A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 11

-Kurdish folk song from Erbil region ONE OF MY FAVORITE STUDENTS at the university was Sherin, who drew me aside one day to tell me a secret, although I never quite figured out what it was. Mostly, she seemed simply to want to talk, and we met on several occasions. Delicate and very pretty, with streaked hair, Sherin usually wore neatly pressed blue jeans, feminine blouses, and open-toed sandals. She also spoke much better English than most of her peers. She'd learned by watching American movies-her favorite actors were Kevin Costner and Bruce Willis. In fact, she loved all things American, and sometimes seemed beside herself with excitement when with me, simply by virtue of my nationality.

But despite her modern clothes and Western interests, Sherin came from what sounded like quite a traditional family. She had originally hoped to become a translator, but couldn't because of her father, who didn't want her meeting so many foreigners. She also couldn't talk with boys at school, let alone have a boyfriend, as it might get back to her father. In fact, once when she and I were alone in a taxi together, she refused even to talk to the driver, as it was against her father's precepts. Sherin said she was interested in creative writing, but she never wrote about love-her father might find out.

Still, Sherin loved her father "so much," she told me on many occasions. "He is very strict, but he is very good," she said. "And I am not the owner of myself. Everything I do, I must think of my sisters, I must think of my family, I cannot act alone. Sometimes this makes me nervous because I am not free psychologically. But it is necessary."

And this, I thought, was an important crux to understanding the relations.h.i.+p between the s.e.xes and much else in Kurdistan. Having a love affair wasn't about following one's heart, or even about l.u.s.t. Having, or rather not having, a love affair was about loyalty, both to the family and, by extension, to all Kurdish society. Acting inappropriately meant deeply betraying the family and perhaps causing its ruin. To follow one's heart had the potential to destroy all that one loved most.

LEYLA, A SLENDER, athletic-looking woman in pants and a black jacket, had invited me to spend the night at her dormitory, one of a half-dozen cheery utilitarian buildings cl.u.s.tered around walkways and gardens, enclosed by a high wall. Leyla's friends joined us in the gardens soon after my arrival, and we spoke about many topics, including Saddam, American music, and the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iraq, which everyone favored. Then we focused in on personal stories. As usual, everyone had one.

One woman with curled hair and eyes framed with mascara said that she had been promised "from the cradle" to a grown man of a neighboring tribe because her uncle had killed one of the man's family-a common practice in tribal Kurdistan. But by the time she reached p.u.b.erty, the man was forty-six, and she refused to marry him. He agreed to let her go if she paid him 100,000 dinars-an enormous sum. But then she got lucky. The man ran into financial difficulties and agreed to let her go for only 15,000 dinars. "Now I am studying to be a teacher and every day I thank G.o.d for my good fortune," she said.

Another woman, dressed in a tight black sweater, had also been promised "from the cradle" to an older man. But when she was in her second year of high school, she told her family that she would never marry him. She wanted to continue her studies, perhaps become a doctor or journalist, and although "the man was beautiful, he was empty in the head." Her father had been angry at first, but he loved her and eventually relented.

A third woman pulled me aside to tell me privately that she was the daughter of a man who had two wives. "My friends don't know, please, please don't tell," she said urgently, making me promise. Her mother was the unfortunate first wife, who had borne only five daughters, no sons, and so her father had married again, to a woman who'd given him three sons and two daughters. As a businessman, he was rarely home, but when he was, he stayed exclusively with his second family-the student hadn't seen him in years. Why did the man bother having so many children if he wasn't going to stick around? I wondered, moved by the student's distress and need to tell me her story.

That evening, after a simple dinner of cracked wheat, yogurt, and tea, Leyla took me around the dormitory to collect more stories. I spoke with students whose villages had been destroyed in the Anfal, students whose fathers and brothers had disappeared, students who'd been forced out of Kirkuk, and students who'd survived the devastating chemical bombing of Halabja. I listened and took notes until I couldn't listen or take notes anymore. There were just too many stories, and after a certain point, they all sounded the same. I felt weighted down, to perversely-and guiltily-perk up only when a story was especially gruesome.

At the same time, I felt in awe. Here were all these hundreds of young women-just a tiny fraction of young Kurds everywhere-who were not only putting their indescribable past behind them, but gamely moving forward into a modern and, to them, completely foreign new world. Who knew what these women could do, where they might go, what Kurdistan might become?

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Along the Hamilton Road, with Side Trips IN 1928, A BRITISH ENGINEER NAMED ARCHIBALD M. HAMILTON set out to build a road through one of Kurdistan's wildest and most inaccessible regions-a land about an hour north of Erbil, filled with jagged mountains, deep-cut gorges, rus.h.i.+ng rivers, and sheer rock cliffs. The ostensible purpose of the road was to enable trade between Iraq and Iran, hitherto difficult because of the many mountains. But an equally important by-product of the project was to gain control over the fiercely independent Kurdish tribes who lived in the region. As Hamilton writes in Road Through Kurdistan, quoting the director of the project, " 'You know that all great nations, past and present, have found roads essential for maintaining law and order. Once highways have penetrated a region the wildest people are pretty sure to become peaceful simply by copying civilised modes of life. . . .' "

Hamilton Road, as it became known, begins at Spilik Pa.s.s, just east of the town of Harir. When Hamilton started work, Spilik Pa.s.s was infamous for its marauding brigands, who for centuries used the lookout point to watch out for caravans traveling between Arabia and Persia. The engineering party was itself under constant threat of attack.

Beyond the pa.s.s, Hamilton Road turns a bend to reveal a blinding vista of blue-white peaks marching toward the horizon, before starting a twisting descent into dark, mysterious Gali Ali Beg, a skinny, ten-mile-long chasm. Canyon walls rise on both sides, as slopes striated with diagonal slabs of rock flash by, turning the world into a tilting whirligig. Glittering patches of streams appear, to end in a thick, fast gush of water-Gali Ali Beg waterfall-shooting out of the mountainside like a fat tongue.

From the falls, Hamilton Road enters the valley proper, its entrance marked by a twenty-foot-high column of twisting orange-and-white rock. With sheer walls rising on both sides, the road nudges its way forward, winding in and out of shadows. Alongside rushes the chasm's river, above which hide caves once used by the peshmerga, and small waterfalls bursting out of rock, silver sunflowers. High above, striated cliffs resemble castle battlements, keeping watch over all who pa.s.s below.

In the spring, gra.s.ses and wildflowers erupt all over the gorge, das.h.i.+ng drops of color everywhere. "When spring comes to Gali Ali Beg," writes Hamilton, "the barren country of Kurdistan, with its rugged mountains and grey rocks, bursts suddenly into extraordinary beauty. . . . The mists lift, and it is as if a veil that for months past had hung over the eyes of the beholder, were suddenly withdrawn. . . . One realizes then why men have fought and slain each other during so many centuries for possession of these apparently useless lands."

JUST BEYOND GALI ALI BEG was a turnoff for Diana, where I had an invitation to stay with an a.s.syrian family. Perhaps descendants of the ancient a.s.syrian Empire-a subject of much debate among scholars-the a.s.syrians are not Kurds, but a separate Christian people, also known as Nestorians, who broke with the Western church in A.D. 431. Their community once extended as far east as China and Siberia, but they suffered horrific slaughter at the hands of the Mongols, shrinking to a tiny population centered in southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran until after World War I, when many moved to northern Iraq. From the 1920s until the Anfal, Diana was predominantly a.s.syrian, but now housed only about eighty a.s.syrian families amid a much larger Kurdish refugee population.

The road into town meandered past a marketplace selling carpets, couches, and cabinets, all sitting outside in the dust. At one end was the Diana Prosthetic Limbs Center, and at the other, a bridge leading into the older, quieter, prettier part of town, where the a.s.syrians lived. Pa.s.sing over the bridge, the atmosphere on the streets immediately felt strikingly different from anything I'd yet experienced in Kurdistan, though I would encounter it again in Ainkawa, a Christian town just outside Erbil. People were dressed in T-s.h.i.+rts and jeans, men and women were casually socializing, and inviting cafes were open for business. It was the freer Christian culture that did it, some Muslim Kurds later ruefully told me.

In a walled compound across from Diana's main church lived my hosts-Guergis Yalda, his wife, Wargin Issa, and their three children. Out front stretched a garden and porch, while inside, their home was s.p.a.cious and airy, furnished with Persian carpets and baroque-style chairs. On the walls hung several religious plaques and photographs of Guergis as a peshmerga. A tall man dressed in khak and a turban, he had joined the Barzani revolution in 1968, at age seventeen.

Like Guergis, many rural a.s.syrians joined the Kurdish resistance early on, fought alongside them for decades, and pa.s.sionately supported the current Kurdish leaders.h.i.+p. In contrast, many urban a.s.syrians kept well away from the revolution, and harbored deep resentment toward the Kurds, both for historical reasons and for more recent grievances, primarily over land claims. When setting up the semiautonomous zone, the Kurdish government made equal rights of minorities a founding principle, and the Christians had five representatives in parliament, many more than their small population warranted. Nonetheless, relations.h.i.+ps between the two groups were often strained.

One of the most famous of the a.s.syrian peshmerga was a woman commander named Margaret George, whose name was frequently mentioned to me as an example of Kurdish tolerance toward both women and Christians. But Margaret George, much distinguished in battle in the early 1960s, was a poor and ironic exemplary choice. Not only had she been one of few women fighters in the Iraqi Kurdish revolution, she had also been murdered in 1966, probably by a jealous lover.

Guergis had joined the Kurdish revolution "to protect my family from the Iraqi government," he said. "And because I liked Mulla Mustafa. All a.s.syrians liked Mulla Mustafa, and he liked a.s.syrians. He trusted us more than he trusted his own Kurds."

As a peshmerga, Guergis's expertise lay in land mines. He advanced ahead of the regular forces to deactivate the mines, or followed behind to lay mines for the enemy. The Russian-made mines were the easiest to find, as they were stuck into the ground on nails. American-made ones, buried in the earth, were more problematic.

From 1968 to 1974, Guergis fought in the mountains, and, after the Algiers Accord, fled to Iran. But he never forgot his childhood sweetheart Wargin. For twelve years, they kept in touch by phone and finally, in 1981, married. "Even when we weren't in contact, I always knew she was waiting for me and never looked at another," Guergis said, gazing fondly at his wife. As I was discovering, the people of northern Iraq are highly romantic.

Also living with the family was Guergis's father Yalda, to whom everyone was eager to introduce me. He's almost one hundred years old, but speaks excellent English, they said-a claim in which I didn't place much stock. I was always being introduced to people who allegedly spoke excellent English, only to find that their grasp of the language was fair at best.

A tiny man paralyzed from the waist down, Yalda, I soon realized, spent his days sitting largely alone on big, puffy cus.h.i.+ons in his sunny bedroom. Blind and almost deaf, he wore a sweater and dapper fedora throughout my visit and kept himself company by praying and singing for hours at a time, his lilting voice rising and falling as the world swirled by. The family was accustomed to the sound, eating and talking in other rooms to its background, but to me it was extraordinary, a harmony to the melody of life.

To talk to Yalda was to interrupt his inner dialogue and penetrate through h.o.a.ry shades of old age-a challenging task I didn't undertake until the second day of my visit. Yet when I did, I was astonished to discover that the family was right-Yalda spoke a near perfect British English, using a sophisticated vocabulary far larger than almost anyone else I'd met in Kurdistan. He hadn't spoken English in many years, but easily fell back into the language. I sensed his excitement at the chance to speak it again. "You came back!" he said to me at one point after I'd left him for several hours.

Born in 1907, Yalda had served with the British levy forces, or conscripted troops, composed of mostly a.s.syrian soldiers under British officers, employed to help control the unruly Iraqi countryside after World War I. Later, he'd worked intermittently as an interpreter in various military and civilian capacities, including a stint at the front during World War II. Between jobs, he came home to till the soil in Diana.

Yalda was filled with stories of battles and betrayals, which I had a hard time following at first, as I thought he was telling me his personal history. But then it dawned on me that he was reciting the whole sorry twentieth-century history of the a.s.syrian people, including their 1920s resettlement in northern Iraq from Turkey and Iran, following much hara.s.sment by the Turks and Persians, and their betrayal at the hands of the British. The a.s.syrians had supplied the British with most of their troops during the 1920 to 1932 British Mandate, creating bitter antagonisms between them and their Muslim neighbors. So when the British Mandate ended, the a.s.syrians requested special protection from Britain or permission from the League of Nations to migrate to Syria en ma.s.se. But the British saw no reason to reward their loyalty and left them to fend for themselves under the newly instated Hashemite monarchy. Thereupon the Arab rulers deemed the a.s.syrian community, despite its small size, to be a threat to national unity. In August 1933, Iraqi armed forces ma.s.sacred many hundreds of a.s.syrian villagers. Joining in the fray against the Christians were the Kurds.

Not surprisingly, Yalda had little good to say about his Kurdish compatriots. But, echoing his son Guergis, he made one major exception. "The best Kurds are the Barzanis," he said. "They are not Christian, but they are kind people, they are educated people. We can work and live with the Barzanis."

GUERGIS AND I could communicate in Persian and English, but for more serious conversations, we depended on the help of a neighbor, Susan. A pretty and vivacious woman in her thirties, Susan had recently returned from many years spent living in Canada. She had married a Canadian but was now divorced and back to see if she could make a place for herself in the new Kurdistan-although I sometimes wondered why exactly she had returned, as she, too, had little good to say about the Kurds.

One morning, Guergis, Susan, and I set out to explore the Hamilton Road east of Gali Ali Beg. But first, we returned to the dramatic gorge to take a narrow, zigzagging detour up a mountainside to the fortress town of Rowanduz. Diagonal shafts of brown and red fell in striated cliffs around us as we climbed, while on the earth's floor below, at the junction of the rivers of Gali Ali Beg and a smaller gorge, waters boiled.

We entered Rowanduz, once the thriving capital of the Soran emirate, built on sheer rock cliffs between two chasms and flanked by eight thousand-foot-high peaks. To one side rose gray-faced Hindren Mountain, the site of a decisive 1966 battle in which a few thousand peshmerga had held off ten thousand Iraqis, forcing the government to negotiate with Mulla Mustafa. To another side dropped Kharand Valley, into which we gazed to see birds floating on the winds and a green snake of a river blinking far below. During World War I, when the Russians were fighting the Turks in the area, a squadron of Russian Cossacks charged toward Rowanduz at dusk, unaware of the gorge, and fell to their deaths, Guergis said.

Rowanduz itself, for all its splendid setting, felt poverty-stricken and neglected. In its center lay a bereft square equipped with a cannon, which had been made by one Wastah Rajab for his emir, Mir Muhammad, the one-eyed prince who ruthlessly captured Amadiya and much of the surrounding region in the 1820s and early 1830s, slaughtering thousands along the way.

Rejoining the Hamilton Road, Guergis, Susan, and I continued east. The way was dotted with poppies and caves, some of which Guergis had lived in as a peshmerga. He told war stories as the landscape flashed by-the Iraqis had bombed here, a KDP hospital had stood there-and seemed to know everyone manning the checkpoints we pa.s.sed. Watching him wave to the grizzled guards, their baggy pants flapping in the wind, I got the sense of a huge net laid over the land, with everyone and everything connected.

Here and there erupted the occasional dark brown tents of the seminomads. Usually, two or three were cl.u.s.tered together-rectangular shapes with open sides and whipped peaks, supported by sticks. Goats and sheep and children sometimes gamboled about out front.

The tents were made by women, who wove strips of goat's hair, each about three feet wide by fifteen or more feet long, and sewed them together. The goat's hair was waterproof, but it still let in the light, and the average tent lasted six or seven years. There were both winter tents, which were permanently pitched near towns and villages, and much smaller summer tents, made for carting up mountains.

We reached the village of Berserin, marking the end of Gali Berserini, another steep, shadowy ravine. On the lam somewhere within it had once lived Ismail Simko Agha, the handsome, daring, and ruthless chief of Iran's s.h.i.+kak tribe, from the Urumieh plains in northwest Iran. In 1921, Simko led a successful revolt against the Persians, proclaiming autonomy, and was subsequently driven over the border, into Iraq.

Simko had been a notoriously cruel leader, of the kind that has given Kurds a bad name. He once obtained the surrender of rebellious underlings by promising to spare their lives and grant them their freedom. He then had their right wrists smashed and neck tendons slashed, leaving them technically free, but with their heads rolling.

Not being as familiar with Simko's history as I could have been, I made the mistake of mentioning his name to Susan, who responded with a rush of invectives. One of Simko's most treacherous acts had been to invite a delegation of a.s.syrians, including their spiritual leader Mar s.h.i.+mum Benyamin, then over ninety, to meet to discuss a possible alliance during World War I. Simko then ambushed the party, killing every one of its members, and drank Benyamin's blood in a rage.

Hamilton Road continued, with snowcapped mountains rearing to the right and the left. At times, high hills hemmed us in on both sides; at other times, we shot up inclines to see waves of green and blue ridges lapping in all directions. We were nearing the Iranian border, a wild region that had often been entirely under peshmerga control. We pa.s.sed the small towns of Nowperdan, once a KDP political center, and Choman, where my lugubrious friend Dr. Shawkat had spent his early revolutionary years. Thereafter soared Halgurd Mountain, the highest mountain in Iraq, a 12,250-foot-high peak standing in magnificent isolation, wrapped in a mantle of snow.

As we drove, Guergis continued telling his peshmerga stories, praising the valorous Kurdish movement at every turn. Susan was telling stories now, too-about how the brutal and ignorant Kurds had ruined the country. Guergis could not understand Susan's English, and she paid little attention to what she was translating, making me feel like a Ping-Pong ball bouncing back and forth between two widely divergent opinions. And in the end, though my sympathies lay with the Kurds, all that mattered were the heart-stopping mountains.

On the slopes beyond Halgurd Mountain, red flags flashed. Between them crawled s.p.a.ce-age men in heavy helmets and plastic face s.h.i.+elds. The flags marked land mines, which the men were defusing. An estimated 12 to 15 million mines riddle Iraqi Kurdistan, especially near its borders, making it one of the most heavily mined regions in the world. Most of the mines were laid in the 1970s, when the Iraqi army used them against the Kurds, and during the Iran-Iraq War, when they were laid by both countries. Between 1991 and 2002, over thirty-six hundred people had been killed and over six thousand maimed by the mines, and civilian casualties continued at the rate of ten to twenty people per month. Between 1993, when demining began, and 2002, only about a hundred thousand mines, or less than 1 percent, had been destroyed.

Hamilton Road ended in Haj Omran, a scruffy border town where Mulla Mustafa had once had his headquarters. Clinging to a mountainside, the town overlooked a wide valley, making it a strategic lookout point that the Iraqis had been furious to lose to the Iranians, with the help of the KDP, at one point during the Iran-Iraq War.

"Mulla Mustafa's house was down there near that spring," Guergis said.

"Tourists used to come here to ski before the Kurds destroyed it," Susan said.

Haj Omran centered on one windswept street lined with dusky storefronts and dingy eateries. Jostling shoulders in the thoroughfare were dozens of dark men in bulky jackets and straight-legged trousers, few baggy pants and no turbans. There were also no women, or, at least, none in sight. Haj Omran existed for trade, not for living.

The tradesmen in town operated legally, Guergis said-though I had my doubts-while smugglers operated down below. He pointed to a spot in the valley far away where I could just make out dozens of men and horses moving about in a square-shaped camp.

I remembered a popular joke I had heard. G.o.d pushed the Kurdish people out of heaven and into h.e.l.l because they were making too much noise with their dancing. But Satan didn't like the noise either, so he sent the Kurds to purgatory. Pa.s.sing by one day, G.o.d noticed that things were suspiciously quiet. What's happening? Why isn't anyone dancing? he asked a young boy. Oh, everyone is too busy to be dancing! the boy said. They are all out smuggling people between heaven and h.e.l.l.

NORTH OF HAMILTON ROAD lay the valley and village of Barzan, the heart of Barzani tribal territory and birthplace of Mulla Mustafa. The region was best explored with a member of the Barzani confederation, as they are a notoriously insular and private people. I headed north with Mr. Saleh Mahmoud Barzani and Jula, a translator. Mr. Saleh was an impeccably dressed older gentleman in crisp khak crisscrossed with a s.h.i.+ny leather pistol harness, a double-tiered red-and-white turban, and a soot black mustache that I suspected was dyed. Many Kurdish men are quite vain, and to dye one's hair or mustache is not at all unusual. Jula was a slender young woman who'd recently returned to Iraq from Iran. She was not happy to be back. Previously pursuing a career as a filmmaker in Iran, a country known for its many fine directors, she saw no future for herself in Iraq.

When we reached Barzan, I was surprised to find myself in a wide valley dotted with dark green scrub bushes and trees. I'd heard Barzan described as "hardscrabble" and "rocky," but in the late spring at least, the region was an idyllic retreat, with the village clinging to a slope at one end, the Greater Zab River roaring with melted snows at the other, and brightly colored birds flitting between. More birds, wild animals, and plants can be found in the Barzan valley than almost anywhere else in Kurdistan, as Mulla Mustafa's older brother, Shaikh Ahmad, outlawed hunting and the use of vegetation for firewood in the 1920s-one of the many unusual actions of the Barzani family.

Heading north to Barzan The village of Barzan was surprisingly small, with less than two thousand people. The valley seemed to echo with emptiness. More than any other region in Kurdistan, Barzan has suffered endless a.s.sault. Only one house in the village dated back to before 1991, and the village center was not a square or marketplace, but a prominent graveyard in which Mulla Mustafa, his son Idris, and other famed Kurdish revolutionaries were buried.

The origins of the Barzani confederation are unclear, but it probably dates back only to the early nineteenth century when a newcomer to the valley, a man named Taj ad-Din, was initiated into the Naqshbandi Sufi order. This first Barzan shaikh and his successors soon acquired many followers in the isolated region, then inhabited by a simple but fierce pastoral people living on the edge of Zibari tribal territory. The shaikhs had a reputation for utmost piety and integrity, and, by the late 1800s, believers were touting the Barzan valley as a quasi-utopian community in which land was held collectively, and refugees of all tribes and religions were welcome.

Mulla Mustafa was born in 1904, the son of Shaikh Muhammad, known for his religious mysticism, and younger brother of Shaikh Ahmad, an eccentric and rebellious religious leader at least thirteen years his senior. The Ottomans imprisoned Mulla Mustafa and his mother for nine months when he was less than two years old, and hanged his oldest brother Abd Al-Salam II in 1914. His father may also have been hanged by religious fanatics in 1908. Mulla Mustafa studied for ten years in Barzan, and later furthered his education in Suleimaniyah. Always a secular leader, "Mulla" was his proper name, not a religious t.i.tle.

In 1931, Shaikh Ahmad apparently instructed his followers to eat pork, perhaps to symbolize the link between Christians and Naqshbandis, infuriating a powerful neighbor, Shaikh Ras.h.i.+d of Baradost, who attacked the Barzani villages. The Iraqi government, already soured on Shaikh Ahmad for his refusal to obey various decrees and pay taxes, used the violent outbreak as an excuse to march on Barzan, only to be soundly defeated by the small and poor, but tough and valiant Barzani confederation. The government then called on the help of the British Royal Air Force, who bombed seventy-nine Barzani villages, destroying over thirteen hundred homes. Shaikh Ahmad and Mulla Mustafa escaped to the mountains, but they were eventually caught and exiled, first to southern Iraq and then to Suleimaniyah.

When his exile ended in 1943, Mulla Mustafa returned to Barzan and began building the Kurdish resistance movement in earnest. His first revolt failed, forcing him and about twelve hundred fighters into exile in Iran, where they joined the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad. When Mahabad was defeated in December 1946, Barzani was offered the chance to surrender, but refused. Instead, he and his forces, hotly pursued by the Iranians, fled to Iraq, Turkey, back to Iran, and finally to Russia, in a heroic retreat legendary among Kurds. "We marched for fifty-two days," Barzani once said. "In the high mountain pa.s.ses the late spring snow was six to twelve feet deep. We fought nine encounters, lost four killed and had seven wounded."

Living in exile in the Soviet Union for almost twelve years, Barzani learned Russian and studied economics and science, but never became a Communist, saying that good Muslims could not become Communists. Returning to Iraq in 1958, after Brigadier Qa.s.sem's coup d'etat, he fiercely continued the Kurdish struggle until 1975, when the Algiers Accord forced him into exile again-at first in Iran, but later in the United States, where he was diagnosed with lung cancer. By then a defeated man, stranded far from his aerie in the land that had betrayed him, he spent his last years writing letters to Was.h.i.+ngton politicians, trying to raise interest in the Kurdish cause. He died on March 1, 1979.

UPON OUR ARRIVAL in Barzan, we were met by Dr. Abdullah Loqman, a tall and lanky man with salt-and-pepper hair, originally from Dohuk, who had moved to Barzan in 1991 to provide humanitarian medical aid. At that time, there had been almost nothing left standing in the entire region, he said to me in good English as we walked through the village. Only in 1997, with the help of the oil-for-food program, had relief come to the valley, in the form of reconstructed villages, paved roads, schools, and a comprehensive health program. Dr. Loqman now oversaw the region's health services and worked with a German aid organization that had built a nursing school in the valley.

Dr. Loqman took us to visit a half-dozen Barzan widows, living in reconstructed homes interspersed with animal huts on the edge of the village. Greeting us with wide smiles, the women ushered us into a spare, whitewashed room, with thin rugs and cus.h.i.+ons, where a teenage girl prepared tea. All of the women appeared to be in their late forties and fifties, and were dressed in a distinctive style, with long black dresses and two hennaed locks of hair framing their faces. The rest of their hair was tucked away, under two thin black scarves, one of which was tightly drawn and tied in back, and the other of which was looser, its skinny ends knotted together and either thrown over the back or left to hang in front.

In 1975, after the Algiers Accord, not all of the Barzanis and their followers fled to Iran. Many remained behind in their villages, or returned home from Iran a few months later after a general amnesty. That fall, while they were out collecting their harvest, thousands of Iraqi soldiers arrived to surround and eventually destroy some eighteen hundred mostly Barzani villages. Helicopters whirling overhead to prevent escape, the soldiers brutally shoved the villagers into vehicles and bused them to the southern deserts, where they lived in desperate conditions for almost five years.

"Kissinger," Mr. Saleh spat out as the women related this story. He then glared around the room, his hawklike features catching the light from the window.

In 1980, the women went on, a convoy of army trucks rolled up to their camp to take them away again-this time to the collective town of Qushtapa, near Erbil. Qushtapa had no real facilities either, but at least it was in Kurdistan, for which they were grateful-until, that is, about three-thirty A.M. on July 30, 1983. Hundreds of soldiers surrounded the camp. Moving in a tightening band from house to house, rooftop to rooftop, they arrested all men and boys over age twelve.

"It was just before daybreak when I saw the soldiers on the roofs, in the helicopters, everywhere," said one woman. "My husband looked at them and said, 'Now is our end, these are not ordinary soldiers.' They shot everyone who tried to run away, and they searched every house, every cupboard, every WC."

The other women and we listeners sighed deeply-a reaction that I had noticed often before during the telling of tragic tales. The sighs seemed to alleviate some of the stress building up inside the room.

By noon, about nine hours after the operation had begun, it was over. Between five thousand and eight thousand Barzani men and boys had been captured in Qushtapa and three other collective towns, to be loaded onto buses and driven away. Like those who disappeared five years later during the Anfal, they were never seen again. A decade later, Saddam Hussein left little doubt as to their whereabouts. "They betrayed the country and they betrayed the covenant," he said in 1993, "and we meted out a stern punishment to them, and they went to h.e.l.l."

In accusing the Barzanis of betrayal, Hussein was referring to a specific event. Shortly before the Barzani men were abducted, the KDP had helped the Iranians capture Haj Omran, the scruffy border town I had visited earlier. The men were taken in retribution. The absence of any international outcry following their disappearance may well have encouraged Hussein to use the same technique again, on a larger scale, during the Anfal.

After the buses rolled away, the Qushtapa camp was sealed and its electricity and water supply cut off. "We remained alone, only women," said a younger woman, starting to cry. The room fell silent. "We had no more men, we had lost them all. We went to the river to try to get water, but the soldiers chased us and hit us with stones. And at night, we were very afraid, maybe they would come back to rape us. We didn't dare sleep alone, we always slept six or seven together, with big knives."

Everyone was crying now, even Mr. Saleh and perhaps, I thought, Dr. Loqman. Though they had all lived and relived this story thousands of times, it was impossible not to.

"Others have cried, too, hearing our story," a woman said, watching me, "but why is the world listening only now? This happened many years ago."

THAT AFTERNOON AND the next day, Dr. Loqman took Mr. Saleh, Jula, and myself on a driving tour. We visited a small carpet factory and drove along the Greater Zab, lush with poplar trees and flanked by jagged peaks, in which once had roamed a kind of leopard and still roamed wild boar, wolves, and bear. Reaching the top of one crest, we came upon a tiny village of twenty-two families recently returned from Iran. The village had no electricity or running water, but it did have the kind of views that would cost millions many places in the world. The village mukhtar was a handsome, educated young man with a fas.h.i.+onable haircut and leather jacket.

Northeast of Barzan was Bedial, an ancient Christian settlement. Driving along a well-paved mountain road, we saw it sitting by itself on a gra.s.sy mountaintop across a valley, surrounded by red peaks. Reaching the village was a different story altogether, however, as we had to drive down one steep mountain and up another, on rocky dirt roads pockmarked with deep muddy holes. It was astonis.h.i.+ng to hear that after Bedial was bombed in 1975, the villagers rebuilt their beloved church-sixteen hundred years old, they said-entirely by hand and on foot, hiking up and down the surrounding slopes with the necessary building materials. There had been no road then.

We traveled on, to an even more ancient site, the Shanidar Cave. Between 1951 and 1960, an American archaeologist named Ralph Solecki excavated the cave, to find nine Neanderthal skeletons, the oldest dating back forty-six thousand years. One of Solecki's more startling discoveries were the flowers that he found buried with the bodies. "With the finding of flowers . . ." he writes, "we are brought suddenly to the realization that the universality of mankind and love of beauty go beyond the boundary of our own species. No longer can we deny the early men the full range of human feelings and emotions."

Solecki's discovery reminded me of the Kurds' own love of flowers-and dance, song, poetry, and love stories. Despite a relentlessly cruel history, at times self-inflicted, the Kurds are in many ways a gentle people.

To reach Shanidar from the road was a forty-minute walk along a trail that headed up a small crest, dipped, and swung up again to the dark triangular cave. Along the way was evidence of an old a.s.syrian road, built by King Sargon II to carry out expeditions against the Kurds-an earlier version of the Hamilton Road.

The mouth of the cave was about eighty feet wide by twenty-five feet high. Inside, the shelter expanded out to about twice that size, with dust motes spinning in the air and black soot hanging in thick threads from the ceiling. During the winter months, villagers kept their sheep and goats in the cave, much as they had done for centuries. Padding about on the loamy dark earth, hidden from sunlight, I wondered about all the generations that had once lived, loved, and had dreams and secrets here. The only evidence of Solecki's dig, which had descended some fifteen feet, was a shallow indentation in the floor.

THAT EVENING, AFTER a multicourse meal served by a bevy of Barzan widows, Dr. Loqman, Jula, and myself settled down in the living room to interview Mr. Saleh. Born in Barzan, he knew and had experienced much, or so I'd been told, and I wanted to hear his personal story. But that proved to be all but impossible. Although Mr. Saleh had enthusiastically agreed to be interviewed, he did not want to talk about his life, but rather about the larger Kurdish story. No matter how much I, with the help of Dr. Loqman, tried to encourage him to talk about himself, he forged ahead with a detailed and accurate impersonal history of the Iraqi Kurds. I had had other similar encounters, especially with older Kurdish men, and I wondered how much of it had to do with the Kurds' emphasis on the communal rather than the individual. I couldn't imagine interviewing any American about his or her life, and hearing details about U.S. foreign and domestic policy rather than about careers, families, personal highpoints, and low points.

Interviewing was often tricky in Kurdistan. Sometimes, as with Mr. Saleh, there were gender- and age-difference issues. Often, as with many villagers, there was the literacy issue. Before traveling to Iraq, I had thought of literacy primarily in terms of whether a person could read or write, but, in Kurdistan, I realized that it extends further than that. Literacy gives a person reference points, the ability to reach beyond his or her immediate world, and an acquaintance with the logic inherent in reading and writing. During my early interviews with villagers, especially, conducted with the help of eager but inexperienced translators, who often added yet another layer of obfuscation to things, I frequently came away befuddled by stories that followed no timeline, had murkily related causes and effects, and names that meant nothing to me. It wasn't a matter of the villagers' intelligence, but their way of ordering the world.

Furthermore, there were cultural issues. Although I'd read as much as I could before traveling to Kurdistan, in-depth anthropological studies of the Kurds, as opposed to political ones, are limited in number, especially in English, and I had few guidelines to go by when formulating certain kinds of questions. How to find out about centuries-old customs and rituals when I didn't even know exactly where to look? Much of traditional Kurdish culture was dying fast, I knew, as the younger generation was more interested in the Internet and satellite TV than in their grandparents' old-fas.h.i.+oned ways, but reaching out to record some of it was no simple matter.

I was able to coax a few personal facts out of Mr. Saleh that evening, however. Mulla Mustafa had been his uncle, and after his own father had been killed when he was very young, Mr. Saleh had been raised by Mulla Mustafa's family. Later, he had worked for the Kurdish leader, serving in his guesthouse and looking after his children while they were all living in the mountains.

"What was Mulla Mustafa like?" I asked.

"He was a simple man, he never thought about anything but the Kurdish cause," Mr. Saleh said. "He would say, 'I am only the servant of this nation.' "

What little Mr. Saleh told me corresponded to what I'd read. Mulla Mustafa was said to have focused all his energies on the Kurdish struggle. A man of average height but imposing build, he was reputedly tough, charismatic, and courageous, of quick intelligence, shrewd instincts, and good judgment, despite a limited education. Usually dressed in shal u shapik and a two-tiered red-and-white turban, with a double cartridge belt around his waist, he liked to talk cryptically and often conveyed his ideas through fables. He regularly found the time to pray and to receive all kinds of visitors, from diplomats to peasants. However, he was also said to have been autocratic, egotistical, shortsighted, and naive in the ways of the outside world, and to have had a ruthless side.

Mr. Saleh had been with Mulla Mustafa in Haj Omran in 1971, during a famous attempt on his life. The Baath regime's head of security had sent five imams, or religious men, to negotiate with Mulla Mustafa, giving one of them a tape recorder, which, unbeknownst to them, was also an explosive device.

"Mulla Mustafa welcomed the imams, and they took seats and a servant came in with tea," Mr. Saleh said. "The imam turned on the tape recorder, and it exploded, but Mulla Mustafa was not killed because the servant was between him and the imam."

The imams' cars were also rigged with explosives-the men were not meant to return alive. In those days, the Baath Party did little to hide its disdain for Islam.

RETURNING TO ERBIL the following evening, I went directly to the family home of Othman and Kanan Rashad Mufti, two brothers in their fifties whose father, Rashad Mufti, had been a famous Qadiri religious leader and judge. Othman and I had a date to attend a ritual ceremony in a local tekiye, or religious meeting place, an excursion that he had already prepared me for by showing me graphic photographs of long-haired dervishes plunging swords and daggers into their bodies.

The Qadiris and Naqshbandis, to which the Barzanis belonged, are the two great Sufi orders of Kurdistan. Like all Sufi orders, they are mystical Islamic sects whose members work to achieve a personal, ecstatic communion with G.o.d. The Naqshbandis do so through quiet meditation, the Qadiris through ritual ceremony. Both orders' spiritual leaders, the shaikhs, have at times played extremely powerful roles in Kurdistan, forming alliances with wealthy aghas and leading ma.s.s rebellions. Kurdistan's earliest nationalist movements were led by shaikhs, and the Barzani family could not have reached the prominence that it did without its standing in the Naqshbandi order. Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK party, also came from a shaikhly family, of the Qadiri order. Both orders transcend tribal loyalties, however, and once counted many tens of thousands of Kurds from many different tribes among their followers.

The Qadiri order arrived first in Kurdistan. Founded in the twelfth century by Shaikh Abd al-Qadir, originally of Gilan in Persia but later of Baghdad, it spread to southern Kurdistan around 1360. The Naqshbandi order, founded in the fourteenth century by Baha ad-Din Naqshband in Bukhara, in today's Uzbekistan, arrived in Kurdistan only in the early nineteenth century, but spread with much greater rapidity, largely because of its charismatic Kurdish leader, Mawlana Khalid. However, since the rise of the modern nation-states and the Kurds' growing awareness of the outside world, the influence of both sects has precipitously declined. Today, many educated Kurds scoff at the old-fas.h.i.+oned ways of the shaikhs, whose most dedicated followers remain the uneducated, powerless, and poor.

Arriving at the Mufti family home at about eight P.M., I found its front porch crowded with visitors, most older men in baggy pants and turbans, visiting in a carryover tradition from the former Rashad Mufti's religious leaders.h.i.+p days. Neither of Rashad's sons was a religious leader-Kanan ran Erbil's archaeological museum, and Othman was director of the Ministry of Islamic and Religious Affairs-but because of their family's notable standing, dating back centuries, many believers still visited their home every evening, some coming for advice, others to socialize. The crowd made me wonder when the two brothers ever got a chance to rest.

Joining me at the Mufti family home were my English professor friend Himdad, and several of his friends. Himdad had agreed to serve as my translator that evening, and his friends had asked to come along. None of them had ever been to a Qadiri religious meeting before, and there was an escalating buzz of excitement among us as we waited to depart. Rezan, the woman translator who had shown me around Erbil, had also wanted to come, but because the ceremony was held at night, her attendance was impossible.

Finally, it was time to go. Othman's wife lent me her abeyya, the black tentlike garment that covers everything but the face, and we set off, heading to the Kesnazan tekiye in one of the darker and older sections of town. As we drove, Othman expressed some last-minute reservations about bringing me along. I would be the only woman there, he said, as the ceremony was only for men, and although he'd cleared my attendance with the local shaikh, some believers might resent my presence. I didn't take his words to heart; I'd been hoping to attend a Qadiri ceremony ever since arriving in Kurdistan.

As we neared the tekiye, the street around us became crowded with cars and men, while, at the end of the block, an entrance door blazed silver-white in the darkness. Parking, we headed toward the sound of drums and a chanted prayer, or zikr, which is a recitation of the divine name. The sea of men parted neatly, chanting all the while, and we pa.s.sed into a foyer, where we took off our shoes, to add them to the hundreds already puddled all over the floor.

We entered a well-lit, rectangular room, where lines of men in baggy pants or caftans sat cross-legged against the walls and in a neat double row in the center. Some wore white or embroidered caps, and all were chanting "Ya, Allah" over and over. On the walls above hung banners embroidered with the names of Allah and the Prophet Muhammad, while up front sat a round, white-bearded shaikh in a bright green turban, a dagger at his waist, leading the zikr through a microphone. We joined the shaikh at the front and watched as believers filed steadily in until every inch of the floor was covered with perhaps three hundred cross-legged men. "You are the strongest, You are Almighty, stop this oppression," said the shaikh in a prayer as the chanting continued.

The men stood up, and recited the Islamic shahada, or confession of faith, "La elaha ella Allah"-There is no G.o.d but G.o.d. As they chanted, the men rhythmically moved their heads up and down, slowly at first but then faster and faster, as their breaths became shorter and punchier, and the shahada gave way to Allah, Allah, Allah. Three men entered thumping dafs-large tambourines-and some of the chanters took off their caps to let loose long cascading hair that they swung up and down with ever increasing speed until I could hear them crack. One man pointed at the sky, shouting "Allah, Allah, " then collapsed into a faint, to be pulled out of harm's way by his colleagues.

Another shaikh entered, this one dressed in a green-and-gold cape and turban, followed by a dozen believers. The shaikh beside us took a few angry steps forward. This was his tekiye!, the new shaikh was intruding!- perhaps, Othman said, because he'd heard of my presence, which seemed to be eliciting more curiosity than disapproval. Someone brandished a sword, sending a ripple of fear and excitement through me, and the first shaikh became angrier than ever. Apparently, he had commanded his followers to refrain from using swords that night-at Othman's urging for my sake, I suspected. But the new shaikh was protesting that decision, with my secret encouragement.

The lights went out, and we all sat down while the shaikhs negotiated. The room grew hotter, the chanting louder. A man came up to me in the semidarkness, munching on a tea gla.s.s and pointing at my camera, and I dutifully took a picture of his mouth, miraculously devoid of cuts. Then the believers stood up again, and suddenly the swords and skewerlike daggers came out, by the dozens it seemed. The first shaikh had lost the battle, and the men were in a frenzy to begin. The chanting and drumming grew louder, more men pointed at the ceiling and collapsed, hair flashed. One man approached me with a dagger, crouched down, and pushed the skewer through one cheek and out the other, followed by another man who did the same with a skewer pushed through his lower jaw. The men walked around the crowd for several minutes, making sure I took their pictures, before pulling the skewers out again and pressing their thumbs against the wounds.