The Time for an Independent Kurdistan Is Now
For too long, my people have been attacked, killed, and betrayed. We can no longer believe Washington’s promises or hope that Baghdad will help us.
BY MARCH 4, 2016
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.
