The murder of Sardasht Osman is a crime that must be utterly and unconditionally condemned by anyone who cares for this region. It is sad, however, that this crime was so rapidly and so disgustingly politicized by the members of the opposition group. It saddens me that this cruel crime whose first and foremost target was the stability of this region, was so quickly prejudged by some lunatic figures whose zeal for authority and money allows them to cross all lines of ethics, including outright lying on TV stations.

There are those who believe in the freedom of expression and then are those who abuse that freedom in the name of “independent media,” unfortunately many so called “independent” media outlets here in Kurdistan have opted to become part of the latter category. The “independent” newspapers in question are Hawlati and Awena newspapers, both of which refuse to reveal their sources of revenue, both of which mislead their readers by claiming that being independent of the establishment actually means independent journalism. A quick glance at either of these two papers reveals that there is no balanced reporting and that they both lack the most basic journalistic ethics.

Alas the Western press here in Iraq often relies on these papers for their news, for example, AFP has hired the chief editor of Awena to serve as their Kurdistan stringer/correspondent. By doing so, AFP is in violation of EU regulations of balanced reporting.

Following Sardast’s murder, Hawlati newspaper wrote on its first page, in a tabloid-style headline that the US has warned the KDP regarding the incident! The US office here in Erbil categorically denied the story and demanded a correction from Hawlati, who, shamelessly published a correction in their next issue, as if it was an innocent mistake.

These newspapers and some magazines, like Lvin, collectively turned Sardasht into a hero and found through the media channels of the opposition, a brief moment of fame through which to vent against the establishment. Well let me be the first one to say that Sardasht was not a hero. He was a victim of terror, terror that has crippled every Iraqi region since 2003 except Kurdistan The real heroes are those men who stand at checkpoints in 100 degree temperatures and ensure that this region is safe. the real heroes are those men and women who have turned Kurdistan into “the other Iraq,” and who have helped bring in billions of dollars in investments, which in turn have raised the living standards for the people of Iraqi Kurdistan. It is because of those men and women that Sardasht’s murder became such a big deal. If Sardasht was from Baghdad or Musil, who would speak of him? Who would protest for him? It is only because such incidents are so rare in Kurdistan that Sardasht became such a celebrity.

Unfortunately some people have forgotten the days when Kurds were being killed on identity, the days when they were being gassed with chemical weapons and were being buried in mass graves. Worse than that is that they forget the fact that there are still those who would want to do the same things to the Kurds.

May Sardasht Osman rest in peace and may God give his family and friends patience as they come to terms with this tragedy and may Kurdistan remain, as it has been since 2003, free of terrorism and fear.

Vahal A.
May 29, 2003
Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq

5000 dead and there were no campaigns to find the missing, no effort to list the dead, no Le Monde article crying, “We Are All Kurds,” no eulogies for the the infant whose last breath was taken in his father’s arms and subsequently photographed so that his brutal ending could have shook the conscience of humanity. It didn’t shake anything. The next day, the news in Iraq were celebrating victories in the northern battlefields while Western newspapers were busy reporting on the indictment of Oliver North for the Iran-Contra affair and a Colombian airplane crash. And there was nothing about the Kurdish town along the Iraq-Iran border which had been turned into a mass grave.

The corpse-littered streets of Halabja were as if they were not part of the map of this earth.

When a Kurdish delegation asked a Kuwaiti official to condemn Saddam’s use of chemical weapons, his disgusting response was, “what did you expect to be sprayed with, rose water?” No, sir, not rose water, but not mustard gas, either! Two years later, Kuwait would be on the receiving end of Saddam’s brutality as he annexed and occupied the sovereign state of Kuwait.

This anniversary is especially memorable because the man who ordered the attacks, Ali Hassan al-Majid was executed this past January for, among other crimes, the genocidal attack on Halabja. But it doesn’t stop there, the garbage can of history still reserves spaces for those who supplied Saddam with the weapons, for those who helped his military industry, for those Western politicians who stood idly by, for those Arab politicians who should have spoken up, for the newspaper editors who ignored Halabja, for the clergymen who did not express disgust.

Because Halabja was a moment in humanity’s history when cruelty triumphed over goodness, when the promise of “never again” was broken and the international community watched, not long thereafter, how Slobodan Milosevic and his gangsters massacred civilians in Srebrenica, how Hutu warlords macheted Rwandans of Tutsi origins and now how the Janjaweed are massacring and displacing the innocents of Darfur.

So on this 22nd year anniversary of Halabja, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I ask that you please stop to take one moment of silence in honor of victims of genocide everywhere.

One of my earliest memories of interacting with Christians involves going to our Christian neighbors’ houses on what I later would learn was Easter to get colored eggs. A group of us, Muslim boys would get together and go to Christian houses, every year in a trick-or-treat (minus the costumes) style of collecting candy and colored eggs. That was before I even went to school. At school, I had a number of Christian friends, we had a class called, “Islamic Education” and Christians were asked to leave the classroom for that period, that was the “secular” Saddam’s way of saying that Christians don’t have to learn about Islam if they choose not to, but I don’t really remember it to be a choice, I think they had to leave. I am speaking from memory and not as an expert on education curriculum.

In 1991 Iraqi Kurdistan was freed from Saddam’s regime and in the almost two decades that followed, the Christians of this region have thrived politically, culturally and economically. Let me back this up. Kurdish law dictates that amongst the 11 quota seats of the 111-member parliament, 6 must be filled by Christians, one of which is for Armenians. The proposed constitution of the Kurdistan region lists all of the Christian communities of the region as major components of the Kurdistani society.

The Syriac language whose immediate parent language is Aramaic is taught in Kurdistan’s public schools, students don’t merely take one language class in their mother tongue, the whole curriculum is in Syriac. This system applies to all Christian students for all pre-collegial levels of education. TV and radio stations, magazines and newspapers as well as tens of Chaldo-Assyrian cultural centers criss-cross this region.

Nearly all Christian churches have been renovated and tens of new ones have been built, some of the churches in Kurdistan and in the immediate disputed territories date back to the 7th century AD! According to AINA, 66 churches have been bombed in Iraq since the start of combat operations in 2003, far more than 66 churches have been built in the Kurdistan Region since 2003! Zero have been bombed by the terrorists.

The Christian villages that were demolished by the former regime have all now been rebuilt, thousands of housing units have been built by the KRG for Christian villagers across the Kurdistan region. Additionally, large sums of money have been invested by the KRG in Christian areas in the disputed areas of the Nineveh plains.

While Christians are targeted in the rest of Iraq simply for being Christian, the Kurdistan region has opened its arms for thousands of Christian families who now call Kurdistan home. Not only are they welcomed here and enjoy all the rights as the native Kurdistanis, they are also given financial assistance, in the form of monthly stipends, thanks to the KRG-established Christian Affairs Committee headed by Sarkis Aghajan.

Mr. Aghajan is an Assyrian Kurdistani whose contributions to the enhancement of Christians’ living standards in Iraqi Kurdistan have earned him international recognition, including having been knighted by the sitting pope with the award of knight commander in the order of St. Gregory the Great (rarely given to non-Catholics). Once KRGs finance minister, Sarkis, 48 is now retired and last week at his residence in Ainkawa, he told me that he wants to write his memoirs and complete his mission, hoping that ultimately, other governments in the Middle East would look after their Christian minorities.

Alas, so little of this is reported. On the contrary, last fall, Human Rights Watch released a report on the minorities of the Nineveh plains titled, “On Vulnerable Ground” where they shamelessly ignored the Christians’ golden era under the KRG.

KRG officials are not angels, they are politicians, they do not do it because of the “black eyes” of Christians, they do it for votes and popularity, but the end result is that a generation of Christians are now fluent in their mother tongue, that their villages are built, that their political rights are protected, that their culture is thriving and that their golden age in modern Iraq is now, here in Kurdistan.

Just last week, the region’s President, Mr. Massoud Barzani ordered Kurdish universities to accept 2000 Christian college students from Mosul to continue their education here in Kurdistan. Atheel al-Nujaifi, Mosul’s governor was unable to even comment on the Presidents move, mainly because he knows that he cannot protect his Christian citizens, because in Mosul, the terrorist continue to be active and their motto continues to be, “be a Sunni Arab or be dead.”

Upon hearing of his return, six families from Halabja with missing children from that day in 1988 went foreword to claim him as theirs, a judge, based on the results of DNA testing, decided that the child who was born Zimnako and renamed Ali was indeed the son of a survivor who still lives in Halabja, Fatima Mohammad Salih, a woman who had lost six children and her husband to the chemical attack of March 16, 1988.

So there they were, a mother who had lost everything but the memory of things and people that once were and a young man who, at birth was taken off the track of anything that can even resemble a normal childhood, a normal life. Twenty one years after losing all of her family, Fatima was presented with a Farsi-speaking son named Ali who has to now learn Kurdish in order to communicate with his biological mother, who has to now learn to be Zimanko again, as he was called for the first four months of his life.

How does one begin to move on from the shadow of Saddam, from the bloody legacy of Saddam, from the lives that were shattered by Saddam? What sin had Zimnako’s mother committed to be treated like this, to experience such pain and loss? Alas we leave the story where we read it, the headlines switch back to the election law and to who gets what. We forget about Zimnako and what Zimanko’s story represents, the need for an adequate system of transitional justice which includes a decisive de-Ba’thification policy. Only then can the phrase which we once so proudly wrote and spoke about, “the new Iraq” can once again be written with a capital N.

Below is an AP photo of the young man and his mother:

Vahal Abdulrahman
Salahadin, Erbil
December 6, 2K9

While the security situation seems to be slightly better in Kirkuk these days, one still gets the feeling that this city is constantly awaiting its next bombing, everywhere you go, you see heavily armed policemen, wearing bullet-proof vests. On top of each and every police truck, a man in a helmet has his index finger on the trigger of a machine gun, waiting for an order from the officer in the front passenger seat to say “start fire.” Police trucks penetrate through traffic with annoying sirens and occasional multilingual commands over loud speaks, ordering the cars immediately before them to make way or else…

There are no Americans to be seen, per the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement, SoFa, the Americans have retreated back to their bases and are called to duty only at the request and under the command of the Kirkuk police department, officially known as the Directorate of Kirkuk Police. Unlike the other police departments in Iraq, Kirkuk’s is in charge of not only the city center but also the districts (in the rest of Iraq, the Iraqi military handles security in the outer districts). Kirkuk’s outer districts includes the Sunni Arab district of al-Hawijah, which, despite the presence of an awakening council, continues to be, for the most part, a no man’s land. Fighters of al-Hawijah awakening council have had their salaries cut after the security file was transferred to the Iraqis and according to one awakening council leader, the funds have not come in for two months! I could not help but wonder whether the Maliki government is intentionally irritating members of Kirkuk’s awakening councils in order to stir things up ahead of the upcoming elections of which Kirkuk will take part. So I asked whether the al-Anbar awakening council members’ salaries have also been reduced and the negative response confirmed my fears.

I sat there, puzzled, “is this Kurdistan? Is this the heart of Kurdistan?” The Kurdistan I know and love has no terrorists, nobody wears an armored vest, nobody’s church or mosque is protected by heavily armed policemen. The Kurdistan in which I live has no ethnic tensions, the Kurdistan in which I live, foreigners hail cabs as freely as they would in London or New York, they attend concerts, they even watch baseball and American football on large HD TV sets in Erbil’s newly built T-Bar and Speed Center.

The naive person in me, the idealist person in me started to wonder, why would a Turkman or an Arab NOT want to be part of this prosperous and safe region and instead opt for this oh-so tense status quo?

With that thought and with the bright flames of the Baba Gurgur oilfield behind me, I sped through the Kirkuk-Erbil highway and came back to Erbil, just in time to catch Dolphins-Patriots game, in which Patriots were, of course victorious!

The new cabinet will have only one woman, Asos Najib Abdullah who will be the minister of labor and social affairs.

Here is some poetic justice, the man who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death by hanging, judge Ra’ouf Rashid will now be the minister of Justice in Barham Salih’s cabinet.

This administration has some very challenging tasks ahead of it, including patching things up with the federal government over natural resources, Kerkuk and other disputed areas and of course make every effort to keep a strong Kurdish presence in the upcoming Iraqi parliament.

Below is the list of the individuals who will be heading the new government:

Dr. Barham Salih: Prime Minister
Mr. Azad Barwari: Deputy Prime Minister

– Sheikh Ja’far Mustafa Ali: Minister of Peshmerga Affairs
– Baez Sa’ed Talabani: Finance
– Raouf Rashid: Justice
– Abdulkarim Sultan Sinjari: Interior
– Abdullah Abdulrahman Abdullah (a.k.a. Ashti Hawrami): Natural Resources
– Tahir Abdullah Hawrami: Health
– Safeen Muhsin Dizayi: Education
– Kamaran Ahmad Abdullah: Reconstruction and Housing
– Samir Abdullah Mustafa: Municipalities and Tourism
– Dr. Dilawar Abdulaziz ‘Ala-a-Din: Higher Education and Scientific Research
– Dr. Ali Oman Haji Badri Sindi (a.k.a. Ali Sindi): Planning
– Asos Najib Abdullah: Labor and Social Affairs
– Kawa Mahmoud Shakir: Culture and Youth
– Dr. Majid Hamad Amin: Martyrs and Anfalized
– Jamil Sulaiman Haidar: Agriculre and Water Resources
– Sinan Abdulkhaliq Ahmad Chalabi: Trade and Industry
– Anwar Jabali Sabo: Transportation and Communications
– Kamil Ali Aziz: Endowment and Religious Affairs

Today I visited the graveyard, incidentally with a friend whose father was amongst the victims of Saddam’s Barzanicide campaign. Painted in white, the tombstones have nothing written on them. No names, no dates of birth or death, no verse from the Qur’an, not even the so much as something indicating who they collectively were. Underneath the tombstones are bones belonging to men who once were fathers, sons, husbands and brothers, they were trucked away from their humble homes and collectively murdered only for being Barzanis.

A few minutes into the visit my friend who was orphaned at the age of 2 said that we should leave, I then realized just how personal this was for him, that the likelihood of his father’s remains being under that sacred ground must be causing him the sort of pain that I cannot ever imagine. I held on to one of the tombstones and quietly recited the first Sura of the Quran, al-Fatihah, not the eighth Surah, al-Anfal in whose name the genocide against the Kurds was declared, in whose name 8,000 Barzanis, 182,000 other Kurds were murdered for having been born Kurds.

On the way back he told me of a lady who still keeps her 14 year old boy’s clothes, books, notebooks and other belongings as if one day, he could come back to that history book, to that draft of a poem he attempted to write, to that photo of that soccer player he liked, to the memories of that next door girl on whom he had a crush.

Six years into post-Saddam Iraq and one thing is certain, we are living in an Iraq where Saddam’s legacy is part of our daily lives.

– Vahal Ali is an Iraqi American writer living in Kurdistan, he can be reached at Vahal.ali[at]gmail.com