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Azar Mirkhan

Kurdistan

DURING OUR WELL-ARMED drive to northern Iraq in May 2015, Dr. Azar Mirkhan spoke of his father, the man who had helped lead the 1974 Kurdish uprising against the Iraq government and who had then taken his family across the mountains into exile in Iran. Due to Heso Mirkhan’s prominence in the Peshmerga—and Iranian nervousness about their own Kurdish population—the family had initially been forced to live in a Kurd-free city in central Iran, a stricture that was lifted when the Iran-Iraq War started in 1980 and the Khomeini regime suddenly saw a use for the Iraqi Kurd exiles in their midst. Moving his burgeoning family—it would ultimately grow to ten sons and four daughters—to Iranian Kurdistan, Mirkhan resumed his Peshmerga leadership role, as well as his cross-border incursions. That caught up with him in April 1983, when he was killed in an ambush in northern Iraq.

“I don’t really remember him that well, because I was only eight when he died,” Azar said. “My strongest memory is that there was just a constant parade of Peshmerga commanders coming to our house, conferring with my father.”

For nearly thirty years, Heso’s remains were lost somewhere in the mountains of Kurdistan, but a few years ago, Azar and his brothers began a months-long quest to locate them. By talking with villagers and Heso’s surviving companions, they finally found his bones at the bottom of a remote ravine.

“We brought them back to our village, and he was given a hero’s funeral,” Azar said. “Even Barzani was there”—the KRG’s president, Massoud Barzani.

The doctor’s sense of personal loss was more evident when he talked of the death of his brother Ali, the second oldest of the fourteen Mirkhan siblings and the first to follow Heso into the ranks of Peshmerga leadership. “When Ali was killed, it was a tragedy not just for the family but all Kurdistan,” Azar said. “He was a natural leader of men—charismatic, brilliant—and, okay, he was my brother, but I believe we would be in a very different place now if he had stayed alive. Many, many people who knew him have said this to me.”

Azar told me those stories perhaps in part to explain why our destination that day, a little village in Iraq called Gunde Siba, still haunted him. He was on an indefinite leave of absence from the hospital where he worked in Erbil, the KRG capital, to devote all his energies to confronting the crisis caused by the ISIS invasion of the previous year. His duties, which appeared to be largely self-determined, consisted of periodically touring the Peshmerga front lines and advising its commanders. Everyone in the KRG, it seemed, knew the Mirkhan name, and one of its happier consequences was that its bearers could expect to be treated with immediate respect and deference.

As we spoke, it became clear that Azar’s self-appointed mission went far beyond confronting the threat of ISIS. He saw in the KRG’s current situation a precious and unprecedented opportunity to create a true Kurdish nation. To achieve that meant not just defeating the ISIS fanatics but ridding the land of the Kurds’ historical enemies, the Arabs, once and for all. “For fourteen hundred years, they have sworn to destroy us,” he said. “At what point do we take them at their word?” To Azar, that point had now been reached. In his view, which is by no means a minority one in the KRG, the first task at hand is to sever the remaining vestiges of the Iraqi state—it is a point of pride with Azar that he doesn’t speak Arabic and has only once been to Baghdad—and then to dismantle the legacy of forced Arab-Kurd integration initiated by Saddam Hussein.

But time was running out. At about the midpoint on our drive, we were passing an unassuming farming village when Azar slowed the car to a crawl, gave a disdainful click of his teeth. To me, the village was indistinguishable from a hundred others we’d passed, but Azar saw something quite different.

“This is our problem right here. Forty years ago, this village was all Kurdish, except for maybe one or two Arab families. But now the Arabs have almost completely taken over because they breed like rabbits. That’s why I always tell Kurds, ‘Never sell your land to Arabs. No matter how poor you are, never sell to them.’ It should be a law.”

Part of the doctor’s severity stems from what he regards as Kurdish complacency in the face of the dangers that lay all around, and it is further fueled by the tragedy he witnessed in Gunde Siba on August 3, 2014.

For twenty-two years after its creation in 1992, the KRG was a relative oasis of stability and peace in the region, its ties to Baghdad ever more theoretical. That exempt status was most nakedly revealed during the American intervention in Iraq, in which the KRG openly sided with the invaders, providing them with back bases and airfields from which to carry out the fight; as local officials are fond of pointing out, not a single coalition soldier was killed in the KRG during the Iraq War. That calm continued through the steady disintegration of Iraq after the American withdrawal, as the KRG became ever more reluctant to pay even lip service to affiliation with Baghdad. To the good citizens of the KRG, it increasingly appeared that their mountain enclave had somehow found a way to escape the maelstroms swirling around it, that the days of warrior families like the Mirkhans might go the way of folklore. That fanciful notion ended with ISIS’s lightning advance into central Iraq in June 2014.

“I’ve never trusted the Arabs, but as strange as it sounds, I trusted Daesh,” Azar explained, using a common, vaguely pejorative term for ISIS. “In the past, the Arabs always lied—‘Oh, you Kurds have nothing to fear from us’—and then they attacked us. But Daesh was absolutely clear what they were going to do. They wanted to take this part of the world back to the caliphate. They wanted to eliminate everyone who was not their kind—the Christians and the Kurds and the Shia—and they were absolutely open about it. After their June offensive, I had no doubt they were coming for us next.” The doctor even pinpointed where they would strike first. “Any fool looking at a map could know. It was going to be the Yazidis. It was going to be Sinjar.”

Azar Mirkhan, forty-one, inspecting an ISIS execution site outside Sinjar, 2015

The Yazidis are a Kurdish religious minority that ISIS had long excoriated as “devil worshipers” and vowed to exterminate. Making them especially vulnerable, their Mount Sinjar homeland was in the far northwestern corner of Iraq and outside official KRG territory. What’s more—and this is what a glance at a map made obvious—with ISIS’s capture of Mosul that June, the land link between the KRG and the Yazidi Kurds in Sinjar was reduced to a single rutted farm road.

In the days and weeks after the June offensive, Azar made use of his family name to compel meetings within his circle of civilian and military comrades. At each, he warned of the coming ISIS attack. “No one took it seriously,” he recalled. “They all said, ‘No, their fight is with the Shia in Baghdad. Why would they come here?’ They just didn’t see what was about to happen.”

On August 1, 2014, ISIS guerrillas attacked an isolated Peshmerga outpost in the town of Zumar, which lay just ten miles away from the last road into Sinjar. When still there was no sign of action by the Kurdish government, in desperation, Azar Mirkhan rustled up five or six of his Peshmerga friends, and together they raced west.

“And this is as far as we got,” Azar said. “Right here.”

We were standing on the shoulder of the road in Gunde Siba, just a few miles west of the Tigris River and still some forty miles from the town of Sinjar. “By then, it was night, and right here we started meeting the Peshmerga who had fled from Sinjar and, behind them, the Yazidi refugees. It was impossible to go on because the road was just jammed, everyone trying to escape. We set up a defense post here and rallied some of the Peshmerga to stay with us, but this is as far as we got.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the air. “We were one day too late.”

In Sinjar that day—August 3—ISIS began carrying out mass executions, a slaughter that would ultimately claim the lives of at least five thousand Yazidis.

They were also rounding up thousands of girls and women to be used as sex slaves. Tens of thousands more Yazidis were frantically scaling the flanks of Mount Sinjar in a bid to escape the killers. Of all this, Azar Mirkhan had only an intimation in the terror-stricken faces and anguished accounts of those survivors streaming into Gunde Siba.

But Azar had little time to grasp, let alone address, the tragedy unfolding in Sinjar. Just two days later, ISIS began a second offensive, this one aimed directly at the KRG capital city of Erbil. Turning back from Gunde Siba, the doctor raced south for the battlefield.