Patrick Treacy visits Kurdistan 1990

May 8, 2012 - PRLog -- The air was still chilly this early in the day and the station was unexpectedly alive with people coming and going, on route to differing destinations. I was apprehensive about the long journey, although fired by the sense of adventure and somewhat eager to find a Kurd who would take me back across the Zagros Mountains to the cities of Arbil and Sulaymaniyah. The morning sun was getting higher in the sky, when I became acquainted with a enigmatic young driver, called Soubi, who was willing to make the journey north.

"You want to go to Kurdistan?" he said in disbelief. "But it’s many hundred kilometres from here!"

"I know that, how much will it cost?" I inquired, haggling for the fare, although I knew that I could easily afford whatever price he demanded as I had exchanged some dollars for a very favourable rate the day before. "Five hundred Saddams for one day! he replied

I immediately told him that this was much too expensive but a quick calculation told me it was only about forty dollars for the journey. "Three hundred!"  I replied I said, knowing we would probably split the difference at four hundred Iraqi dinars in the end. .

We set off around 7.30 a.m., as the dew began to fade in the heat of the coming morn and made our way along the 14th July street to the intersection for the highway for Mosul. On the outskirts of Baghdad, we passed through many small villages, mostly collections of one-storey dwellings, erected close together and separated by little walled courtyards.

http://youtu.be/LOAmKg-FsCY



Our journey brought us north, along the fertile plains of in the valley of Samara, past the farms of wheat fields that nestled along the river Tigris to the village of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. Soubi told me that the village was also special to the Kurdish people, being the birthplace of their great leader, Saladdin, who in 1187, rallied the armies of Islam to beat the Crusaders at the battle of Hattin. The following year, he won back Jerusalem from the Christians and defeated the armies of King Richard the Lionheart. After some hours of mostly unchanging landscapes and listening to the music of a Kurdish favourite, called ‘Juwan Hajo’, we reached the village of Ash-Sharqat. The village still had the feel of Arabia, adorned with palm trees that overlooked mud walled buildings and streets lined with vendors dressed in dishdashas selling tobacco and spices on the side of the road. Soubi slowed down on the far end of the town and pulled the car over to what appeared to be a little roadside garage. He appeared to be familiar with the premises and I assumed that he must have brought his taxi there some time in the past. I got out of the vehicle, as some small boys guided him up an elevated concrete ramp, positioned at a twenty-degree angle to help the mechanic make repairs. These roadside garages are common along the northern highway, usually located close to gaily painted kerbside advertisements that advertised Castrol or Duckhams Motor Oil.

The garage owner then appeared. He was a jovial man, with capillaried cheeks and a handlebar moustache who approached us with outstretched welcoming arms. ‘Salaamu a leekum, bi-kher-bay, salaamu a leekum’ he smiled, shaking our hands and emitting a string of salutations in both Arabic and Kurdish. I had not heard the languages spoken together in the one sentence before but in this region it probably was good for business as you wouldn’t know who was liable to drop in. Soubi later told me that the Kurdish language was Indo-European in origin and that differing dialects are spoken throughout Kurdistan. In the southern areas of the region, those bordering Iraq and Iran, Sorani is spoken, while in the northern areas around the Turkish border, Kurmanji is the principal dialect. The different groupings didn’t understand each other and this was further complicated by the fact that one used Latin and the other, the Arabic script. While the negotiations for a service were under way, the garage owner gave his young son a few dinars to go off to a teashop and fetch us three glasses of sweet blood red tea. The small boy ran off down the road to an entrance beside a nearby hotel and I began thinking about the journey ahead and pondered what difficulties lay before me. To the east lay the town of Kirkuk, the rich oil centre of northern Iraq and the heavily fortified Khalid ibn Walid army base. The whole area had originally been part of an autonomy deal with Kurdistan, but the Ba’ath regime had begun a process of planting the area with Arabs and forcing the original inhabitants to move futher south. During the Iran Iraq war, the army garrisons in the area were greatly reduced and the local freedom fighters, the peshmerga, which literally means ‘those who face death’, had reasserted themselves. It was dangerous for a foreigner to travel alone in the area because even the local Kurds could be members of the jash, collaborators who were paid by the Iraqi government to spy on their neighbours. I was contemplating these thoughts, when I noticed the garage owner viewing me in a meditative manner, as he slowly rubbed his oily hands in his khaki coloured sharwal.

"He wants to know where you’re from?"  asked Soubi

"Irlanda" I replied.

"Irlanda", he said with a intent look of sadness in his eye. Then he approached me and striking his clasped hands over his heart, he said "Bobby Sands!"

At that precise moment, I knew he welcomed me because he felt our peoples shared a common fate of oppression and suffering. It was a valuable lesson to learn and unknowingly he gave me a blank passport that I knew would be able to use again before I left Kurdistan