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By Root 940 0

Kurdish conflict has resulted in a death toll equivalent to eleven Northern Irelands or forty-five Spains in half the span of time. Kinzer says that a reasonable case can be made either way that the war is the fault of the Kurds or the Turkish government: the Kurds because of the fanatics who rallied people to pointless rebellion and killed everyone who stood in their way, and the government because it oppressed the Kurds for so long that they had no choice. Kinzer asks, “But after so much bloodshed and the passage of so much time, what does it matter which of these arguments is right? Even definitively answering the question of guilt, which is of course impossible, would solve only the problems of the past. Turkey’s challenge is to overthrow the tyranny of the past and begin to lay the foundation for a new future.”

The fighting between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkish soldiers has been going on for nearly thirty years, according to Meline Toumani in her article “Minority Rules,” and since 2004 the violence has alternated between short-lived cease-fires and sporadic attacks. Most of us know this from reading newspaper headlines. Yet I don’t believe many of us really have a handle on this old conflict, and when I was searching through my files to find a piece that both outlined the history of the conflict and was fairly up-to-date, I found I didn’t have one. So I turned to Christiane Bird’s excellent book A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts: Journeys in Kurdistan (Ballantine, 2004) and decided that this was the right occasion to make an exception and feature a book excerpt. The excerpt below is from the first chapter of the book, “Through the Back Door.”

CHRISTIANE BIRD is also the author of Neither East nor West: One Woman’s Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran (Atria, 2001), among others.

THE KURDS are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own. Probably numbering between 25 and 30 million, they live in an arc of land that stretches through Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of the former Soviet Union, with the vast majority residing in the region where Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran meet. About eight hundred thousand Kurds also live in Europe, with about five hundred thousand of those in Germany, while some twenty-five thousand Kurds live in the United States and at least six thousand in Canada.

Not a country, Kurdistan cannot be found on modern maps. The term was first used as a geographical expression by the Saljuq Turks in the twelfth century and came into common usage in the sixteenth century, when much of the Kurdish region fell under the control of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires. For the Kurds themselves, Kurdistan is both an actual and a mythical place—an isolated, half-hidden, mountainous homeland that has historically offered sanctuary from the treacherous outside world, and from treacherous fellow Kurds.

I became interested in the Kurds during a 1998 journey to Iran. While there, I traveled to Sanandaj, Iran’s unofficial Kurdish capital, where I was immediately struck by how different the area seemed from the rest of the Islamic Republic—heartbreaking in its lonesome beauty, and defiant. Despite a large number of Revolutionary Guards on the streets, the men swaggered and women strode. These people are not cowed, I thought—no wonder they make the Islamic government nervous.

In Sanandaj, I stayed with a Kurdish family I had met on the bus, and attended a wedding held in a small pasture filled with about two hundred people in traditional dress. To one side were the city’s ugly concrete buildings; to another, empty lots strewn with litter. But the people and their costumes, framed by the far-off Zagros Mountains, transcended the tawdry surroundings. Women in bright reds, pinks, greens, blues, and golds. Men in baggy pants, woven belts, and heavy turbans. Boys playing with hoops. Girls dreaming by a bonfire. Musicians on a mournful flute and enormous drum, followed by circling men dancing single file, one waving a handkerchief over his head.

After I returned