Archive
A ‘thank you’ to Iraqi Kurds in the name of foreign reporters
I’m writing with news of something I’ve helped work on for over the past 18 months with one of my heroes, American writer and ex-international correspondent Jonathan Randal. It’s called the Kurdistan Mental Health Project. It’s a ray of hope at a time when people are enduring several conflicts around the world that once again are killing, maiming and uprooting lives.
Thanks to this project, a gift in the name of the foreign correspondents and researchers who have covered Iraqi Kurdistan’s ordeals, 30 young psychology graduates and practitioners will begin on 16 January 2024 being trained across Iraqi Kurdistan at the start of a two-year course on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
This ‘talking’ treatment is a first step to help Kurds move sustainably beyond their traumatic history: brutal campaigns by Saddam Hussein, the genocidal Islamic State assault on the Yezidis and other violence that has scarred the region. Despite Kurdish society’s pressing need for access to contemporary psychological treatment, there is not much beyond medication and/or denial being done to overcome the personal and collective damage done by these ordeals.
You can find out more about the Kurdistan Mental Health Project here on the website of the Anglo-Kurdish charity that thought up the project. The therapy is being taught online by a group of teachers linked to Oxford University and being coordinated on the ground by an Iraqi Kurdish training center.
The first two years of the project are being paid for by an anonymous gift in the name of friends of Kurdistan, many of them journalists, who researched in or reported on the region. In part, this is a ‘thank you’ to all the Kurds who so generously helped those who travelled there. Despite the risks, they ensured our access to people and safety getting in – and out – of Kurdistan to inform the outside world about their long-suppressed cause.
Ideally, the project will find new backers to run four years more, at which point we hope the Kurdistan Regional Government will keep it going. You can scroll down to the bottom of the page from here to sign up to a newsletter that will post occasional updates about the project. Or if you like, click here to find out how to make a private donation, if you like.
We’d love it if you would please help spread the word, which we hope would attract support from outside governments (some are already interested) and the bigger foundations already present in Iraqi Kurdistan. Such institutional funding is likely the best way to get the Kurdistan Mental Health Project on its legs.
Please do forward a link to this post to anyone you think might like to hear about this, or post a few of your own words on social media with a link to project’s page on the charity website, perhaps accompanied by a picture of yourself in action in Iraqi Kurdistan and the hashtag #kurdistanmentalhealth. These would both be wonderful ways to show solidarity with this initiative.
Iraqi Kurdistan: an audience in the palace
Being ushered into the presence of a country’s most powerful person is a highlight of any trip. In Iraqi Kurdistan, that means visiting Masoud Barzani, former president and leader of the biggest political-military movement.
Thanks to the chance to travel in the company of Jonathan Randal – revered here for his book on the Kurds and reporting for the Washington Post – that also means being picked up in a motorcade of black limousines and swept up to Barzani’s palace on the smooth first fold in the mountains that rise north of the capital, Erbil.
Jon told Barzani how grateful he still was for Barzani’s role in saving him and an embattled group of foreign reporters whom Barzani helped make it out of Iraqi Kurdistan safely in 1991, just ahead of advancing Iraqi troops. Barzani then reminded us of how one day in 1996 he’d been in his home village of Barzan, its houses then still flattened piles of rubble after being blown up a decade before by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein when Jon suddenly appeared in front of him with a first rapid-fire question: “What are you doing here?” To which Barzani remembered replying: “This is my village. What are YOU doing here?”
It’s a good question. Jon, now 89, usually says that the Kurds were his last reporting love because, however desperate their predicament, they could laugh at it and make him laugh too. I was once again with Jon that day in Barzan, and remember how we stopped on the potholed road, jumped out of the pretty white Suzuki jeeps that we’d driven over from Turkey and astonished Barzani’s entourage by wandering up to talk – interrupting what they’d hoped would be a day off in a tense period of soon-to-turn-deadly internal Kurdish political rivalry.
My contribution to our palace visit was a memory from further back: a gift of two pictures of Barzani as a young guerrilla leader in the mountains in 1985, when the Iraqi Kurds became tangled up in the Iran-Iraq war. Barzani remembered that day too. “Our headquarters was half an hour away and the Iranians told us a group of their senior commanders were coming. So we hurried over,” he said. “Then we found the Iranians had brought a group of journalists. The Iranians were very keen to make it look like we were fighting alongside them.”
In the shifting Bermuda triangle of Kurdish geopolitics, Iran, like Turkey, is now occasionally bombing bits of Iraqi Kurdistan to underline its discomfort with Kurdish issues and to provide distraction from domestic problems. But nearly forty years since my first visit in that Iranian helicopter, it’s the only place in the Middle East I can think of where the same man still presides over his people. A lot has improved, with roads, airports, some international recognition and construction everywhere. Many enduring and apparently insoluble problems remain, of course, yet Iraqi Kurds still manage to laugh at some of them.
How to buy your copy of the new edition of Dining with al-Qaeda
There are two ways to acquire a copy of the new paperback edition of Dining with al-Qaeda: Making Sense of the Middle East.
The easiest and least costly is to order the new Kindle Direct Publishing version on Amazon.com wherever you are in the world – normally $18.99 or equivalent plus postage
If you would like a high-quality version of the book – printed specially in England with 100g/m paper, finer printing of the pictures and lovely inside cover illustrations – please email me directly at hughpopebooks@gmail.com.
This version of the book costs £22/€26/$31. Postage is extra, usually the equivalent of 10-13 euros. Payment can be made by Paypal or bank transfer in the UK, EU, Turkey or the US. Typically, delivery is made in about 10 days.
In the US it is easy to find used copies of the US hardback edition on Amazon, but be warned that the typeface is quite small (the publisher, Thomas Dunn/St Martins Press, said I either had to cut two chapters or shrink the font, and authorial pride won). The photos in the 2010 edition were also minimalist; the 2021 editions have 90 illustrations, double the number and printed larger.
Dining with al-Qaeda out in a new, updated UK paperback
The updated, UK paperback edition of Dining with al-Qaeda is out! The book has a new subtitle “Making Sense of the Middle East”, a striking new cover and inside cover artwork from the Naranjestan Palace in Shiraz, Iran.
The only way to buy this edition is by messaging me here (hughpopebooks@gmail.com). The book costs £22/€26/$31. Sending to an address in the UK adds £3 in postage, making £25. For sending to an address in Europe and the rest of the world, the cost including postage is £39/€43/$50. (The previous US rate is now no longer valid after changes in postage rates). Registered post is 5 euros extra. Payment can be made by Paypal or bank transfer in the UK, EU, Turkey or the US. Typically, delivery is made in about 10 days.
Encouraged by praise from Publisher’s Weekly for the first edition’s 40 “exquisite photographs”, I’ve added another 50 of my favourite black and white images and given them all more space. Fine-tuned and rearranged by designer Kjell Olsson, they now pop out of the page on sleek 100g white paper. The new text also now uses British English spelling, has a larger and smoother typeface and, whisper it, has bid farewell to most of the U.S. edition’s Oxford commas.
There’s a new prologue too, explaining the other reason I’m putting the book back into wider circulation: I think it is still as relevant as it was in 2010. I’ve added a few lines here and there to underline that point from time to time. But Dining with al-Qaeda remains a personal bildungsroman based on my three decades of exploration, adventures and newspaper reporting in the region. I wrote it to give readers a feeling for Middle Eastern peoples, places and dynamics, not to detail a blow-by-blow account of the latest news.
Focused as it was on describing the Middle East as I lived it, including previous “springtimes” of democratic hope, the first edition was not about the Arab uprisings that began a couple of years after I finished the original text. But the underlying need for more understanding is just as urgent today as then. The turmoil of the past decade – popular hopes for greater freedoms, grim repressions and wars – follows pre-existing patterns that are the warp and weft of this volume.
“[Dining with al-Qaeda is] among the handful of books that explain the road that led [to 2011’s Arab Uprisings]. This book is recommended not just for its easy readability and its rich colours [but also] as an introduction to how stories become articles … particularly impressive is his skill in presenting the various sides, for example seeing the same event from Palestinian and Israeli, or through Arab and American eyes.”
Walter Posch, Journal for Intelligence Propaganda and Security Studies, Aug 2013
The first edition was excerpted in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines, as well as being translated into French. Dining with al-Qaeda has been widely praised as “a very good book” (The Economist ), “terrific” (Ian Black in The Guardian), and a “fascinating memoir” (Publishers’ Weekly ). You can find many other reviews here.
I hope you enjoy this now even more readable book!
The zig-zagging rise of the Kurds
Again it has taken a tragedy – this time, the jihadi massacres of Yezidi Kurds on the slopes of northern Iraq’s Mount Sinjar – to focus international attention on the Kurds and on how precarious their lives can be. Yet beyond such drama, recent trips among Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi Kurds have made me conscious of a new surge of self-assurance and intertwining in this once-marginalised and disparate group of peoples, who number perhaps 25-30 million people between Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
Kurds have been victims of terrible events, like Saddam Hussein’s 1988 Halabja chemical weapons attack, or, as here in Turkey in 1991, forced to flee to neighbouring countries as the Iraqi president’s troops attacked after the first Gulf War.
On a July trip through northern Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds’ Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) looked more prosperous and autonomous than ever, part of a two-decade-long trend of development that has persuaded the U.S. President to tell the New York Times it is “functional the way we would like to see”. And despite the KRG’s real shortcomings – contested territorial ambitions, poor governance and a tendency for its fabled peshmerga fighters to run away to fight another day – the Iraqi Kurds’ relative success is also part of broader new Kurdish ambitions and recognition.
The renovated main square of Erbil, capital of the Iraqi Kurds’ Kurdistan Regional Government
In Syria, whose Kurdish minority was almost invisible to outsiders until a year or two ago, the main Kurdish militia has carved out three relatively autonomous cantons. It has so far held its ground against the jihadists of the Islamic State with little outside aid and – despite some early rivalry with the KRG – helped the Iraqi Kurd peshmerga defend the Yazidis and hit back against the jihadis inside Iraq. In a rarely seen moment of Kurdish solidarity, Turkish Kurd fighters have now also joined the front lines of both Iraqi Kurd peshmerga and Syrian Kurd militia.
More than half of the world’s Kurds live in Turkey, and they are tasting new success there too. After 30 years of fighting the main insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), top Turkish and PKK officials now say they think it unlikely they can defeat each other militarily, and peace talks are making progress. Even non-PKK Kurds in Diyarbakir now speak glowingly of trying to win the kind of autonomy that the Iraqi Kurds enjoy. And on August 10, an unabashed Turkish Kurd national movement leader won nearly 10 per cent of the overall vote as a presidential candidate in Turkey – sweeping in first in 11 provinces in southeastern Turkey.
Much-jailed Turkish Kurd leader Ahmet Türk (second from right) dances at a party two months after his March 2014 election as the municipal mayor of a major Kurdish-majority province in Turkey. On the right is his co-maor, Syriac Orthodox Christian Februniye Akyol.
There are deep cracks in the foundations of this Kurdish progress: clashes of interest with neighbouring Turkish, Iranian and Arab states, the Kurds’ disconnected mountain geography, their divided tribal societies, and their four main dialects, which are mutually hard to understand. Iraqi Kurds have yet to prove they can prosper without their share of oil income from Baghdad, have occupied territory well beyond what their Arab and other neighbours consider to be fair and have kept a tight rein on KRG media. A foreign security expert resident in the KRG told me there were increasing fears of a domestic backlash against the alleged corruption and concentration of wealth in the ruling elite – epitomised by the ownership of some of Erbil’s grandest building projects. The wounds of internecine strife in the 1990s are still unhealed: inside the KRG’s own territory, I still passed through checkpoints that divide the region up between at least three armed factions.
In Syria, the main Kurdish organisation faces long term liabilities, with threats from jihadists on one side, and continued links with the Syrian regime on the other (for instance, see Crisis Group’s May 2014 report Flight of Icarus: The PYD’s Precarious Rise in Syria). Turkey’s main Kurdish movement is beholden to armed insurgents, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which itself is burdened with a designation as an international terrorist group (more here). And, beyond news of occasional executions, Iran lets slip little information about the situation of its Kurds, two of whose most important leaders were murdered in exile by gunmen linked to Tehran in 1989 and 1992 (a book with rare and compelling reporting on one of these killings can be found here).
Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani takes a break in his hometown of Barzan, 1992
Nevertheless, many changes seem almost miraculous. When I first met KRG President Masoud Barzani during the Iran-Iraq war in 1985 – he was then a young guerrilla chief fighting on the Iranian side, and the Iranian army helicoptered us in for a surprise visit to his Loulan camp in a remote mountain corner of northern Iraq – nobody in my group of a dozen journalists had much idea who he or the Kurds really were. When I started visiting Turkey in 1980, few non-Kurds seemed to care that the government was still ordering its officials to deny that the country’s Kurds existed and to call them “Mountain Turks”. In the 1990s, when I tried to pitch a story on the region’s Kurds to the Los Angeles Times, a kindly editor wrote back to advise me “don’t put the word ‘Kurd’ in [your proposal] … To us, it guarantees that we won’t understand the story”.
In 1991, as a reporter I witnessed the stumbling dawn of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. Back then, travel between major cities took hours on dizzying, broken-down mountain roads. Vehicles were falling apart and smuggled fuel was (and often still is) sold in barrels and plastic jerry cans. All around us villages had been flattened into non-existence, often with not a stone left standing on another, sad evidence of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal scorched-earth policies.
Village houses flattened by Saddam Hussein, 1992 (left) Kurds crossing the Tigris from Syria to Iraq, 2002 (right).
Two decades later, a Kurdistan has emerged, even if its legal status remains something of an elastic envelope. Iraqi Kurds seem to be able to use their growing international recognition and support to keep on pushing out, waiting, and pushing out again. Entering the KRG no longer needs a ride on a tin-tub speedboat across the Tigris River or shadowy permits from Syrian intelligence: there are now direct international flights to Erbil airport and its sleek tubular arches, and KRG border police stamp a welcome into many country’s passports without demanding a visa. To go on to Baghdad, however, a proper Iraqi visa is needed.
Not surprisingly for a people for whom smuggling between neighbouring states has long been a way of life, the American dollar is as good a currency as the Iraqi dinar. The newest computers, top-of-the-line cameras and surveillance equipment are carted off to the rest of Iraq, Iran and Turkey from Erbil’s bustling electronics district, which charges lower prices than New York, partly because nothing seems to be taxed. Things don’t always work out. Because Baghdad insists all Iraqi oil must be marketed through the central government [corrected: see below], two tankers full of the Iraqi Kurds’ first oil shipments that used an Iraqi pipeline through Turkey were kept floating off the U.S. coast for weeks in a legal limbo this summer. But some Kurdish oil is finding buyers.
Breaking the Ramadan fast at a falafel seller in a renovated part of Erbil’s city centre.
Growing assertiveness is showing in Kurdish languages and cultures. When I traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1990s and early 2000s, outsiders mostly used Iraq’s national language of Arabic for work. When the Kurdish zone expanded anew during the 2003 war, I moved with Kurdish fighters into territory formerly held by the deposed Saddam Hussein regime — once again into Kurdish towns with shop signs only in Arabic. Domestically, a main concern for Masoud Barzani’s region-wide television station has been to coin a new kind of high Kurdish as a language that would be understood through the whole territory. This is still a work in progress: a refugee Syrian Kurdish schoolteacher in Erbil told me in July that after nearly a year here he still couldn’t fully understand the Iraqi Kurds’ main east-central Sorani dialect. Arabic, however, was much less known to those educated after 1991. “Learn Kurdish!” the two young men who drove me across the country ended up yelling in frustration as our conversation reached another dead end. It was true: anybody seeking to operate effectively outside the English-speakers in Iraqi Kurdistan’s elite now needs to do just that.
Erbil’s castle.
The city of Erbil, now the KRG capital, is still dominated by its ‘castle’, an oval of fortifications and brick mansions on the site of an ancient settlement or ‘tel’ that through history has risen 50 meters over the plains around. The castle is being restored and the city is in the throes of a rapid transformation. Concentric ring roads are expanding like ripples in what has become a concrete sea. Wide highways are well-paved and busy with new-looking, sometimes expensive cars. One of the biggest buildings in the city used to be the Saddam-era regional parliament building; now it’s hard to spot. At the same time, large parks have been laid out that attract crowds after the heat of the day.
In old parts of Erbil a few old low-rise brick houses (above left) can still be found. But they are giving way to 20-story luxury mall-and-residence complexes. New-build housing estates now extend far into the surrounding plains (above right) and hills to the north.
Several new glittering malls (like the Royal Mall, above left) compete for attention from the elites. Construction is under way to rebuild the more popular Kayseri Market in the city center (above right), where straw-coloured brick vaults now frame bazaar shops that sell everything from Kurdish cradles and carpets to dried vegetables, gold and mountain honey. Soon there will be nothing left of the old corrugated iron roofs riddled with holes, a continued legacy of the malevolent neglect of Saddam Hussein’s rule.
A new sense of Kurdish pride can be felt, too, from the first ‘Welcome to Kurdistan’ sign in the airport bank ads to the vast flag that now flies over the Erbil castle (above left). After years of Iraqi oppression of Kurdishness, one petrol station (above right) seemed to feel the need to plaster the word ‘Kurd’ everywhere. Back in 1991, just after renewed Western protection gave the Iraqi Kurds their road to more autonomy, if people wanted to fly the sunburst flag of Kurdistan, they had to draw it by hand on pieces of paper.
Between long stretches of empty mountains, there are still storks on the electricity pylons and great herds of sheep and goats. But the places where the roads now turn into the jarring old bone-shakers mostly seem to be where a dam or bridge is being built nearby. The countryside is busy too: towns given over to the production of concrete breeze-blocks, or valleys in which the newly rich find hills and outcrops on which to build their own private villa-castles as summer weekend retreats.
Old flat-roofed mountain villages stepped up the mountainsides have become rarer but still possible to see.
In a sign that KRG President Barzani also remembers the precariousness of the past, however, he prudently keeps his main residence and workplace on a hard-to-attack ridge in the first line of mountain foothills north of Erbil. For sure, the Kurds have a long way to go, and any independent state, for instance, would prove much harder than it looks. Weeks after my visit to Erbil, judged safe for travellers in recent years, the city came under threat of direct attack by the jihadists from the new Islamic State. But, with help from Syrian and Turkish Kurds, its defenses have not crumbled.
The Qandil valley
Such cooperation, until recently unthinkable, are part of the recent intertwining of the fates of the Iraqi Kurds’ KRG, Turkish Kurds and Syrian Kurds. This could be seen not just in the operations to save the Yezidis and others but also somewhere as remote as the PKK headquarters, at times attacked and often only grudgingly tolerated by the KRG in the remote Qandil Valley. The KRG authorities have now extended a new line of electricity poles, cellphone service and a good main road to the small Iraqi Kurdish villages there. Villagers live in apparent harmony with PKK checkpoints and the presence of hundreds, if not thousands, of Turkish Kurd insurgents camped out in the mountains above. Another powerfully revived link is between Syrian and Turkish Kurds, with perhaps 250,000 Syrian Kurds fleeing to Kurdish areas of Turkey in the past year (described in my Crisis Group blog here) and Turkish Kurds giving military and humanitarian aid to their cousins in Syria.
The PKK’s cemetery and parade ground in Qandil Valley.
Alongside Qandil’s well-built Iraqi Kurdish village houses, squabbling ducks in the water canals and peach orchards heavy with fruit, a number of buildings lie flattened after attacks on the PKK by the Turkish Air Force in recent years. But even here, there is hope of change and peace after 30 years of a war that has killed at least 30,000 people on both sides. The PKK is becoming more open too, and won some of its first positive press in the West for their role in defending the Yezidi Kurds in Sinjar from jihadi attack (for instance, in Prospect Magazine and the Daily Beast).
Village house in Qandil said by the PKK to have been flattened by Turkish Air Force action.
Long journeys from little-known places by determined, well-organized people can sometimes reach their goal: Qandil is not far as the crow flies from Loulan, where I first met Barzani earlier in his Kurdish struggle 30 years ago. Passing the last PKK checkpoint on my way home, I asked one of the Turkish Kurd insurgents about what lay behind his dedication to a cause and an organisation that required him to live indefinitely without pay, without holidays, without families, and without a love life. He laughed wryly and took the long view of a true believer.
“I guess you could say we’re like a dervish lodge”, said the man in his 30s. “And we’ll keep at it until we win the rights we want for the Kurds.”
***
All photographs copyright by Hugh Pope
This version of the article article has removed an incorrect reference to sales of Iraqi Kurdish oil having to be directed through Baghdad according to U.S. and international law.
Black Snakes, Undershirts and the Peacock Angel
The penultimate chapter of Dining with al-Qaeda focuses on my experiences during the Iraq war with the Yezidi community, who straddle the northeastern corner of Iraq and patches of southeast Turkey. These 500,000 people seemed to me to be as representative as any of the other pieces of the Iraqi mosaic before, during and after the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein. Their fate seemed particularly unfair to me, since they had laid good plans for the future. Like many Iraqis, any hopes of quick improvement were dashed.
I also chose to write about them because, thanks to my Kurdish interpreter and fixer Sagvan Murad (see picture left), a Yezidi activist in his regular life, I had privileged access to the community. A strange aspect of the Yezidi faith is that even its adherents know little of the exact tenets of their religion — except for emphatic denial of outsiders’ prejudice that they ‘worship the devil’. Ultimately they are monotheists with a special reverence for their protector, the Peacock Angel.
One of the outsiders who knows the Yezidis best – Eszter Spät of Hungary, author of one of the only good books on the community – has now put together an intriguing website illustrating Yezidi holy objects from their peacock standards to the religious ceremonies surrounding their traditional undershirts. Through photographs (click on them to make them bigger), she and her collaborators show how straightforward observation and photographs gets as close to the truth about the Middle East than any formal history, theorizing or journalistic shorthand.
Spät’s website also set me straight on one thing about the black snake on the wall of the shrine of Yezidi divine Sheikh Adi in Lalish (visible on the photo here too). Nobody knows quite what it symbolizes, but Yezidi myths have it that a black snake led Noah and his ark of animals to safety. Yezidis had previously joked with me that this snake was kept black with shoe polish. According to Spät, however, it’s really done with the soot of the holy oil lamps…
The oil is still stored in ancient amphorae deep in the shrine, where, equipped with my trusty headlamp, Murad and I explored the inner recesses and stone-carved underground spring. Murad taught me how to make a wish in the amphora store by tossing an old rag backwards over my head to land on a ledge (I was successful on my third attempt). One of his wishes must have come true: while things have been pretty tough for Yezidis since 2003, he’s now risen high to become acting chief of protocol for Iraqi President Jalal Talabani!
Hugh Pope 