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Kevin McKiernan has reported on the Kurds of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria since 1991, but he began his career as a journalist in the 1970s covering armed confrontations by Native Americans. In The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland he draws parallels---using examples of culture, language, and genocide---between Native American history and the experience of the Kurds. With a population of more than twenty-five million, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state, but until recently their long struggle for autonomy has received relatively little attention. Following World War I, the Kurds were promised a homeland, but the dream collapsed amid pressures of Turkish nationalism and the Allied realignment of the Middle East. For the remainder of the century, the story of the Kurds was one of almost constant conflict, as Middle East governments repressed Kurdish culture, language, and politics, destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages, "disappeared" and even gassed the Kurds---often as the West provided military assistance or simply looked away.
The Kurds are politically and ideologically diverse and were never a "nation" in the modern sense, but their struggles for self-determination have been repeatedly betrayed by outside powers. Yet in 1996, a Syrian Kurd would boldly inform the author that the Kurds "were a key to the stability of the Middle East"---prophetic words today, McKiernan writes, as the fallout from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and other developments join to make Kurdish independence a likely, if not imminent, prospect.
McKiernan mixes Middle East history with personal narrative, as he comes face-to-face with Kurdish refugees in the mountains of Iraq and Iran, a hidden war in Turkey, guerrilla safe houses in Syria and Lebanon, backpacking trips behind army lines, scrapes with hostile soldiers, and, finally, the discovery that his personal translator during the Iraq war was also a spy for Saddam Hussein. His complex portrait of the Kurds includes interviews with Jalal Talabani, the first Kurdish president of Iraq, members of the legendary Barzani family, and Abdullah Ocalan, the now-imprisoned leader of the lengthy Kurdish uprising in Turkey. Interwoven throughout is the story of the author's charming and resilient driver who survived a terrorist attack in Iraq, and the American doctors who nursed him back to health.
McKiernan's coverage of the war in Iraq includes a visit to the camp of militants linked to al-Qaeda who were responsible for a series of suicide bombings in the Kurdish region, and he examines how U.S. preoccupation with toppling Saddam Hussein allowed many of these insurgents to escape to Iran, regroup, and later turn their jihad against the American occupation. McKiernan also examines the role of journalists in the run-up to the war as he tells how his Kurd-provided "scoop" about Iraqi scientists came to be used in U.S. claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Kevin McKiernan has been a war correspondent for over thirty years. He covered the Iraq war for ABC News in both Kurdish and Arab areas. Prior to that, he coproduced The Spirit of Crazy Horse for PBS Frontline and wrote and directed Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, the award-winning PBS documentary. McKiernan has published articles about and photographs of the Kurds in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and other publications. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One
Viva la Fiesta
A man who has been bitten by a snake will always be afraid of rope.
--Kurdish proverb
Beginning
As bulldozers unearthed the corpses of fifty-four men executed in 1983 by Saddam Hussein's troops, several Kurds from a nearby refugee camp stared at the remains with curiosity. "They are just skeletons in uniforms," said one refugee.
The hands of many of the captives had been tied, noted another refugee, remarking that the killings must have been hasty: Loaded ammunition clips clung to their belts and one of the dead wore a canteen that was still full, eight years later. Someone unhooked it from the skeleton's belt and emptied the water into the grave. Nevertheless, what stuck in the minds of the Kurds, traumatized victims of a genocidal campaign largely unknown in the West at the time, was the sight of the watches, inexpensive ones, on the wrists of two of the corpses. The brand name was Orient, and the watches were still ticking. One witness told me calmly, "Everyone here was surprised that watches could last so long underground."
Watches ticking on the wrists of skeletons. Husbands and sons disappearing. Millions of refugees fleeing for the mountains in winter lest they, too, "disappear." Such searing images were my introduction to the Kurds when I arrived in northern Iraq in 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War. The White House had exhorted the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. The Kurds did rebel, but without aid from Washington, they were savagely crushed, and one and one-half million starving refugees were driven into the mountains of Iran and Turkey. I followed their story in all three countries, and then I saw it fall out of the news. That was a dozen years before a U.S. invasion would topple Hussein, bringing Shiite Arabs and minority Kurds to power in Baghdad and setting the stage for the Transitional National Assembly's selection of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president of Iraq.
By 1991, I had seen my share of conflict as a journalist, beginning as a public radio reporter in the 1970s, when I covered the FBI-Indian wars in South Dakota. Since then, I had been a witness to war in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. Despite the horrors I had seen elsewhere, I was unprepared for the scale of devastation visited upon the Kurds. By the time I arrived in Iraq, one hundred eighty thousand Kurds were dead or missing, according to human rights monitors, and nearly four thousand villages had been destroyed in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees still remained in the mountains, most of them living in tents in the snow or under plastic tarps, still terrified that Hussein's troops--who were regrouping after their retreat from Kuwait--would return.
Before long, many of the Kurdish refugees I met would be inching their way home, putting the nightmare of Iraqi domination behind them, trying to piece together a future. For the remainder of the decade, Iraqi Kurds would occupy a mini-enclave in northern Iraq, protected by allied overflights but mostly forgotten by the world. After a quarter century of forced relocation to "modern villages," mass murder, and widespread disappearances, they suddenly found themselves in the throes of a fragile liberation. For the first time, the Iraqi Kurds could travel and associate freely, share information, trace missing relatives, and rebuild villages. Sporadic fighting remained between Iraqi soldiers and the Kurdish peshmerga (those who face death). But each day, despite the misgivings of neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria, and even the United States, the Kurds of Iraq were moving closer to autonomy, if not eventual independence. Despite betrayals by friends and allies, something in their spirit, if not their luck, seemed to be changing.
I didn't realize it at first, but the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. Like many first-time visitors, I would learn that "Kurdistan" was an ethnic mosaic of shifting tribal alliances that had been divided historically among the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian empires. It had never been a unified nation, but the territory of the Kurds inside the Ottoman empire, a politically and linguistically diverse area, had been carved up after World War I, the land parceled out to Iraq, Turkey, and Syria (at this point, the borders of Kurdish areas in Iran and the Soviet Union already existed). At the time, I had little sense of the Kurdish dream of reunification or of the regional powers that manipulated internal divisions among the Kurds to deny them that dream. To appreciate the complex and interwoven world of a divided people, I needed to follow the story beyond Iraq, across illusory borders to neighboring countries--especially to Turkey, which is home to a majority of the world's Kurds. It was only after more than a dozen trips to these Kurdistans, some of the visits lasting months, that I began to realize that what had occurred in this seemingly remote land had important connections to the West, especially to the United States.
As the Kurds emerged from the shadow of history, and I pursued their multilayered story, two insights slowly came into focus. I began to realize that the local repression of the Kurds in the Middle East had been--and was being--carried out with international assistance, primarily through the supply of weapons, and, accordingly, that war crimes trials for individuals such as the "Butcher of Baghdad" would accomplish little more than revenge if the important lessons of this collusion were ignored. The other realization was the striking relevance of American history, a parallel that gradually illuminated each successive journey. As I pushed deeper into Kurdistan, I was struck by the fact that the Kurdish story mirrored key aspects of the conflict over land, language, and identity I had encountered at home as a young American reporter in Indian Country.
In 1991 I certainly had no idea of what lay ahead. Little could I imagine that I was embarking on an odyssey that would take years and that would bring me face-to-face with the ongoing struggle of Kurds in Iraq and Iran, a hidden war in Turkey, where I'd see Kurdish refugees driven from their homes by U.S. weapons, guerrilla safe houses in Syria and Lebanon, backpacking trips behind army lines, and more than a few scrapes with hostile soldiers. I had little inkling of future regime change in Baghdad or of a post-Saddam era in which the Kurds' old fear of dictatorship would be replaced by heady nationalism. Finally, like many others, I could not have predicted the U.S. occupation misfortune or the ferocity of an insurgency that would threaten Iraq's unity, inadvertently propelling the Kurds toward autonomy and homeland.
Hometown Pageantry
It was a hot afternoon in August, a few months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and Santa Barbara's Fiesta parade was about to begin. By now, rodeo riders were kicking up dust at the Earl Warren Showgrounds, the barbeque grills on East Beach were smoking, and bars all over the resort town were coming alive with mariachi music. The sidewalks in front of the Paseo Nuevo mall were packed. Onlookers yelled, "Viva la Fiesta!" and playfully cracked each other with cascarónes, colored eggs filled with confetti. As the crowds jockeyed for position, politicians waved flat-brimmed flamenco hats from motorized floats, and little girls in ruffled dance dresses, trajes flamencas, twirled in the street.
In another clash of culture and politics, a small group of Chumash Indians hoisted placards protesting the enslavement of native tribes in the late 1700s, the period when Spain built a Catholic mission and a military garrison in Santa Barbara. Such counterdemonstrations took place every summer. For most parade watchers, the protests were a harmless sideshow, almost a part of the festivities. If there were contradictions, the noisy hoopla seemed to drown them out. Old Spanish Days was as close as Santa Barbara came to a sanctioned, citywide bash. Now in its seventy-ninth year, the fiesta had become an annual tourism bonanza for local merchants, a hybrid ethnic event promoted by the city council and the chamber of commerce. The war in Iraq seemed over. It was carnival time in Santa Barbara.
The Kurdish Driver
Among the thousands attending the festivities was Karzan Mahmoud, my Kurdish driver from northern Iraq. I watched Karzan slip into the middle of State Street, awkwardly clutching a Kodak camera in his left hand. He was trying to take photos of the deputy sheriffs passing on horseback. The deputies were decked out in cowboy boots and hats, wore pearl-handled revolvers in holsters, and carried rifles in leather cases by their silver-colored saddles. Karzan's right hand, mangled in a terrorist attack in Iraq, lay stiffly at his side, but that crisis was largely behind him now and he seemed delighted by the spectacle. He had seen cowboys and horses in the black-and-white westerns on Iraqi TV. Now he was in California, in a western of his own. "Karzan big man," he said jokingly in his much-improved English.
Karzan's camera was a gift from my high school friend, Mike Brabeck, the Boston physician who arranged the U.S. surgeries for Karzan's wounds. The young Kurd, looking much older than his twenty-five years, had been shot the year before in an assassination attempt on the Kurdish prime minister. Hit by twenty-three bullets in less than a minute, Karzan knew it was a wonder he'd survived. For the last few months, thanks to Dr. Brabeck, Massachusetts surgeons had been operating to repair the damage. Recently, the Boston Globe had published a dramatic account of his recovery, complete with before and after photos. Karzan had twenty copies of the Globe story packed away in his suitcase, ready to give his friends back home.
I had met Karzan in northern Iraq in February 2002, when I was on assignment for ABC New...
Kevin McKiernan has been a war correspondent for over thirty years. He covered the Iraq war for ABC News in both Kurdish and Arab areas. Prior to that, he coproduced The Spirit of Crazy Horse for PBS Frontline and wrote and directed Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, the award-winning PBS documentary. McKiernan has published articles about and photographs of the Kurds in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and other publications. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Chapter One
Viva la Fiesta
A man who has been bitten by a snake will always be afraid of rope.
--Kurdish proverb
Beginning
As bulldozers unearthed the corpses of fifty-four men executed in 1983 by Saddam Hussein's troops, several Kurds from a nearby refugee camp stared at the remains with curiosity. "They are just skeletons in uniforms," said one refugee.
The hands of many of the captives had been tied, noted another refugee, remarking that the killings must have been hasty: Loaded ammunition clips clung to their belts and one of the dead wore a canteen that was still full, eight years later. Someone unhooked it from the skeleton's belt and emptied the water into the grave. Nevertheless, what stuck in the minds of the Kurds, traumatized victims of a genocidal campaign largely unknown in the West at the time, was the sight of the watches, inexpensive ones, on the wrists of two of the corpses. The brand name was Orient, and the watches were still ticking. One witness told me calmly, "Everyone here was surprised that watches could last so long underground."
Watches ticking on the wrists of skeletons. Husbands and sons disappearing. Millions of refugees fleeing for the mountains in winter lest they, too, "disappear." Such searing images were my introduction to the Kurds when I arrived in northern Iraq in 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War. The White House had exhorted the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. The Kurds did rebel, but without aid from Washington, they were savagely crushed, and one and one-half million starving refugees were driven into the mountains of Iran and Turkey. I followed their story in all three countries, and then I saw it fall out of the news. That was a dozen years before a U.S. invasion would topple Hussein, bringing Shiite Arabs and minority Kurds to power in Baghdad and setting the stage for the Transitional National Assembly's selection of Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani as president of Iraq.
By 1991, I had seen my share of conflict as a journalist, beginning as a public radio reporter in the 1970s, when I covered the FBI-Indian wars in South Dakota. Since then, I had been a witness to war in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East. Despite the horrors I had seen elsewhere, I was unprepared for the scale of devastation visited upon the Kurds. By the time I arrived in Iraq, one hundred eighty thousand Kurds were dead or missing, according to human rights monitors, and nearly four thousand villages had been destroyed in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees still remained in the mountains, most of them living in tents in the snow or under plastic tarps, still terrified that Hussein's troops--who were regrouping after their retreat from Kuwait--would return.
Before long, many of the Kurdish refugees I met would be inching their way home, putting the nightmare of Iraqi domination behind them, trying to piece together a future. For the remainder of the decade, Iraqi Kurds would occupy a mini-enclave in northern Iraq, protected by allied overflights but mostly forgotten by the world. After a quarter century of forced relocation to "modern villages," mass murder, and widespread disappearances, they suddenly found themselves in the throes of a fragile liberation. For the first time, the Iraqi Kurds could travel and associate freely, share information, trace missing relatives, and rebuild villages. Sporadic fighting remained between Iraqi soldiers and the Kurdish peshmerga (those who face death). But each day, despite the misgivings of neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria, and even the United States, the Kurds of Iraq were moving closer to autonomy, if not eventual independence. Despite betrayals by friends and allies, something in their spirit, if not their luck, seemed to be changing.
I didn't realize it at first, but the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state. Like many first-time visitors, I would learn that "Kurdistan" was an ethnic mosaic of shifting tribal alliances that had been divided historically among the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian empires. It had never been a unified nation, but the territory of the Kurds inside the Ottoman empire, a politically and linguistically diverse area, had been carved up after World War I, the land parceled out to Iraq, Turkey, and Syria (at this point, the borders of Kurdish areas in Iran and the Soviet Union already existed). At the time, I had little sense of the Kurdish dream of reunification or of the regional powers that manipulated internal divisions among the Kurds to deny them that dream. To appreciate the complex and interwoven world of a divided people, I needed to follow the story beyond Iraq, across illusory borders to neighboring countries--especially to Turkey, which is home to a majority of the world's Kurds. It was only after more than a dozen trips to these Kurdistans, some of the visits lasting months, that I began to realize that what had occurred in this seemingly remote land had important connections to the West, especially to the United States.
As the Kurds emerged from the shadow of history, and I pursued their multilayered story, two insights slowly came into focus. I began to realize that the local repression of the Kurds in the Middle East had been--and was being--carried out with international assistance, primarily through the supply of weapons, and, accordingly, that war crimes trials for individuals such as the "Butcher of Baghdad" would accomplish little more than revenge if the important lessons of this collusion were ignored. The other realization was the striking relevance of American history, a parallel that gradually illuminated each successive journey. As I pushed deeper into Kurdistan, I was struck by the fact that the Kurdish story mirrored key aspects of the conflict over land, language, and identity I had encountered at home as a young American reporter in Indian Country.
In 1991 I certainly had no idea of what lay ahead. Little could I imagine that I was embarking on an odyssey that would take years and that would bring me face-to-face with the ongoing struggle of Kurds in Iraq and Iran, a hidden war in Turkey, where I'd see Kurdish refugees driven from their homes by U.S. weapons, guerrilla safe houses in Syria and Lebanon, backpacking trips behind army lines, and more than a few scrapes with hostile soldiers. I had little inkling of future regime change in Baghdad or of a post-Saddam era in which the Kurds' old fear of dictatorship would be replaced by heady nationalism. Finally, like many others, I could not have predicted the U.S. occupation misfortune or the ferocity of an insurgency that would threaten Iraq's unity, inadvertently propelling the Kurds toward autonomy and homeland.
Hometown Pageantry
It was a hot afternoon in August, a few months after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and Santa Barbara's Fiesta parade was about to begin. By now, rodeo riders were kicking up dust at the Earl Warren Showgrounds, the barbeque grills on East Beach were smoking, and bars all over the resort town were coming alive with mariachi music. The sidewalks in front of the Paseo Nuevo mall were packed. Onlookers yelled, "Viva la Fiesta!" and playfully cracked each other with cascarónes, colored eggs filled with confetti. As the crowds jockeyed for position, politicians waved flat-brimmed flamenco hats from motorized floats, and little girls in ruffled dance dresses, trajes flamencas, twirled in the street.
In another clash of culture and politics, a small group of Chumash Indians hoisted placards protesting the enslavement of native tribes in the late 1700s, the period when Spain built a Catholic mission and a military garrison in Santa Barbara. Such counterdemonstrations took place every summer. For most parade watchers, the protests were a harmless sideshow, almost a part of the festivities. If there were contradictions, the noisy hoopla seemed to drown them out. Old Spanish Days was as close as Santa Barbara came to a sanctioned, citywide bash. Now in its seventy-ninth year, the fiesta had become an annual tourism bonanza for local merchants, a hybrid ethnic event promoted by the city council and the chamber of commerce. The war in Iraq seemed over. It was carnival time in Santa Barbara.
The Kurdish Driver
Among the thousands attending the festivities was Karzan Mahmoud, my Kurdish driver from northern Iraq. I watched Karzan slip into the middle of State Street, awkwardly clutching a Kodak camera in his left hand. He was trying to take photos of the deputy sheriffs passing on horseback. The deputies were decked out in cowboy boots and hats, wore pearl-handled revolvers in holsters, and carried rifles in leather cases by their silver-colored saddles. Karzan's right hand, mangled in a terrorist attack in Iraq, lay stiffly at his side, but that crisis was largely behind him now and he seemed delighted by the spectacle. He had seen cowboys and horses in the black-and-white westerns on Iraqi TV. Now he was in California, in a western of his own. "Karzan big man," he said jokingly in his much-improved English.
Karzan's camera was a gift from my high school friend, Mike Brabeck, the Boston physician who arranged the U.S. surgeries for Karzan's wounds. The young Kurd, looking much older than his twenty-five years, had been shot the year before in an assassination attempt on the Kurdish prime minister. Hit by twenty-three bullets in less than a minute, Karzan knew it was a wonder he'd survived. For the last few months, thanks to Dr. Brabeck, Massachusetts surgeons had been operating to repair the damage. Recently, the Boston Globe had published a dramatic account of his recovery, complete with before and after photos. Karzan had twenty copies of the Globe story packed away in his suitcase, ready to give his friends back home.
I had met Karzan in northern Iraq in February 2002, when I was on assignment for ABC New...
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- PublisherSt. Martin's Press
- Publication date2006
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- ISBN 13 9780312325466
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