A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Part 6

CLIMBING INTO THE BMW again the next morning, Mam Muhsen, Hickmat, a guard, and I drove down the mesa to the Christian village of Kani, to congratulate the Chaldean Bishop Raban. The bishop had been appointed to his position only two months before, Mam Muhsen said, and on this Easter morning-for it was Easter, I'd forgotten-people were coming from miles around to congratulate him and ask his blessing for the new year.

The village was located down a steep muddy hill, at the end of which stood a small church, an adjoining complex, and the bishop. A tall, thin, ascetic-looking man with long black robes, a fuchsia cap and belt, silver-rim gla.s.ses, and gray hair, he was mingling with his paris.h.i.+oners, kissing children on the head. But upon our arrival, he moved away from the throng to usher us into a huge reception room, its perimeter lined with dozens of cream-and-gold, Louis XIV-style chairs.

Moments later, a contingent of fifteen or twenty men and boys also arrived, all in traditional Kurdish dress. Some were Christian, some Muslim, but the bishop shook all hands with equal warmth and offered everyone candy, tea, and a seat. We had barely settled in when another group entered, causing everyone to rise, shake hands, and exchange good wishes. Then another group came in, and another, and as we rose and sat, rose and sat, the first group left. Except for a few girls under age ten and myself, everyone in the room was male.

Somehow, during a short break in all the coming and going, the bishop, who spoke some English, found a moment to tell me about himself. "In 1961, when I was ten and a half and the KDP had its headquarters here, the Iraqi government bombed Amadiya and all around Amadiya," he said. "A helicopter came down to my village, and I climbed in. I told the soldiers, 'I want to be a priest, I want to go to Mosul.' Then, like a miracle, the helicopter engine had trouble, and I had time to go home and get money and clothes."

"Weren't you afraid?" I asked, imagining him as a village boy surrounded by soldiers. But the bishop either didn't hear me or didn't understand.

"The helicopter took me to Mosul," he said. "And in all those hundreds of people, it was like a miracle again, I saw my uncle. He took me to a priest, and I started to study. I finished in 1973 and came back to my village. I have been a priest here for twenty-nine and a half years, and now, I am so honored, I have been made a bishop."

"Was this village bombed in the Anfal?" I asked, though I already all but knew the answer. Like the villages I had seen in the Aqra valley, Kani was largely built of clay and stone-not post-Anfal cement.

"No, G.o.d was with us," the bishop said.

As He was with many Christians during much of Saddam Hussein's regime. In the early years of Hussein's dictators.h.i.+p especially, many Iraqi Christians-unlike the "traitor" Kurds-had enjoyed often-tolerable relations with the Baathists.

Christians in the Amadiya area had suffered a far worse time of it in the 1840s, not long after the Kurdish emirates had been abolished. Kurdistan had then become more accessible to Western missionaries, whose proselytizing activities led to a steep decline in relations.h.i.+ps between the Muslims and the a.s.syrian and Chaldean Christians native to the region. The hostilities reached one horrific climax in 1843, when Kurds from the Botan emirate, north of Amadiya in what is now Turkey, brutally attacked their a.s.syrian neighbors, slaughtering around ten thousand men and abducting women and children as slaves.

Layard, the British archaeologist, blamed the attacks primarily on a fierce shaikh living in the court of the Botan prince, Bedir Khan. However, he also questioned the judgment of the American missionaries who had helped stir up trouble by building a large school and boardinghouse. "These buildings had been the cause of much jealousy and suspicion to the Kurds," he writes. "They stand upon the summit of an isolated hill, commanding the whole valley. A position less ostentatious and proportions more modest might certainly have been chosen."

Reading those words months later back in New York, along with daily missives advocating war against Iraq, but few words regarding the country's rebuilding, I angrily wondered why people hadn't yet learned to carefully consider the consequences of their actions before plunging into new environments. Like introducing a strange species or microorganism into an ecosystem, whole worlds could be turned upside down, with horrific consequences, by seemingly straightforward actions.

TO AND FROM Amadiya, Mam Muhsen pointed out various personal landmarks-a cave once used by his peshmerga, a valley where he'd lived in the 1970s, a ridge that led to Iran; he'd hiked that six-day trip too many times to count. And along one empty stretch of road, he slowed down the car until it stopped with a shudder.

"This is where I was almost killed by the PKK [Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party]," he said. "In all my years in the mountains, the Iraqis never wounded me, but here, the Kurds of Turkey almost killed me. They used an American-made gun, a BZK, and shot at the car from those mountains. The car started burning. I was unconscious, I don't remember. . . . Someone came and pulled me out."

We sat in silence. No other cars or villages were in sight, and I could hear nothing but the sounds of our breathing and the ticking of the cooling engine. Mam Muhsen had been extremely lucky.

"Amadiya has been tormented by the PKK," he said. "Their forces surrounded Amadiya. They forced us to defend ourselves. It's clear to us the PKK wants to destroy Kurdistan. It's all politics. The PKK is supported by Iraq and Iran, who are using them to hurt Turkey. The Kurds of Turkey don't understand this. They think they are fighting for their independence. But the PKK is the worst. They destroyed many of the villages we rebuilt after the Anfal."

He restarted the engine.

TO UNDERSTAND THE political situation in Iraqi Kurdistan today, it is also necessary to understand the political situation in Turkey's Kurdistan- something that I had not fully appreciated before departing for Iraq.

When it comes to the treatment of its Kurdish minority, Turkey has a history that almost rivals that of Iraq. In its zeal to establish a national ident.i.ty postOttoman Empire, Turkey even denied it had a Kurdish minority, declaring Kurds to be "mountain Turks who have forgotten their language." Kurds who did not call themselves Kurds could rise high in Turkish government and society, and often did. But to speak Kurdish in public places, give Kurdish concerts, teach Kurdish language, and even at times wear Kurdish dress-let alone talk Kurdish politics-was usually forbidden.

In the late 1970s, Abdullah calan (p.r.o.nounced "oh-jalan"), an Ankara university student, and other young radicals secretly founded the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. In 1980, Turkey suffered a military coup, which led to brutal crackdowns on political dissidents. And in 1984, the PKK attacked its first Turkish military outposts. Fed up with Turkish repression, an economic exploitation of the Kurdish southeast, and the overall failure of democracy in Turkey, the PKK declared that the only solution for the Kurds was to separate entirely from Turkey and form an independent nation.

Civil war began. Rather than addressing the Kurds' real grievances, Turkey inst.i.tuted a ma.s.sive military buildup in the Southeast, torturing and murdering suspected PKK members and supporters, and forcibly evacuating and destroying villages. The PKK reacted by slaughtering large numbers of Turkish soldiers and progovernment Kurdish civilians, quickly garnering the group a reputation for terrorism. By the time the war ended, with the arrest of calan in 1999, about thirty-seven thousand people had been killed, over three thousand Kurdish villages destroyed, and at least 1 million Kurds rendered homeless.

The Kurdish-Turkish conflict had a direct and immediate effect on Iraqi Kurdistan. About ten years earlier, Baghdad had cleared villages in a twenty-kilometer-wide stretch along its Turkish and Iranian borders, creating a no-man's-land where no guerrillas could hide. In the mid-1980s, Iraq granted the Turks permission to enter Iraqi Kurdistan when in "hot pursuit" of the PKK. The policy suited Iraq at the time; at war with Iran, it could not afford to police its Turkish border. And the policy still suited Iraq over fifteen years later, at the time of my visit; Saddam Hussein welcomed the Turkish presence in Kurdistan as a destabilizing influence. Hence the Turkish tanks I'd seen on my outing with Majed, Yousif, and family. Hence, also, the Turkish air attacks against PKK camps in Iraqi Kurdistan that had started after the Gulf War and continued. Sometimes these air attacks had destroyed Iraqi Kurdish villages, rather than PKK camps, leading the Iraqi Kurds to interpret them as warnings.

Initially, relations between the KDP and PKK had been good. In 1983, the two parties signed a cooperation agreement against any kind of imperialism, with American imperialism heading the list. But in 1987, the KDP broke with the PKK, largely because of the PKK's violent methods. Less than a year later, the PKK signed an alliance with the PUK, whose territory does not border Turkey, but it also soon fell apart.

After the 1991 Gulf War, the KDP, PUK, and other smaller parties successfully established a self-governing, semiautonomous Kurdistan. One of the fledging coalition's early acts was to declare its intention to "combat the PKK," as it understood that if Iraqi Kurdistan was to survive, it needed Turkey's help. Turkey was the only neighboring country that could provide the military bases needed for the Western allies' protective air patrols and offer the Iraqi Kurds an essential economic trade route to the West.

In July 1992 the PKK successfully cut off that trade route. Fighting broke out between the Kurds of Turkey and the Kurds of Iraq. In 1994, the internal fighting between the KDP and the PUK also began, enabling the PKK to play the two Iraqi parties against each other. "calan is the enemy of Kurds," the KDP declared after one unfortunate incident in which the PKK took humanitarian aid workers hostage against possible KDP attacks.

In March 1995, some thirty-five thousand Turkish soldiers entered Iraqi Kurdistan in order to destroy PKK camps-only the largest of several similar expeditions throughout the 1990s. Officially, the KDP opposed the action. Privately, they condoned it; both they and the PUK worked with the Turks in various anti-PKK operations.

calan was arrested in 1999, and the PKK abandoned its armed military struggle, saying that it would now fight for equal civil rights through peaceful means. However, about five thousand PKK peshmerga were believed to be still hiding in northern Iraq in the early 2000s, giving Turkey all the excuse it needed to cross the border-and to keep about fifteen hundred troops permanently stationed in Iraqi Kurdistan. Skirmishes between the PKK and the KDP also continued. I had already seen many buildings and a few villages now completely abandoned due to post-1991 PKKKDP hostilities.

All of which set the stage for yet a new chapter in Iraqi-Turkish-Kurdish relations to begin with the Iraq war of 2003, when the United States proposed sending large numbers of Turkish troops into northern Iraq-supposedly for peace monitoring and humanitarian purposes. Not surprisingly, the Iraqi Kurds reacted with anger, outrage, and ma.s.s demonstrations. To allow some Turkish troops into Iraqi Kurdistan to pursue the PKK was one thing. But to allow a ma.s.s invasion by a military force that was brutally suppressing fellow Kurds and occasionally bombing Iraqi Kurdish villages-not to mention badly mistreating the Iraqi Kurds during the 1991 uprising-was unthinkable. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed, and the Turks were kept out of northern Iraq, though the issue was to come up again months after the war.

THE s.h.i.+FTING RELATIONs.h.i.+PS between the KDP, PUK, PKK, Iraq, and Turkey may seem Byzantine, but they are par for the course in Kurdistan. Throughout the centuries of the Ottoman-Safavid Empires and before, the Kurdish tribes were constantly forced to form new alliances, break old ones, join loose confederations, leave them, toy with friends, and two-time enemies in order to survive. And throughout the twentieth century, with little voice in their respective nation-states, the Kurds were again often forced to temporarily ally themselves with one strange bedfellow or another. An uncertain status in the world necessitates constant balancing acts.

LEAVING GAMADIYA THAT AFTERNOON, I returned to Dohuk to find Majed and Yousif waiting for me. Like Mam Muhsen, they had Easter calls to make, and were eager to have me come along. It doesn't matter that we are Muslim and our friends Christian, they emphasized. The problems of the past are over; all religions as well as tribes get along well in the new Kurdistan.

Though nothing is ever quite so simple, many other Muslims, Christians, and members of other minority groups expressed similar sentiments to me in northern Iraq. The fledgling democracy was granting full religious and cultural rights to all minorities, and some citizens did seem to be developing what one scholar calls a "Kurdistani"-as opposed to a "Kurdish"-ident.i.ty, apropos of the new pluralistic Kurdistan.

We made the rounds, starting with a visit to the big, modern a.s.syrian church, where we met several priests. Next came a stop at the home of Armenian neighbors, followed by visits to several Chaldean Christian families. At every stop, candy, nuts, colored Easter eggs, and tea were pa.s.sed around, along with expressions of Christian-Muslim goodwill, and it was a heartwarming feeling to be enthusiastically welcomed into living room after living room by host after host. As at Bishop Raban's, other groups kept arriving and leaving as we made our calls, until I got the sense that the whole town of Dohuk was on the move. The whole male population of Dohuk, that is. Except in a few cases, there were no women guests-just hostesses.

Our last stop was the home of a Christian man originally from the Barwari region, also home to Majed and Yousif's family. The friends.h.i.+p between the two families went way back, to the days of their great-grandfathers. Back then, the Muslim great-grandfather had helped the Christian great-grandfather escape from an Ottoman ma.s.sacre.

"They wouldn't give him up, and for this reason, we have always been close," the Christian said, ceremoniously laying out a pristine white tablecloth, upon which he placed a.s.sorted nuts, four tumblers, and a bottle of Scotch.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Questions of Honor AT THE NORTHERN EDGE OFIRAQI KURDISTAN, NOT FAR from the Turkish border, is the city of Zakho, population about 150,000. Some historians believe that its name derives from the ancient Aramaic word zakhota, meaning "victory," and refers to a battle fought nearby between the victorious Romans and the defeated Persians. Xenophon the Greek mentions Zakho in Anabasis, written in 401 B.C., but the city is probably considerably older than that, perhaps dating back to the 2000s B.C.

Part of the Bahdinan emirate during much of the Ottoman Empire, Zakho hugs the banks of the Khabur River, which splits in two just before entering the city. A one-thousand-year-old bridge spans one of the channels, while the other circ.u.mnavigates the town to join up with the first branch by the ruined tower of the Zakho castle, built in the 1700s on the site of a much older fortress.

But none of this ancient history has much bearing on Zakho today. Like the rest of Kurdistan, its past has been burned and destroyed, submerged and trampled on so many times that it is but a blip in the city's collective memory. Most people in Zakho know almost nothing about its early history, just as most people in Kurdistan know little about what occurred in their lands prior to the 1960s, or even, among the younger generation, the 1980s. Ask the average Kurd to what era an ancient monument in town belongs, and he or she won't be able to say. Constant oppression and war allow no time for the contemplation of the past.

Continual upheaval has also meant that the Kurds have had little time to cultivate their traditional arts. Who can think of weaving carpets or spending hours cooking elaborate dishes taught by grandmothers when most of one's family is in the mountains or in jail, bombs are falling, and one may have to pack up-again-and leave soon?

Before the advent of radio and television, the Kurds preserved their history and culture through an unusually rich oral tradition-a treasure trove of folktales, epic poetry, songs, and proverbs. Especially on winter evenings, people gathered in homes and male-only guesthouses to gossip, exchange information, tell stories, and sing. Family and tribal histories, community legend and lore were preserved, created, and re-created through the authoritative voices of elders pa.s.sing along their knowledge to the young. Some fortunate Kurds learned to read and write Arabic through village mullahs, and the upper crust learned Turkish and Persian in schools for the n.o.bility, but for centuries, most villagers were nonliterate, and Kurdish remained an oral language. The first Kurdish newspaper did not appear until 1898, when it was published in Cairo, Egypt, of all places; pressure from the Ottomans made it impossible to publish in Kurdistan.

The Kurds' oral tradition was already breaking down by the 1960s, and would probably be in steep decline today even without the horrific events of the past four decades. But relentless war and oppression have hastened its demise. Only recently, with the start of a shaky peace, are the Iraqi Kurds fully opening their eyes and wondering at all they have lost, not just physically and emotionally, but also culturally.

Yet throughout it all, even in the worst of times, the surviving ancient sites of Kurdistan have never completely lost their power. Palpably drawing both the literate and the nonliterate to them, especially at the end of the day, when dusk brings with it the larger questions of life, the sites offer respite. They are places of forgetting as well as remembering, places in which to lose the pain and immediacy of the modern world in the imagined glories and mysteries of the past.

MY NEW FRIEND Arjin, who lived in Zakho, agreed to give me a tour of her city. Unmarried and in her early thirties, with a face filled with cheekbones and interesting angles, Arjin worked as an office a.s.sistant and had an excellent command of English. She was also extraordinarily astute.

Leaving her home shortly after my arrival, we headed downtown, picking up her friend Pelsin on the way. Pelsin worked with Arjin and was in her late twenties, with wide gray-green eyes. She also spoke some English and, like Arjin, wore a calf-length skirt and matching jacket, no head scarf.

Nearing the city center, we pa.s.sed more of the strange marble houses that I knew from Dohuk-the ones with the spindly columns and odd-sized bay windows, built by the nouveau riche. And here and there stood a surprising number of drab, sullen hotels. As a gateway leading to Turkey, Zakho was a businessman's town and center for the illicit emigration trade.

We stopped into a tiny gold shop. Traditionally, gold and silver have played an important role in Kurdish culture-often part of the bride-price paid by the groom to the bride, and a way in which to store wealth, especially for women. A typically Kurdish style of jewelry is the queesh or parang, made of gold or silver coins on a chain hung around the neck or waist, or along the brim of a traditional hat or turban, once common among Kurdish women but much rarer now.

The storeowner was trained as a mechanical engineer, but he earned five or six times an engineer's salary by running his gold shop, he said. Nearly half of his business came from renting out his jewelry, usually to customers who were attending weddings-the single most important occasion in most Kurds' lives. One of his largest pieces, a flamboyant chest piece made of gold orbs, rented for 400 dinars a day, almost the equivalent of a civil servant's monthly salary.

Puffy white Western wedding dresses could also be rented at a shop down the street, next to a photographer's studio. Some Kurdish families rented the dresses, went next door to have their pictures taken, and then brought the dresses back. Others bought the "fake gold" that had recently become available. "This makes the rich people very angry," Arjin said with a sly smile.

Descending a few steps, we entered a dank vegetable market, its tables piled high with cuc.u.mbers, zucchini, onions, green almonds, and unripe pistachios in pink skins. Arjin and Pelsin greeted a friend while I looked around, trying not to stare at several women shrouded in black from head to toe, their faces covered with thin black cloths, lacking even slits for eyes. I'd seen a handful of similarly attired women in Aqra and Amadiya, but their dress was still strange for me, as it was unusual in Kurdistan.

Throughout Greater Kurdistan, women's clothing varies widely. In the villages of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, many wear either the traditional colorful Kurdish costume-which differs from region to region-or a dishdasha, the caftan. When going to market, these women often cover their heads, but not their faces, and go uncovered in their homes and fields. The long black abeyya or chador, enveloping the entire body and head, but not the face, is worn mostly by urban Kurds. In Iran, such coverings are required on the urban streets-though not in the villages, or the home, where most anything goes. In Iraq, they are voluntary and usually worn only by traditional older women. In Turkey, they are rarely seen.

Few women anywhere in Greater Kurdistan cover their faces, and when they do, it is generally only in the smaller and more conservative cities, and only when visiting the market or other public s.p.a.ces frequented by strangers. Most urban Iraqi Kurdish women, young and old, dress modestly in knee- or calf-length skirts and blouses, or sometimes pants, with occasional head scarves. Fas.h.i.+ons are somewhat freer in the liberal Iraqi city of Suleimaniyah, where many women wear pants; freer still in the homes of urban Iranian Kurds, where many wear tight-fitting T-s.h.i.+rts and jeans; and freest of all in the cities of Turkey's Kurdistan, where women flaunt tightfitting clothes on the streets. I scarcely saw a single young woman in Turkey's Kurdish cities in a skirt.

The face cloth is called the kheli, my new friends told me as we left the market, and the women could be wearing it because they were old and traditional, because they were shy, or because they came from a "high" or ill.u.s.trious family. Pelsin herself came from a "high" family, and, though they no longer had much wealth or power, there was much consternation in her tribal community when she refused to wear the kheli.

"I told them, okay, maybe if I just went to the market once or twice a week, I would wear it," Pelsin said. "But I work in an office, I go out every day. And finally they accepted that. But they still don't like it that I wear jackets and skirts-they want me to be completely covered."

"I myself tried to wear the kheli to the market a few times," Arjin said with a mischievous grin, "but every time, I tripped and fell down."

As we walked, I learned more. Pelsin's neighbors were also peeved that she worked, was often not home to receive them, remained single, often refrained from gossip, and took taxis by herself-something few Iraqi Kurdish women do. As a member of an important family, she was expected to set impeccable standards by dressing ultraconservatively and comporting herself ultrademurely. Most of all, she was expected to keep herself well removed from the public eye; heaven forbid that she should ever think of taking a higher-profile job or a position in the government, as a handful of other Kurdish women had. And why in the world didn't she wear the dishdasha around the house like everyone else?

Talk. Gossip. It is the oppressive bane of the Kurdish woman's existence. What is she wearing? Where is she going? How much did she pay for those shoes? How often has she spoken to that man?

In an earlier era, and in many parts of traditional Kurdistan today, Kurdish women drifted out of their homes in the late mornings or afternoons to sit in their doorways and talk. For many, it was the high point of an otherwise backbreaking day spent cleaning the house, preparing the meals, caring for the children, hauling the water and firewood, tilling the fields. Traditional Kurdish women worked-and work-far harder than the men. Times have changed, and people are changing, but the tradition of gossip is dying hard.

Arjin, Pelsin, and I meandered out of the downtown and down wide empty streets to the one-thousand-year-old Pira Dellal Bridge. Built of cut limestone blocks fit so tightly together that they appeared to be welded, the bridge rose to an arched peak about thirty feet above the Khabur River. The bridge's incline was so steep that it was hard not to imagine horses and people slipping and sliding over its smooth, guard-less sides in inclement weather.

"Do you notice that there are no other women alone together here?" Arjin said as we stepped onto the bridge.

She was right, although I did notice a few women together with their families.

"Women do not go out by themselves in Zakho, except to the market. Zakho is a very conservative city."

The Khabur River rushed below us, a churning brown current running high with the spring.

"After the uprising, some women did come here alone with other women," Arjin went on. "We had more freedom then, everyone was so happy Saddam was gone. But now that time is finished. Now is the same as before. Only men and families come here."

So the old order has rea.s.serted itself, I thought dispiritedly. Throughout the traditional Muslim world, public s.p.a.ces are dominated by men, while women are relegated to the private s.p.a.ces of the home. Why had Kurdistan reverted to the old order? And why so soon? Was it simply because in the face of much upheaval, people needed familiar touchstones? Or had an early disillusionment already set in? When and how does change become permanent and true? How much of change comes from above and how much from below?

On the other side of the bridge, we walked along the riverbank. The bridge was more beautiful from this angle, with the late-afternoon rays of the sun warming the limestone into gentle pinks and tans. A wash had been thrown over the world.

The one-thousand-year-old Pira Dellal Bridge "I never went to the bridge until I was fifteen or sixteen years old," Pelsin said, breaking into my reverie.

"What?" I said, startled. The bridge is Zakho's primary historic attraction, the focal point of an otherwise scraggly architectural landscape.

"As a high family, we never went out in public places."

I blinked hard. I didn't know what to say. To be of a "high" family in Kurdistan sounded like more of a curse than a blessing.

"Life must be very difficult for you here," I finally said, wis.h.i.+ng that I could somehow change things. My new friends seemed so capable, so intelligent, so buried.

They shrugged, exhibiting the Kurdish stoicism that I noticed so often. "It is okay. Sometimes we are depressed, but little by little, things are changing."

BEHIN DZAKHO ROSE a range of dry, rugged, elephant-skin mountains, followed in the distance by the higher icy peaks of Turkey. Gazing out of Arjin's bedroom window later that day, I felt at the edge of existence, close to the land and the sky. Children were playing in streets nearly empty of traffic, and Arjin and I had just returned from visiting her sister, who lived next door. She had recently been ill and was receiving thirty or forty visitors a day, every day. The city around me notwithstanding, I was in a village.

Arjin's family home was big and dark and spa.r.s.ely furnished, with an inviting garden lined with flower beds out back. In the house lived about a dozen people, including Arjin's frail mother, several siblings and cousins, and the wife of a brother who was living in England. Pale, silent, and pregnant after the brother's most recent visit, the wife had been waiting for five years to join her husband.

Arjin, one of her sisters, a teenage niece, and I had gathered in the small upstairs bedroom to talk and giggle, look at pictures, and munch on baklava. Arjin's sister spent a long time studying herself in a handheld mirror, while the teenage niece, who had just started covering herself, took time out to say her evening prayers. None of the other under-forty women in Arjin's family wore the head scarf.

"Many young women are starting to cover themselves more and more," Arjin said as we watched her niece, and I remembered Bayan, my bright-eyed, tightly covered translator in Dohuk. "I think because after the uprising, we went a little crazy. We were like teenagers, we did like Westerners do. So maybe now, without realizing, we want to return to our own culture. We are Muslim."

What parts of one's culture to keep and what to leave behind when moving from one era into the next? How to know what losses to mourn, what changes to embrace?

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I awoke to the sounds of sheep baaing, birds singing, chickens cackling, people hammering, and men slapping loaves of bread into shape in a bakery down the street. On the rooftops around me, between satellite dishes, women were stringing laundry up on clotheslines.

Arjin and I breakfasted on typical Kurdish fare-the flat nane tanik, white cheese, yogurt, honey, tea-and then Arjin handed me the keys to the family car. We had places to visit, but Arjin couldn't drive and a.s.sumed that I could. Like many Iraqi Kurds with limited firsthand knowledge of the outside world, she imagined that Westerners, and especially Americans, were proficient at everything. If they only knew!

Arjin badly wanted to learn how to drive, but to do so would have meant undertaking a difficult and exhausting campaign against public opinion. Most women in traditional Kurdistan do not drive. Cars are regarded as the province of men, and women who trespa.s.s risk being viewed as immoral. Most traditional Kurdish women also do not travel by themselves or spend the night away from home unless in the company of male relatives.

However, these mores-which do not necessarily apply to urban Kurdish women, especially in Iran and Turkey-are changing. Many in Iraqi Kurdistan told me that women's lives have greatly improved over the last two decades. And I had already met several women from traditional families who drove, lived in school dorms, or held jobs that involved extensive unaccompanied travel.

Whether or not a woman was allowed to drive, travel, or spend nights away from home without a male escort all depended on her family and where it stood vis--vis the h.o.a.ry question of honor.

Honor is a central value in Kurdish society, affecting everyone, but it is women who are the most burdened. It is they who must maintain their family's reputation by keeping both their behavior and all perceptions of their behavior above reproach, especially in poorer communities, where a young girl's virginity may be her family's only commodity. Women must therefore not only refrain from pre- and extramarital s.e.x, flirting, and seductive dress, but they must also take care not to be spotted with an unrelated man once too often, spend too many unaccountable hours away from home, or go out without family after a certain hour. Such strictures lead to women keeping unnaturally tight reins on themselves. Yet they can scarcely afford to do otherwise, as the price for mistakes is extraordinarily high. The specter of honor killings is always lurking.

Many Kurds I met were quick to blame honor killings on fundamentalist Islam, but the practice is feudal and patriarchal in origin, not Islamic. Sharia, or Islamic law, calls for the stoning of both men and women for adultery, but only when there are four witnesses and when the punishment is carried out by the authorities. Taking the law into one's own hands, as some Kurdish families do, is not condoned by Islam, and s.e.x between an unmarried man and unmarried woman is not a capital offense under sharia.

As elsewhere in the traditional Muslim world, most Kurdish women live under many other strictures as well. Women must marry, preferably before age thirty, if they wish to gain respect and a three-dimensional, quasi-independent life. Unmarried women usually live with their parents or married siblings, where they are expected to shoulder much of the housework, and remain virgins until they die. Divorced women are usually forced to return to their parents' or a sibling's home, as they have no other means of economic support, and they are often treated as objects of great shame by their family.

Men are also expected to marry. A bachelor garners little respect in traditional Kurdish society, where a man needs a wife to provide him with everything from food to s.e.x. Prost.i.tution was almost unknown in the strongly family-oriented Kurdish communities until recent decades, and is still often regarded with unmitigated horror, as I learned for myself one evening, when a male friend of Arjin's family took us up a mountaintop for a scenic view of Zakho. Dusk was settling in, a blue haze descending, and bushes were jumping out of the darkening landscape like fat black sheep. From one spot on the mountain, the friend pointed out the site of a former "casino," once filled with Egyptian prost.i.tutes imported by the Baathists to distract the Kurds from their cause, he said. But the peshmerga had successfully bombed the casino one day, killing all the "evil" women inside. He beamed proudly, seemingly not suspecting that there might be another way to view the matter.

Once married, Kurdish women were traditionally expected to produce as many children as possible. Many middle-aged Kurds I met throughout Greater Kurdistan had ten, twelve, or even more siblings. But today's families are considerably smaller, with many younger village families raising only three or four children, and educated families, only two or three. However, especially among villagers, boy children still tend to be more prized than girl children, and, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, if a wife does not bear a son, her husband has grounds to take a second wife.

As Muslims, Kurdish men are allowed to have four spouses, while Kurdish women can have only one. But a man can take another wife only if he is financially able to do so. "Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice (to so many) then one only," reads the Quran (4:3).

Not surprisingly, the taking of second wives was not a subject about which most Kurds felt comfortable talking to me. And many insisted that with modernization and the deterioration of their agricultural society, in which many children were needed to harvest the crops, the practice is dying out. But in the absence of any hard data, I remain unconvinced, at least as far as Iraqi Kurdistan is concerned. I met a number of powerful men under age forty-five who had two wives, and some women told me that they believed the custom was becoming more, rather than less, common, due to the shortage of eligible men post-Anfal, coupled with Kurdistan's increased oil-for-food wealth.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, both men and women were always pointing out to me how liberal their society is, compared to other Muslim societies, in its treatment of women. Educated Kurds often referred to the writings of early Western travelers and scholars-most male-who commented on the relative freedom of Kurdish women. And in some ways, the early visitors' observations hold true: many Kurdish village women cover only their heads, many have much authority in the home, men and women mix somewhat in social settings, and Kurdish women are often much more outspoken than are their Arab counterparts. Throughout history, too, Kurdish women have occasionally held high positions in politics and the military.

But from what I saw, the typical Iraqi Kurdish woman's so-called "greater freedoms" were limited and far from widespread. Though change is under way, most traditional Kurdish women's lives remain highly circ.u.mscribed, sometimes in ways that are more extreme than in some other parts of the Islamic world. While in Iran in 1998, for example, I met many women who, despite the mandatory covering, drove cars, took taxicabs by themselves, owned businesses, served in government, worked as professionals, and went out alone with other women at night, at least in the larger cities, without anyone blinking an eye. Honor killings are also rarer in Iran, as it is a more sophisticated society, further removed from its tribal past. But many Iraqi Kurds I met did not want to hear this; they were too intent on proving their moral superiority over their hostile neighbors. To them, Iran was an enemy state and, ipso facto, more antifemale.

LEAVING ZAKHO, ARJIN and I headed west through a dry, flat land bordered to the immediate north by the elephant-skin mountains that I had seen from her window. We were traveling on a well-paved, four-lane highway and at first encountered little traffic.

As we drove, I tentatively asked Arjin about the tribal affiliations of Zakho's citizens. Despite my interest in the topic, I'd learned to approach it with caution. Some people reacted quite defensively to the subject, saying that there was no such thing as tribes in Kurdistan anymore and that the old tribal names-Barwari, Zibari, Doski-now referred more to geography than to groups of people. "Is New York a tribe? Is California a tribe? No! They are places, and it is the same in Kurdistan!" one man said to me, shutting me up. But other Kurds I met were as interested in their tribal heritage as was I, and Arjin-I should have known-fell into the latter category.

Although the once-paramount power of the tribe is no more-in that sense, my defensive friend was right-tribal affiliations are still central to Iraqi Kurdish ident.i.ty, a fact I first learned from anthropologist Diane King, who lived in northern Iraq for a year in 199798. However, as King points out, the tribes differ considerably in age, form, and degree of influence over their members. Some tribes are centuries old, others relatively new. Many are based on genuine kins.h.i.+p links, others share a more fictive sense of family. Some number in the tens of thousands, others in the hundreds. A few still wield considerable power, most do not. Many Kurds are also completely nontribal, having either lost their affiliations centuries ago or else descendant from a once-separate group that was never organized into tribes. I would find even more nontribal Kurds in Turkey and Iran, where many have been a.s.similated into large, non-Kurdish cities such as Istanbul and Tehran.

Even the word tribe means different things to different Kurds. Some Iraqi Kurds, for example, consider the Barzanis, despite their enormous power, to be a confederation rather than a tribe, as they were only formed in the nineteenth century, by a shaikhly family and peasants who defected from neighboring tribes.

The city of Zakho, said Arjin, was a mix of many people. "Most people in Zakho are from the Sindi, Suleyvani, or Guli tribes, or they are Zakholi or Kocher," she said. By "Zakholi," she meant people who had lived in the city for several generations and who'd forgotten, or pretended to have forgotten, their tribal affiliations. By "Kocher," she meant the former nomads of various tribes, settled now for generations, who lived scattered all over Iraq and Turkey. The Sindi were a conservative mountain tribe known for making mistakes-"I would never marry one," Arjin laughed-and the Suleyvani, a more modern plains tribe known for paying too much attention to appearances. The Suleyvani were more modern than the Sindi because the Iraqi government had conquered their flat lands some twenty years earlier than they'd subjugated the Sindi, who were able to put up a fiercer fight from the mountains.

"What about you?" I asked Arjin. "What's your family's history?"

Arjin had been born in Mosul, now in Iraqi government territory, as had all her siblings, she said. Her father had died when she was young, and an older brother joined the peshmerga. Then one day in the 1980s, the Iraqi forces arrested her mother. "You must go to the mountains and tell your son to give himself up," they said-a common tactic used to pressure the Kurds. Her mother refused and was promptly imprisoned. She'd had brain surgery a few years before and was not in the best of health. But through bribery, Arjin's uncles managed to smuggle the drugs she needed into her cell.