee is served to Karim Agha Translating Karim Agha's story for me was Nizar Ghafur Agha Said, a disheveled-looking man in a rumpled brown suit. An old friend of Karim Agha, Nizar spoke good English, as he had lived in the United States for over twenty years. He was now in Kurdistan to test the waters for a possible move back. In the United States, Nizar was just one more struggling foreign-born businessman, but in Iraq, he was a member of a distinguished family, with many connections. His grandfather was Piramerd, a beloved Kurdish poet famed for his originality and long life, dying in 1950 at age eighty-seven. Piramerd had written a well-known poem about the Hamawands and their earlier marauding ways: "Terror of highwaymen, bribes to the escort, pilfering at night. . . ."

KARIM AGHA WAS not the first agha I had met. In the Dohuk governorate, my host Majed had introduced me to Muhammad Agha, chieftain of the Sharifani, a subtribe of the Kocher, and to two Yezidi aghas. The Sharifani agha, an educated man of about forty, wearing khak, a turban, and ultrashiny leather shoes, had hoped to study medicine, but was forced to become agha at age sixteen, because of his father's untimely death. His agha responsibilities were twofold, he said-working as the representative of his clan, and as an adviser to his people.

The two Yezidi aghas could not have been more different. Nejem Agha Qaidi, chieftain of Al-Qaidi, was an uneducated older man with a grizzled face, thick gla.s.ses, ratty red cardigan, and baggy pants. He seemed deeply depressed. His tribe had been forcibly moved out of their eight villages and into the small, poverty-ridden collective town of Sharia during the Anfal, losing not only their homes and farmlands, but also their holy shrine, which could not be rebuilt elsewhere, as it had to be erected over sacred graves.

In contrast, Shaikh Shamo, agha of a Haveri subtribe, was a buoyant, round-faced man who ran several successful businesses, including hotels and lotteries, and had two wives and many children. He reigned over the much larger collective town of Khanik, population about three thousand, and invited me to a sumptuous lunch, which we ate standing up, together with about a dozen other men, all of us crowded around a table groaning with heaping platters of food. Everyone except my translator and I wore a red-and-white turban and ate with his fingers.

In Diana, off the Hamilton Road, I met Delawar Muhammad Ali, the big and friendly agha of the Majel tribe, who hated to be addressed by his t.i.tle; he felt it distanced him from people. Uneducated but perceptive, Delawar struggled to understand the changing world around him. "In some ways, being an agha is easier for me than it was for my father because people have more money now," he said. "But in some ways, it is harder because there are many more people, more problems, and bigger problems. My father did not have an Anfal."

The agha was once the all-powerful Kurdish leader. Whether in charge of a small clan of a few hundred or a large tribe of many thousands, he made all major decisions for his group, while often extracting oppressive taxes. He usually had multiple wives and many children, and owned vast tracts of land and many thousands of animals. Sometimes the aghas' greed and cruelty created much deep resentment among their followers, but many aghas were greatly respected. Some were loved.

The authority of the agha in Iraq began to decline in the 1950s, due to the growing power of the central government, agrarian reform laws, and the mechanization of agriculture, which made the chieftains and their villagers less interdependent. Nonetheless, and despite what many people told me, the time of the agha, like the time of the tribe, was far from over in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though many aghas no longer had any real power, even the weakest among them still garnered much respect and brokered disputes, both between members and between members and the state. Some aghas also retained considerable wealth and sizable militias, meaning that they were heavily courted by the powers-that-be.

By far the most impressive agha I met in Iraq was Ako Abba Mamand Agha, chieftain of the Ako tribe, who lived in and around Raniya, a town surrounded by craggy peaks about an hour and a half north of Suleimaniyah. One of the most tribal regions left in Kurdistan, the Raniya area was also home to the Bilbas people, allies of the Ako. Next door lived the Pizhdar, a oncefierce but now much weakened tribe, who were the Akos' traditional enemy. The town of Raniya was also where the 1991 uprising began, on March 5, triggering a revolt that almost overnight swept throughout Kurdistan.

Ako Agha lived in a simple compound of new, low-slung buildings on the edge of Raniya. Dildar, the translator who had traveled with my companions and me to Halabja, first took me to meet him one night at about eleven P.M., after our drive up from Suleimaniyah, dinner, and a nap. I wondered about the wisdom of arriving at such a late hour, but Dildar, whose husband was from Raniya, a.s.sured me that she knew Ako Agha well and that it would be no problem. We arrived to find him sitting outdoors on a cement patio splashed with yellow light, surrounded by about twenty other men and teenage boys in baggy pants. A tall, charismatic, and powerfully built man in his mid-forties, with a thick black mustache and dark observant eyes, Ako Agha was himself dressed in a resplendent white shal u shapik and a black-and-white turban.

He did not smile when we were introduced. For a moment, I wondered if Dildar had misjudged things and he resented our intrusion: two women breaking into this comradely all-male gathering. I also doubted that he would say much of interest. Most aghas I met seemed guarded, perhaps unsure of their footing with a foreign woman. Ako Agha surprised me.

Two of the men vacated their seats, and Dildar and I sat beside our host. She and he caught up for a few moments, while I looked around, suddenly realizing that we had arrived in the middle of a traditional evening at a diwan, or guesthouse. I had been in many diwans-most recently with Karim Agha-but never at night.

The diwan was a quintessential element of traditional Kurdish life. At one time, every leading family had one, a special room or house to which male villagers went to socialize, do business, and consult their agha regarding social and legal matters. Women sometimes went to the diwan for advice during the day as well, but the guesthouse was a predominantly male preserve. Boys began attending the diwan in their early teens, and it was here that the traditional tribal ways were pa.s.sed from one generation to the next. All men were expected to attend the diwan every evening.

In earlier eras, many diwans also functioned as inns for travelers, and in return, the travelers provided the villagers with a much-hungered-for commodity-news of the outside world. The most famous of diwans were celebrated in Kurdish folksongs and folktales, while many wealthier aghas had their own residential minstrels. Wandering dervishes and dengbej, or traveling storytellers, stopped by from time to time as well.

Like most of the aghas I met, Ako Agha maintained a formal indoors diwan, furnished with spotless white armchairs and couches, in which he and his visitors usually convened. But during the summer, he moved his court outdoors, onto the patio, where fireflies danced arabesques over the lawn in front and black mountains hulked protectively behind.

"The Ako have lived in Raniya for more than nine hundred years," Ako Agha said, turning his attention to me. "Our territory stretches north into the Erbil governorate and east to Iran. We are a strong and powerful tribe, with many subtribes. . . ."

At this, he reeled off twenty-five names without hesitation and without repeating himself, and said that he, like all Ako aghas before him, was of the Bash-aghayi subtribe. His father had owned tens of thousands of acres of land preland reform, but Ako owned less than forty, and supported his family mostly through business contracts and trade.

"The Ako are famous for offering refuge," he went on. After the fall of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in 1946, some Iranian Kurds had escaped to Raniya, while both Mulla Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani had at times hidden in the inaccessible Ako mountains. In fact, during the "thick-headed" internal war, Ako Agha himself had tried to reconcile the two parties. At the height of the hostilities, he and Dildar's husband, who I now learned to my surprise was a Bilbas leader, made sure that "not one shot was fired in Raniya."

To offer refuge, especially to those fleeing the wrath of their own aghas, was an important role of many traditional tribal leaders. But the host agha's hospitality was not altogether altruistic. In return for providing the fleeing refugees with protection, land for a new home, and other necessities, he expected labor and loyalty.

A servant brought out large gla.s.ses of chilled du, the Middle Eastern drink made of yogurt, followed by trays heaped high with ripe apricots, watermelon, and small sweet cuc.u.mbers. Served with the cuc.u.mbers were plastic salt shakers, one neatly parceled out to every two people.

"Because I am agha," Ako Agha said as we munched on the fruit, watermelon pits flying around us, "I also help the poor and resolve many different kinds of conflicts." One constant source of trouble was the arena of love and marriage, of course-about which I would learn more the following day-and another concerned land disputes. "But the most difficult problem to resolve is murder," he said.

"How often does that happen?" I asked, startled that he had voluntarily brought up the subject.

Ako Agha shrugged. "Sometimes I resolve two or three killings a month, sometimes only one a year. The people come to me, and I try to reconcile their two families, with offers of money, or land, or women. I try to find a link between them, so that they will settle and no more blood will flow."

"So you don't go to the police or courts?" I asked He laughed. "No. We love our government, but we don't want to tire them out."

Many aghas preferred to settle killings intertribally, and the process did make some sense, the Kurdish Human Rights Organization notwithstanding. The legal system in Kurdistan was still slow, and many villagers, remembering the Baath regime, feared dealing with state authorities. The agha was the power that they knew, trusted, and obeyed.

The killings were often resolved with "blood money," usually ranging from 100,000 to 300,000 dinars (about $5,000 to $15,000), with accidental deaths costing less, and premeditated ones more. Promising an eligible daughter in marriage to a man in the victim's family was also a common solution, especially among the poor. And when no eligible daughter was available, a younger child was sometimes promised instead.

To be avoided at all costs was a "blood feud," which began between the two families when no peaceful solution could be found. Once a serious problem in the region, the blood feuds could last for generations. In earlier decades, it scarcely mattered whether the original murderer was killed or not, what mattered was that the collective honor of the group be restored by killing an enemy of at least a comparable social status. In the modern era, the prevalence of blood feuds has greatly diminished, but I did meet one man in Suleimaniyah who had fled his village because of a blood feud.

"To resolve a killing takes much time and patience," Ako Agha said. "One killing took me six years, another eight years. The killing that took eight years happened between two subtribes, and before it was finished, eight people were killed and five people injured."

THE NEXT MORNING, Dildar, Ako Agha, and I climbed into his shiny Land Cruiser for a tour of the Ako valley, a narrow opening between two mountain ranges. With us were two armed peshmerga, and Ako Agha brought along a video camera.

Quickly leaving Raniya behind, we headed west and then north along a flat dirt road, lined with pretty clay homes, neat stone walls, symmetrical piles of firewood, and gardens beaming with sunflowers. Many of the homes had electricity, harnessed from a river below, but nowhere in sight were the ugly electrical wires that blighted other parts of Kurdistan. The region had a settled and peaceful feel.

"Was the Ako valley attacked in the Anfal?" I asked Ako Agha, already all but knowing the answer.

"No, we were with the government at that time," he said, and my stomach sank a little. "But before that, we were in the mountains. I spent most of my first twenty-five years in the mountains. Our valley was bombed in the 1960s, because my father supported Barzani, and again in 1976, when they destroyed our family's house and the only Ako school."

The road stopped abruptly. The Ako valley had ended, while to either side extended two new valleys, one leading to Rowanduz, the other to Haj Omran. We climbed up a small hill to view the countryside.

"Why did you support the Baath regime?" I asked our host, summoning up my courage.

"We didn't really support them," Ako said. "We were really helping the peshmerga by letting them pa.s.s through our mountains. The Kurds needed a few tribes to be with the government in this way."

"So you were a kind of double agent?"

"Yes." Dildar answered the question herself, without translating. "And there were no hard feelings because of this. Everybody loves this man."

"During the Anfal, the Iraqis controlled all the area around our mountains," Ako Agha said. "But over eight hundred peshmerga were hiding in safety here. Some stayed in my house, and some I took in my car through enemy lines."

"And the Iraqi government didn't know?"

"Not for a long time. But on January 31, 1990, the Iraqis finally arrested me and thirty-three others. They'd heard some reports. They held me ten months and twenty days, and I was taken to the Revolutionary Court in Baghdad three times. Six among us were executed, twelve sentenced to life, and the rest freed."

On our way back to Raniya, I asked Ako Agha what he thought would be the future of the tribes and aghas in Iraqi Kurdistan.

"It will depend on the situation of the government," he said. "If there is conflict between the parties, the aghas will still have much power. During the internal fighting, the aghas grew stronger. But if the government is settled, the aghas will lose power, and then I think the power of the tribes will be finished in another fifteen, sixteen years."

"Would that be good or bad for you?" I wondered what it felt like to contemplate losing the powerful position that one's family has held for generations.

"I would prefer for the government to be settled," he said. "Because if the government is settled, then my life will be settled, too."

BACK AT AKO AGHA'S compound, we were met by two strutting male peac.o.c.ks, fanning their shimmery tails, and by the younger of our host's two wives, a tall and handsome woman of about thirty, who whisked Dildar and me behind the winter diwan to the women's quarters.

Like the rest of the compound, the women's quarters were spartan, composed of several large rooms furnished only with red carpets and thin green-and-gold cushions. In one corner stood a traditional Kurdish cradle, covered with a floral sheet, under which the youngest of Ako Agha's nine children slept. Built in a style that dates back to the thirteenth century, and still widely used in Kurdistan, the traditional cradle is made of wood, with rockers on the bottom and a handle for carrying spanning the top. The child is strapped in with cloth strips, with a urine pipe attached, so that the mother can go about her ch.o.r.es, but cannot flex its legs, which can lead to medical problems. Hip dislocation is common among young Kurdish children.

As Dildar and I took seats, a wizened but still beautiful woman with round dark eyes joined us. Dressed in black from head to toe, she looked to be over seventy years old, but her hair was still dark and shiny, thanks to dye and henna, and woven into five or six braids in back, with open tresses framing her face, as was the Bilbas custom. The tresses reminded me of the ones worn by the Barzani women I'd met earlier, and when I commented on this, the woman agreed, but said that the braids were exclusively Bilbas.

The woman was Maryam Swara Hammad Agha, Ako Agha's mother and a local legend. Although the lowly fifth and last wife of Ako's father, Ako Abbas Mamand Agha, whom she married when she was a teenager and he middle-aged, Maryam had garnered the utmost respect in his household, often serving in his place when he was away. "Abbas Agha loved her a lot, she could do what she wanted, and he never did anything without asking her first," Dildar told me.