People in Kurdistan and Iraq, much like their Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian neighbours, have lived through multiple wars, ethnic cleansing campaigns, sanctions, and countless atrocities, yet have remained resilient despite all the losses. Resilience has been our collective lifeline — passed down from our ancestors for millennia. People’s resilience stems from their love for life and their communities — fixed in traditions and practices that have deep roots in our lands.
Shenah Abdullah is the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Food Sovereignty Programme Manager and an ethnographer and researcher at the Kurdistan Institute in Slemani, Iraqi Kurdistan.
Uncovering the Roots of Our Shared Agricultural Heritage
In the village of Bestansur in Iraqi Kurdistan, 9–11,000 years ago, people strived collectively to sustain their communities by planting and saving ancient grain seeds in their fields and on the sides of the mountains. There, archaeologists have found early evidence of agriculture. Evidence of agriculture is found far and wide in Mesopotamia, one of six areas in the world known as the birthplace of agriculture. Along with Bestansur, the village of Charmo, Qalati Saed Ahmadian, and other sites in Iraqi Kurdistan are revered for their cultural and agricultural heritage.
To examine the impacts of decades of interventions and trajectories of our communities’ agricultural practices and traditions and in search of local seed varieties in Iraqi Kurdistan, in 2023, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Beirut Office, in collaboration with the Kurdistan Institute in Slemani, began an Oral History Study (OHS) that continues as I write. This interdisciplinary ethnographic study continues to document the rich heritage of farming communities in rural areas in the Sulaymaniyah Governorate. Informed by a lifetime of agricultural experiences and practices of farming women and men in rural areas in Kurdistan, our study offers primary knowledge about the region’s traditional natural farming practices, farmers’ testimonies, seed-saving practices, and the sustainable agrarian heritage of local communities.
In addition, our small team of local researchers practice and advocate for sustainable, clean agro-ecological methods and encourage local farmers to build on and share their ancestors’ traditional agrarian heritage with regional and international circles working on food sovereignty. Moreover, we work towards building connections between farming communities in different regions in the Slemani Governorate to enable discussions and build strong local networks of small-scale farmers, which in Kurdistan, like the rest of the world, have been dwindling.
As part of the Oral History Study documenting stories on food sovereignty in Iraqi Kurdistan, we want to share the regeneration and resilience of three villages in Iraqi Kurdistan with you, which are located in different geographical regions. Dere village is located in the cold upper Sharbazher Region bordering Iran, while Banimaqan is situated in the hot Garmiyan Region close to the disputed Iraqi cities, and Haladen is situated in the mountainous Surdash Region where resisting farming communities have lived for thousands of years.
These communities are interconnected through their resilient agricultural heritage and connection to their land and self-sufficient agrarian practices that have endured wars, ethnic cleansing, and multiple calamities. The narratives of the farming women and men provided in the following sections are powerful testimonies and reminders that our human connections to our natural roots and our communal determination to be self-sufficient have kept us resilient for thousands of years.
The first story tells the agricultural heritage and resilience of the village of Banimaqan in the dry Garmyan region. In the second story, we learn about the village of Haladen in the Surdash region, where the leftist branch of the current Patriotic Union of Kurdistan fought the Ba’athist regime in the mid-twentieth century. In the third story, we witness the history of peasant life and in particular the role that women have traditionally played, in the beautiful Dere village, in the Sharbazher region.
Hope and Resilience
Despite all the dismal stories about Iraqi Kurdistan and its so-called unproductive agricultural system, our forthcoming study highlights the critical role of communities of small-scale farmers and their ecological and oral traditions as food producers and guardians. There are many unexamined places and hundreds of untold stories from which we can learn and gather hope and solace.
Our communities’ roots of resilience in Kurdistan, Iraq, and other regions in the Levant are old and strong, as are our agrarian heritage and seed varieties, from which new life has been sprouting for thousands of years. In these regions, many unexamined oral traditions and agricultural practices exist that we believe require serious attention and recognition. Even during the hardest and most painful times, strong seeds of hope and resilience continue to sprout and nourish us.
Stories from Resilient Farming Communities
For the past two years, we have spoken to farmers in many different communities, from the village of Shanakhse next to the Iranian border to Hero Village in Pshdar. At each of these field sites, we learned valuable information about our past roots and traditions, as well as our present challenges and uncertainties.
In our ethnographic examination of farming communities’ agricultural heritage and practices in the Kurdistan Region, farming women and men in the areas we visited continued to remind us that they stayed rooted in their lands and sustained their communities, and resisted and preserved countless atrocities and uncertainties for as long as they could recount. In each of the brief narratives of the farmers that follow, we learn about their collective resilient strategies to stay and return to their natural environments and start again. Despite the political and economic hardships of each of the periods recounted, the farming women and men stood firm. They returned to cultivate their fields and orchards as guardians of their lands and communities. They refused to be uprooted and resisted all the political upheavals, as their ancestors had done.
During the Baathist ethnic cleansing campaigns of the 1980s, which intensified between 1987 and 1988, thousands of villages in the Kurdistan Region were destroyed and forcefully evacuated and as a result farming communities were uprooted from their lands and fields. Farmers and their families were sent to barren camps on the outskirts of the cities to break their spirits and connections. Yet, as our first narrative story demonstrates, people in the Garmiyan and other region and others around them resisted the atrocities and survived together. They survived collectively and at times alone, gathered their strength and began a new after the Kurdish uprising of 1991.
In the summer of 2024, during our field research in the Garmyan Region, a local guided us to a green haven in the dry and hot Kirkuk region, Banimaqan — also known as Maqan.
After the ethnic cleansing Anfal campaigns of the Ba’athist Regime in the 1980s, locals were forced to relocate to government camps, where they survived for several years. Our host, Najeba Khan, a hopeful female farmer and single mother, vividly recalled their time in the camp away from their “field and animals” as terrible times. Najeba then explained how, in 1991, after the Kurdish uprising, they started anew:
When the Baathist army destroyed our village, we all fled. This area in Maqan was a forbidden military zone. No one could come near it without being shot at. After 1991, my siblings and I, we are nine in total, came back here. There was no greenery here. We began planting all the trees you see now. We grow vegetables to feed ourselves… We do not depend on the government. We each now have our garden.
This oasis in the dry and hot Garmyan region is a testament to one family’s resilience to rebuild a community of nearly 20 homes, fields, and gardens from the remains of a military compound built to destroy their culture and spirit. As one of the eldest members of her family, Najeba reminded her grown children, who listened behind our camera while we recorded her testimonies, that she and her siblings toiled day and night to bring life back to the barren military zone. With a wide grin, she told us that they could dig wells, plant trees, raise animals, grow food to feed themselves and share with others during the embargo period in the 1990s.
Najeba’s perseverance and zest for life are remarkable, and on this hot summer day, our team returned to Slemani with a new spark of hope. We learned that not even the brutal Anfal Campaign could uproot resilience in this community.
Feeding a Revolution
In the Surdash region, we visited the beautiful village of Haladen, where Kurdish Komal, the leftist wing of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, fought the Ba’athist regime in the mid-twentieth century. In a beautiful patch of a field surrounded by multiple mountain chains dotted with grapevine orchards, an elderly farmer and his wife shared personal stories about living and surviving during several challenging decades. On this hillside plantation filled with fruit trees, grape vines, and clean rows of vegetation, Ahmed, an elderly farmer in his mid-80s, refused to rest in bed due to complications in his kidneys, and with the help of his wife he continued to produce an abundance of nutritional food, as his ancestors had done for eons.
An animating storyteller, Ahmed patiently recalled many periods in his life from the latter period of the British monarchy when he was a young shepherd roaming the mountains to the long years of multiple Ba’athist administrations from 1963 to 1990 when Haladen and neighbouring villages became central areas for the Kurdish revolutionaries who were sheltered and fed by the villagers. Ahmed informed us:
We had everything in those periods. We grew everything and did not buy anything. We fed the Peshmerga fighters whenever they came. We fed them and cared for them. Sometimes dozens would come and stay in our home… After the chemical attack on our village, the government soldiers took us to Peramagroon camp. It was hard times.
Ahmed told us that his mother, wife, and all the village women cooked and gave the best of what they had to the Kurdish revolutionaries. He insisted that without their agricultural produce and animal products, the fighters would not have been able to continue their revolutionary movement against the Iraqi government. He recalled many stories about the hard times of war and relocation with his wife. No matter how often I asked Ahmed to come to the point, he continued to elaborate and asked me to wait and listen for more. In Haladen, we learned many lessons, including being patient while listening to a wise elderly person speaking.
Ahmed had survived multiple military operations and attacks, including a chemical attack on his village, which killed both Peshmerga fighters and villagers. But despite all the hardships, he and his wife found the strength to plant and grow again around the camp where they were relocated, in exile in refugee camps in Iran. On this new hill overlooking the village of Haladen, he and his wife had built another beautiful oasis. Life for Ahmed and his wife was about producing nourishment from their hands and returning, persevering, and farming away even if their bodies failed them.
Women Farmers as Guardians of Tradition
In breath-taking Dere village, in the Sharbazher region, we had the pleasure of meeting farmer Abdulwahid, his wife Gulchin, and their children Shara and Yusif, who collectively care for their fields. On a bright sunny day at the end of August 2024, Abdulwahid, Gulchin’s lifelong partner and companion, declared to me with a big grin on his face that without Gulchin, whom he called a shera zhin, a lioness of a woman, he and his family would not have been able to continue. Abdulwahid explained:
Gulchin is a wife, mother, farmer, cook, an engineer — she knows everything about farming, and I learn from her. She pushes me to continue every morning. She has kept us all going.
Abdulwahid, a prisoner of war during the Iraq-Iran War, informed us about the vital role women played in their village and his family. He referred to his wife, Gulchin, as a lioness due to her strength and bravery. He told us that in his six years of imprisonment during the 1980–1989 war, she cared for their children, fields, animals, and the rest of their family. On the night of our interview in August, while Gulchin and I chopped a whole container of freshly picked tomatoes from their garden, she spoke of the importance of producing their food instead of depending on the government.
I always tell my children about those years. I tell them to work hard and eat from their fields. During the war, we had nothing to eat when we were in Slemani. We were away from our fields. We waited for the government rations to feed us. I pray we will never see those days again.
Dere has become one of our main bases for the Oral History Study, where we return for field interviews, film screenings, and panel discussions, as we did during the food sovereignty festival in April of 2024 with a team of food sovereignty activists. We have also recently begun exchanging critical knowledge and heirloom seeds with farmers in Dere and shall continue to learn from each other. Dere is one of Kurdistan’s natural heavens where clean water from the mountains runs down through all the fields in the village, and old oak and walnut trees have been standing tall for hundreds of years.
In Dere, we learned that self-sufficiency meant that women and men had to combine their collective strengths, from dusk to dawn, while working shoulder-to-shoulder to produce their food. Farmers Abdulwahid and his wife and others in Dere are hopeful about continuing their clean agriculture heritage to be self-sufficient, as their ancestors were in the past.
