Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East (26 page)

And now that Saddam was gone, satellite television was not only legal but also readily available. The standard price was a hundred dollars for a thousand channels, similar to the rate in Syria. If one were a good bargainer or found a good black-market distributor, it was possible to do better. There were also several young men who had made a nice career out of programming satellite dishes for their technologically inept elders.

Young people in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region loved their satellite television. They watched everything from Al-Jazeera to CNN, BBC, FOX News, and all the major stations from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Lebanon. And of the thousand channels, I think at least a hundred must have been pornography. In the words of one Kurdish couch potato, “We went from a life of prison to satellite. Now we look at everything, X-rated films, American movies, this is all new to us. It is a shock for us. It is like jumping from the sauna into a cold pool. Imagine, before all of this, fundamentalists would kill people for watching a movie or going to a bar.”

People in Iraq never turned their televisions off. When they weren’t at home, their television stayed on. When they ate dinner, the television blasted. Even when they had guests over, their television stayed on. Even at the most formal dinners I attended at people’s homes, the television never went off. For these Kurds, television is a symbol not of wealth but of freedom. A television that never goes off serves as a reminder to these once oppressed Kurdish people that they can think whatever they want and that they are free from the ruthless grasp of the Ba’ath Party.

I also saw a ton of Internet cafés in the slums of Arbil. They are springing up all over northern Iraq; young people there certainly have enough time on their hands to become acquainted with using the Internet. The mechanisms of civil society and democracy may be in place in Iraqi Kurdistan, but the economy remains too slow to provide young people with jobs. Consequently, many of them spend hour after hour on the Internet. I learned more about new programs on the Internet from Iraqi youth than I had from friends at Oxford. They taught me how to use messenger services and Internet phone services I had never even heard of. What I had already heard of, they showed me how to
really
take advantage of.

The Arbil slums were an interesting place to see the far reach of communications technology, but I found most of the people there to be rather apathetic about politics. Now that the Kurdish civil war is over, they don’t bother much with politics. As for the war in Iraq, well, it might as well be taking place in another country.

M
y next stop in Arbil was Salahaddîn University,
the Iraqi Kurdistan Region’s most famous educational establishment and one of the best in Iraq. Founded in 1968 and originally located in the eastern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, Zankoy Selaheddîn moved to Arbil just over a decade later and has grown into an internationally recognized university with eighteen different colleges. There were a few notable buildings that really gave the university its character. I wasn’t exactly sure of their function, but they were beautiful stone structures. There was a contrast between segments of the university that looked brand new and parts that seemed dilapidated and as if they hadn’t been refurbished in over a decade.

I explored the university, looking for young Iraqi Kurds to talk to. As I asked around for the office of the university president, I encountered a student who seemed eager to speak with me. His name was Omar. Despite the blistering heat, he wore long pants and a long shirt buttoned all the way to the top. He conducted himself in a very professional manner. This is something I would notice about Kurdish youth: They have very adult mannerisms and they take themselves very seriously. Many will put on a shirt and tie just to go to the market or run an errand.

We made small talk about the heat, but soon turned serious. He asked me how I found Iraqi Kurdistan and where I was from. I asked him to describe the atmosphere in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region immediately after September 11. He explained that while people in the Sunni and Shi’a parts of Iraq believed September 11 was the punishment from God, the Iraqi Kurds felt the experience and the grief was shared because they, too, had experienced suffering at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Initially I was confused, because Omar was making a distinction between the Iraqi Kurdistan Region and the Republic of Iraq. I would learn that most Iraqi Kurds do not see themselves as part of a larger Iraq; being part of Iraq has always been a temporary acquiescence for them, an unfortunate detour from a road that will ultimately lead to an independent Kurdish state.

Eager to get the Kurdish reaction to the sequence of events that followed 9/11, I asked about popular perceptions after the United States went into Afghanistan. Omar paused for a minute and then, after letting out a sigh, explained that at first they felt safer in Iraq, but not long after the liberation from the Taliban began, many Al-Qaeda fighters fled Afghanistan and set up camp in Tawela and Biyara where they collaborated with members of the extremist Sunni group Ansar al-Islam.

After chatting with a couple dozen students and getting a sense of what I would need to see while in northern Iraq, I had the chance to sit with the president of the university, Dr. Sadiq. Dr. Sadiq’s office had fancy rugs and couches and an elegant desk. He had neatly combed gray hair and wore a dark gray suit and bright orange tie. There was an air of confidence about him; I could tell that he was proud of the university and what he had contributed to its success.

Dr. Sadiq had a tremendous amount of confidence in the students of Selaheddîn University. He described them as innately political, channeling their considerable activism and spirit into student unions, demonstrations, civil society organizations, and other ambitious endeavors. With an air of pride, he predicted that it is the students who will bring about the reforms in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. His premonition didn’t surprise me, as these students today are learning about democracy and shaping their modern identity around what this means to them. As a result, young people are active in getting involved. In Arbil alone there are at least 183 nongovernmental organizations, some of which are a couple of guys sitting in a garage, but many of which are legitimate organizations. These youth are very ambitious. They have a vision, they love their country—Kurdistan—and they have a developed sense of citizenship. As a result, they believe that in order to be good citizens, they must embrace the idea of democracy. For young Kurds, embracing democracy is synonymous with making a contribution. In this supposedly prosperous part of Iraq—where unemployment is as high as 60 percent—youth have the free time to channel this ambition toward volunteering and civic entrepreneurship.

I
had been invited
to the Iraqi Kurdistan Region as a guest of the Kurdistan Regional Government. I initially had concerns that such hospitality was a ploy for me to be a mouthpiece for the Kurds, but this was not the case. I talked to whomever I wanted and if I needed help, the government was there to provide it for me. They didn’t interfere at all; in fact, they seemed eager to hear my findings on the youth. The foreign minister said to me on a number of occasions that the youth are of vital importance and that the government wanted to fully understand their needs and their thinking. So before setting out to meet the young people building Kurdistan’s dynamic civil society, I took advantage of the access I had been granted and paid a visit to the minister of human rights. I wasn’t quite certain what was in the portfolio of this ministry, so Hachem, an aide to the minister, offered to show me.

Hachem was in his mid-twenties and his desk was decorated with the Kurdish flag, as well as the flag of the Ministry of Human Rights. He sat in front of a large, modern computer monitor. He told me to come over to his side of the desk so he could show me some of the ministry’s work. As I huddled with him around his brand-new Dell computer monitor, he reached into a box and pulled out more than twenty DVDs. He popped in the first one and told me that it was called
Crimes Under Saddam
and was designed to show the brutality of punishment under the former Iraqi dictator.

As we went through image after horrific image, I thought I was going to be sick. The images and videos Hachem showed me were eerily reminiscent of what I had seen at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I watched three young people with their hands tied behind their backs get thrown off the top of a three-story building; the torturers then picked the bodies up and did it all over again. I watched repeated beatings, firing squads, and whippings. I watched a man get his hands surgically removed for dealing in American currency. I watched tongue amputations take place as punishment for speaking out against Saddam. I watched the Fedayin al-Saddam sit a man next to another man who had already been blown up and place an explosive device in his pocket; the man’s last words were, “Is this how I am going to die?” I watched executioners make four or five tries to decapitate a man, finally using a smaller hand knife and violent sawing gestures to complete the task; I saw the killers then hold the severed head up in the air.

Hachem wanted me to see what Iraqi Kurds had lived under before the Kurdish uprising in 1991, and what the rest of the Iraqis had experienced up until Saddam was overthrown. After we’d made it through the first batch, Hachem pulled out about twelve more DVDs, and we watched all or part of each of them.

When one sees the torture, brutality, and barbarism to which they were once subject, and one compares that horror to the peace and hopefulness of present-day Kurdistan, it is not difficult to understand why they look so kindly upon those they view as responsible for deposing Saddam’s murderous regime.

Of all the images shown to me by Hachem, the footage of Halabjah had the greatest impact on me. On March 16, 1988, just one day after a combination of Iranian and Kurdish forces seized the eastern Iraqi city of Halabjah, Saddam Hussein and his trusted general “Chemical Ali” gassed the city, killing approximately five thousand people. Many of these were women and children. I watched video footage of people running from the chemical gas and of children frozen by the poison. I heard tapes of screams and saw skin melt off people’s faces. I watched children with their hands in the air and mothers holding on to their daughters. It was all so horrible.

The March 1988 gassing of Halabjah was part of a larger campaign by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds of Iraq. The Kurdish youth in Iraq today were born into the most brutal phase of Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign, a period in which Saddam didn’t discriminate between innocent civilians and soldiers, or between men, women, or children. Beginning in 1978, but taking on its most organized and brutal form in 1987 and 1988, Saddam’s Anfal Campaign still torments the youth of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, whose earliest memories are of running from Saddam’s troops. At the order of Saddam Hussein, more than five thousand Kurdish villages were emptied and more than two hundred thousand people were arrested, many of whom either disappeared or were killed. Among the most brutal of these campaigns was the extermination of eight thousand Barzani tribesmen. Many of the mass graves that were uncovered during Operation Iraqi Freedom provided evidence of Saddam Hussein’s Anfal Campaign.

The latter phase of Anfal offers the mostly deeply embedded images and horrific memories for young Kurds. In February 1988, the final year of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein launched the first of what would be eight major Anfal operations. As the Iranian forces, aligned with Kurdish forces, gained positions on the periphery of Baghdad, Saddam sought not only to quash the encroachment, but also to punish the Kurdish people, who he believed were both insubordinate to his regime and inherently inferior to the Arabs who ruled Iraq.

While the Halabjah massacre is the most notorious of the Anfal campaigns, Hussein also orchestrated extermination campaigns in Garmiyan, Koi Sanjaq, Lesser Zab, Bahdinan, and Bazi Gorge. In most of these cases chemical gasses were employed by the Iraqi army and women and children were not spared. After six months and eight campaigns of Anfal operations, it is believed that as many as two hundred thousand Kurds, including many women and children, were brutally slaughtered. Just three days after arriving in Iraq, I had the opportunity to visit Halabjah. The journey was nearly five hours from Arbil. I drove across Iraq, visiting Sulaimaniya and other towns and cities on the way. Given the notoriety of Halabjah, I expected a big city. Instead, it is a quiet, melancholy village, a living ghost town. It reminded me of the Rwandan town of Murambi, which I’d visited in December 2002. The bodies of some of the sixty thousand people massacred in Murambi during the 1994 genocide were littered around the classrooms they died in. I felt the same pervasive, profound sadness in Halabjah.

As I drove into the city limits, there was a billboard that read “Welcome to Halabjah.” Depicted on the billboard were images of dead babies and gassed Kurds. All of Halabjah was a reminder of what had happened on that fatal day in 1988. There were monuments comprised of mortar shells; there was a cemetery with five thousand tombs commemorating the victims. In the center of the city was a large monument to the gassing of the Kurds; posted next to it was a giant blue sign that read “It’s not allowed for Ba’aths to enter.” Although the Kurds have had virtual autonomy since the 1991 uprising, there always remained a fear that Saddam Hussein could come back in; the Ba’ath presence still lingered at the periphery of Kurdish life. The youth in the Iraqi Kurdistan region believe that with Saddam out of the picture, they are now one step closer to their dream of Kurdish independence. Whether or not this is true is yet to be seen, but young Kurds give the United States credit for taking Saddam out of the picture.