32 Time November 25, 2019
The modern middle easT was
formed exactly 100 years ago when,
in the wake of World War I, the victors
began creating new countries. Among
the populations deemed deserving of
nationhood—along with Armenians and
Azeris—were the Kurds. The Kurds had
lived for centuries in the mountains and
high plains where Mesopotamia becomes
Anatolia and, with their own language,
culture and identity, met the criteria for
a nation of their own. Instead, the Kurds
ended up within the borders of five other
nations, a tapestry cut by a jigsaw.
What photographer Moises Saman
documents on these pages is that divi-
sion playing out in three of the coun-
tries: Kurds in Iraq are giving refuge to
Kurds from Syria, who have come under
attack by the army of Turkey, the nation
with the largest Kurdish minority of all.
(The Kurds in Iran and in Armenia are
uninvolved in the current conflict, ex-
cept by viewing the Kurdish satellite
channels that unite the roughly 24 mil-
lion Kurds in the region, plus 1.5 million
living in Europe.)
On Oct. 6, President Trump spoke
on the phone with the President of Tur-
key, then abruptly ordered U.S. forces to
abandon their positions protecting Syr-
ia’s Kurds, who had been essential allies
in the common fight against ISIS. Turk-
ish troops then began shelling Kurdish
towns in Syria, and Turkish forces pushed
forward, irregulars executing people in
ditches along the road. Perhaps 160,000
civilians fled the advance, most going
deeper into Syria. Some 15,000 Kurds
have so far made their way east to Iraq.
There, some found themselves in a
desolate refugee camp that already con-
tained Kurds from Syria who had fled
the country when Syria’s civil war began,
back in 2012. The two groups would serve
as bookends in the Syrian conflict, if any-
one thought it was over. Instead, the U.S.
pullback marked the start of an espe-
cially convoluted new phase, in which for-
eign powers— Russia and Turkey, which
World
T
rushed into the void left by the U.S.—
patrol highways also frequented by a
rump U.S. force, and occasionally even
by the Damascus government.
Among the Kurds, the situation is
scarcely simpler. Syrians arriving at the
Iraqi border approach after dark, hail-
ing Iraqi Kurdish sentries from the dark-
ness without drawing the attention of the
Syrian Kurdish forces, who would prefer
they remain in Syria. As many as 250 ar-rive in a night. After registering—their
names checked against a list maintained
by Kurdish security agencies—they are
given a blanket. In the morning, they
board a bus for the 60- or 70-km jour-
ney to a camp across a landscape stip-
pled with reminders of what seems to be
nearly incessant conflict. Graveyards hold
only some of the at least 60,000 Kurds
killed by Saddam Hussein’s forces in the
late 1980s. Broken concrete marks the