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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.