A short walk in Kurdistan

A fatal airdrop

The day before we were due to leave Çukurca, the border town where the biggest camp was situated, a refugee was killed by an airdrop, crushed by a crate of food that fell from a Hercules C-130, one of the US air force transport planes involved in the relief operation. The parachute had failed to open; and the crate fell directly onto her tent. Her corpse lay among brown PVC packages that littered the hillside like the debris of a weekend picnic.

The packages were surplus military field supplies left over from the Gulf War—MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, manufactured in Mullins, South Carolina, boasting a menu of Chicken à la King, biscuits, chiclets and purified water. Many of their intended recipients were puzzled by this dangerous largesse, shouting helplessly up at the transport planes, imploring them to offload further down the valley where they would kill sheep or goats instead of people.

But the planes continued to scatter their seed, the parachutes blooming like paper flowers as they fell. Big and white and slow, or small and fast and jungle‑green, the parachutes vanished between the folds of the hills, pursued by those who could still run. Mourners carried the dead woman on a bier through the sea of mud and excrement in the camp and down to the town, where she was laid out in the mosque, wrapped in white cotton, joining two dozen children and old people who had died in the night, from diarrhoea and dehydration and cold.

The refugees fought over the boxes from the airdrop, their contents were bought and sold in the camp and in the town. There were many other business opportunities on the border, Jelal explained to me; money changing was one of them. Iraqi dinars, with the smiling face of the dictator, were at a discount against the Turkish lira. The Turkish banknotes bore the steady gaze of Ataturk, father of the nation, hammer of the Kurds. To set against these embodiments of Turkish and Iraqi nationalism the best the Kurds could offer were lapel buttons with photographs of Masoud Bersani, leader of the Iraqi Kurdish Democratic Party.

“We’d tune in to the BBC,” said Jelal. “Rak‑rak-rak. Voice of America. Rak‑rak‑rak. They were all jammed. All we heard was Saddam. And Saddam and Saddam again. It was Saddam or Shakespeare.”

Jelal cut a graceful figure as we moved through the camp, slender and aquiline, his beard short and trim, distinct from those of the longer-bearded Peshmergas, the militant Iraqi Kurdish insurgents still active on the other side of the border. Before we set off for Iraq he asked me to pay a formal visit to his father in order to gain his permission for him to accompany me. Their current dwelling place was a leaking blue-polythene-roofed shelter in the camp on the border. Here Jelal’s parents lived with his two brothers and their wives and children. There were many children in the family and most of them were unwell. The tent was not big enough to hold them all. At night the men slept outside in the rain. Firewood in the camp was growing increasingly hard to find. Jelal had no books and hardly anything to write with.

I explained our mission to Jelal’s father, with Jelal translating my words. His father, his air of patriarchal authority undiminished by the reduced circumstances, listened carefully.

“We have fled from one state to another,” he said, as we sat outside their tent. “Now the Turks won’t even let us in. We are nowhere. People throw things at us from planes and we behave like beasts. What are we to do?

“So Jelal may go with you,” he said. “Perhaps it will help us.”

What I had been asked to find out, on behalf of the coalition of western relief agencies that was coming together to cope with the refugee influx, was simple enough. Should they be preparing for a further influx of Kurds from Iraq towards Turkey? Or towards Iran? Access to military satellite photography might have told us more than we could find out on the ground. But satellite pictures were not forthcoming. Ground truth was what we were after. And walking with Jelal was to prove a different kind of education. It was a lesson in spiritual geography, in the refugee state of mind.

Before the uprising, Jelal told me, he had been a student at the translation school in Mosul. He was a budding actor. Just a few weeks earlier he had been playing the part of the fool, Feste, in a stage production of Twelfth Night. Despite his current gloomy state of mind he described himself as an optimist. His English was impassioned and precise. He was beginning to be in demand among the TV crews that had begun to arrive in Çukurca. The evening before we left for Iraq I saw him on the ABC video monitor in the Press Centre in the town, his picture transmitted via satellite to New York. Jelal himself could not go to the press centre; refugees were not allowed to cross the border into the town, so he was being interviewed in the camp, near the tent where he lived with his father and brothers and their wives.

In the course of the interview the reporter asked him about what he termed the “Kurdish problem”.

“It’s not just a problem any more,” said Jelal. “It’s a disaster.”

He paused, and added “It’s a catastrophe. A tragedy.”

Then he stopped, the thesaurus of ill fortune temporarily exhausted, grasping at hyperbole. He looked at the camera and said:

“It would be better to drop a bomb on us than to leave us here, where we die every day.”

A night in the barracks

We set off for Iraq the following day, crossing the first pass on the Turkish side, picking our way across pale scree slopes and scabs of snow, with Suleiman and his mule bringing up the rear. As we walked Jelal talked about his life in Mosul before the Intifada:

“The world knew more about what is happening to us than we did ourselves. There in Iraq we were in exile from the world. We knew nothing at all. We had no news.”

“We’d tune in to the BBC. Rak‑rak-rak. Voice of America. Rak‑rak‑rak. They were all jammed. All we heard was Saddam. And Saddam and Saddam again. It was Saddam or Shakespeare.”

“In the camp now we have nothing to do but listen to the radio all day. We know everything. We know the worst, but we cannot act. We are powerless. We are not human.”

Jelal liked walking; it made him feel free, although he was still weak from his first journey out of Iraq. We stopped at the head of the first pass for Suleiman to say his prayers. There was no grass for the mule to graze on. After Suleiman had finished praying Jelal recited some verses, in Arabic and in Persian. They were by Ahmadi Khoni, the most celebrated of Kurdish poets.

“Arabic is too rhetorical, though,” Jelal declared, “Things take too long to say. English is quicker.”

Under the rock, looking south across the valley, towards Mecca, an old man sat, motionless, beneath a shelter of parachute silk. He was blind. Someone had collected wood for a fire; the old man’s hands were stretched towards it. But the fire had gone out.

We spent the night, though not by our wish, in a Turkish army barracks on the border. The young commander, who had been trained in Germany, pressed us to stop there. His manner brooked no refusal. I explained that we were working for a medical charity. We were then asked to tend to a man with a head wound, which we cleaned and dressed. Luckily Jelal had first aid training. I was anxious to leave before our medical knowledge was tested further. That night the commander kept me up late in ardent conversation about the beauties of soldiery and the rise and fall of empires, ancient and modern—the Hittite empire, the Ottoman empire, the British and Austro-Hungarian empires. He was an enthusiast of imperialism, a connoisseur of conquest. And he insisted that I spend the night with him in his quarters, dispatching Jelal to the smoke-filled dormitory where conscript soldiers were whiling away the time watching cartoons on TV.

Early in the morning Jelal sent me word that while we had been with the Commander, the muleteer, Suleiman, who had been separated from us, had been beaten by soldiers in the barracks and interrogated concerning our true intentions in travelling to Iraq. So the three of us left quickly, very early in the morning, walking confidently past the sentries, before any order came through to restrain us. Suleiman rode on the mule. Two soldiers came after us with a message demanding that we turn back. By that time, though, we were on the Iraqi side of the border, so we kept going.

Here, lower down the escarpment, beyond the snowdrifts and the concrete border markers, was the Valley of the Zab, a fierce river that rages through Anatolia in deep limestone gorges, joining the Tigris south of Mosul on the Mesopotamian plain. Below us, as we began the descent, a great rock stood. Under the rock, looking south across the valley, towards Mecca, an old man sat, motionless, beneath a shelter of parachute silk. He was blind. Someone had collected wood for a fire; the old man’s hands were stretched towards it. But the fire had gone out. He was quite still. Jelal looked away.

“He is waiting for the Angel Israfel to catch his soul,” he said.

Peshmergas in a cave

“None sing so wildly well /As the angel Israfel,” wrote Edgar Allen Poe in his poem about the angel of the last trump. The sweet-voiced Israfel was having a busy time there in the Zab Valley. There were clusters of new graves in the ruined villages where the refugees camped. Some died the day they arrived. A lone woman, not so old, lay by the roadside; she had died within the hour; her skin was still soft, her flesh malleable. Some passers by took the body and washed and wrapped it and buried her there.

We continued walking for another day. We spent that night with a band of Peshmergas in a cave. They were in a bad way, physically, and requested antibiotics from us. We were fortunate that this was all they wanted—or maybe Jelal had connections that I did not know about. Later I learned that the only other foreigners in northern Iraq at that time, two Italian journalists, had been murdered by another group of Peshmergas in the next valley.

Then, suddenly, there were no more refugees.

As we descended to the plain we saw a field of light below us. It was the sun glinting on the windows of parked cars, hundreds of them, abandoned at the end of the last road in Iraq. From here the refugees had been forced to take to the footpaths that led through the mountains to Turkey. The cars were all empty; there were no more people on the way. The few refugees remaining told us they were heading eastwards to Iran.

The present continuous tense

Once the flow of refugees stopped our work in Iraq was done. So early in the morning we set out along the same path we had come on, back up the valley of the Zab. The path was almost empty of people now. We passed the night in an empty cave. Under the big rock at the head of the valley the old blind man was no longer there. The woman’s grave was filled and covered with stones. Those who buried her had moved on. The weather was changing: crocuses showed through the snow; and the sky was clear of clouds.

“The sun is just uprising,” said Jelal, returning to his role as a student of the English language. “Present continuous tense.”

“The sun also uprises,” he added. “Present tense. Is that correct?”

“That’s quite correct,” I said.

A man coming towards us on the road called out a greeting. He was from Jelal’s home village, one of the villages from which the Kurds were expelled by the Iraqi government in the 1980s. Since the intifada began he had been separated from his family. Jelal told him he had seen his father alive, three or four days before. The man wept; Jelal kissed him tenderly.

“I used to sit and talk with that man in the apple orchard by our house in the village,” he said. “But the army burnt the orchard in 1988. They burned our land. They drove us out and burned everything.”

Jelal fell silent then, but as we came over the last pass he began to sing. He sang the Fool’s song from Twelfth Night.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day…

“Past tense and present tense,” said Jelal. He sang to the mule. He asked Suleiman the mule’s name. It was Khamu.

“That name means One Who Carries Sadness”, said Jelal. And he laughed.

“At least I have all my limbs,” he declared as we approached the displaced camp on the border once more. “I have not stepped on a landmine.” Then he started to sing again, in the present tense, an English children’s song he had learned in Mosul.

For everything under the sun
There is a remedy or there is none.
If there is remedy try to find it
If there is none never mind it.

That evening we reached the border. Suleiman set off home with Khamu. I went with Jelal to the entrance of the camp. He looked at me and smiled. We bid each other goodbye. Then I walked down the hill to the town, and he walked towards the tent of his brothers. ✭

Afterword

Thanks to Professor Lenn E. Goodman of the University of Hawaii for a correction regarding the angel Israfel, incorporated into this version.