A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 4

"In the beginning of the Anfal, helicopters would come and circle the area in the night," he says. "No one could sleep, there was panic. And some nights, we could hear bombing nearby. Then the bombing started in our area, and we fled the village. The first sign that the bombs were chemical was a shortness of breath, and we smelled a bad odor we couldn't identify. We fled higher up the mountains with just our clothes, we were very afraid.

"After some time, we started toward Turkey. On the way, we spent one night in a valley, and that night, that valley was bombed, again we were very afraid.

"When we reached the border, the Turkish government refused to let us enter. But the Kurds of Turkey helped us, and we forced our way in. The soldiers put us in a refugee camp, but there weren't enough tents, and they treated us very bad, kicking us, accusing us of being terrorists. So after one-two months, we fled to Iran and stayed there four-five years. Iran wasn't good, but it wasn't bad. All the village went together, around a hundred families. After the uprising, about forty families came back, and more are still coming.

"When the Iraqi forces occupied this area, they shot people first, asked questions later. One of my relatives was shot coming home from his fields in the evening. This happened all the time. We didn't have any rights. We couldn't travel between villages easily-checkpoints were everywhere. They took our crops and our animals. That's why we became revolutionaries."

ONE WEEK LATER, Dr. Saadi and I rendezvous again, to travel to Koreme, a village in the Doski subdistrict that was destroyed during the Anfal through ma.s.sacre, deportation, and bulldozing. Human Rights Watch/Middle East conducted an early, in-depth case study of the Anfal here in 1992, which led to other studies elsewhere, and to the conclusion that the Anfal was a genocidal campaign. The HRW report initially brought some attention to Koreme, but now the small, reconstructed village feels isolated and forgotten, its moment in history pa.s.sed. Accessible only by a poor dirt road, impa.s.sable in bad weather, it has no electricity or running water.

Entering Koreme in the pouring rain, the skies cracking apart with thunder and lightning, Dr. Saadi and I head to the home of mukhtar Hadji Mustafa Othman. Despite the tumultuous weather, he comes out on the front porch to welcome us. Dressed in baggy pants and a turban, he is one of the only middle-aged men left in the village, as he was in jail when the ma.s.sacre occurred.

We enter a room furnished with thin carpets, a kerosene heater, and a picture of Mulla Mustafa. As we settle in, the front door begins creaking open and shut, open and shut. The room fills up with old men and young boys, all in traditional dress, and the men in red-and-white turbans, until it seems as if the whole village sans females is arriving. The old men's faces are tan, wrinkled, and worn, while the boys' cheeks shine pink with excitement-Koreme receives few visitors. One young boy pours out gla.s.ses of tea, another washes more gla.s.ses to accommodate the crowd, and the rest nudge one another and stare. Prayer beads go click, click, click.

"Since the Kurdish revolution began in 1961," the mukhtar says, "Koreme has been destroyed and rebuilt four times. The worst time was the Anfal on August 28, 1988.

"Before the Anfal started, the villagers knew something was going to happen. There were many soldiers in the area, and some of the villages nearby were being bombed. So on the morning of August 27, most of the Koreme families tried to flee to Turkey with their animals. But they couldn't get across. The Turkish soldiers closed the borders.

"The villagers started back to Koreme and reached the village early the next morning. It was surrounded by soldiers. The men and boys put their hands in the air, and everyone was arrested. The soldiers took the animals away, and divided the villagers into three groups-women and children, old men, and boys and men. The first two groups were taken to refugee camps. The third group was divided again, and thirty-three boys and men were taken to a field behind the village, where they were shot."

A few days later, I would speak to two of the survivors of the shooting, Qehar Khalil Muhammad and Abdul Kerim Naifha.s.sen, who would describe being lined up and marched single file out of the village. Once in the field, they were ordered to stop, turn around, and kneel shoulder to shoulder. The Iraqi soldiers fired three rounds; none of the victims were blindfolded.

"When we returned to our village in 1993, there was nothing," the mukhtar goes on. "Everything was destroyed-the soldiers even poured cement over our springs. First, we lived in tents, but then the KRO brought us materials, and we rebuilt our houses.

"Before the Anfal, Koreme had more than one hundred families, or seven hundred people. Our soil is good, and we had many orchards and animals. Now we have only twelve families, or seventy-five people. Not all those people were killed, some didn't want to come back."

The tea gla.s.ses empty, the mukhtar offers to show us the place where the ma.s.sacre occurred. Outside, we discover that the rain has stopped, dark clouds pulling back to reveal a glorious spring day. A half-dozen villagers accompany us as we traipse across a sloshy field to the edge of a gentle incline, now glistening with a velvety sheen. Quietly, the villagers point out the spots where the ma.s.sacred once knelt, where the soldiers once stood, and where the bodies were once buried, before being moved to a cemetery. Everything is now overgrown with new gra.s.s. Birds are swooping, and rainwater drops are twinkling. Nothing indicates that anything out of the ordinary ever happened here.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Disturbances IN THE CENTER OF DOWNTOWN DOHUK STOOD THE INSt.i.tUTE of Fine Arts. From the outside, it was a forbidding-looking place with a yawning entranceway manned by guards. Inside, the vestibule and corridors were damp and dark, but then the building opened up to reveal a lovely sun-dappled courtyard filled with flowering bushes, a vine-covered arbor, dozens of students, and music. Brightly colored murals-of a Studebaker, of fighters with flags-danced on the walls, and white sculptures stood here and there. Three young women in long tight skirts were playing the violin, their sheet music propped up on spindly stands. Two young men in leather jackets were looking cool. Through an open practice room, another young man was a.s.siduously practicing Bach, his notes floating up to cup the scene like a protective umbrella.

The artists Sirwan Shakir and Amin Yousif, and I were "taking a stroll." Both men taught at the inst.i.tute, and both spoke English. Amin, an intense, dark-haired man in his mid-twenties, was fluent. Sirwan, a kindly looking man with wavy hair just starting to gray, could make himself understood. Both men effusively welcomed me. You cannot understand Kurdistan without talking to its artists, they said.

Like the University of Dohuk, the Inst.i.tute of Fine Arts had been founded after the 1991 uprising, and charged no tuition, sc.r.a.ping by each month on a small stipend from the KDP government. The school offered cla.s.ses in music, the visual arts, and theater, with most of its curriculum focused on the Western artistic tradition. As we toured, we pa.s.sed a drawing cla.s.s sketching still lifes beneath reproductions of the old masters, and an orchestra cla.s.s rehearsing Beethoven. Among the musical instruments that the students studied or had studied were the violin, piano, accordion, flute, and cello, although the school did offer a few Eastern music cla.s.ses to juniors and seniors.

This lack of emphasis on Eastern music in general and Kurdish music in particular seemed to me a serious loss. The Kurds have an enormously rich musical tradition that differs from region to region. There are hundreds of Kurdish battle songs, love songs, children's songs, work songs, dance songs, wedding songs, religious songs, lullabies, and epics that tell heroic legends. Various instruments are used, including long-necked lutes (saz, tambur), short-necked lutes (aud), frame drums (daf ), cylindrical drums (dehol), goblet drums (dimbek), oboes (zirna, nerme ney, balaban), flutes (shimshal, shebbabe, dudik ), zithers (qanun), whistles (pik), and spike fiddles ( kemanche, richek).

Was the inst.i.tute's emphasis on Western art an attempt to validate its program to the outside world? Ironic, if so, as the world wasn't paying attention. Or did it have more to do with the Kurds' traditional att.i.tude toward musicians? For centuries, Kurds regarded musicians as chawash, or low cla.s.s, and in some regions, musicians were considered to be a separate, gypsylike caste who did not intermarry with others, despite often earning a decent living.

But with or without an Eastern music program, the mere existence of a fine arts inst.i.tute in war-torn Kurdistan seemed remarkable-a sign that people do, after all, need more than food and drink, shelter and work, and even freedom to survive.

As we were touring, many students came up to me, wanting to know who I was and what I thought of Kurdistan. Two especially curious young artists pulled me aside. Don't believe everything people tell you here, they said. It is not true that we are free. The KDP controls everything, and they say we should not protest against two subjects-society and government. As artists, we must protest, it is our job, but they say, You are Kurdish; it is your national duty to make art that says only good things about the Kurds.

This was my first concrete validation that all was not precisely as it seemed in Kurdistan. As in every society, darker currents flowed beneath the shining, little-engine-that-could surface. The enormous power of the two governing Kurdish parties had already been making me nervous, as had Dr. Shawkat's frequent phone calls, wanting to know where I was going, to whom I was talking. It is only for your own protection, you are free to do whatever you like, he always said. That was true, and I often operated without KDP-or, later, PUK-a.s.sistance, using taxicabs and independent translators. However, I was also growing slowly more aware of being loosely monitored, albeit in a friendly fashion. Dr. Shawkat, especially, seemed to regard my safety as his personal responsibility.

AS IT HAPPENED, the day of my visit to the inst.i.tute was also the day of the school's graduation play. Though I was not especially interested in attending, Amin and Sirwan talked me into it. I returned to the inst.i.tute that afternoon to find it mobbed with a well-dressed crowd of students, families, city officials, and a television crew. This student production was a major event, a place to see and be seen.

The small theater was crowded with fold-up chairs, the majority filled with men in dark suits. The far fewer women in attendance sat mostly in back. Four officious men reigned by the stage, kicking off the event with a moment of silence for the martyrs.

The play began. Called Body Language, and more a work of modern dance than a play, it starred three lithe young men in tight white bodysuits. Illuminated red fish and green mountains glowed on a backdrop, while music sounding suspiciously like Philip Gla.s.s drifted out. The young men stretched their limbs, from the fetal position into birth, war, suffering, death, and beyond. I could have been viewing a student dance performance in any cultural capital in the world. And in contrast to the Western music and painting cla.s.ses I'd visited that morning, the performance seemed authentic and organic, a true melding of Kurdish experience and a contemporary art form.

After the performance, Amin led me down the street to two nearby exhibition halls-the Martyr Salman Gallery, named after a slain student, and the Dohuk Gallery. The Salman was filled with allegorical paintings of the Anfal that made me cringe, but the Dohuk Gallery was more interesting, with the works of dozens of artists, ranging in style from realistic to abstract. Some were simplistic and amateurish, but others, like the dance performance, felt authentically modern Kurdish. Sirwan's abstract, romantic landscapes-dark, with splashes of light-were there, as was Amin's work.

But I had to specifically ask to see the latter, which Amin showed me only after we had toured the rest of the museum. Then, and with some reluctance, he led me to two small paintings on a side wall that I hadn't noticed before.

I looked at the two appealing small dark nudes, and was struggling to find something insightful to say, when I noticed Amin staring at me, anxious and more intense than ever. Quiet and solemn, with a dark shock of hair and deep eyes, throughout the day, he had often seemed lost in his own thoughts.

"It is dangerous, but I can defend myself," he said.

I stared, having no idea what he was talking about.

"I am willing to make the sacrifice, I have nothing to lose," he said.

It dawned on me. In this Muslim society, this conservative city, the depiction of the nude was unusual, bold, and shocking.

"People are talking, even at the inst.i.tute," Amin said. "They say I am a l.u.s.tful man. I once made a nude sculpture, and they made me cover it. But the body is art."

AMIN AND SIRWAN had invited me to lunch. Since they lived separately, I a.s.sumed that meant going to one of their homes or the other, but when I arrived at the inst.i.tute on the appointed day, I learned that the men had two lunches planned.

"First you will go to Sirwan's home, and then come to mine," Amin said.

"But you will eat so much at my house, you won't be able to eat at Amin's! My wife is an excellent cook," said Sirwan.

"What?" I said. "I can't eat two lunches."

"It's your own fault," Amin said. "Because you say you don't have enough time to come on different days."

It was true. I was making frequent day trips to villages outside Dohuk and, unsure of my schedule, was hesitant to make luncheon appointments. But my friends' double invitation, and their eagerness to host, saddened and embarra.s.sed me. To think that so little happened in Kurdistan-aside from war and death-that my arrival was a major event. I wished I'd tried harder to visit them on different days.

Sirwan lived on an unpaved road not far from the inst.i.tute. Beyond the house to one side was the White Mountain; beyond the house to another was one of Dohuk's newest housing developments. Built along hilly roads, it held huge marble homes, both mansions and caricatures of mansions. Not quite large enough to support their architectural elements, the strange edifices sported tall spindly columns framing normal-sized doors, gingerbread eaves, and turrets with too-tiny bay windows. The homes belonged to Dohuk's nouveau riche, who had made their money-how? Perhaps semi-legal trade?-such as the oil trade between Baath-controlled Iraq and Turkey, banned under international sanctions, but a major source of revenue for KDP Kurdistan. Or smuggling? No one could say, although everyone agreed that the homes belonged to families who'd had nothing before 1991.

Kurdistan, and especially Dohuk, also thronged with a surprisingly large number of expensive cars-BMWs and Mercedes, Land Cruisers and Jeep Cherokees. Most had arrived in the country only after 1997, when the oil-for-food agreement went into effect. Most were also refurbished seven- to ten-year-old models, purchased for $5,000 to $8,000. Still, to see so many expensive vehicles in a land of reconstructed villages, poverty, and much recent suffering was disconcerting, and it raised questions in my mind as to what exactly was happening behind closed doors.

The day of my luncheon visits was cold, wet, and miserable. I was shivering as we made our way through the muddy roads and fields surrounding Sirwan's home. Even after reaching our destination, it took me some time to feel at ease. Though s.p.a.cious, Sirwan's house felt cold and dispirited, filled with aging furniture and faded photographs of a more prosperous era. Some depicted Sirwan's uncle, who had served as a minister in the Iraqi government.

"My uncle was very famous. When he died in Switzerland, Barzani shipped his body home," said Sirwan.

I nodded, trying to be appreciative, while wondering at the way in which so many people I'd met attributed everything positive directly to Barzani-father or son-much as they attributed everything negative directly to Saddam. Do the Kurds see the world much more personally than we do in the West? And, if so, is this due to their tribal heritage, with its emphasis on the community and agha, or tribal chief? How much of the Kurds' constant praise of the Barzanis was heartfelt, and how much pro forma?

Sirwan's wife's cooking was indeed outstanding-the same biryani rice, tershick, and other dishes I'd eaten elsewhere, but cooked to perfection, with unusual spices. The television was blaring throughout much of the meal, but no one seemed to notice until I brought it up, then Sirwan obligingly switched the channel to one broadcasting romantic vistas dubbed with the music of Celine Dion.

Sirwan and his family had stayed put during the 1991 uprising, when much of Dohuk had fled to Turkey, he told me over tea. His father had had a stroke and couldn't be moved. They'd been frightened, of course, but the Dohuk citizens had done nothing to antagonize the Iraqis and so stayed safe. I would remember his words later, in Erbil and Suleimaniyah, where some complained about the conservative, placid nature of Dohuk, which had played a feeble role in the revolution, they said.

While Sirwan was talking, the front door handle moved with a jerk. I jumped. Rain was pouring around the house. We were isolated by water and mud. Who knew what could happen here? The handle jerked again, accompanied by a thump.

"What was that?" I squeaked, heart racing, imagining armed men outside.

But it was only the family cats, who had learned to jump up to the door latch when they wanted to come in. I laughed, embarra.s.sed. I don't know how to read this world yet, I thought.

But even many weeks later, near the end of my three months in Iraqi Kurdistan, I still didn't feel I had a true bead on the possible danger there. And neither, it seemed, did most of the populace. A few people chilled me with dire warnings, others seemed too cavalier, while most appeared to be as uncertain as I was about where things stood. Fear has little to do with reality, I learned in Kurdistan, largely because reality is so impossible to gauge.

How does prolonged fear affect the human psyche? I was in the country for only a short period, but the Kurds had lived with the suffocating weight of often indeterminate dangers their entire lives.

AMIN ARRIVED TO take me to my second lunch. The rain had let up somewhat, and we hurried to a ramshackle car parked about a hundred yards from Sirwan's house, where the road was still pa.s.sable. Inside, his father waited.

"B'kher-hati," he said with a chuckle as we climbed in. Shorter and rounder than his son, he was dressed in a red sweater vest, tweed jacket, and fedora, c.o.c.ked at a rakish angle. A former Communist who'd once been imprisoned for throwing a drink at Saddam's picture while drunk, he worked as a lawyer.

Driving down Dohuk's main street, we traveled into a part of town I hadn't seen before. Along the way, we pa.s.sed various short commercial districts devoted to one product-refrigerators, TVs, carpets, sinks, couches. The buildings grew more decrepit.

"This is the poor part of Dohuk," Amin said as we finally parked. "Where you are staying is the rich part."

Entering a sullen apartment building, we climbed up crooked, uneven cement steps-typical of Kurdistan, where much has been built on the cheap and in a hurry-to a large but threadbare apartment. Amin's mother, a thin, dark woman who must once have been ravishing and still was beautiful, met us at the door in a knee-length skirt and blouse, a cigarette in her hand.

Amin and I moved into the main room, furnished with carpets, a television set, and a table at which lunch had been set up for two. Apparently, the rest of the family had already eaten.

Amin's mother glided in with various dishes, not saying a word. At first, Amin and I filled up the uncomfortable silence with idle chatter, but soon settled into what was a favorite topic among young Kurds: getting out of Kurdistan. Fed up with the region's high unemployment, insecurity, and sorrows, coupled with exposure to the West through the Internet and TV, many Kurds under thirty wanted out. But without pa.s.sports, which were issued through Baghdad, most Kurds could leave the country only through the human smuggling "mafia" run by cooperating Kurds and Turks. Everyone knew about it, and when you were ready to go, you approached it like any other job-asking around, getting recommendations.

About $3,000 bought a third-cla.s.s pa.s.sage by truck and boat, first to Istanbul and then on to Greece or Italy. About $5,000 bought a second-cla.s.s ticket, also by bus and boat; and $7,000, a first-cla.s.s ticket, via airplane, to the European country of your choice. The cheapest option was the most dangerous, of course. People sometimes suffocated in the holds of the trucks or drowned in the boats.

A few days earlier, I had met one thirty-something woman who had been smuggled out on a third-cla.s.s ticket two years before in order to marry, sight unseen, the brother of a colleague living in Austria. The woman, who spoke flawless English and German, was home visiting her mother when we met, and she told me about her dangerous ride. The first leg had been easy enough, she said, but from Istanbul to Athens, she and about thirty other Kurds had been tightly packed into a two-story hold hollowed into the center of a truck. The women had been in the top section, the men in the bottom. They squatted the whole way, for twelve hours. Once in Athens, they were placed in a refrigerator truck with the same two-story arrangement, and the truck boarded a ship en route to Italy. The truck had two fans, one blowing air in, the other pulling air out, but as the ten hours of the pa.s.sage ticked by, the engine grew weaker, and the fans turned slower and slower. She thought it was the end.

I shuddered at the scene. Could I be as strong as she if I were in her shoes?

Amin's parents could perhaps afford to buy him a second-cla.s.s ticket should he decide to emigrate, but he wasn't sure yet if he really did want to leave. He didn't know where to go or what to do when he arrived. Getting asylum in Europe was far more difficult now than it had been a few years before. The United States was out of the question: the long trip was too expensive, and visas virtually impossible to obtain.

"If I could get a good job here, I would stay," Amin said. "But to get a good job, you must belong to the party."

As I was learning, contacts and influence were key to success in Kurdistan, and helped to account for the schism I found between "can-do" Kurds on the one hand, and Kurds who seemed thoroughly exhausted, depressed, and without hope on the other. For Kurds with contacts, money, or education, the new Kurdistan had much to offer, as there was an enormous amount of challenging work to be done. But for the disenfranchised, as always, there was mostly hardship.

Amin and I moved on to other topics. Every week, he taught cla.s.ses at the Juvenile and Women's Prison.

For the most part, street crime was a minor problem in Kurdistan. Theft and a.s.sault were rare, and drugs, still virtually unknown-so much so that the police often didn't recognize contraband when they saw it. The country also remained all but untouched by hepat.i.tis and AIDS. But under Iraqi law, by which Kurdistan was still governed, children as young as eleven could be imprisoned for six months for stealing a pack of cigarettes, and women jailed for "s.e.xual misconduct."

One young woman in Amin's cla.s.s had been arrested at age fifteen for having s.e.xual relations, he said. She'd gotten pregnant and gone to the hospital, where she told a doctor she wanted an abortion. But instead of helping her, the doctor reported her to the police, who placed her in jail, where she lost the baby. A Dohuk court then sentenced her to fifteen years in prison, of which she'd already served three. "It is better for her in prison," Amin said. "If she was free, her family might kill her."

Although I didn't know if all the details of Amin's story were correct, its overall thrust was. When it comes to s.e.x, Kurdish culture is highly traditional. Women are expected to be virgins when they marry, and pre- or extramarital s.e.x is strictly prohibited, as is flirting and "allowing" rape. Women who break the taboos are sometimes murdered by their own families, in so-called "honor killings"-a problem in various traditional tribal areas in the Middle East and southwestern Asia, but especially prevalent in parts of Pakistan, Jordan, Palestine, and Kurdistan.

Amin himself had once been arrested, at age 16. He'd had long hair then, which had led some to accuse him of being h.o.m.os.e.xual-another Kurdish taboo. One day a guard hara.s.sed him and Amin hit him back. He'd spent ten days in prison and afterward cut his hair.

The rebel is highly prized in Kurdish society, but only if he or she rebels against an outside authority such as the Iraqi government. Rebelling against the culture itself carries a heavy price.

BAYAN AHMED, AN INTERPRETER I'd met through the Women's Union, offered to show me around the Dohuk bazaar. A small woman in her mid-twenties, Bayan was always dressed from head to toe in dark-colored garments, with long-sleeved blouses, skirts brushing her ankles, and head scarves that revealed not a single strand of hair or inch of neck. When I'd first met her, I'd barely noticed her, as she had been one of many and had said few words. But after a few days together, spent interviewing Anfal victims in the villages surrounding Dohuk, I'd grown to greatly appreciate her eager intelligence, curiosity, open-mindedness, and streak of mischief.

On our first morning together, I had asked Bayan if I could pay her for her services. "No!" she'd said indignantly, straightening her already ramrod-straight back. "We Kurds are not like foreigners. We do not want money for helping people."

Bayan's dream was to work for the United Nations or another foreign aid organization in a country similar to Kurdistan. For the moment, however, she, like most young people in Kurdistan, was unemployed.

We rendezvoused that morning with Sosan, one of Bayan's best friends. In contrast to Bayan, Sosan wore makeup, large earrings, nail polish, and a V-neck sweater, and was bareheaded, with long curled hair. She also seemed more worldly than Bayan. I wondered at how two such apparently different women could be so close.

The twosome did have one thing in common, however: clunky black shoes with thick stacked heels, which in Bayan's case were about four inches high. I'd seen similar shoes all over Dohuk. They were the latest fashion craze among young women.

We entered the city's half-covered, half-open-air bazaar, which housed a typical Middle Eastern array of goods ranging from spices and vegetables to plastic products and makeup. Most interesting was the fabric market, holding dozens of shops bursting with bolts of mostly synthetic fabrics in all colors and designs, some very ornate, with gold and silver threads, sequins and brocade. Used in the making of the traditional Kurdish women's dresses, which could cost as much as $200, the fabric was imported from all over the region, the most expensive coming from Bahrain. Neither Bayan nor Sosan wore the traditional dress except on special occasions-only the older generations wore it every day, they said. Nonetheless, the fashion of the fabrics changed every few months, and the most stylish of Dohuk's matrons tried to keep up.

"Dohuk is a city that depends on appearance and gossip," Bayan said, "and clothes are very important."

Even in Kurdistan! How strange it is that the ordinary petty vices never lose their hold, even in the wake of extraordinary suffering. Vanity, jealousy, bickering-they're always there.

We stopped at a modern-looking restaurant for lunch. The airy downstairs was filled with many tables and chairs, but it was only for men. The upstairs, with far fewer tables and a ceiling so low that I had to duck my head, was for families and women.

"Sosan and I often come here for lunch," Bayan said, with such a gleeful look to her eye that I gathered that most women in Dohuk did not go out alone for lunch.

Bayan and Sosan had met at the University of Salahuddin in Erbil. It had been the best of times, they said, eyes shining. They'd loved being away from their families and living in a strange city. They'd shared a dorm room with three other young women and had learned so much-about their studies, about different kinds of people, about themselves. How we miss those days! they sighed. Bayan had earned a degree in English, and Sosan had graduated in law; but without jobs, both now spent most of their time at home and were bored.

I was surprised to hear that Bayan's family, whom I a.s.sumed were quite religious and thus conservative, had allowed her to go away to school. Traditional Kurdish families do not allow their daughters to spend the night away from home.

"Some families do not let their daughters go away," Bayan agreed when I asked, "but more and more are letting them go to the university because they know they will stay in a dormitory."

And Bayan's family was not particularly religious after all, it turned out. Except for two aunts who belonged to a moderate Islamic political party, Bayan was the only woman in her family who covered herself. She had decided to do so in college. "I thought it was right for me," she said simply.

Our kebabs arrived, along with large platters filled with rice, greens, and flat bread. A photographer wandered up to ask if we wanted our picture taken, reminding me that eating out was unusual in Kurdistan, where discretionary income was scarce.

I waited until we were almost through our meal before broaching what I knew would be a ticklish subject-boyfriends.

The women gasped.

"We cannot have boyfriends!" they half whispered, half giggled, glancing nervously around the restaurant, though we were the only upstairs diners, and the waiter was long gone.

"This is very dangerous for us!" Sosan said. "This is illegal."

"We know what is right and what is wrong," Bayan said. "And honor is very important to us. If we lose our honor, it is ninety-nine percent we will be killed."

"No," Sosan said, nudging her friend, "this is not right. The law does not allow killing."

The two women started urgently speaking in Kurdish. I got the sense that Sosan was telling Bayan to keep quiet. Like many Kurds I met, Sosan seemed reluctant to have me learn anything negative about Kurdish culture. Her liberal dress was as misleading as was Bayan's conservative.

"Do you hear about honor killings often?" I interrupted them.

"No," Sosan said.

"A few times a year." Bayan leaned forward confidentially. "One time, a woman was a little wrong in the head. She went to Zakho, she said she wanted to go to Turkey. She was there seven days, and she didn't do anything, but her family killed her."

"But this is illegal," Sosan said reproachfully. "It was, what do you say in English?-premeditated. Her killers were sent to prison. That is the law."