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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.
Hugh Pope 