My name is Haval and this is my grande storiella. I was born on the 23rd of March 1983, which means the third day of the Kurdish New Year’s Eve. I was born during the Iran-Iraq war, which started in 1980, therefore when the war ended, I was five years old. I cannot say I remember that period very well, I remember it as one remembers dreams. In 1999 everything changed and turned bad, because of Saddam Hussein’s decision to attack Kuwait. I was 7 years old and of course I do not remember much, but I do know that people were worried and everyone was talking about the fact that Iraq could end up in a very bad situation. Anyway, I remember that eight months after Saddam invaded Kuwait, the Americans started to attack Erbil, because they wanted to bomb some military basis, but I had no idea. I remember that we were playing football and then we started running.
My uncle, who already had disabilities at that time, was selling gums, flowers and other things on the street. Once I accompanied him into his little shop’s stand, I remember hearing sirens. People who were driving down the street, stopped their car and started running towards the bus station. All the petrol stations were stormed by the population, because we knew that the Americans did not bomb public spaces, such as petrol stations or bus stations. When I looked at the sky, I saw three missiles and as I looked at them I felt as if they were coming at me. So, I left my uncle and then run away with all the people and the crowd going to the bus station. But I had no idea why this was happening. In the meantime, while the US was bombing Iraq as a result of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the Kurds took this opportunity to make a real revolution against Saddam. One must remember that Saddam had killed about 182,000 Kurds in six months, a veritable genocide. The Kurds saw this opportunity and hoped that Saddam would be driven out of Kurdistan, so they all made the revolution. I was about eight years old in March 1991. At that time, women, children, men stormed the Iraqi army and police stations. Many Iraqi soldiers died because the Kurds took revenge for all the deaths they had suffered, following Saddam’s orders. Indeed, the Kurdish people succeeded in liberating Kurdistan from Saddam.
However, George Bush the father unexpectedly decided after the end of the first Gulf War not to change the Iraqi political system and did not remove Saddam from power. Therefore, four or five million Kurds left Kudistan and fled to Turkey and Iran, for fear of the retaliation that Saddam’s regime would take to avenge the Kurdish revolution. My family and I went to Iran, so the exodus started in the very early morning, at 6 or 7 am. Someone knocked on the door, it was our neighbour called Ali and he said “What are you doing? Are you still sleeping?”. My father had five kids and my brother Goven was only six months old. Nearby there was a bus station that belonged to the government, our neighbour Ali stole a bus, because Saddam was no longer in control, and said “Get on that bus”. So we got on the bus. My family originally came from Rawanduz, next to the Iranian border. The bus took us to Rawanduz, where we stayed with our family and then, after two days, they said that Saddam reached to Massif, which is 20 kms from Erbil. When he arrived in Erbil, everyone from Rawanduz and that area went to Iran as well as my family. However, the journey to Iran was not very easy. People went in trucks if they ware available. Thousand and thousand of people were going on foot, in tractors, in trucks, in pick-up trucks. So whenever you saw some space, you jumped on the truck and set off. We were lucky that we found a big truck and with my family we got on it. When we reached the border, Iran could not open it for four days. So, for four days we stayed in the mountains and in March those mountains still have the snow, so it is very cold. There was no food, people were sick and they were dying. I saw old people dying and sometimes I remember that there were parachutes, maybe from Europe or Iran, which dropped us food and people were running to have it in order to survive.
My brother Gloven was six months old and we almost lost him because of the lack of milk and the cold. It was very difficult to stay there for four nights and we were always next to each other to stay warmer. After those four days, Iran decided to open the border, and built lots of camps just outside Iraq, at the Iranian border. So, we entered. My grandmother was from Iran, we were lucky to have relatives there. However, my family was very large and the first time was terrible, because it was difficult for my mother’s relative in Iran to find space for all of us. I remember that they removed cows and sheep in the stable and they put us there, they cleaned it up a little bit and I think we stayed there for one week until they organised us. We stayed in Iran for three months. Everybody there was a refugee, so we did not have money, we left everything in Erbil and we did not know when we would return, nothing was clear. As an eight-year-old boy, I remember during these three months that we did not go to school, so I was selling sunflowers on the street. I used to go to the market, buy two kilos of sunflowers and put them in a small paper and then sell them to people. Those three months were really difficult, but during that period there was a lot of pressure on Saddam, so in that same year, in 1991, he decided to grant autonomy to the Kurdish people. Therefore, all the Kurds, including my family, came back. When we came back, Kurdistan was a very poor region. There was no salary, no electricity, but people keep on living there and, even if we were in poor conditions, we managed to survive. After two years, the two political parties started the civil war in Kurdistan and my father decided to go to Baghdad. We sold everything in Erbil and then we went to Baghdad. However, the money we got from the sale was not much, but enough to buy a small flat. We stayed in Baghdad for three years. It was very difficult at school, because I could not speak Arabic. When I started school I was in sixth grade and for me it was terrible: everybody was making fun of me, I could not speak Arabic at all, because in Kurdistan we are a totally different ethnic group and we are not Arabs. Anyway, somehow the first year was fine, not nice but it was ok. The year after, I learnt to speak Arabic and I made new friends. The third year another story started: Saddam arrested my father.
At the time, my father was a taxi driver and he had a Shia friend, but he did not know that he was also a member of a political party that was forbidden in Baghdad (Saddam was Sunni). One day, my father came home and told my mother to go and see his friend, because he had had an operation. My mother fortunately did not go and my father, who went to see him, saw that there were too many people and only then realised that he was in the middle of a clandestine party meeting. My father did not return from that visit. We did not know what had happened to him and we did not even know where this friend of him lived. Let’s try to imagine, five children, my oldest sister was 14 years old, I was the second, 13 years old. We all started crying. Of course there was no phone, there was no fax. There was nothing. The next day he did not come back, so we did not know where to go, we had no relatives. My older cousin came from Erbil and helped us. We went to all the hospitals in Baghdad, to the police stations, everywhere, but he was nowhere to be found. We did not know what had happened to him. My cousin had a friend who worked in the security services and he went to that place to ask for some help. One of the officers came to our house and told us: “Do not look for your father, because he has been arrested. Do not look for him, do not make any connections, because no one will tell you where he is until they finish the investigation”. Part of the family stayed in Kurdistan, while my mother, my cousin and I went back to Baghdad, to be ready at home for when the notice would arrive about where to recover my father’s body. Four months and 20 days later someone arrived. We were waiting for someone to come and tell us where my father’s body was. Instead, they told us we could go to the general security service to meet him. We went there, I did not recognise my father, he was thin, just skin and bones. He was very white, because he told us that he had not seen sunlight for all those months. And then he told us the whole story. Now, we had to think about the next step: what are we going to do? Who will believe him? Obviously nobody. There was only one piece of good news: despite the torture, he had never confessed what they wanted, but had always told the truth, that he happened to be passing by that day. We were told the day of the trial, so my cousin’s friend found the name of the judge for us. We made a deal with him, bribing him for 3 million Iraqi dinars. An absurd amount of money for us. To do this, we sold my father’s taxi and our flat, but that only brought us 1.2 million. We still needed more than 1.8 million dinars and my cousin told us we had to go to Erbil. Before telling this, I must explain the border problem.
Image two borders: Iraq and Kurdistan. In between is an area that can only be crossed by special means from 6am to 6pm. So you can take a sharing taxi from Baghdad to the Iraqi border, and then you get out of the taxi and into the truck. This truck takes you to the border with Kurdistan, because cars were not allowed to pass between the two borders. So, my cousin told me that I had to go to Erbil in person to get the money from a very rich relative of ours. I had to go and get this huge amount of money and take it to Baghdad. I was only 13 years old. I left anyway but arrived at the border at 18:20. Everything was closed and the area was dangerous. I did not know what to do, I had no money to go back. I collapsed on the ground and started to cry. There was a soldier who told me: “You have to go back, you cannot stay at the border”. But I did not know where to go. I then realised that there were two boys, one in his early twenties and the other older, who were talking to each other in Kurdish. I started to listen to them. They were in the same situation as me. They made a crazy decision to cross the forbidden zone, which separates the two borders, on foot. I joined them. So all three of us decided to walk. The younger boy started running, so I asked him why he was doing that. He told me that if we stayed there, in the forbidden zone, while it was dark, we would risk our lives, because the Iraqis had orders to shoot on sight. So, we ran. I was the fastest, because I was the youngest. But the old man had a belly, so it was more difficult for him. When it got dark, the younger guy kept telling us: “WTF, please go faster”. We were running in the middle of nowhere. A pick-up arrived on the main road, we were scared, because we thought it was a soldier, but he spoke to us in Kurdish and said, “What the hell are you doing? Get in the truck!”. When he said that, we got into the car and he drove us to the Kurdistan border. I always thought the man was an angel God had sent us, a miracle. Once we arrived, I took a taxi to my aunt’s house, the one who would help us. I went there, it was very late. At that time I was a shy person and I was very shy to go in, because it was late and I did not know what to do. I sat in front of the door and started crying. My aunt’s husband heard, opened the door and could not believe it: how had a thirteen-year-old boy managed to get all the way here by himself? He was a very good person, then he took me inside and my aunt thought I was there to tell her that my father, her brother, had died, so she started crying. But I told her he was not dead and explained the whole situation.
They took me to the kitchen, they brought me food, water and after that, I told them the whole story and that he needed 1.8 million dinars. My aunt’s husband told me “Do not worry, I will give you this money”. He died in 2002, but he was a really good person. He was rich and whenever my family needed anything, he was ready to help us. However, there was another problem: how are we going to send a child with this amount of money to Baghdad? So, they talked to each other, they were in the meeting room and I was outside. They talked for hours. People were afraid to go to Baghdad with this money, because transferring money was not allowed. So, they found a solution: converting this money to US dollars and then put them in my underwear. It was risky, but they did not check the children. I managed to go back to Baghdad and to take the money safely. It was in 1996, September or October, when we paid the judge who released my father. My father loaned a lot of money to buy another car, a taxi to work, and then we rent another a new apartment. After only three months, there was a knock on our door. My father opened it and I remember him saying, “Let’s go, let’s go”. What was happening again? The superior court had found out that we had paid the judge and the judge got scared, so he sent someone to tell us to flee immediately.
Imagine five children and my pregnant mother screaming all the way. We left everything behind, even pyjamas…we did not have anything. As soon as we arrived in Erbil my mother gave birth. I only returned to Baghdad 20 years later.
Grandi Storielle 🖌📚 