Key facts
Details
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 neighboring 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.