A12 FOLIO O THEGLOBEANDMAIL | SATURDAY, NoVEMBER 2, 2019
BARDARASH REFUGEE CAMP, IRAQ
T
ears welled in Fatiyah Sa-
lam’s eyes as she hugged her
sister, Hamdiyah. Their sur-
roundings, in a refugee camp
more than 250 kilometres from
their homes, didn’t matter, at
least for the moment.
Fatiyah and Hamdiyah hadn’t
seen each other since 2013, when
Fatiyah fled northeastern Syria as
Islamic State fighters approached
her hometown. Her sister stayed
behind. For the past six years, Fati-
yah has lived with her daughter-
in-law and grandson in the Domiz
refugee camp, on the outskirts of
the Iraqi city of Dohuk, wonder-
ing when it might be safe to return
to the Kurdish part of Syria.
Times seemed to get better in
Rojava, as the Kurdish enclave in
northeastern Syria is known, es-
pecially after U.S. soldiers arrived
in the area to help crush the self-
declared caliphate. Maybe, the
family hoped, they’d be able to
move home soon.
The Salam sisters – at 56, Fati-
yah is the elder by two years –
were reunited on Oct. 23, not in
Rojava, but in Bardarash, yet an-
other refugee camp in the Kurdish
region of northern Iraq, where
Hamdiyah arrived after her own
flight from northern Syria. She
will spend at least the next three
weeks in Bardarash while her doc-
uments are processed.
Reuniting in Rojava became
impossible when U.S. President
Donald Trump withdrew troops
from the region earlier this
month and greenlighted Turkey’s
invasion aimed at driving out the
Kurdish People’s Protection Units
(YPG) militia.
The sisters’ meeting in a refu-
gee camp surely signals the death
of the dream of a Kurdish state in
northeastern Syria – just the latest
time that an independent coun-
try called Kurdistan has seemed
close, only to prove a mirage.
The fact that the Bardarash
camp exists speaks to the never-
ending crisis that the estimated 28
million Kurds scattered across
Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran live in.
The camp was initially erected in
2014 to receive refugees fleeing
the nearby Iraqi city of Mosul, af-
ter it fell into the hands of IS.
It was finally dismantled earli-
er this year after the last of those
refugees trickled home, only to be
hurriedly reopened in mid-Octo-
ber to receive the Syrian Kurds
who began fleeing after Mr.
Trump withdrew American pro-
tection from Rojava.
Many Kurds believe the real
aim of the offensive ordered by
Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan is to drive Kurds out of
Rojava and replace them with
ethnic Arabs allied to the Turkish
military.
Calamity is heaped upon ca-
lamity in this part of the world.
The refugees who reach northern
Iraq are taken by bus from the
border to Bardarash via a route
that passes between two spraw-
ling camps that together hold al-
most 200,000 Yazidi refugees (a
religious minority that shares eth-
nic roots with the Kurds), whose
community was targeted for gen-
ocide by IS. Their shattered home
region remains uninhabitable
five years later.
The betrayal of the Kurds didn’t
begin with Mr. Trump. Over a 10-
day drive across the lands of this
invisible country – a journey that
took photographer Andrea Di-
Cenzo and I more than 1,000 kilo-
metres through northern Iraq, via
refugee camps filling up with
Kurds fleeing Syria, and into the
repressed southeast of Turkey –
many of the Kurds I meet remind
me that their tragedy, in its mod-
ern form, began a century ago.
The great powers who divided up
the Ottoman Empire after the
First World War decided that the
Middle East they were redrawing
would be easier to manage with-
out a land-locked Kurdistan in the
middle.
Since then, the Kurds have re-
peatedly risen up in Iraq, Turkey,
Syria and Iran, only to be crushed
each time – including with the use
of chemical weapons by Saddam
Hussein’s regime – while the in-
ternational community looked
away. Their language and culture
have been systematically re-
pressed by all four states they live
under.
“Whatever takes place – chem-
ical bombardments, air strikes,
keeping us from having an inde-
pendent state – the big powers
can do it and get away with it,”
said Hussein Ali, a family friend
who drove Fatiyah from the Dom-
iz camp to Bardarash to meet her
sister. “It is not in the interest of
the big countries for Kurds to have
a country and use our resources to
protect ourselves.”
For the past 16 years, ever since
Iraq’s Kurds marched south with
the U.S. armies that ousted Mr.
Hussein, they and their cause had
one important ally: the United
States of America. That ended on
Oct. 6 when Mr. Trump, after a
phone call with Mr. Erdogan,
abruptly pulled U.S. soldiers out
of the part of Kurdistan that lies
within modern-day Syria. The
Syrian Kurds, who had lost 11,
fighters while spearheading the
defeat of IS, were left to their own
devices while their future is being
decided between Mr. Erdogan,
Russian President Vladimir Putin
and Mr. Putin’s client, Syrian
strongman Bashar al-Assad.Suddenly, Iraq’s Kurds, clinging
to the autonomous region they’ve
carved out in the mountains east
of Mosul, worry that they’re a
Trump tweet away from a similar
fate.
I’d travelled through Kurdistan
before, in 2008. Then, I found a
people optimistic about the fu-
ture, fond of the U.S. and all things
Western. Retracing part of that
journey in 2019, I encountered
growing anger at the U.S. and the
West, blended with a sense of de-
feat – as if decades of progress to-
ward the Kurds’ long-held dream
of independence had been un-
done by one poorly considered
presidential decree.ERBIL, IRAQThe capital of the Kurdistan Re-
gional Government (KRG) – the
mini-state in northern Iraq that is
the closest the Kurds have ever
come to a country of their own –
was surprisingly quiet when we
arrived in late October. A five-day
pause in Turkey’s offensive
against Rojava was about to ex-
pire, and the trickle of refugees
crossing into the KRG was threat-
ening to become a flood. But Erbil
remained deceptively calm.
The nearest thing to a popular
protest came Oct. 21, when a
group of young men pelted a U.S.
military convoy – which was arriv-
ing in Erbil after withdrawing
from Rojava – with stones as it
travelled to the American military
base outside the city. Fearful that
such scenes might annoy Mr.
Trump into ending U.S. support
for Iraqi Kurdistan, too, the KRG
ordered the men arrested the
same night.
The KRG is caught between a
population that instinctively
wants to stand with its Kurdish
brethren in Syria, and agovern-
ment that knows that three-quar-
ters of the region’s trade comesvia Turkey. Many Erbil residents
say they’re boycotting Turkish-
made products, but every day,
trucks carrying crude oil – the re-
gion’s main export – travel down
the highway to Turkey, passing
trucks heading the opposite di-
rection laden with Turkish-re-
fined fuel and other goods. “In the
KRG, our hearts are in Rojava, but
our hands are in the pockets of Er-
dogan. If he closes the border to-
morrow, people will starve here,”
said Hiwa Osman, a prominent lo-
cal journalist.
The KRG is afraid to lose what it
has. This mini-state stands both
as proof that Kurds cangovern
themselves and a reminder of all
the barriers standing between
them and genuine independence.
Iraq’s Kurds have their own
border regime – this is the only
part of the country where Wester-
ners can arrive without first secu-
ring a visa – and social policies
that are far more liberal than in
the areas governed by Baghdad.
Women play visible roles in poli-
tics and the economy. The Chris-
tian and Yazidi minorities say
they feel safe here.
The model of a moderate Mus-
lim democracy that Iraqi Kurds
have built is a dangerous one in
the eyes of its neighbours. Even
more threatening was the auton-
omous region’s status as a proud
ally of both the U.S. and Israel, a
position that put it at odds with
Iran, as well as its proxies in Bagh-
dad and Damascus.
When I made another trip to Er-
bil in 2014, two of the most opti-
mistic people I met were Tanya
Gilly Khailany, a Canadian-edu-
cated politician who had served
as an MP at the Iraqi parliament in
Baghdad, and her husband, Dara
Khailany, an adviser to the KRG’s
then-prime minister (now Presi-
dent), Nechirvan Barzani.
A catastrophe was unfolding
that year, just 80 kilometres to the
west of Erbil. IS fighters had seized
control of Iraq’s second-largest
city, Mosul. The battle to defeat IS
would subsequently claim thou-
sands of Iraqi Kurdish lives (in ad-
dition to the 11,000 Syrian Kurds
killed) as they fought alongside a
U.S.-led international coalition to
slowly liberate the lands that had
fallen under IS control.
But to the Khailanys, there was
also opportunity in this crisis.
Both spoke of their hope that the
countries the Kurds had allied
themselves with – first and fore-
most the U.S. – would finally un-
derstand why the Kurds needed to
be independent. Iraq and Syria
were on the verge of ceasing to ex-
ist. Who could argue that the
Kurds shouldn’t go their own
way?
“Right now, all options are on
the table,” Ms. Gilly Khailany, a
graduate of Carleton University,
told me at the time. Three years
later, the KRG made its move,
holding a referendum on whether
to declare an independent state.
Unlike the close-fought cam-
paigns in Quebec and Scotland
that the KRG pointed to as mod-
els, the September, 2017, vote was
a romp, with 93 per cent voting
Yes.
But none of the Kurds’ allies –
not the U.S., not Canada, which
had deployed soldiers to advise
the Kurdishpeshmergaforces as
they battled IS – backed the Kurds’
desire for a country of their own.
When the federal Iraqi army, sup-
ported by Iranian-backed Shia mi-
litiamen, marched a month later
on the Kurdish city of Kirkuk – in
an oil-rich region economically
vital to the idea of an independent
Kurdistan – thepeshmergawith-
drew. It had been made clear to
them that the Western troops sup-
porting their fight against IS
would not help the Kurds defend
land they considered their own.
“I still remember that day [of
the referendum]. I took my
daughter and told her ‘maybe you
will see this [an independent
state] in your lifetime.’ I didn’t ex-
pect it would happen overnight,
but we were close. We were almost
there,” Ms. Gilly Khailany said,
fighting back tears at the memory.
KURDS, AWheretheKurdishroadends:
TheGloberetracesapeople’spat
DonaldTrump’sdecisiontoabandonKurdishalliesinSyriawasn’tthefirst
timetheinvisiblenation’sdreamsofindependencehavebeendashed–and
they’reworrieditwon’tbethelast.MarkMacKinnonreturnstoKurdish
territorytoseehowitsrecentyearsofprogresshavebeenundone
PHoToGRAPHY BY ANDREA DICENZo/THE GLoBE AND MAIL
A vendor pushes a cart outside of a tea house in Erbil, which is the capital of the KurA man sits below a poster depicting Middle Eastern leaders in a tea-shop
in Erbil. The region has often been accused of taking Turkey’s side,
especially after the mini-state closed its only border with Syria.Whatevertakesplace–
chemical
bombardments,air
strikes,keepingusfrom
havinganindependent
state–thebigpowers
candoitandgetaway
withit.Itisnotinthe
interestofthebig
countriesforKurdsto
haveacountryanduse
ourresourcestoprotect
ourselves.HUSSEIN ALI
FAMILYFRIENDOFSALAMSISTERS