FuzzyLumpkins
03-04-2016, 02:06 PM
It was a bitterly cold, overcast day in the winter of 1991. I was only 4, but I still recall how we struggled up 6,000-foot-high mountains near the Iraqi-Turkish border. Twenty feet ahead, my mum was carrying my 2-year-old brother on her back as she trudged through the snow. Two days on foot had left her exhausted and weak.
As I trailed behind, dad kept urging me on. “Just over the hill, son.”
Dad was lying. I followed mum’s faltering footsteps as she plunged to the ground again. I stood over her crying.
We were among thousands of Kurdish families fleeing from Saddam Hussein’s army, which was bent on annihilating the Kurds.
It took five grueling days to reach the makeshift camp that straddled the Iraqi-Turkish border. The weather was harsh. There was no sanitation and little food or water. Every day was a ritual for survival: one sip of water per person from the cap of a bottle, a piece of dried bread, and a few frozen dates. Men clutched bags holding their families’ remaining possessions; women carried wailing children. This mass exodus, the flight of almost 2 million people, marked another climactic chapter in the long struggle of the Kurdish people with successive Iraqi governments.
Everyone had a story. This is mine.
My dad was a revolutionary fighter, known as Peshmerga — in Kurdish, “those who face death.” He had been fighting for autonomy since the 1960s and was part of an uprising to expel the Iraqi Army from the Kurdish provinces following the end of the Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s forces were weakened. The Shiite uprising in the south had emboldened the Kurds, but without U.S. support, Saddam’s army started to regain territory and take vengeance. The decisive use of Iraqi helicopters — sanctioned by the U.S. military — to level rebel strongholds forced the Kurds to flee.
We finally reached the camp, called Belehe, but it was no salvation. It was an open graveyard. Our family of nine squeezed into a tent meant for three. I remember winds shaking the flimsy tents at night, as a fragile old woman abandoned by her family cried for help. Mum gave me a small piece of bread to hand to her. By the next morning, the cold had killed hundreds of sleeping children and several of my relatives. The old woman nearby our tent had frozen to death, her family nowhere to be seen.
This is my first childhood memory of Iraq: forced to flee my home to the mountains for refuge from the Iraqi government. In the years that followed, I witnessed the Iraqi regime kill six of my relatives and abduct several others, all for the crime of advocating for Kurdish rights.
The Kurds had been fighting for self-rule ever since the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The struggle reached its peak after 1979, when Saddam Hussein came to power; in the ensuing years, his army killed as many as 182,000 Kurds, poisoned thousands with chemical weapons, and razed more than 4,500 of our villages.
Like many other Kurds, I tried in vain to suppress this bitter past following the overthrow of Saddam in 2003. The U.S.-backed no-fly zone in Iraq and humanitarian support had paved the way for our return from the mountains to the cities below and gave us the space we needed to build a de facto state in Iraq’s north.
After the United States overthrew Saddam, American officials called upon us to return to Baghdad to give the new federal Iraq a try. I didn’t want to be part of the new Iraq any more than any other Kurd, but I felt we had no other choice but to try to secure our rights through a democratic process in Baghdad.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/04/the-time-for-an-independent-kurdistan-is-now/
As I trailed behind, dad kept urging me on. “Just over the hill, son.”
Dad was lying. I followed mum’s faltering footsteps as she plunged to the ground again. I stood over her crying.
We were among thousands of Kurdish families fleeing from Saddam Hussein’s army, which was bent on annihilating the Kurds.
It took five grueling days to reach the makeshift camp that straddled the Iraqi-Turkish border. The weather was harsh. There was no sanitation and little food or water. Every day was a ritual for survival: one sip of water per person from the cap of a bottle, a piece of dried bread, and a few frozen dates. Men clutched bags holding their families’ remaining possessions; women carried wailing children. This mass exodus, the flight of almost 2 million people, marked another climactic chapter in the long struggle of the Kurdish people with successive Iraqi governments.
Everyone had a story. This is mine.
My dad was a revolutionary fighter, known as Peshmerga — in Kurdish, “those who face death.” He had been fighting for autonomy since the 1960s and was part of an uprising to expel the Iraqi Army from the Kurdish provinces following the end of the Gulf War in 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s forces were weakened. The Shiite uprising in the south had emboldened the Kurds, but without U.S. support, Saddam’s army started to regain territory and take vengeance. The decisive use of Iraqi helicopters — sanctioned by the U.S. military — to level rebel strongholds forced the Kurds to flee.
We finally reached the camp, called Belehe, but it was no salvation. It was an open graveyard. Our family of nine squeezed into a tent meant for three. I remember winds shaking the flimsy tents at night, as a fragile old woman abandoned by her family cried for help. Mum gave me a small piece of bread to hand to her. By the next morning, the cold had killed hundreds of sleeping children and several of my relatives. The old woman nearby our tent had frozen to death, her family nowhere to be seen.
This is my first childhood memory of Iraq: forced to flee my home to the mountains for refuge from the Iraqi government. In the years that followed, I witnessed the Iraqi regime kill six of my relatives and abduct several others, all for the crime of advocating for Kurdish rights.
The Kurds had been fighting for self-rule ever since the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The struggle reached its peak after 1979, when Saddam Hussein came to power; in the ensuing years, his army killed as many as 182,000 Kurds, poisoned thousands with chemical weapons, and razed more than 4,500 of our villages.
Like many other Kurds, I tried in vain to suppress this bitter past following the overthrow of Saddam in 2003. The U.S.-backed no-fly zone in Iraq and humanitarian support had paved the way for our return from the mountains to the cities below and gave us the space we needed to build a de facto state in Iraq’s north.
After the United States overthrew Saddam, American officials called upon us to return to Baghdad to give the new federal Iraq a try. I didn’t want to be part of the new Iraq any more than any other Kurd, but I felt we had no other choice but to try to secure our rights through a democratic process in Baghdad.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/04/the-time-for-an-independent-kurdistan-is-now/