Posts Tagged ‘Kurdistan’
A Letter to H.E. Masoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq
May 4, 2015
Mr. Masoud Barzani
President
Kurdish Regional Government
Erbil, Iraq
For delivery in Washington, D.C.
Dear President Barzani:
With great pleasure we welcome you to the United States. I am so happy about the evident progress of the Kurdish people in their long struggle for their rights and autonomy, and their partnership with America.
Fifty years ago – in the spring of 1965 – I interviewed and photographed your esteemed father in Kurdistan. I was traveling through the mountains with a group of pesh mergas under the command of Colonel Akrawi, on assignment from Life Magazine, which published my article and photographs.
I have never forgotten that experience. Mullah Mustafa Barzani asked me to help the Kurdish cause with the people of America, and I have tried to do that in my modest ways as a photographer and writer. Much time and many events have passed on the world stage, but in my heart I have never forgotten the wonderful hospitality and special character of the Kurds.
In the last two years I have published a series of blogs of these photos on https://bywilliamcarter.wordpress.com I have corresponded with Kurds in the U.S. and in Kurdistan, who warmly invite me to travel to Erbil. My wife and I must think realistically about this at age 80!
Perhaps a comprehensive pictorial book can be published celebrating the dynamic present and inspiring history of the Kurds on their long road to autonomy. As part of that story. my diaries and pictures of your father, the pesh mergas, the hospitable village life and beautiful landscape would be available.
Please accept the enclosed photograph of Mullah Mustafa Barzani as a token of my admiration for all that you and your people are doing to honor his memory.
William Carter
I received this reply from Mr. Barzani dated May 17, 2015:
Letter from Masoud Barzani to William Carter
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Much More on the Kurds Part 6
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
They defended their birthright as a people.
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Much More on the Kurds Part 5
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Much More on the Kurds Part 4
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
Mullah Mustafa Barzani (right) with an assistant
Marching peshmergas getting directions from locals
Shepherds in spring: Kurds and their lands are distinct from others in the Middle East
Migrant shepherd family in spring
Relaxing in a village tea shop
Christian girl sheltering in a cave from Iraqi bombing
Mullah Mustafa Barzani during our last interview
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Much More on the Kurds Part 3
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
This Carter photograph was taken in Yemen, prior to William Carter’s visit to Kurdistan. Newly arrived Carter had been traveling in Yemen with veteran New York Times correspondent Dana Adams Schmidt, who told Carter about then little-known Kurdistan and who later helped him get there.
Kurdish villagers beside a well-used road in northern Iraq
Kurdish village, northern Iraq
Shepherd boy in spring
Spring religious ritual, near the Iraq-Iran border
Spring religious ritual, near the Iran-Iraq border
Sorting grain on a rooftop
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Much More on the Kurds Part 2
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
Morning in Kurdistan
Native Ibex from Kurdish area of eastern Iraq or western Iran
Conference between locals and peshmerga commanders
Burial of an executed “josh” (“donkey” or Iraqi government spy)
Kurdish graveyard
Peshmergas enjoying home hospitality in village north of Suleimaniya
Peshmerga platoon on the march
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Much More on the Kurds Part 1
northern Iraq 1965
photographs and text © William Carter
Because there’s been such a huge response to my Kurdish blogs (including a speaking request in California), I dug deeper and found more images from my trip to their mountain homeland in June 1965.
The figure at left is legendary leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani, father of the current President of Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani.
(By the way, I received several requests that I call it simply “Kurdistan,” not “Iraqi Kurdistan.” Well, that request is thick with politics. Suffice it to say I am an American, and my country is a member of NATO, which includes Turkey, whose southeast corner has an overwhelmingly large Kurdish population. Yet in my heart I am thrilled that the U.S. military and the Kurdish peshmerga fighters are working shoulder to shoulder these days–in a part of the world where trust is always in short supply)
More than 50 years ago, the day I was saying goodbye to Mullah Mustafa, we shook hands, and he said, “Please help us in America.” Through the translator I replied, “America is a big ocean, and I only have a small cup.”
Everyone laughed.
A few days later, when I rode away on a donkey, east toward the Iranian border, my peshmerga hosts lined themselves along the brow of a hill, waving for a while, then just standing there and watching me go, for nearly an hour, until I dropped out of sight.
Not, though, out of mind.
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Seeds of Today’s Headlines
plus some heartwarming responses
by William Carter
Mullah Mustafa Barzani, 1965
Running in this space for several months, my Kurdish blogs attracted wide attention, not least from the Kurds themselves. Seeing unknown, 50-year-old photographs of their own legendary founding hero, Mullah Mustafa Barzani (left), was a heart-warming revelation.
One non-Kurd who responded was Chris Kutschera, who runs a photo archive in Paris dedicated to his and others’ photographs from Kurdistan, and to his several books and many articles on the Kurds. Chris has added a number of my 1965 photographs to his ongoing collection, which can be visited at www.chris-kutschera.com
These days I get up early to scour the headlines for the latest news of the Kurdish peshmergas’ valiant struggle against the ISIS marauders in Syria and Iraq, helped by U.S. airdrops of supplies. Those of you who see the New Yorker magazine can read Dexter Filkins’ recent report in depth and detail on these special people.
Over the years visiting journalists, including myself, have admired these proud and independent folks to the point of struggling to maintain professional objectivity on the ins and outs of their long-running struggle for “autonomy” within existing Iraq, Turkey, and Syria — or, one day perhaps, independence as a separate nation.
One Kurd who responded to my photographs of the ancient Mesopotamian stones was Kozad Ahmed. A Kurdish archeologist born in Baghdad in 1967 (two years after my visit), he contextualized those stones in his detailed 2012 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Leiden in Holland, titled “The Beginnings of Ancient Kurdistan” (c. 2500-1500): A Historical and Cultural Synthesis.” Evidently those stones were smuggled out of the village of Betwata the 1970s, auctioned in Geneva and are now in museums in Jerusalem and Baghdad.
![[kneeling in a line] With Kurdish pesh mergas, Iraq, 1965](https://bywilliamcarter.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/kurdsi002.jpg "[kneeling in a line] With Kurdish pesh mergas, Iraq, 1965")
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Iraqi Kurdistan: More Surprises (Part 3)
Many of us learned in school that Mesopotamia’s Tigris-Euphrates Valley cradled the world’s earliest civilization. Unending waves of conquest would sweep over this well-watered land, obliterating much — but not all — of its history. Recent violence in northern Iraq spotlights once-isolated ethnic groups, such as the Yazidis and the Chaldean Christians; Aramaic-speaking villagers as well as remote members of the Muslim Kadri sect. Some of these far-flung peoples and languages date back thousands of years.
And, archeologists have long suspected there were important artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia still awaiting discovery in caves in Kurdistan. I learned this after a journalistic trek on foot and by donkey through the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan “recently” — only fifty years ago.
Welcomed by the, as yet, little-known Kurdish peshmerga guerrilla fighters, I was doing a photo story on their long-running struggle for autonomy within Iraq and Turkey. At one point my hosts showed me broken, thick stone rock carvings a local sheik had had dragged out of a cave. Evidently he wanted to sell them to me, but I was not in that business. It would have taken an expedition to move them. I took pictures of them, with their hieroglyphic writing. The next year, in London, I showed the photographs to the British Museum. The experts became quite interested, and wanted lots of details, including the exact location, which I was unable to provide other than “oh, we just happen to stop there for tea last June on the march from point A to point B, somewhere north of Sulaimaniya.” Nonetheless the British Museum reproduced my pictures in a scholarly publication.
Given the destruction of the once wonderful Baghdad Museum occasioned by the Bush-era invasion, I sometimes wonder if that stele, and others (?) like it, are not safer staying in their caves. During Saddam Hussein’s ruthless bombings and gassings of isolated ethnic villages — as under the current Isis marauders — some of these thousand-year survivors have themselves reverted to living in caves. Again, I photographed one group all too briefly before hurrying on to rejoin the peshmergas’ march. I always wanted to go back and explore these other ethnicities of Kurdistan, but that was not to be. This year, 2014, the Kurds invited me to fly into Erbil, now a modern city built on oil revenues. We would have loved to, but pushing 80, I hesitated — luckily, just before a new wave of gunmen surrounded the city.
Iraqi Kurdistan 1965 photographs © William Carter
Member of the Muslim Kadri sect celebrates spring ritual near the Iraq-Iran border
Members of Muslim Kadri sect celebrate spring ritual near the Iraq-Iran border
Christians sheltering in a cave from aerial bombing — Iraqi Kurdistan
Christians sheltering in a cave from aerial bombing — Iraqi Kurdistan
Mesopotamian stone carving hidden in cave, Iraqi Kurdistan
Mesopotamian stone carving hidden in cave, Iraqi Kurdistan
Hieroglyphics on stone in cave, Iraqi Kurdistan
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
Iraqi Kurdistan: More Surprises (Part 2)
In this part we focus, in black and white, on the villagers and shepherds living in the mountains of northern Iraq in 1965.
For background text, please see the previous blog (part 1).
Iraqi Kurdistan 1965 photographs © William Carter
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8. I think this is the town of Halabja, later victim of a horrible gas attack by Saddam Hussein.
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
More on the Iraqi Kurds
Barzani’s Legacy Persists
Because 2014 may be a decisive year for the Iraqi Kurds, a flood of enthusiastic responses poured in from my recent blog which featured photos of their legendary leader, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, and other memories of my trip through their beautiful homeland.
Here, then, are more of those Kodachrome slides shot with my Leicas on assignment from LIFE in 1965.
Photographs © William Carter
1. Mullah Mustafa Barzani, spring 1965
2. Mullah Mustafa Barzani, spring 1965
3. Kurdish Peshmergas en route
4. I hiked for two weeks with these tough survivors
5. Hospitality in a local village
6. A local sheik dressed accordingly
7. The girls were no slouches, either
8. Proudly singing traditional songs in the Kurdish language
9. Peaceable Kurdistan lacks a seaport but has oil which the U.S. currently blocks the world from buying
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
“All That is Ours!”
IRAQ, 1965: Mullah Mustafa Barzani, historic leader of Kurdish pesh merga resistance fighters, gestures toward the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Forty-nine years later, has the Kurds’ historic longing for full independence finally become a reality?
By William Carter
In a top-secret mountain setting — he moved continuously because the Baghdad government had placed a huge bounty on his head — Mullah Mustafa Barzani had granted me an extraordinary interview because I was on assignment from the then-influential magazine, LIFE. Speaking Kurdish through a translator, he recited highlights of his proud people’s long history of partition and betrayal, and obliquely thanked the US for the diplomatic and tangible support the Americans were already supplying covertly via their then-ally, Iran. I myself had been smuggled in from the Shah’s kingdom, dressed as a Kurdish nomad and crossing the river frontier on a donkey after midnight.
After the interview and photographs I resumed my weeks-long journey by foot on donkey westward through the spectacular mountain landscape, dotted with spring wildflowers and hospitable tiny villages. My guide was one of Barzani’s commanders, Colonel Akrawi, who spoke excellent English and who, when he was not conducting raids on Iraqi police stations, was collecting plant specimens for a book he was writing on Kurdish botany. After a miserable night in a canyon village being shelled by the Iraqis, we arrived, one late afternoon, at a spectacular clearing and lookout point.
Below us, to the west, strings of lights outlining the Kirkuk oil fields were beginning to wink on; beyond lay the relatively large city of Kirkuk itself.
With a wide, proud sweep of his arm, the personable Colonel Akrawi said softly but very firmly, “All that is ours.”
This spring of 2014 my wife and I were invited to travel to the modern city of Erbil, Kurdistan as honored guests to meet Massoud Barzani, Mullah Mustafa’s son, who, with other Kurds, had, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, occupied high posts in the Baghdad regime. (I believe I photographed him as a child 49 years ago.) At 80, We declined the offer, partly because of kidnapping worries. Just as well we weren’t there last week when the ISIS Islamic fundamentalists came marauding through northwestern Iraq — although I would have had my camera ready!
Now may be a pivotal moment for the Kurds. With their extraordinary bravery, organization, newly won oil income and fierce in-group identity vis-a-vis Arab domination, they may emerge as the only winners amid the long-drawn-out failure of the artificially conceived, ethnically impossible, divide-and-rule “state” concocted by colonialists drawing ruler lines across maps in London and Paris a century ago.
The new threat — and old spirit — were summed up by the head of Kirkuk’s regional police force: as reported by Joe Parkinson in The Wall Street Journal on June 20, 2014: “I’m from Kirkuk and I’m ready to die to protect it.”
Kodachrome photographs June, 1965 © William Carter
Mullah Mustafa Barzani, 1965
Peshmergas in the cliffs above Kirkuk
Same guys with a little sponsorship from (then) U.S. friends in Iran
Modern weaponry in support of tribal traditions — what else is new?
Norther Iraq is not a desert, and the Kurds are not Arabs
Peshmergas at dusk: is the moon finally
rising over Kurdish independence?
Colonel Akrawi had been trained at Sandhurst, England. He was my guide and companion for 3 weeks. Years later I heard he had been wounded and eventually died in Switzerland. But what ever happened to the book Akrawi was writing on Kurdish botany, as our platoon
hiked through scenes like that below?
Copyright statement: William Carter papers, © Stanford University Libraries. Click here for a detailed usage guide.
By William Carter 