A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 14

When Maryam and Abbas Agha fell in love, their tribes, though usually allies, were feuding. And her father, the Bilbas chieftain, had promised her to another. But Maryam refused to obey her father's wishes and after years of stubborn resistance and admiring Abbas Agha from afar, finally got her way in 1951, when they wed. "My husband was the most handsome and most powerful man I ever met," she told me, still much in love though Abbas Agha had pa.s.sed away decades earlier. "He was taller than Ako-over two meters-and had big and beautiful eyes. He couldn't read or write, but he was very wise."

One of Maryam's main duties as a wife had been caring for her husband's many guests. In those days, much more than now, throngs of people were always stopping by. One time, during the Barzani revolution, she fed nine hundred people on only a few hours' notice.

However, the most strenuous part of her job had been caring for the many couples who took refuge in the diwan. As her son Ako Agha had told me the night before, the guesthouse was not just a meeting place and inn, but also a hideaway for runaway lovers. Young men and women who had fallen in love against their family's wishes came to the diwan, where no one dared touch them, to live until their case was resolved. The couples stayed in the diwan for as long as it took to negotiate peace, sleeping strictly separately, of course, until they were married. Ako Agha himself had a perfect track record, never failing to reconcile the lovers' families.

So here is a much-needed safety valve, I thought as I heard of the custom-a way for at least some lucky lovers to escape the horror of honor killings.

"We have two couples staying here now," Maryam said. "One has been here for two years."

"Two years!" I said.

"Two years is nothing!" Maryam said. "Two couples is nothing! Sometimes, we had ten, twenty couples staying here. Some got married and still stayed here. Some were married when they came and had to wait to get a divorce and get married again. One stayed five years."

"Five years!" I said.

"Yes, it was like a free hotel," Maryam said, with a smirk. "And sometimes, those who came didn't listen, they didn't help, they didn't work. They just took advantage."

Shaking her head in exasperation, Maryam rose to say her midday prayers, while Dildar and I went out back to find the runaway couple who had been at the diwan for two years. The wife, Adiba, was too busy cooking to talk, but her husband, Khalid, agreed to take a stroll with us around the garden, now wilting in the noonday sun.

"We come from a village near Koya, many miles away," he said. "I first saw Adiba when I was seventeen and she was fifteen, and we loved each other right away and wanted to marry. I asked her family, but they refused, and so we ran away. We don't have any tribes or diwans in Koya, but we knew about Ako Agha and how he helps people, and so we came here."

As we were talking, I realized that Khalid had, in Kurdish terminology, "kidnapped" Adiba. Throughout my travels, many Kurds had mentioned the "kidnapping" of women to me, a phenomenon that seemed to happen quite often. Until now, I had never really understood what it meant, as further questioning usually revealed not a true kidnapping, but a kind of elopement in which a woman voluntarily leaves her home to follow a man.

Though not always. In the past especially, some women had been kidnapped against their will, sometimes by rival tribes. I would meet one such woman in Turkey. She had been abducted at age fourteen, while out in the fields, and had cried herself to sleep at night for years. But over time . . . She shrugged. She was middle-aged now, with a comfortable home and four children of her own.

"Adiba and I married last year, and have a son, but still we cannot go back," Khalid said. "Maybe in another one, two years . . . I talk to my family sometimes, but Adiba still has not talked to hers. They are still very angry, even though I paid them 50,000 dinars [about $2,500]."

How ridiculous of Adiba's parents, I thought. Khalid seemed like an honest, hardworking man who sincerely loved their daughter. And he had already paid them a significant amount of money. What more did they want?

BACK INSIDE THE women's quarters, Ako Agha, freshly returned from brokering a settlement over a traffic accident, and Hamid Kak Amin Bilbas, Dildar's husband, had arrived for lunch. A compact, gray-haired man of about fifty, dressed in baggy Kurdish trousers and a b.u.t.ton-down shirt, Hamid was a lawyer, a profession that ran in the family.

Hamid's stepfather and Dildar's father had gone to law school together, which was how Dildar and Hamid had met. Yet throughout their courtship, Hamid had never told her about his deep involvement with the PUK, and in 1986, she was astonished to find herself fleeing with him to the mountains to join the peshmerga. "I couldn't believe it!" she said, shaking her head and laughing.

"Dildar is a very brave woman," Hamid said. "During the chemical attacks, she was the only one who went out of the shelter to get wet blankets to cover our faces."

"I was always sticking my head out, trying to see what was going on," Dildar laughed, amazing but not surprising me.

As it turned out, Hamid and Dildar had survived not one, but two, chemical attacks. And twice, Dildar had been forced to travel through enemy territory almost completely on her own. One trip was due to a medical emergency that necessitated treatment in Baghdad. The other was the death of her father in Dohuk. For four days, she traveled by mule and foot from Suleimaniyah to Raniya, where, with the help of Ako Agha, she slipped secretly through enemy lines and over mountains to her father's home. On her way back, she collapsed in Ako Agha's diwan for a week or two, numb with grief and exhaustion.

"I told you I knew Ako Agha well," Dildar said as the two of them exchanged glances, and I wondered about all the other possible personal interconnections swirling around me in Kurdistan.

A servant came in to spread out a plastic tablecloth on the floor for lunch. The conversation turned to Hamid and the Bilbas. A confederation of six tribes that straddled the Iraq-Iran border, the Bilbas were at least as numerous as the Ako.

But the Bilbas no longer had a paramount powerful agha. Maryam's father had been the last.

"We went the other way, the educated way, and left the tribal behind," Hamid said in pa.s.sable English, thanks to several years spent in London. "My stepfather started this when he graduated in law from the University of Baghdad in 1948. Now we still have some small aghas, to help with small problems, but for killings and other big problems, we go to the courts. We believe in the justice of the courts."

I looked from Hamid to Ako Agha and back again. Both were about the same age and of high standing within their respective tribal groups. But one had stuck to the traditional ways, and the other had been modernized through education. Ako Agha was by far the more romantic character, but Hamid personified the inevitable way of the future. Earlier, Ako Agha had told me that he was planning to send his children to college. He was, in effect, the end of the traditional Ako agha line. I was witnessing the twilight of an era.

THE DIWAN WAS not the only safe haven in Kurdistan. Women fleeing from abuse and the wrath of their families had another as yet limited but growing option: women's shelters, which I at first simplistically viewed as a new and enlightened idea coming from the West. Only gradually did it dawn on me that the shelters had in fact arisen to fill the gap left by the shrinking number of diwans. The shelters were not so much an improvement on traditional Kurdish society as they were a replacement for a once-integral component of that society, now disappearing due largely to exposure to the West.

At the time of my visit, there were only two official public shelters, both in Suleimaniyah. Plans were in the works to open others in Dohuk and Erbil. Some organizations, including the women's branch of the Iraqi Workers' Communist Party, also took in women in need on a more informal basis.

The more easily accessible of the two official shelters was the Nowah Center, located in a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. A well-kept place enclosed by a high wall, it could accommodate a total of about twenty women. To the right of the entrance was an education and handicrafts area where the women took literacy and other cla.s.ses, and in back was a communal kitchen.

The center's director, Bayan Mamoud, an energetic woman with sparkling eyes and l.u.s.trous black hair, told me that the shelter had been founded in 1999 by seven women's organizations. Most of its funding came from a German nongovernmental agency, and the shelter also received a small stipend from the PUK. The average shelter stay was three months, and rooms were usually half to fully occupied. Most of the clients heard about the center through outreach programs in their villages, on television, or on radio.

When a client arrived at the shelter, the staff quickly contacted her family. If her family were unaware of her whereabouts for any significant length of time, and especially overnight, her life would be placed in danger. Women whose lives were in danger did not stay at the Nowah Center, but were sent to a safe house run by PUK's Women's Union.

Bayan and her all-woman staff, which included lawyers, social workers, and her sister, next met with the woman's family, sometimes in the shelter, but more usually traveling to her village. "The process is very difficult," Bayan said. "In the beginning, the families do not hear us and are very angry. And sometimes we must meet with an agha or shaikh, and we are very afraid. We have difficulties with our car-it is very old-and in winter, the day is short. We sit with the agha or shaikh and many men, just two ladies-I often go alone with my sister-and we don't feel safe until we are back in Suleimaniyah. We don't bring the police, because if we did, the family would become even angrier."

I felt astonished at the women's courage: two young, unmarried, and well-educated outsiders meeting with large groups of angry and probably uneducated men.

"Often we must go back to a village many times, sometimes it takes ten visits," Bayan said. "But usually, we are successful. The families calm down, we find a solution, and they sign a contract, which we can use later in court if anything happens. We always follow up on the women after they leave here."

Most women came to the shelter because of marital problems, often due to arranged marriages, the taking of second wives, or the common Kurdish practice of jin ba jin, or "woman for woman." Prevalent among poor Kurds, the practice involves two families exchanging women as brides in a reciprocal marriage arrangement-usually, two daughters exchanged to marry two sons. In this way, the onerous bride-price, traditionally paid by the groom's family to the bride's, is avoided, and a double wedding can also be arranged. When no eligible daughter is available, a family might pledge a niece, cousin, or much younger child instead, to be wed upon reaching p.u.b.erty. And, in a potentially heart-wrenching twist-luckily dying out-if one couple divorces, the second is expected to follow suit.

Bayan introduced me to some of the women at the shelter. Two were in their forties, but everyone else was disconcertingly young-most well under twenty. All were villagers, a fact that even I, after nearly three months in Kurdistan, could tell at a glance. The young women had a simple, direct, and capable way about them that spoke of hours spent toiling in the kitchen and fields, along with an air of puzzled watchfulness, as if working hard every moment to understand the urban world around them, so different from what they were accustomed to.

One of the girls, wearing an orange-and-white dress with a blue-and-white scarf and a fake diamond ring, told me that she was in the shelter because of jin ba jin. She didn't know exactly how old she was, but guessed fourteen or fifteen, she said as she nibbled on her fingernails, chipped with a deep red polish. She hadn't wanted to marry her husband, and when he took her home, he and his family "did nothing for me-no gold, no home, no furniture," she said, reminding me of how young she was. Instead they all lived together in a crowded house, and when she complained, her husband beat her and shouted, "Go to your own home if you don't like it here."

So she went back home, where her uncle and grandfather beat her even harder, saying, "If you were a good woman, why did they send you back? We don't want you here." Her uncle locked her in a closet, to drag her out later and beat her again. Three months pregnant, she lost her baby, and, after hearing an announcement on the radio, ran away to the shelter. Now she didn't know what to do. She didn't want to return to her husband or her father's home. But she had no other options.

I traveled on to the safe house, the Aram Center. Also founded in 1999, the Aram Center had admitted sixty-seven cases in the last three years, all but three of which had been resolved. However, life at the shelter, whose location was kept strictly confidential, was very difficult; most of the women and their children didn't dare go out on the streets.

One of the unresolved cases involved a rape victim. In her early twenties, she wore denim leggings, plastic sandals, and a black T-shirt printed with a rose and a letter written in English that read: "Darling . . . When are you coming back to me? I'm waiting." She couldn't stop crying as she told me her story.

Her brothers had been in prison when she was raped, but as soon as they came out, they began threatening her with talk about her "betrayal," she said. They found the man who a.s.saulted her and forced them to marry, but still, it was a bad situation, and she was afraid she might be killed. Then her brothers did kill her father-in-law. She was pregnant by that time, but she managed to keep it hidden until she gave birth, when a kind judge helped her and her baby escape to the shelter. Now, her family said they wanted her home, but she didn't trust them, and she couldn't see any future for herself or her son, age two. "We can't even go outside. How will he go to school?" she sobbed.

Another unresolved case involved a woman in her late twenties, dressed in a polka-dot blouse and black pants. She and her husband had married against her parents' wishes, running away to Dohuk to wed, and then to Iran, where they lived for ten years. Money was exchanged between their families, and, a.s.suming they were safe, they returned to their village. But ten days later, someone entered their house at night and shot them in their sleep. Her husband was killed, her son shot in the legs, and she was shot in the back, legs, and hands.

I listened in horror to the gut-wrenching stories. I'd been hearing occasional similar tales all over the country, but some had seemed like hearsay and others had just been statistics. It felt completely different to be hearing the painful details from the victims themselves. How could a part of Kurdish society, no matter how small, not only condone this kind of behavior, but glorify it under the name of "honor"?

One easy but highly unsatisfactory answer is that a cruel and seamy underside exists in cultures everywhere, differing in its particulars, but seemingly an inevitable part of human existence.

The number of honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan is believed to have been holding steady or on the decline prior to the uprising. It spiked dramatically in the early to mid 1990s, and is believed to be on the decline again. Experts blame the spike on a variety of factors, including economic and social dislocation, the rivalry between the two parties, the Kurdish government's near-complete failure to address women's issues up until recently, the rise of Islamists, and the influence of the violent Baath regime. High unemployment rates, not enough schools, collective towns in which people are crowded together with nothing to do but gossip, and the mores of a deeply entrenched patriarchal order struggling to regain control over a chaotic new world undoubtedly contributed to the rise as well.

Activists estimate that since 1991, some four thousand women were victims of honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan-a number that is impossible to verify, and one that may be grossly inaccurate, as some honor killings are disguised as accidents on the one hand, and different types of murders have been pa.s.sed off as honor killings on the other, in the hopes of lighter sentencing. Whatever the numbers, most Kurds agree that the practice started increasing dramatically immediately after the establishment of the semiautonomous zone, when the political parties apparently killed women suspected of fraternizing with the Baathists and Arabs who'd previously worked in the region.

Only in 2001 did the PUK and in 2002 the KDP seriously address the issue of honor killings by finally repealing the Iraqi laws that allowed for the killings under mitigated circ.u.mstances and that sentenced its perpetrators to no more than three years in prison. By the time the Iraq war of 2003 began, honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan were finally being treated like all other murders, putting the enclave in a far more humanist position than the rest of Iraq, where the repressive laws still stood. Increasingly powerful Kurdish women's groups, publications, and conferences abroad had also been instrumental in drawing attention to the practice, and some believed that such vigilance had already paid off impressively. The Suleimaniyah's Independent Women's Center, for one, estimated that the number of honor killings in the region decreased to 47 in 2001 from 171 in 1991.

If I wanted a negative example of how trauma affects a society, I thought, remembering the questions I'd had before arriving in Iraq, I would be hard put to find anything more dramatic than the 1990s spike in such murders. Publicly, the Kurds had accomplished a superhuman amount in their decade of semi-independence, making it appear as if they had pa.s.sed through their recent horrific past more or less psychologically unscathed. But insidious disturbances were at work, created by wounds that will take many years, if not decades, to heal. For some at least, the Kurdistan "safe haven" had been safe in name only.

ONE MONTH AFTER I left Iraq, I was again vividly reminded of the precarious nature of life in the safe haven. Sitting snugly coc.o.o.ned in my New York apartment one morning, I received a call from Zerrin Ibrahim, whom I had met in Dohuk. A lively, intelligent, and outspoken woman in her thirties, Zerrin worked for the United Nations, helping Turkish refugees who had fled to Iraq.

Zerrin had terrifying news. She had been imprisoned by the Baathists while on a routine U.N. visit to Mosul and now, back in Dohuk, had good reason to believe that she was on Saddam's. .h.i.t list. The Iraqi regime had a history of s.a.d.i.s.tically murdering former prisoners after releasing them.

Zerrin was contacting me in the hopes that I could help influence the U.N. to transfer her to another post outside Iraq as quickly as possible. With thousands of miles between us, I felt both far removed from her sickening ordeal-how could it be real?-and fraught with helplessness. All I could think to do was make a few ineffectual phone calls. The situation was only resolved several weeks later when the Dohuk governor a.s.signed Zerrin full-time bodyguards, who remained with her until the end of the war.

Zerrin had given me garbled details of her imprisonment over the phone and later sent me a detailed written report. She had gone to Baathist-controlled Mosul on June 1, 2002, to renew her pa.s.sport, as did all U.N. local staff once a year. Parking outside the appropriate building, she proceeded to the second floor, where an officer said she needed to visit his boss's office regarding a few routine details. Two men would take her there.

Leaving the building, Zerrin felt a pistol in the small of her back. She was taken to the Mosul Intelligence Office. Three and a half hours later, a tall, bulky man with dark skin and an infected eye arrived. Accusing her of spying for the United States, Britain, Israel, and Turkey, he said that she had fifteen minutes in which to confess. If she cooperated, she could go back to Dohuk the next day. If she did not, she would be sent to Baghdad, where she would be executed. She asked what evidence they had against her, and he said that she was being uncooperative and would be sent to Baghdad.

Eight hours later, at 3 A.M., Zerrin heard a car arrive. Two men shoved her out of the detention room and into the car's backseat, covered with dried blood. They drove to a prison outside Baghdad, where she was forced into a cell on the building's fourth floor. Measuring about three by two yards, the room was painted dark red and was completely dark, except for a dim light above the door. Insects were everywhere.

A knock came, and a moment later-eyes blindfolded, wrists tied- Zerrin was taken to the first floor for her first interrogation of many. The guards never guided her on the way down and laughed whenever she fell.

Inside the interrogation office, six men waited. One accused Zerrin of being a spy for four enemy states, starting with Israel. His proof? Zerrin's department head, who worked in the Baghdad office, was a French Jew. Zerrin said that she had not known that he was Jewish and did not believe him to be a spy, but if they believed he was, they should be interrogating him, not her. The men slapped her so hard that her mouth filled with blood. Then, saying that that was enough for one day, they sent her back to her cell.

More interrogations followed, each targeting Zerrin's alleged connections to a different enemy country. Her contacts with an English aid worker and American researcher were brought up, as was her work with Turkish refugees. And whenever she did not provide the answers that her interrogators were looking for, they hit her.

Back in her cell, Zerrin was unable to eat. Her right side felt leaden, as if she'd had a stroke, and one horrific day was spent listening to the screams of another woman on her floor. The woman was in labor and kept crying out for a gla.s.s of water, but no one responded as she delivered her baby alone in her dark, dirty cell.

Finally one day, Zerrin was handed a letter calling for her execution and taken to a court within the prison. The "trial" lasted only fifteen minutes, during which time a judge read the accusations against her and said that she would be executed.

Two days later, Zerrin was told that she was being released. She fainted. Guards handed her back her clothes and drove her to the house of a Baghdad relative. One hour later, she left for Kurdistan. She arrived home at 7:30 P.M. on June 15, two weeks and a day after her arrest.

Just what had been the reason for Zerrin's arrest? Had the Baathists truly intended to execute her? Had they really believed her to be a spy? Or had her arrest been meant as a warning-both to her and to the United Nations?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Syrian Interlude ON MY WAY IN AND OUT OF IRAQI KURDISTAN, I TARRIED nearly two weeks in Syria, home to about 1.5 million Kurds, or 9 percent of Syria's total population of 17 million. After the heady freedom of Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria came as a shock. Gone was all celebration of things Kurdish. In its stead were the secrecy, uncertainty, and fear of a people living under a repressive, strong-armed regime.

For thirty years, between 1971 and 2000, Syria was ruled by President Hafez a.s.sad, a shrewd, authoritarian, and at times brutal Middle Eastern leader known for his Arab nationalism and opposition to Israel. a.s.sad allowed the Syrian people considerable cultural and religious freedoms- he himself was of the minority Alawite faith-but few political ones, and he was responsible for various human rights atrocities, most notoriously the 1982 ma.s.sacre at Hama, during which ten thousand to twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered. When a.s.sad died in 2000, many were hopeful that his successor, his soft-spoken son Bashar, would usher in a gentler, more open, and less corrupt era. Some improvements have occurred, but overall Syria has changed little since the elder a.s.sad's death.

In general, the Kurds of Syria have not suffered from persecution as extreme as that inflicted on the Kurds of Iraq, Turkey, or Iran, and Syria today is more tolerant of its Kurdish population than are Turkey and Iran. Nonetheless, Kurdish has never been recognized as an official language- though it is allowed on the streets-and Syrian Kurds cannot legally publish, study, teach, or write in Kurdish, or hold Kurdish concerts. Books published in Kurdish must be sold surrept.i.tiously, although their possession is allowed. Kurds suffer discrimination in the workplace, and while some Kurds have risen to high levels in government-including membership in parliament-their influence is limited. Kurdish political parties are technically speaking illegal, but some are informally recognized and allowed to operate in what is basically a one-party system run by the National Progressive Front (NPF), a body of allied parties dominated by Syria's Baath Party.

Worst of all, over two hundred thousand Syrian Kurds, or one-sixth of its Kurdish population, are denied full citizenship. The Syrian government claims that they are foreigners, or descendants of foreigners, who immigrated illegally into the country from Turkey starting in the 1920s. Never mind the fact that most of these "foreign" Kurds were born on Syrian soil and have no other nationality; they are denied such basic rights as the right to vote, run a business, work as a doctor or engineer, hold a position in the government, possess a pa.s.sport, be admitted into a public hospital, or register marriages. Furthermore, "illegal" Kurds cannot own real estate or an automobile without the help of an intermediary who is a full citizen. "Foreign" men are not allowed to marry women who are full citizens.

The Syrian Kurds live in three separate geographic pockets in northern Syria: the northeastern part of the Jazira, a fertile plain, where most of the "foreigners" live; the northwestern part of the Jazira; and the Kurd Dagh, the only mountainous Kurdish region in Syria. Many Kurds also live in Damascus, which has had a large Kurdish population since the Middle Ages. Many Damascus Kurds have long been a.s.similated into Arab culture. And with few mountains to offer them protection and a community that is dispersed geographically, Syrian Kurds have never waged the sort of full-scale war against their government that has at times torn apart Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.

WHEN I ARRIVED in Qamishli, the Syrian border town, on my way back from Iraq, my host family was waiting for me. We had spoken only briefly on the phone, and I had never met our mutual contact, but in true Kurdish fashion, the family showered me with gracious hospitality. They had turned their cheery children's room into my guestroom, prepared an elaborate welcoming meal for me, and arranged to take time off from work to provide tours of the area. Before I left them five days later, they would also insist on taking me out to dinner several times, buy me a half-dozen CDs and a ring to remember them by, purchase my plane ticket from Qamishli to Damascus, and give me money for the taxi ride between the Damascus airport and my hotel. No amount of protestation on my part would deflect them from these purposes.

The family lived in a modern apartment on a street that was part Kurdish, part Arab. Qamishli was largely developed after the discovery of oil in the Jazira in the mid-1900s, and was inhabited by a mix of Kurds, Arabs, Turks, a.s.syrians, Armenians, and Syrian Orthodox. Portraits of President a.s.sad, past and present, hung everywhere, sometimes four or five on one short block, along with dozens of statues of the father. The city had more than its share of slums and unpaved streets, but also housed luxury apartment buildings and upscale shops, including a United Colors of Benetton.

After lunch, my hosts took me on a drive due west of the city, through a land of wheat and barley fields and pastures teeming with sheep. At first, I took the many shepherds among them to be Arab, as all were dressed in long white jalabiyya, or caftans, and flowing head cloths. Then my hosts told me that, on the contrary, most were Kurdish. Kurdish dress is not allowed in Syria, they said, a statement that I later learned was not altogether correct. During periods of strong Arab nationalism, Kurdish men have been forbidden to wear traditional dress, but during periods of leniency, the male costume has been allowed and is still worn in the Kurd Dagh. Many Kurdish men also began switching voluntarily to Arab dress after World War I. Kurdish women have never been subject to any restrictions regarding dress.

My hosts were reluctant to let me talk to any of the people we pa.s.sed or, later, to most of their neighbors. It wouldn't be safe, they said. They also advised me not to take notes, and to destroy all my Syrian Kurdish-related papers before leaving the country, as I could be searched at the airport. When the family arranged for me to meet a Kurdish politician, the event had to be carefully ch.o.r.eographed so as to appear to be a purely social occasion.

We pa.s.sed by one village after another, all looking much alike: flat, poor nondescript places built of cement and clay brick, with drooping electricity lines. Yet my hosts could tell them apart. "Arab, Arab, Arab," they said as the apparently newer and better-laid-out villages flashed by.

We were now in the heart of al-Jazira, an Arab word meaning "the island," that refers to the northern part of the Mesopotamian plain between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. During Ottoman times, the Jazira-today divided between Syria and Turkey-was a giant grazing ground, used by Arab nomads pasturing their camels and sheep in summer, and by Kurdish seminomads herding their huge flocks down from the Anatolian highlands in winter. Uninhabited and remote from central government, the Jazira was notorious for its lawlessness, though relations between its Arab and Kurdish tribes were generally good. Then in the 1920s, an enormous influx of about twenty-five thousand Kurds and many tens of thousands of Armenians and other Christians escaping Turkish ma.s.sacres poured into the region.

From the beginning, tensions between the newly arrived populations and the older ones flared. At the same time, as the settlers began cultivating the land, it became apparent that the region was highly fertile and could become the breadbasket of the thennewly created state of Syria, carved out of the old Ottoman Empire along with Iraq and modern Turkey. By 1945, the Syrian government was starting to speak ominously of the "infiltration" of Kurds into the increasingly important region, and in the late 1950s, in the wake of growing Arab nationalism, the government began its first crackdown on the Kurds. Those caught with Kurdish music or publications, previously allowed, were arrested, as were over five thousand political "suspects," many accused of belonging to the illegal Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria. In 1962, the government conducted an unusual census that led to the stripping of some 120,000 Jazira Kurds, and their descendants, of their rights as Syrian citizens, proclaiming them illegal immigrants. Fears of Iraq's growing Kurdish nationalism and the discovery of oil in the Jazira undoubtedly had much to do with the government's actions.

The next year, an "Arabization" program similar to the one in Iraq was devised, with a Lieutenant Muhammad Talab Hilal drawing up a twelve-point plan. Among other things, Hilal proposed declaring all Kurdish land deeds null and void; denying Kurds education and employment; establishing a ten- to fifteen-kilometer-wide "Arab Cordon" along the Turkish border that would be completely devoid of all Kurds; replacing Kurdish religious leaders with Arab ones; and enticing more Arabs into the region with land and housing.

Due to the 1967 war with Israel, the "Arab Cordon" and other parts of Hilal's plan were never implemented. However, forty model Arab villages were built, about seven thousand Arab families imported into the region, some sixty thousand Jazira Kurds expelled or convinced to leave, and the remaining "non-Syrian" Kurds denied full citizenship. The hara.s.sment and arrest of the leaders of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria also continued. One politician I met told me that he had lived six years on the lam in the 1960s, staying in a different house every night.

In the early 1970s, the state's persecution of its Kurdish minority eased, and in 1976, President a.s.sad renounced the replacement of Kurds with Arabs in the Jazira. However, the denial of full citizenship continues to oppress more than two hundred thousand Kurds, while allowing the state to claim, on paper at least, that the Jazira is predominantly Arab. In addition, about seventy-five thousand of the two hundred thousand "non-Syrian" Kurds are descendants of "illegal" marriages between "foreign" fathers and Syrian mothers, meaning that they have no doc.u.mentation or rights whatsoever.

"The policy is tragic and absurd," my hosts said. "The children of the illegal marriages were born here, but can't even go to primary school."

My hosts and I had reached Amuda, one of the largest towns in the Jazira. In the 1930s, the mystery writer Agatha Christie and her husband, noted archaeologist Max Mallowan, lived in Amuda, while Mallowan conducted digs in the area. Like Iraq's Shahrizur, the Jazira is covered with dozens of tells, or artificial hills, some dating back to Roman and a.s.syrian times, and others to prehistoric man. Christie had a deep appreciation of Syria but little good to say about her temporary hometown. "Amuda is mainly an Armenian town and not, may it be said, at all an attractive one," she writes. "The flies there are out of all proportion, and the small boys have the worst manners yet seen, everyone seems bored and yet truculent."

We drove by Christie's old home-a clay brick house with odd, heavy b.u.t.tresses-a grim police station with indolent guards lolling around out front, and dozens more posters and statues of President a.s.sad the elder. Then we turned onto a quiet side street lined with high walls, to enter a compound bursting with yellow and orange marigolds, a stately home, protective cypress trees, and a flagstone patio on which several aristocratic-looking women and a man were socializing. Joining them, we partook of tea and sesame-flour cookies, cherries and apricots, Turkish coffee and candy, and gentle conversation and laughter. The scene felt genteel, sophisticated, Old World, and far removed from anything I'd experienced in Iraq, where everything had felt so new and raw. So this is what cultured Kurdistan feels like when it hasn't been bombed into oblivion time and time again, I thought.

THE NEXT DAY, my hosts and I again traveled along a road heading west through the Jazira. But this time, the Turkish border, dotted with guard towers and strafed with barbed wire and mines, was often less than one hundred yards away. We pa.s.sed through several villages that straddled the two countries, a wide military swatch in between. In the distance rose the mountains of Turkey, including Mardin, where some of my Iraqi Kurdish friends had lived in refugee camps. From the ca.s.sette deck came the voice of Zakaria, whose buoyant music I'd heard everywhere in the semiautonomous zone. I may have felt far from Iraq, but, in reality, we were only about forty miles away.

"Before the 1980s and the trouble with the PKK, the soldiers let the villagers go to the border and shout h.e.l.lo to their families at the end of Ramadan," my hosts said. "Sometimes they even let them shake hands and hug. But then the fighting started, and now if you get too close to the border, the Turkish soldiers will shoot you."

The PKK has as difficult a history in Syria as it has in Iraq. Shortly before the 1980 military coup in Turkey, PKK leader Abdullah calan and other party members fled to Syria where they were welcomed by a regime hostile to Turkey. President a.s.sad the elder offered the rebel group offices in various cities and a training ground in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon-help that was "crucial to the initial success of the PKK," writes historian David McDowall.

At first, the Syrian Kurds wholeheartedly embraced the PKK. Here at last was a radical organization fighting for an independent Kurdistan. Young Syrian Kurdish men and women joined the rebels by the thousands, to take up arms and head to Turkey. About seven thousand never returned.

Syrian Kurdish anger toward the PKK grew. Not only were loved ones disappearing, but the PKK was heavy-handedly soliciting funds and services from the Kurdish community. Furthermore, the PKK declared that Syria had no indigenous Kurds of its own, that all Syrian Kurds were in reality displaced Kurds from Turkey who wanted to move back north-a claim that the Syrian regime welcomed, as it was perfectly aligned with their own. But most Syrian Kurds had no desire to leave their homes.

Not until 1998, after eighteen years in Syria, were calan and the PKK suddenly forced out. Turkey had ama.s.sed a large force of troops on the border and was threatening to invade unless Syria expelled the PKK. Much weaker than Turkey militarily, Syria complied. calan left, initially to seek asylum in Russia. It was the first step in an exile that would eventually lead to his capture in Kenya and life imprisonment.

My hosts, who had lost a boy and a girl cousin to the PKK, expressed nothing but bitterness toward the guerrilla group. "The PKK killed people who criticized calan," they said. "Or they cut off noses and ears. And the police knew everything, but said and did nothing. They didn't care what happened to us."

Once again, it was all about politics and their ironic bedfellows, I thought. The Syrian government had supported the PKK while repressing their own Kurdish population in much the same way that the Turkish government had supported Iraqi Kurdistan while repressing their Kurdish population. And ordinary people, caught in the middle as usual, paid the price.

DUE WEST OF the Jazira and northwest of the historic city of Aleppo stretches the Kurd Dagh, the only mountainous Kurdish region in Syria. Dense with sleepy villages, rolling hills, olive and cypress trees, and terraced vineyards, the Kurd Dagh has been home to a relatively prosperous Kurdish community ever since Kurdish lords ruled over Arab va.s.sals here in the medieval era. Reminiscent of Greece and other picturesque parts of the Mediterranean, the Kurd Dagh is the sort of place that attracts tour buses with its idyllic vistas, inviting roadside restaurants, pristine lakes and dams, and historic sites.

The Kurd Dagh has not suffered from the kind of abuse that has plagued the Jazira. However, as I toured the picture-perfect hills with a Kurdish politician and his woman a.s.sociate-who preferred to remain nameless-I heard stories of Kurdish villages at times deliberately cut off from electricity and on-again, off-again road checks that necessitated the payment of bribes. Kurdish farmers were often denied the government subsidies that Arab farmers obtained easily, and Kurdish political meetings had to be held in secret, my companions said. As politicians, they also never knew when they might be arrested.

Their stories reminded me of Muhammad Hamo, a Syrian Kurd I'd met in Suleimaniyah. The former owner of a bookstore in Aleppo, Muhammad had been forced to flee to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2001, after the Syrian authorities had destroyed his shop and home library. Muhammad had been surrept.i.tiously selling Kurdish books in his store for years, with long stretches of time pa.s.sing during which he'd been allowed to operate in peace. But on three separate occasions prior to his final ouster, something had triggered the state's ill will and he'd been arrested. Once, he was locked in solitary confinement for six months simply for writing poems about freedom. "Before they locked me up," Muhammad said, "they asked me, 'Why do you write about freedom? You already have freedom.' "

Which was worse, I wondered as I remembered Muhammad's story and listened to my companions: constant predictable repression or periods of relative freedom abruptly interrupted by harsh crackdowns?

We spent the night in a small village, arriving at about eleven P.M. via a back road, after evading a Syrian police station in a nearby larger village. "We don't want anyone to know you are here," my guides explained as we slunk around the edge of the larger village, to fly through a moonlit landscape, fields on either side, no other signs of human life in sight. "They might make trouble for you and us, or throw you out." My guides had been making similar comments throughout the day. Each time they did, my heart started to thump and I had to resist the urge to slide down in the backseat.

The village was small, populated by no more than twenty families, some related to my guides. Driving into one of the compounds, we were warmly greeted by a bevy of older women, all dressed in colorful dishdasha. With no idea we were coming and despite the late hour, they did not seem at all surprised to see us and quickly began preparing a snack while we took seats on the carpeted floor.

"Our lives are good, we have no complaints," the women told me as they brought out dishes of yogurt, olives, various fresh cheeses, hummus, and baba ghanoush-the latter two dishes a Mediterranean influence, seldom served in Iraq. "Except the usual one. We work too hard! Our men do nothing but drink tea and talk!"

OVER THE CENTURIES, the fabled Syrian capital of Damascus, another of the world's oldest cities, has served as a place of exile for prominent Kurds. The last powerful Kurdish emir, Bedir Khan, whose family ruled the Botan emirate in what is now Cizre, Turkey, from the 1200s to the 1840s, lived out his last years here and is buried in the Kurdish Quarter, a web of steep streets etching the foothills of Mount Qasyun. The site of Kurdish troop cantonments during the Middle Ages, the Kurdish Quarter was also once home to Mawlana Khalid, the charismatic shaikh who almost single-handedly spread the Nasqhbandi Sufi faith in Kurdistan. Mawlana Khalid fled from Suleimaniyah to Damascus under mysterious circ.u.mstances in 1820 and is buried in a whitewashed tomb perched high above the city.

The best known of Damascus's former Kurdish residents, however, is Salah al-Din, better known in the West as Saladin. A preeminent hero of the Islamic world, Salah al-Din is most famous for having recaptured Jerusalem from Richard I-the "Lionheart of England"-in September 1187 after eighty-eight years of Christian rule. Generally regarded as a man of great integrity, intelligence, and chivalrous behavior in battle-in contrast to the barbarous Crusaders-Salah al-Din has almost as many Western as Eastern admirers. He has been lauded by writers ranging from Sir Walter Scott to Dante, who in Canto IV of the Inferno describes Salah al-Din as "sitting at a distance separately," in Limbo because although not Christian, he led a virtuous life.

Salah al-Din Ayyubi was born into a prominent Kurdish family in Tikrit in today's Iraq in 1138, but grew up mostly in Baalbek (Lebanon) and Damascus, as political circ.u.mstances forced his family into exile. At age fourteen, he joined his uncle in military service to Nur al-Din of the ruling Zangi dynasty, and so impressed the Syrian governor that he was appointed administrator of Damascus at age eighteen. In 1171, he became ruler of Egypt, and then succeeded in uniting the hitherto warring Muslim territories of Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and northern Mesopotamia. The founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, which governed Egypt and the Red Sea coast until 1250, Salah al-Din died of malaria in 1193, three months after signing a peace treaty with Richard the Lionhearted.