A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 3

MY COMMUNICATION WITH Majed and his family improved considerably whenever their cousins Yousif and Fatma, visiting from San Diego, were in the house. An outgoing brother and sister in their thirties, Yousif and Fatma had left the Middle East for California in 1992. As the oldest of nine siblings, Yousif had immediately gone to work and was still the family's primary breadwinner, employed as a taxi driver. Fatma, five years younger, had completed two years of community college and worked as a clerk. Both were now American citizens.

Like Majed, Yousif had a dramatic story. His father, Sayyed Rashid, Majed's father's younger brother, had also been a peshmerga, as had their two other full uncles-one killed in battle-and various half uncles. What a family, I thought as I listened to the history, though neither Yousif nor Majed seemed to find it particularly unusual. How many other Kurdish families had sacrificed an entire generation to the national struggle?

Sayyed Rashid, too, had fought in the mountains for years but, in 1985, had been imprisoned. Yousif, then eighteen and knowing that he would be next, went underground, keeping on the move, staying only with families he could trust. One time, while he was still at home, soldiers knocked on the door, but his mother told them that he had just left, and they believed her. Another time, he was at an aunt's house when a friend called to say that the soldiers were on their way. Yousif started out the door and was only partway down the block when they appeared. But they didn't know what he looked like, and he pa.s.sed by unnoticed, eventually to escape to Iran. Then in 1988, his father was released, and the whole family fled to Turkey during the Anfal. For one year, Yousif had no idea whether they were dead or alive. Finally, he located them in a refugee camp, but he was arrested several times by the Turks before being allowed to join them. In 1992, after four years in the camp, the family was offered asylum in the United States.

Yousif and Fatma were now in Kurdistan for a two-month visit. I found it a little curious that they could afford to take off so much time from work, but I didn't give it too much thought until one afternoon while I was socializing with other women in the family room. Neighbors had stopped by for tea and sweets and, in the course of conversation, I was startled to hear Fatma say that she hated Connecticut, the state in which I'd grown up.

"Why?" I asked, surprised. Connecticut isn't the sort of place to which people usually have visceral reactions.

"My husband was killed there," she said. "We were married on February 7, and twenty days later, he was killed in Bridgeport. He just went into a store, and two kids asked him for money. He had sixty-four dollars, but it wasn't enough. They shot him in the back. So I don't like Connecticut. San Diego is my favorite city."

She spoke in the same matter-of-fact tone that Kurds everywhere use when talking about personal tragedy. The kind of tone that doesn't allow for prolonged grieving or sentimentality, the kind of tone that says we have to be practical, be strong, move on.

Only twenty days, I thought. That would be tragic enough for an American woman, but I imagined it to be worse for a Kurdish one, as Kurdish culture holds virginity in high esteem. And how unfair it seemed that Fatma had lost her husband to violence in the United States, the country to which she'd fled for refuge.

"I'm so sorry," I said.

Fatma sighed, and toyed with her hands.

"But maybe I will find a new husband here," she said, with a glancing sparkle to her eye that disappeared again so quickly that I wasn't completely sure I'd seen it.

But I had seen it! So Fatma was in Kurdistan to find a husband. And Yousif was undoubtedly along to act as her protector and approve any prospective groom.

Many Kurds living in the diaspora return to Kurdistan when it comes time for them to marry. Most are men, who have often left the country illegally, established themselves abroad economically, and obtained a green card or its equivalent. Their mothers then line up a few marriage prospects, the men come home to look them over, and, after extensive negotiations and wedding ceremonies, take their new brides home-or, occasionally, have them shipped, sight unseen. And more than a few Kurdish women are quite willing to go along with this arrangement, if only to escape the economic and physical insecurity of life in Kurdistan.

Besides, the process isn't as cold as it sounds. In the close-knit Kurdish communities, families have usually known one another for generations, and the bride and groom often know of each other, even if they haven't actually met. As elsewhere in the Middle East, marriage between first cousins is preferred, followed by marriage between second cousins.

Fatma's case was unusual because she was a woman and a widow, come back to find a husband. But as a U.S. citizen and an attractive thirty-year-old, she had much to offer. So much so, I now realized, that in her case widowhood wouldn't be the slightest issue.

So I wasn't surprised to come home one day to find the house in a tizzy. A young man had asked for Fatma's hand. He had seen her at a family gathering where, as usual, men and women had scarcely mingled. But he'd nonetheless found a moment to speak to her privately, to say that he liked her and wanted to pay a visit. Why? she'd asked-surely disingenuously. Because I want to marry you, he'd said.

And so began a series of visits between the two families. Like many other Muslims, the Kurds have an elaborate marriage negotiation process. The week after the woman agrees to marry the man, his family comes to formally ask for her hand. Next comes a legal visit, in which the families agree on the conditions of the marriage and the bride-price, which the groom's family pays to the bride, usually in the form of gold, money, or property. Theoretically, the bride-price is for the woman to use in case of divorce, but it doesn't always work that way, as sometimes the estranged husband keeps the bride-price for himself.

I met Fatma's groom-to-be, his mother, and several women relatives one day as they were leaving the house and I was coming in. The women were dressed traditionally, with head coverings, but the young man wore a neatly pressed b.u.t.ton-down shirt and pants. He was slim and pale, and seemed quiet and gentle.

After they had gone, Fatma grabbed my arm excitedly. "What do you think? He's nice, don't you think? He's a teacher in a college, and very intelligent." She blushed.

I agreed that he seemed nice, and asked how long it would be before they could marry.

"Oh, that will take a very long time," she said. "Maybe more than one year. We have much paperwork to do before he can come to the United States. We will have to meet often." She blushed again, more deeply. "That will be very embarra.s.sing for me-Kurdish women do not meet with their husbands before they marry. We are very shy."

IN THE AMADIYA district, not far from Dohuk, rot the stumps of three castles that once belonged to Saddam Hussein. A mountainous region of great beauty, Amadiya has been a resort destination ever since the 1930s, when King Faisal built a Mediterranean-style palace in the village of Sarsing, and hotels sprouted up nearby.

One day, Majed, the family, Yousif, Fatma, and I set out in three cars to picnic and tour the sites of Saddam's former castles. Though it was no longer Newroz, thousands of other families were out picnicking-barbecuing, playing badminton, exploring the mountains, and dancing in motley lines that ranged in length from three people to forty or fifty. The longer lines were often wedding parties, with bands. Watching the many revelers, it was hard to imagine that only eleven years before, such activity had been strictly forbidden.

As we drove, Yousif told me about the castles. Before building them, Saddam had evicted all the local inhabitants, he said. But since the Iraqi president still needed local labor, he brought in workers blindfolded so that they wouldn't learn the approaches or layouts. The roads outside the palaces were completely off-limits, and any unauthorized person who trespa.s.sed was shot.

"One of our uncles was a famous wall builder who was called in to work on one of Saddam's airports," Yousif said. "Saddam came to the airport one day and said, 'This section must be finished by tomorrow.' It was a huge section, and the workers couldn't finish it by themselves. So they called in my uncle and hundreds of others, and they worked all night. Even the security men helped. They knew that if the section wasn't finished, they would all be killed."

Like most other Kurds I met, Yousif talked about Saddam Hussein in an intimate manner, as if he were an evil uncle or other close relative. It was always "Saddam," not "Saddam Hussein," and it was always Saddam, not the Baath forces, who was personally responsible for each and every cruel act. With Saddam at a safe distance, the Kurds could also joke about him and, at times, speak of his grim exploits as if they were tales out of Ripley's "Believe It or Not." Many Kurds were fascinated with Saddam, as was I. It was as if we were looking into a dark mirror, at the underbellies of ourselves, of what we might be capable of in the wrong time or place.

Our cavalcade reached the site of the first former castle, near Enishky village, but there wasn't much to see. After the uprising, Kurds had destroyed the edifice, pulverizing some parts, carrying others away for reuse, to leave nothing but a high brick wall behind. The site was now used by the KDP militia.

More interesting was an airstrip nearby, on which stood about a dozen Turkish tanks, neatly aligned in a row, their gun barrels glistening from a recent rain.

"What are they doing here?" I asked, shocked at the sight, but Majed and Yousif shrugged away my question, preferring not to talk politics. I would learn the answer later.

We drove on, to the second and third castle sites, which neighbored each other-one easily accessible near Ashawa village, the other out of reach atop Gara Mountain, a craggy black peak still patchy with snow. A road connected the two, but it was impa.s.sable at this time of year. Saddam had usually arrived at Gara by helicopter.

The Ashawa castle was also destroyed, but it had been built beside a series of lovely, landscaped waterfalls, and these remained. To one side, the waterfalls were shallow and wide, engineered to fall over a stepped-down series of rosy marble blocks. To the other, they were wild and natural, plashing against black boulders fringed with moss. Bridges arched here and there, and a small pool collected near the top, where a small zoo had once stood.

Parking our cars, we walked down to the wild side of the falls, along with dozens of other visiting families. Near the bottom was a stone patio with an oven built into a blackened rock wall. This had once been one of Saddam's favorite spots, Yousif said-he'd liked to come here for dinner and sit by the falls while his servants cooked. I could easily imagine the scene and even feel Saddam's mustachioed ghost, hovering nearby as it tried to take a seat at its invisible table. But the ghost kept getting shoved aside by groups of laughing Kurds taking pictures of one another. There was no room for him here.

CHAPTER FOUR.

After al-Anfal AL-ANFAL REFERS TO THE BAATH REGIME'S FINAL, GENOCIDAL attack on the Kurds, begun on a large scale in February 1988.1 Blasphemously, and cynically, taken from the eighth sura, or chapter, of the Quran, "al-anfal" literally means "the spoils" of war. The sura tells the story of 319 newly converted Muslims who defeat three times their number in the A.D. 624 battle of Badr, and justifies the victors' pillage of the infidels' property.

During the Anfal campaign, about twelve hundred Kurdish villages were systematically destroyed by the Iraqi military through bombing and burning, ma.s.s evacuation, and execution. In the campaign's course, tens of thousands of Kurds-perhaps as many as one hundred eighty thousand- were murdered or disappeared. Ruined villages were bulldozed, wells capped with concrete, fields poisoned, and tens of thousands of civilians placed in refugee centers that were, in effect, concentration camps.

Though unique in its scope and aims, the Anfal was the culmination of decades of attacks against the Kurds by the Iraqi government. Many Iraqi Kurds have seen their villages destroyed numerous times; to rebuild one's house four or five times in a lifetime has been the norm, not the exception, in Kurdistan. From the British attacks in the 1920s to the Kurdish revolt of the early 1960s to the aftermath of the Algiers Accord, the Kurdish villagers have suffered the consequences of their leaders' actions. During the entire reign of the Baath Party, an estimated four thousand Kurdish villages were destroyed and perhaps three hundred thousand people perished.

However, the Anfal was an entirely different operation than the ones that had come before it, and one that went far beyond retaliations against a citizenry for supporting a war on the Iraqi government. According to a 1992 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report: "Anfal was a 'final solution,' implemented by the Iraqi government, the Baath party and the Iraqi army. It was intended to make the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan and their rural way of life disappear forever."

When the major operations of the Anfal began in February 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was running scared of the increasing collaboration between the Iraqi peshmerga and Iran. In the previous few months, Iranian troops had captured strategic sites along the Iran-Iraq border and penetrated deep into Iraqi Kurdistan. But instead of retaliating with focused a.s.saults against the Iranians and peshmerga, Hussein methodically began destroying Kurdistan. On February 23, he launched a colossal air and ground attack, using conventional and chemical weapons, against a peshmerga-held region to the east of Suleimaniyah. Seven other equally ma.s.sive Anfal operations followed, each targeting a different area. The Dohuk region, farthest from Iran, was the last to be attacked, in the eighth and final Anfal of August 25 to September 6, 1988.

Most of the Anfal operations proceeded in more or less the same manner. After gaining control of a region, the Iraqi forces executed the captured peshmerga, herded the civilians into forts, and bulldozed the emptied villages. Virtually all surviving men and teenage boys, along with women and children at some sites, were handcuffed, loaded into convoys of trucks, and driven hundreds of miles to the southern Iraqi desert. There, often at dusk, they were forced out, their handcuffs removed (to be used again), and ordered to stand on the brink of shallow ditches where they were shot and bulldozed into ma.s.s graves.

The remaining civilians-tens of thousands of women, children, and old men-were dumped out into "camps" without shelter, food, water, health care, or sanitation. Usually, the only structures were guard towers and security buildings. Many of the camps were located in the barren plains surrounding Erbil, and the refugees survived only through the generosity of the city's citizens, who organized an enormous relief effort, bringing food, water, blankets, and tents to the camps.

Although technically not part of the Anfal, which targeted rural communities and left most large cities intact, the best-known and single most horrific of the 1988 operations occurred at Halabja, a city of fifty thousand near the Iran border. On March 15, the peshmerga helped Iranian forces enter Halabja-against the wishes of many of its citizens. The next day, Baath forces attacked the city with napalm and chemical bombs. About five thousand people died instantly, perhaps another seven thousand died over the next three days, and many thousands of others fled over the mountains into Iran.

The mastermind behind the carnage was Saddam Hussein's cousin, Ali Ha.s.san al-Majid, nicknamed "Chemical Ali" by the Kurds-and captured about five months after the Iraq war of 2003. As the Baath Party Northern Bureau secretary-general, Chemical Ali had absolute powers over the region and the go-ahead to employ any means necessary to eradicate the "saboteurs." In one 1988 meeting regarding the Kurds, Chemical Ali boasted: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? f.u.c.k them! The international community, and those who listen to them!"

Indeed, the international community did not listen. It was not politically expedient to do so; the United States and much of the West supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War. Even sympathetic listeners took little action, dismissing the Kurdish claims as wildly exaggerated, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Only after the Gulf War, when the Kurds drew attention to their suffering through their uprising, and human rights organizations carefully doc.u.mented the rampant atrocities, did the Kurdish story begin to be heard.

In his destruction of about 4,000 out of a total 4,655 Kurdish villages, Saddam not only destroyed the Kurds' communities, but the very fabric of their society. The Kurds had lived in largely self-sufficient villages for centuries; theirs was traditionally a rural existence centered on agriculture, animal husbandry, and family. By eradicating the villages, the Baathists destroyed the Kurds' economic base and weakened their societal ties, casting them into a chaotic modern world where many have been forced to rely on foreign humanitarian aid. Independence has been replaced by dependence.

Although al-Anfal refers specifically to the 1988 campaign, many Kurds now use the word generically, to refer to any ma.s.sacre or large-scale attack. "To anfal" has also become a verb.

NIZARKEH IS AN ugly stone citadel on the outskirts of Dohuk. Though often referred to as a castle by Kurds speaking English, the word prison or fortress would be more appropriate. Like dozens of other buildings throughout northern Iraq, Nizarkeh was built by the Baath Party in the early 1980s to house the Iraqi army. But as the decade unfolded, the Baathists converted the buildings into refugee camps for displaced families.

During those years, Nizarkeh's perimeter was peppered with mines and patrolled by helicopters. Trespa.s.sers were shot on sight. And after the 1991 uprising, many Kurds were found still locked up in cells, their bodies emaciated, bruised, and broken. Some men had lost their minds; others couldn't remember their names. Women were discovered naked and covered with sores.

One cold rainy day in April, I accompany a delegation of five women from the KDP's Women's Union into Nizarkeh, now occupied by homeless families. Along with other women's groups throughout Kurdistan, the union is working to improve women's lives through literacy and education programs, legal counseling, social services, political lobbying, and small economic projects, such as sewing cooperatives.

We pa.s.s through Nizarkeh's towering entrance gate and into its vast courtyard, encircled by a two-story building ringed with doors. A rusting water tank and battered pickup trucks stand to one side. Cl.u.s.ters of men, their depression apparent even from afar, huddle together near the trucks. Women crouch on concrete walkways, washing clothes.

Our van parks, and we climb out. Picking our way over the mud, we pa.s.s through an open doorway and into a dark hall piled high with metal drums, cardboard boxes, and bulky plastic bags. To one side is a makeshift shower, built of tin oil containers hammered flat, and a bare-chested man getting a shave. Upon seeing us, he lets out an embarra.s.sed yelp and reaches for his shirt.

Down a shadowy circular hallway, our many footsteps echo. We enter a room-a former cell-where a woman named Bayan and two of her six children are waiting. Dressed in a green-print dishdasha and black head scarf, Bayan is in her thirties, with a drawn, careworn face.

The room is clean and well kept, with thin cushions lining three walls, and a refrigerator and cabinets lining a fourth. A television stands in one corner, near photos of family members and Mulla Mustafa.

We take seats on the floor as Bayan serves tea. Then she begins her story.

"My husband and I were married when we were in our teens," she says, "and twenty days after our wedding, he went to the mountains to become a peshmerga. Sometimes I didn't see him for two months, one time I didn't see him for two years. I raised my children by myself, but I didn't mind. People from villages are stronger than people from cities.

"One day in August 1988, the airplanes came to our village, and the next day, the soldiers also came. We ran away to the mountains and hid for fourteen days. But we became hungry, and so we surrendered. We were very frightened, we had no hope, we thought we would be executed.

"The soldiers took us to Beharkeh collective town near Erbil. It was hot, just like a desert, with no water. They gave us nothing. We only survived because the people from Erbil came secretly at night and helped us. Some of the guards also helped us. But we weren't allowed to leave Beharkeh unless we got permission-say, maybe if my son was sick-and then only for three hours a day. For two years, we lived just like prisoners.

"During the uprising, we went to Turkey, and when we came back, we had no place to live. Our village in the Sarsing area was destroyed. So we came here, the castle is free. There are about 140 families living here now. . . ."

A heavyset woman from the Women's Union leans forward. In her fifties and dressed in elegant black, with gold jewelry and a black head scarf striped with gold, she appears to have little in common with the residents of Nizarkeh. Appearances are deceiving; one person's story is everyone's story in Kurdistan.

"I am also from a village of Sarsing," she says, "and what happened to Bayan also happened to me. My husband was a peshmerga, and in 1985, I went to live with him and my three children in the mountains. There were many women living in the mountains, cooking and helping the peshmerga. But one day, the soldiers came and found us. They attacked us, and I still have two bullets in my leg from that time.

"After the attack, my children and I went back to our village. But then the chemical bombing came. I was pregnant, and when my child was born, he was not right in his head-he is fourteen now, but still like a two-year-old. On August 27, 1988, the airplanes began circling again, and we ran to the mountains. There was no place to hide. We thought we would be killed. The soldiers came and took us to Beharkeh at night and dumped us in the desert. When we woke up in the morning, we had nothing."

ZERKAH IS A reconstructed village typical of the many hundreds that dot the Kurdish countryside. Completely destroyed during the Anfal, it was rebuilt by the U.N. agency Habitat and the Kurdistan Reconstruction Organization (KRO). About 150 houses are neatly lined up along a few parallel streets. Painted bright white with blue trim, the houses seem doll-like, while the whole village feels a bit like a cruise ship washed up onto a foreign land.

Anfal widows Maryam (left) and friends Walking up a short walkway to one of the houses, our delegation is warmly received by Maryam, a small woman with a kind, round face made for smiling. Enveloped in a long black dress and head scarf, Maryam is about thirty-five and has five children. Beaming, she ushers us into her spic-and-span home, its main room furnished with carpets, cushions, a tall wall cabinet, and a large television. A born storyteller, Maryam serves tea and starts to talk, while two other women also enveloped in black slip in, to sit silently on either side of their friend like shrouded bookends, their expressions mirroring her expression, her sadness their own.

"It was winter when we left our house," Maryam says. "Saddam's forces had been marching in our area, and we knew something was about to happen. So we went to Gara Mountain, where we stayed for four months, living in caves. But in August the Anfal began, and we were captured.

"They took us to Aqra castle. We stayed there three days, and then they took us by truck to prison in Mosul. For sixteen days we had hardly any food. Some people fainted, some died. The guards came with music and said we had to dance for Saddam. But we were too weak because of hunger, and they beat us-children, women, men. They beat my husband very hard-I don't like to remember-and then one day they put us on buses again, men and women on different buses, and I never saw him again."

Tears roll down her cheeks, but she brushes them away impatiently and shrugs off the murmurs of sympathy around her.

"I memorized this history so it will never be forgotten," she says fiercely.

"They took us to a camp outside Erbil, and thirteen days later, they came and said, 'Oh, do you know what happened to your men? They have been killed, buried alive.' I had four children with me then, and I was pregnant with my last son. I named him 'Be Kas,' 'without anyone,' because I didn't have anyone then. I had already lost a daughter in earlier attacks.

"During the uprising, my children and I climbed the mountains to Iran. We walked on foot for eleven days. One man helped us for a few miles, but mostly we were alone with other women and children.

"After the uprising, we came back and lived in Nizarkeh castle for many years. The situation there was very bad, very dirty, and, in the beginning, there was blood everywhere. Two years ago, we came here. I am very thankful. We have two rooms, and a kitchen with a stove and refrigerator, and bathroom with a shower. I never had a bathroom before. I work a little in the fields, and I get a martyr's salary for my husband from the government. We get a food basket. We have peace. Our lives are very good."

IN THE AMADIYA district, about forty miles northeast of Dohuk, is the "village" of Gizeh. Before the Anfal, Gizeh stood on Gara Mountain, the towering black peak whose summit once held one of Saddam's castles. Security issues made Gizeh difficult to rebuild, however, and after the uprising, the villagers-almost all widows and children-were resettled on the outskirts of another mountain settlement, Kani, which is, technically speaking, their new address. Nonetheless, the villagers still call their new home "Gizeh." In Kurdistan, a village is as much a concept of community as it is a place.

From afar, Gizeh looks poorer than many villages, with huts built of clay and cement, and tall mounds of dark sticks-some animal huts, others, piles of firewood. But as our car turns off the main highway and enters the settlement, the place becomes cozy and welcoming in feel. Roosters and goats are strutting about, narrow paths are winding intimately between homes, and women are sitting on porches, gossiping. Fat clouds float like balloons through the air.

Parking the car, our driver wanders off for a smoke while my interpreter and I enter the house of the mukhtar, or village chief. On one wall hangs a mirror and several photos, including one of Mulla Mustafa. In a corner is a small, handmade cage holding a lovely gray kau, a plump bird of the partridge family. The Kurds keep kaus as pets, treasuring them for their melodious, full-throated song.

Smiling broadly at our request to speak alone with Anfal widows-a meeting only for women!-the mukhtar rounds up five women, all dressed entirely in black, and leaves the room. The widows sit down closely together. In the darkened room, in their dark clothes, their bright eyes flash like hot coals.

Pleasantries are exchanged, and I propose talking to the women one on one. They glance nervously at one another. They want to tell their story together.

Begi, Halimah, Fatma, Auminah, and Rakia all start talking at once. Teenage girls serve a simple lunch of flat bread, cheese, yogurt, and fresh honey still in its honeycomb.

"We were in our village when the airplanes came," the women say. "We ran away to the mountains. But the Iraqi army followed, surrounded, and captured us. They took our men away in closed trucks. We never saw them again.

"They separated the women into two groups, one to stay in Dohuk and one to go to Suleimaniyah, and then the soldiers said they would take away the girls. But we would die before we would let that happen. So we put a small child with each girl so it would seem as if she was married. . . .

"During the uprising, we climbed the mountains to Iran. We went all together, and when we came back, we settled here. We were just widows living alone at first, with no men, but then our children grew up and got married and now we have a village again.

"The organizations built our houses, and we took care of our children by ourselves. In the springtime, we went to the mountains to pick greens and sell them. We had no other work. But we helped one another. That is how we survive, by helping one another."

None of the women has remarried, and none wants to remarry. Their husbands might still be alive, they say. Then one of the women takes us to her home to show us a small shrine dedicated to her husband's safe return-one of hundreds of similar shrines all over Kurdistan. Candlelight flickers over a faded photograph of a man with a bushy, unkempt mustache. Tucked into the photo's corners are fresh wildflowers.

PEACE WINDS j.a.pAN (PWJ) is a small nongovernment relief organization that targets Kurdistan's most vulnerable groups, those whose needs are not being met by larger organizations. PWJ's core service is providing mobile medical care to isolated villages, usually on a two-week rotation basis. Except for one j.a.panese coordinator who shuttles between Dohuk and Suleimaniyah, all of the PWJ staff is Kurdish.

Heading one of Dohuk's mobile units is Dr. Saadi Namaste Bamerni, a compact man with alert black eyes and close-clipped dark hair. Compa.s.sionate and pa.s.sionate, he is deeply committed to Kurdistan and its people. Several of his siblings live in Europe, but he has never considered leaving. "To be in one's own country is best," he says.

One day, I accompany Dr. Saadi into the Kurdish countryside. With us are several medical a.s.sistants and a young man in a dark, well-fitting suit. He resembles an upwardly mobile businessman but is a bodyguard, armed with an American-made pistol, for which he carries a permit-the law in Kurdistan.

Our spanking-white Land Cruiser sails through the Doski subdistrict, past one reconstructed village after another, some pastel in color, others white with bold-colored roofs and accents. Drifting out of the radio is the voice of ivan Perwer, a Kurd from Turkey who is the most popular of all Kurdish singers. For years, his songs were banned in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey-which still bans all but his love songs-and one of his most famous songs is a haunting, unforgettable dirge about al-Anfal. "From the air comes the sound of planes, and everything is on fire, fog and dust. From the land comes the sound of crying children," Dr. Saadi translates.

We pa.s.s through Mangesh, an ancient Christian village and one of the two Doski villages-out of sixty-three-not destroyed by the Baathists. Mangesh, which means "touch" in Syriac, the language of the a.s.syrians, may be named after "Doubting Thomas." One of Jesus' twelve disciples, Thomas would not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead until he could touch Him for himself, and is said to have pa.s.sed through the area on his way to teaching the Gospel in India.

Beyond Mangesh, we turn off onto a dirt road that b.u.mps its way through wide valleys toward lemon-lime hills and a smoke blue mountain range. The landscape is devoid of people and villages, and the few trees in sight are all scrub oaks-small, black, and twisted. The Iraqi government destroyed most of Kurdistan's larger trees during the Anfal, as they once provided coverage for the peshmerga.

We arrive in Navashki, home to twenty-two families. Navashki was flattened in the Anfal, but the villagers rebuilt it themselves after the uprising, with materials provided by the KRO. To one side is a breeding pen of skinny black sticks, housing a half-dozen newborn lambs. To another are a neatly swept henhouse and traditional outdoor oven, where young women are baking nane tanik, a traditional flat bread. For each piece, they roll out a ball of dough into a circle large as a pizza, drape it over an iron mound, and place the mound on top of coals. They hand me one of the crisp breads, warm and delicious.

While Dr. Saadi treats his patients, a young man invites a PWJ a.s.sistant and me into his cozy home, complete with a television. Though too isolated to be on the country's electricity grid, the resourceful Navashki villagers combined their finances a few years before to purchase a small generator, which they turn on only at night.

"We are very happy to be back in our village," our host says as he pours out gla.s.ses of tea. "We lived in the city after the Anfal and never want to go back-life is ugly there. But I am worried about my children. There is only a primary school here, and I want them to study more. Maybe we will move to Dohuk in winter, so my children can go to school, and come back in spring to farm. It will be very expensive-we will have to rent a room. But I don't want my children to suffer, to have my kind of life. I want them to be part of the new Kurdistan."

BALAVA, GOHARZEH, AND BARCHI are three neighboring reconstructed villages near the city of Amadiya. Like all the forty-seven villages once surrounding Amadiya, they were destroyed in al-Anfal.

Balava-Goharzeh-Barchi is another regular stop for PWJ, and one that Dr. Saadi would prefer to make daily, rather than biweekly, as many of the villagers have serious medical problems. In 1988, the area was bombed with chemicals, and its citizens are still suffering the aftereffects. Dr. Saadi treats cases of heart disease, skin disease, thyroid toxikosis, and congenital malformations, mostly cleft palates, all unusual diseases in rural Kurdistan. He also encounters an abnormally high number of miscarriages.

We pull up in front of the Balava clinic, serving all three villages, where a long line of women are quietly waiting, their green-and-gold, red-and-gold, and blue-and-black dishdasha shimmering in the molten rays of the sun. Glued to many hips are small children. The PWJ team pulls a long wooden medicine box out of the van and hurries into the clinic, while the Balava mukhtar, Abdul Jelil Khalid Rashid, a trim, educated man in steel blue khak and turban, tells me his village's history.

"This is not the original site of Balava, the original site is on that hill." He points to a spot several miles away. "We moved here because after the Anfal and the chemical bombs, there was no life-no plants or animals-in the old village area.

"The first time our village was attacked was in 1975, after the Kurdish revolution collapsed. The Iraqi government forces surrounded the town, they shot and bombed, but we escaped and fled to Iran. We came back in 1981 and stayed until 1986. Then the government informed us we had to move to a collective town.

"The planes started flying over six times per day, each time two planes- Mirages, MiGs, helicopters. Then in 1988, ten planes came together, and we knew it was the last chance for us. At dawn, we moved the village to the mountains, and the TNT and chemical bombing began. People felt drowsiness, but only three died, I think because of good luck-the wind was blowing down from the mountains. But all the animals died, and the village was destroyed.

"After the uprising, the KRO helped us rebuild. We have thirty-four houses now, and a water project. Our children go to the new school in Goharzeh, one-two kilometers away. It is a good school with many cla.s.srooms and a basketball court. But we don't have enough teachers, and it is hard for the children to walk there in the snow."

Nahman Selim Othman, the director of the school, arrives and elaborates on the area's history. A heavyset, balding man in a tan Western suit, he appears to be much older than his forty years.