NORTHERN IRAQ: THE SCARF

THE SCARF


They were an extended family crowded across from me around a small table in the roadside café beside the edge of a river—a dark-haired mustached father, two thin twenty something women with short hair, an elderly lady wearing a red and white scarf typical of the region on her head. There was also a man with a craggy face and white hair and several adolescent males. And then there was the four year old girl, frilled up in pink dragging her stuffed dog around the table, seeking entertainment. She was just as restless in this dining establishment as any small child in the US forced to behave in the presence of older relatives. But this was not the US. If you paid attention to the enticing aromas of grilled lamb and chicken and saw the fresh baked pita bread on the table, you might eventually guess the location or get close. Say Turkey or Egypt. But only US military personnel would identify the locale by having actually been near there. My table for two was in Northern Iraq.
I was on the road between Sulaymaniya, a dusty metropolis of 2 million people near the Iran border, and Erbil, the capital of Northern Iraq—also known by its fiercely patriotic inhabitants as Khurdistan. My driver, Farouk, borrowed from the Kurdish Ministry of Health, had strict instructions not to go through Kirkuk, a city I knew from CNN broadcasts, but not from personal experience. There had been a bombing that killed 75 people and injured four times that many three nights prior. I had been in Iraq for about ten days now, and was used to seeing an AKA-47 laid carefully across the backseat of the vehicles in which I travelled. I wasn’t too upset anymore by the Glock pistol the driver carried—except the time he left it in my seat and I sat on it briefly. You would not imagine such weapons were needed to provide mental health as we wound through the Iraqi countryside which is hilly and green and absolutely beautiful. We had past a mountain lake about an hour before and stopped by the shores to watch sunlight glisten on the small whitecaps formed by the wind. In many ways, the verdant mountainsides in this part of the country reminded me of my home in East Tennessee, but with more sheep than cows or horse and many fewer interspersed vacation houses. Looking from the valleys though, you could sight on all the peaks small square encasements just big enough to hold one or two people. I knew from going through some of the passes that those were guard posts. Places where a man can see far in the distance. A place a man scans for the enemy.
I got an uninvited glimpse at why a nation would be so wary when I visited the city of Amadiyah a few days earlier. It is a proverbial city set on a hill with streets that wind up from the plain looking like something right out of the Old Testament. Of course, the cell phones and satellite dishes ended that delusion as soon as we walked down its streets which were few, crunched together, and lined with houses, small businesses, and children playing stickball. We were in Amadiyah that day to visit the 20 bed hospital and fix a couple of hernias pretty much as a gesture of good will. When we got there, we learned a local official would like us to come by his house for “something to eat” afterward. Frankly, we had been taught well before the end of our first week in Iraq that this seemingly innocuous plan meant there would be enough delicious food to feed an army and accompanied by some sort of apology for not knowing we were coming and providing us with “inferior” fare cooked by the person’s wife instead of restaurant catered food. We were continuously bombarded by dolma, hummus, bread, fruits, kabobs and sweets of better quality than we get in restaurants at home. I rarely saw the orchestrator of the meal, but I imagined she had retired to her bed from sheer exhaustion of producing such a feast on short notice.
The Kurdish dignitary who issued the invitation was joined by a band of musicians with their interesting Iraqi stringed instruments and drums, a host of men dressed in their tribal keffiyeh head scarves and Peshmerga uniforms, and a group of confused and amused Americans in their travel clothes. After dinner, he asked if we would be willing to watch a video he had made of life in this village during Saddam’s reign. We sat down and saw the videographer close in on the face of General David Petraeus sitting in a folding chair watching a drama be re-enacted. From his serious expression, it panned out to the flat rocky plain at the foot of the village of Amadiyah. A wedding party marched down the winding mountain path. The women were gathered along the road in their beautiful ankle length dresses with scarves of gold braid. The men were dancing toward them and onlookers had gathered for the occasion. As the Muslim imam approached the crowd, an explosion was heard and then the crowd began to fall to the ground—at first trying to get up and help one another, and finally, unable to struggle any more. The re-enactment commemorates the gassing of the village and the deaths of 3000 people in one day in 1988. That’s about the same number who died in the 9/11 attacks. And this is just one village in Northern Iraq. There were 39 suspected gassings –some leading to over 7000 simultaneous deaths and wiping out entire families. One man who survived told us he had been out of town visiting relatives. On his return, he saw the bodies of his fellow villagers and ran away, hiding in the nearby caves. He escaped to Iran. He had only been back in Khurdistan for two years, but he is happy to be home. I heard a hundred stories like this while I was in Northern Iraq—stories of mothers and children fleeing to the borders of Turkey and Iran at night in snowfall, stories of loved ones who stayed behind to join the Pegmersha and fight for freedom, stories of loved ones who did not escape. As the film ended and the lights came back on, I saw most of the men holding the ends of their red and white scarves to their eyes, wiping away tears they made no effort to hide. Minutes later, the band members got up and played lively tunes and these men were up dancing about the room arm and arm and grabbing us to join in their levity. They taught us this lesson: You honor the dead by remembering and then living life to the fullest.
Just like the family in the roadside café. They were carrying on with their daily existence. And I was out of my element.
When the pretty little Kurdish girl came over to stare at my blonde hair, I showed her my camera. Like any kid, a big smile came across her face. She held her toy dog tight in an adorable pose, becoming a miniature fashion model for my clicking Nikon. The dad came over after a few minutes and caught her up in his arms.
“Are you from Sweden?” he asked in British-accented English.
A small laugh escaped me. “No.”
“Australia?” He conjectured.
“No,” I said, putting my kabob down on the table. “The United States.”
He raised a brow. “U.S.?” He looked a bit disbelieving. Not many US citizens prowl in that pastoral region of Iraq, away from cities and the conflict.
I nodded my head. I wasn’t sure how to gauge his reaction. He began to talk to the people with him at the table. He handed the little girl to one of the younger women and gesticulated with his hands, pointing at me. I started to feel just a little concerned. I look at Farouk, the driver. He was still chewing with the placidity of a dairy cow. I saw the elderly matron in a red and white keffiyeh head covering push herself slowly up from the table and totter arthritically toward me. Her headscarf was the same style the men at Amadiyah wore. I thought back to the tears that soaked into the fabric. When the old woman reached me, I noticed she had a cataract in one eye. She leaned down close to peruse my face—perhaps to make sure the younger gentleman hasn’t made a mistake about my nation of origin. Before I realized it was happening, she touched my cheek and kissed me, as though she were my own mother. Then she reached up to her head, took her scarf off and laid it on my lap.
I looked to the driver for help. “What does she want?”
Farouk didn’t even stop chewing and addressed me as though I am incapable of seeing the obvious. “She wants to give you her keffiyeh.” I will learn later that it is a symbol of her tribe and her allegiance to the Barzani clan who were and are leaders in Khurdistan—an item that is both personal and nationalistic.
I glanced at her clothes. They looked typical of the women in the region—nothing fancy. Her appearance is one of neither wealth nor abject poverty, but still, I didn’t feel it would be fair to accept her clothing. “Tell her it’s very nice of her to offer, but I can’t take it.” I handed it back to her gently as Farouk uttered a few words in Kurdish.
She looked a bit disappointed, but she took it back and replaced it on her head. Then she smiled and chanted over and over, “Ez te hezdikhem.” She patted my arm and smiled. Then she turned and slowly made her way back to her place amongst her family. I looked toward them. They nodded their assent to her, continuing with their meal.
Farouk looked at his watch. “We need to go. It will be close to dark when we reach Erbil. I was told not to drive with you in the dark. Dangerous in the dark.”
“Okay,” I said and got up to leave. The family waved at me, all smiles. I waved back. I pointed the camera one last time at the little girl who giggled and nuzzled her stuffed animal into her neck.
As we got in the car and I heard the engine turn, I asked my driver, “What was that lady saying back there?”
He turned the steering wheel and repeated, “Ez te hezdikhem.”
“Yes!” I recognized the words. “What does it mean?”
A grin spread across his well-fed face, “It means in Kurdish, ‘I love you.’”
I turned my head back toward the restaurant and saw the family through the glass of the windows breaking their pita bread, rolling it around a kebab and sipping hot tea. The old Kurdish woman was talking, laughing, sharing the moment—her keffiyeh resting carefully atop her graying hair.