CHAPTER 9		|	IRAQ
		OÙ EVE!

MASHA HELD MY KITE string, in the way that is almost always good for a kite. Or really—she was the string, the security against fears of drifting off the planet, and I felt safer to have her knotted to me wherever I went. She was stuck to a place, though—in America—and I couldn’t imagine being so stuck to any solid ground.

After nine months apart, it was infinitely clear that we couldn’t stay together long distance if we didn’t see each other’s faces. I flew to Chicago for a fast week in a small hotel. The world of deep dish pizza and pork sausages and hand-holding in the streets: I was electrified to be with her, and nearly panicked to get home to Abu Dhabi. Like I’d left the kettle on, and it was screaming.

I was sick almost from the first bite of pepperoni until the plane back, uncomfortable with the comfort she offered.

I DIDN’T FEAR IRAQ as much as I obsessed over it, quietly. And I didn’t obsess in the notebook-pages-filled-with-its-name kind of way. It was a name that had reverberated just under surface awareness since we—and it was we—began to bomb it—and only since then. And what a good name to do the reverberating!—in with a vowel, out with the hardest of consonants.

As a boy, I trailed in the logic of a country going to wars; now I’d followed it to the Afghan datelines and through to the place where the punishment for our hurt was executed on its most personal scale. Next, I would have to make the logical leap into Iraq.

Two days before leaving for the Eid al-Adha break, I was about as far as I’d get in the brainstorming phase of a week in Iraqi Kurdistan—the final “itinerary” would be a few phone numbers and a general understanding of the east-to-west order of Kurdistan’s three major cities.

My colleague Nora swiveled to face me from her desk in the corner of a large floor of loosely tangled cubicles in our new, stark, glassy offices in Abu Dhabi. Originally she was from Baghdad, but her Assyrian Christian family, native speakers of a modern dialect of Aramaic, had sought refuge from extremist persecution by Arab Muslims in the south. Now her family lived in Dohuk, an Iraqi Kurdish city of about a quarter million near the border with Turkey.

“I’ve never even seen the waterfalls,” Nora said.

At points off the beautiful road from Dohuk to the capital of Kurdistan in Erbil, there are waterfalls, shillal—or so her family had told her. But they had never packed her in the car to see them, despite the modern Mesopotamian fondness for picnicking in pretty places. The Nineveh Plain, the lush region on the upper banks of the Tigris where the legendary cities of Nineveh and Nimrud poked out from the underbrush of suburban Mosul, was her family’s ancestral homeland. But even there, in the autonomous north where Baghdad is despised, Kurdish nationalism and religious persecution of Christians have not made for the most peaceable homecoming.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Kurdish autonomy had increased exponentially. As Kurdish minority status in Iraq became majority rule in Iraqi Kurdistan, hawkish nationalism found new enemies to fill the role of Existential Threat. No surprise, then, that the smaller religious minorities are not champions of the region’s new “freedom.”

Echoing Antonia from Maaloula at her café in Syria, Nora felt more comfortable with a minority group in power. Though Saddam’s Baath Party was founded by Shiites with pan-Arab idealism, it quickly became a party of the Sunni minority (about 35 percent of Iraqi Muslims). And even though other ethnic groups were not invited under this umbrella, Nora’s family opposed the full independence of the Kurdish region for fear of becoming foreigners in their own land. Their religion was already a point against them; now, everywhere but in the north, their Kurdish nationality would be, too.

“They want to have their own country. This is impossible,” Nora spoke flatly. “I’m really supporting Saddam in it. This is Iraq—it cannot be divided into two.”

Ever since her father put her and her little sister on a plane in 2001, away from persecution and toward opportunity, she had been a refugee. He was living now in political asylum in the UAE; she was in the process of becoming an Australian. Her brother Fady, his wife, and their tiny twin daughters stayed behind in Dohuk.

Her Australian citizenship process depended on the plea that it was too dangerous to return to Iraq. She browsed tickets on Etihad Airlines that she knew she couldn’t take. Only once she became an Australian could she go home again.

“Take so many pictures,” she said excitedly. “I want to see my country.”

Danny had written me after an unscripted week in Iraqi Kurdistan. You’ve got to go, he said. His roommate and Arabic teacher in Damascus, Khaled, was a Syrian Kurd who told him just before he left about another student of his.

“She went with her friends to Kurdistan and now she’s in an Iranian prison,” Khaled had said. But Danny had come back delighted.

I passed our building’s security desk on the way out to gather American dollars for the trip. (U.S. currency is common tender in Kurdistan, along with Iraqi dinar, and there were no ATMs.) Ahmed, a guard from Egypt, wasn’t happy with my answer about the upcoming days off.

“Why are you going to Iraq? Don’t go to Iraq.” His eyebrows peaked high above the rims of his glasses. “You need to have a reason.” A United Nations worker or a doctor would have valid reasons, he said, but I was just a tourist. I contested unconvincingly, saying something about wanting to distinguish between facts and fears, and seeking connection. “Or maybe I just want to tell a story to a girl at a bar,” I offered. Ahmed laughed, and a shrug rolled from his shoulders to his teeth.

He found it distressing, then curious, that I would choose Iraq. “There is something wrong with your thinking that you see danger and you say, ‘I’m going to go.’ ” He wasn’t upset. At another moment, he might have been right—there were many moments when I saw danger and teased the gas pedal. But Kurdistan was the opposite: I expected peace.

“You will see they are becoming much better than the other parts of Iraq,” Nora had told me. Despite unresolved ethnic and national and spiritual issues, Dohuk was no Baghdad. Kurds had fought the Arabs for hundreds of years, long before Saddam made their persecution a national pastime. For this, “they lived to learn independently,” Nora said, and had been rich even before foreign companies settled in northern cities to corner new markets and prepare for a postwar boom.

Ahmed had never heard anyone say this. He admitted that even his hometown, Cairo, wasn’t now the tourist trap it used to be, but he wasn’t as afraid—he knew more. Iraq was still a great unknown, still one big messy piece he preferred everyone he cared about would stay away from.

“We have a phrase in Islam,” he said grandly: “La tulqu b’ayadkum ila tahluka.” “Don’t throw yourself by your own hands into hell.”

“Jews don’t really believe in hell,” I said, and he laughed. My consequences and rewards were terrestrial things.

EID AL-ADHA, the Festival of the Sacrifice, celebrates Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac and played the role of a long Thanksgiving break. I offered my parents the decoy stories of stuckness in Abu Dhabi while I made arrangements to go to Kurdistan with Charlotte, a college friend working in Dubai, and her friend Sue, whom I knew mostly from e-mail blasts as our former student body president.

Three hours nonstop and we’d be in Erbil, the Kurdish capital. Of the few facts I knew before takeoff: the seven-thousand-year-old Erbil Citadel, a fortified earthen mound more than a thousand feet wide and a hundred feet tall that UNESCO says “may be regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the world,” sits at the very center of town.

Nora’s brother Fady and his friend Makh picked us up at the airport to spend the afternoon exploring the countryside just outside the capital. Fady, short and stout with a round face and a small snub nose like a grape tomato, appeared almost unceasingly jovial, smiled while he worried, and laughed as a reply to English he didn’t understand. Makh was as quiet as Fady was talkative.

At an intersection near Pirmam, home of the Kurdish Democratic Party’s political bureau, a strange edifice poked out from behind roadside trees, surrounded by low, crumbling walls of some porous material. I thought they really might have been stacks of skulls and femurs. The outer wall of an ancient ruin no bigger than a 7-Eleven, it featured knobby tan and gray stones piling into a tall peak that nearly clipped the telephone wires overhead. A firm overhang shaded the room of an old house or church. Inside, a group of children shared a cigarette, inconspicuous. Out front, a pond of dirty, green water.

Kids scrambled up the rocks. Fady and Makh weren’t exactly sure what the ruin might be—monuments weren’t always well preserved in areas of conflict, what with a revolving cast of bureaucrats responsible for creating agencies of preservation. “Maybe four thousand years ago,” said Makh. It didn’t seem impossible—archeological research had confirmed sedentary presence in the area far earlier.

Content with our analyses, we tromped back to the car, nodding to a man who looked local. What the hell, I thought, maybe he knows something.

“How old is this? Maybe eight . . .” he threw his head toward the bony piles, remembering. My ears buzzed. Eight thousand years of mankind, here! No travel advisory would keep me from the Cradle of Civilization! My heart jumped, in those milliseconds before he spoke again, in the breath before “. . . or nine years.”

Through tears of laughter, I wondered how many of my other gut feelings influenced by a little local confidence had been 99.6 percent wrong. Fady and Makh smiled, too, embarrassed a little about their tour guiding. “I am not from Erbil,” said Fady.

We drove a little farther on to the town of Shaqlawa. On the right, one side of a huge valley slopes up into a sharp slablike ridge. To the left, across the brown and yellow space sprinkled lightly with stubby trees, the opposite escarpment looked like a long cut of pepper steak sliced into thick strips to reveal a deep, smooth red. We turned back toward town.

ERBIL’S MAIN STREETS are concentric orbits around the Citadel, which looks down on the fountains of Shar Park from the top of the massive hill covered thoroughly in steep stone slabs. The hill was home to Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians through the millennia, claimed by the Third Dynasty of Ur, Assyrians, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, Muslims, Mongols, Ottomans and now the Kurdish government.

Two hundred feet away, the Rubenesque singer at the Erbil Tower Hotel’s second-floor bar was squeezed into a skin-tight pink evening gown with a sheen like thinly striped wallpaper, a long slit running up her midthigh, and she thumped to the music and crooned a few notes when breaks from her repartee with tables of dark-haired men allowed. I wasn’t sure if I could call her voluptuous, Iraq being, as I thought, a conservative country. If I could, though, she was.

Tresses of straightened black hair framed an image of heavy white makeup lit irregularly by rotating disco lights of primary colors, flaming sparklers the men would buy from the pink lady, and the unmistakable sound of Arabian pop synth when the keyboardist felt like playing. We were sitting in the back on red velvet couches. “We have another beer from Turkey,” the bartender suggested, and presented Heinekens from Amsterdam.

The singer spoke deeply into the microphone. “Here are my friends from Falujah!” Howls from the front. “Anyone from Basra?” Cheers. “Baghdad?” Bigger cheers. They couldn’t care less where the beer was from.

She never cooed Philadelphia? or The Upper East Side? or Detroit? And so I sat gladly and conspicuously on the velvet with Charlotte and Sue, watching this room of outsiders from the outside.

One of the Erbil drinkers shouted to us over the noise of the bar and the fizzing of the sparklers his table had bought. He said he was having a party on Tuesday. (On Tuesday, just as he said, he called with an invitation.) He paid for our Heinekens. Beer was liberty; the noise was liberating, and the farther these tourists had come—in distance, in difficulty—the happier they were to be in Kurdistan.

OUR TRIPLE ROOM on the ninth floor was the pink of a faded skirt. The bathroom was pastel yellow. We had worried about room-sharing rules for unmarried men and women, but the hotel asked no questions despite our name that mismatched far beyond the possibility for claims of kinship (Chinese, and German-Jewish sounding). It hardly ever mattered. In restaurants we were always seated in the family section (as groups with one or more women always are) and we were treated warmly everywhere as a blend of long-lost relative, zoo animal, alien, and celebrity.

Minutes after we rode the outdoor escalator into Hawler Mall (Hawler is the city’s Kurdish name, Erbil is Arabic—and with whatever we Anglophones called it, we made a little political statement), I felt the weight of universal public curiosity. The gaze was hot, my neck hairs spiked, my skin moved as if I were connected by strings to everyone I could see.

I pointed my camera at a couple of groups of mall-trawling guys with a standard pairing of gelled hair and leather jackets, but soon the tables turned. Crowds sensed action and gathered, almost everyone pushing to have their picture taken with us, the foreigners, or pushing their friends in as if on a dare. On the mezzanine of this mall that sold nearly identical Western-looking merchandise from nearly identical stores manned only by silvery mannequins with no faces and, maybe, some of the curious we were posing with, we obliged as long as we could and kept snapping, with our cameras or with theirs; the product didn’t seem to matter. We hardly ever spoke. We said we were from America. I’d never felt so famous.

When we rode down, they seemed to follow and lead, a tight circle of dozens and dozens of Kurdish teens and adults thronging toward the escalator, out of the mall and across the street, chattering, praising the USA, and halting traffic like a small protest fueled by fascination. Occasionally, someone would present himself as an envoy, suggesting with body language to follow him, to escape from the riffraff. We’d follow for moments, not to escape, but to adventure further until, muddled into lanes of slow-moving cars, we realized our ushers had nowhere to go either. Still, the group lingered. Who were we?

My female companions were more uneasy. It was possible to feel their attention-gathering as something of a different sort. After dark on this crisp November night, there were only men on the Saturday streets of Erbil; there were only men in the malls and at the bar. Only by the fountains in Shar Park, dead in the center of the city, did we see a few small groups of women in headscarves gathering around the fountains lit from below with colored lights. A woman in her black abaya sat with some kids, playing. Everywhere else I looked, women had simply disappeared.

I CALLED FADY after the morning azan. Staggered from every corner of the city, the sounds of the call to prayer were richer than I remembered hearing anywhere else, evolving in a lilting weave and dissolving into the sounds of streetside banter. Mosque megaphones broadcast morning sermons that overlapped with other calls broadcast to those in bed, wafting in gentle cacophony from a hundred minarets up to our pink room on the ninth floor. An hour or so after the first call had sounded it was quiet again—only a handful of mosques were still active in the distance, fading. A car would whoosh by every now and then and disappear.

Fady answered my fourth call. He had decided to leave the night before, abandoning us, and was already in Dohuk. The city felt deserted, too—it was the morning of Eid al-Adha, the Greater Eid, the holiest of all Islamic holidays, and Muslims were busy commemorating Abraham’s obedience. In reverence they would make sacrifices of their own, on the creature substituted for Abraham’s son. I watched drainage ditches and street gutters trickle bright red with sheep’s blood.

Sue and Charlotte didn’t feel forsaken. I hadn’t even thought it was possible to rent a car in Iraq, but it was, and soon we had one, because Sue was from Detroit, Motor City, and having a car was like packing a water bottle. Free for the moment, we sped off on clear roads to the north.

HIGHWAY 3 RUNS FROM ERBIL about 180 kilometers to the Iranian border, and is known by many as the Hamilton Road, named for its New Zealand engineer who completed it in 1932. In between, on one of the five mountain ranges of varying severity, I noticed something humbling out the back window of our Hyundai: a man in a brown T-shirt and shorts, protected from nippy autumn winds only by simple gloves, was cresting this couple-thousand-foot climb on his bike. He had a shaved head and an American military look about him, wearing a hikers’ backpack and smiling as he pedaled. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses. We wished one another well through the window, and Clay—he told us his name with breath to spare and an accent just like mine—pushed on uphill.

Hours later we were parking at the Gali Ali Beg waterfall. The pride of all of Iraq, Gali Ali Beg is printed on the back of the blue five-thousand dinar note (about enough to get kebab nearby). In one of its did-anyone-actually-come-here moments, our Lonely Planet had given us cause for dissatisfaction: the “80 meter” cascade they describe is really on the much shorter side of 80 feet (more like 50–60). Still, Iraqi tourists, who came from all across the country, were genuinely wowed—unspoiled like us natives of waterfall-rich countries with easy road trips.

Clay appeared to his usual welcome of excited locals and visitors giddily trying to make sense of his choices. (Where cars are not taken for granted, and solitude is more pitied than celebrated, a bike seemed an odd pick for a long, voluntary journey—especially for a foreigner expected to have every flexibility.) It was always like this when he coasted into town, he said, and the four of us Americans went to drink hot tea sweetened with cardamom and eat meat on skewers with chewy bread and onions. Clay was an ex-Marine who had done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, he typically chose vacation spots amenable to bike trips: France, Italy, Jordan. In Kurdistan, he was a tourist like us, taking time off from his job teaching English at a school in Egypt.

“I wanted to come back here,” he said. “It’s nicer to get to talk to these people instead of having to fight them.”

Days later in a small town a hundred miles away, we thought we saw Clay once more. He didn’t see us—maybe I was just delirious from the driving. Maybe it was the image that stuck with me, the image of a soldier on his first tour as a tourist, working his way through former battlefields looking for a chat.

He had been to war, right here, and he felt the urge to reconnect. He knew things I would never know. He had seen Iraq from the ground while I had seen it only from the air and through the veil of news reports and eight time zones—and still, we had all come to see this place outside the frame of war. His presence was an affirmation: there are answers to find here.

We kept on driving, hurried like first-timers. On a road that hugs the cliffside above the waterfall, the Gali Ali Beg Canyon unfolds in deep ravines into the wild. Honey from the area is prized, and hushed salesmen offered amber jars out of their cars for the startling equivalent of fifteen American dollars, and, at least at that moment, a gentle unwillingness to negotiate. At the vistas over the gorge, fitted with tables and plastic chairs fashioned to look like tree stumps, Kurdistan presents one of the strongest cases for its reputation of calm normalcy: Domestic tourism is booming like few places in the modern Middle East. Visitors are not only Kurds, but busloads of Iraqis from Mosul and Tikrit and Basra.

Two buses had come from Baghdad, and everyone seemed thrilled to be outdoors. The crowd of a hundred or so danced and cheered while a small band struck up pulsating tunes on trumpet, snare drum, and tom-tom. They wore lanyards with yellow cards that said Al-Balid Al-Jamil in big letters: The Beautiful Country.

A man in a purple sweater handed me his trumpet and let me play. I think he offered with his eyes, and I must’ve accepted with mine. Absurdly, a microphone was produced out of nowhere with its cord trailing unplugged, and they conducted a brief and enthusiastic interview. I was American, I said, and watched faces sour—interest replaced by resentment. “Laa yastatiia‘a,” the tom-tom player objected. He can’t be.

I had let my comfort in stereotypes about the north carry me away. Americans were now liberators in Kurdistan, where Saddam was forever a genocidal menace. In Baghdad, we’d hear again and again, life is not better, the streets are not safer, and people are no happier in the war’s wake. The band didn’t look pleased.

WE STOPPED ON A SUNDAY in Aqrah, a famous town built into a gritty hillside in Iraq’s modern Ninawa governorate. The houses cover the lower hills in a blanket of tan brick with rare pastel highlights: key lime, yellow, purple. Once an Assyrian town, Aqrah is now mostly Kurdish Muslims. Mosques had released hundreds of children from their Eid al-Adha prayers, and they were pouring through the streets in turtleneck sweaters and suits waving ice cream cones (a Kurdish favorite is a mix of six neon-colored flavors) and toy guns. Many had returned for the holiday from new residences abroad, in Stockholm, in Russia, in Canada. “Do you speak Swedish?” kids asked expectantly.

The town was celebrating. A pair of policemen carrying rifles guided us up the road with kids following behind and twentysomethings in shiny suits striking model poses and demanding to have their pictures taken. Four pairs of girls shrieked and flew in happy circles on a mini Ferris wheel operated by a hand crank. If I had learned anything about Kurdistan, I could appreciate their love of amusement parks—the drive from Erbil passed at least three giant Ferris wheels in the middles of nowhere.

On the way down, with a train of fascinated and apprehensive children, we bumped into fifteen-year-old Umar from Volgograd. “They are following you because you are girls . . . to see what you are doing,” Umar said to Sue and Charlotte of his fellow townspeople, presumably those who weren’t in frilly dresses. “All will follow her and try to get her.”

They were also curious, Umar said, because there were only ten female drivers in all of Aqrah. Sue drove our big Hyundai unapologetically.

I still thought of Sue the way I’d known her first—as president of the Student Council, and because I never knew what “Student Council” really meant: as President. Charlotte called her “The Sue Yang.”

There was a comfort in having Madame President at the wheel. And when we drove, I grew into the role of the backseat—and because I thought of backseat driving as a cardinal sin, I became lazier as a matter of principle.

Here: the freedom of traveling with the fixedness of a small group—as detached from our environs as a pinball, but as tightly podded as three pips of cardamom. I didn’t need to fight every second for connection. But maybe that was why I didn’t take notice of my companions even as much as I would a houseguest—moving together, I assumed a kind of closeness that made Charlotte and Sue like parts of me, and me like parts of them. I became more selfish, but I liked to think the self was all of us.

I traveled more comfortably not alone, but more dully. And when I noticed the dullness: a new discomfort, a feeling that I was not doing enough.

Umar was celebrating the Eid according to village traditions: 6 A.M. prayer followed by house visits and gift giving—chocolates, cakes, pepsi (a catchall for any dark soda in Kurdistan)—to other families in town. His family would stay and chat for ten minutes and then move on to the next house.

And what about the Christians? we wondered. He didn’t know much, but there was a church near his house that he had never been inside. We were curious about the minorities in the secessionist state.

Umar offered to guide us to the plain stucco building behind a gate with a crucifix on it. He spoke quietly in Kurdish on our behalf to a few men outside and we were all invited in, warmly; we encouraged Umar to poke in with us to the services held on the small second floor. A dozen or so congregants sat in pews. Umar looked nervous, standing with his back against the wall. He was afraid of “talk,” he said. The village had eyes, and if they saw him at a church, he’d never hear the end of it.

The priest was delighted. He showed us scripture in Syriac (the modern dialect of Aramaic written in an ancient script that looks one part Hebrew, two parts kooky computer font) and invited us to come to a full sermon he was about to give half an hour away in the town of Malabrouan. Umar left the church for the first time in his life and bade us farewell—he wouldn’t go further with this crowd. Happy to have practiced his English, he was relieved to watch us go, grateful to be free again from the fear of gossip. We followed the priest’s pickup truck in the darkness to a stocky yellow building swarming with car lights, took off our shoes, and fell into line behind the regulars.

I couldn’t follow the service—in Kurdish with passages in Syriac—but I liked being a nonpracticing Jew in a Christian service on a Muslim holiday. And when that smugness faded, I settled in to the atmosphere, ancient and magnificent, nurtured by the reverence of the parishioners. The priest in long robes spoke to a full room. Charlotte, half-Jewish, half-Christian (wholly Christian to the congregation), was half-pushed, half-invited to give a short speech in Arabic. She was a traveling Christian, and to the priest, this was the only sensible thing for her to do before the services returned to normal. When the congregants rose, I rose. When they sat, I sat. When they sang, I hummed a tune of my own devising.

Something always drew me to religious hubs. I wasn’t here for divine salvation, but I felt beneath any conscious logic that there was potential in these churches, in the mosques, in the spaces where synagogues were and might have been. Politically, I knew these houses of worship were lighthouses along the sectarian borders that divided the country—there was no denying that the identities that had brought people here mattered. But political curiosity wasn’t what had drawn me here.

In Hawler Mall, I performed the Tall White Celebrity show. In the canyon with Clay and fellow tourists, I was a stand-in for the American military. And yet, if I disconnected from those identities, I was as rootless and aimless as I had been by Osama’s cricket pitch. But if I could sneak up on deliberate, voluntary connections, maybe I could slip into one with lighter baggage.

Here was a chance to bear witness to gatherings that had nothing to do with me. They were prime locations to pan for connection. “Friday” and “mosque”—jumu‘a and jaam‘a—come from the root “to gather.” Arabic words for synagogue and church, kaniis(a), come from an old Semitic root: “to assemble.” For good measure, the English synagogue is Greek, from sun- “together” and agein, “bring.”

After the sermon, we gathered with the priest in the dark parking lot to finally introduce ourselves. It was easier for my nationality to fade as we unwound from Arabic, a mutual second language, in French, a sort of third. Jean-Jésus had studied in France and spoke the clear French only foreigners can manage. “Où Eve!” he asked me when he learned my name. Where’s Eve! He translated his joke proudly to his followers in Arabic. It was a joke older than many civilizations, but it made me imagine a time when it would have been fresh, like we were two old friends shooting a three-thousand-year-old breeze.

I took that moment to tell him I was Jewish. He hardly paused. It was finally getting through to me: it was pointless to try to find my footing by seeking the borders my Jewishness hit. I’d never find an identity in a space bound by prejudice. In blood or language or faith, “Jew” was a nametag I wore largely for the right to rebel against some vague outside pushing in. If I wanted to find an identity that connected to the whole world—I couldn’t look for it in a box defined by what the world was not.

All this time, I dropped “Jew” like a sounding line, waiting for some kind of bump that would tell me how far away the other was. I always lost those lines in the sea.

This was a great thing I should have remembered: the marvelous capacity of human beings to Give Zero Shits. Sure, love’s opposite is not hate (but apathy), everyone told me at the onset of text-driven flirting; but it took a long time to understand the B side—that love is not necessary to prove a lack of hatred. Over time, past points of difference turn wonderfully unremarkable.

Jean-Jésus waived good-bye to Charlotte, and then to Sue. “Say hello to China for us!”

FIFTY MILES TO THE WEST, as the story goes, the town of Lalish was transplanted directly from the heavens. According to the Hymn of the Weak Broken One, one of the most important sources of the Yazidi creation story, “When Lalish came / Plants began to grow,” and the world was set in motion.

We parked outside the town in our dirty car, abreast the heavy metal stanchions; no roads continue through Lalish. The holiest site in the Yazidi faith, Lalish sits in a lush valley, one turn off a quiet stretch of highway. It shares its effect with corners of Damascus or Old Jerusalem, old mortar over even older stones, replicated by the newer buildings in shades of gold and tan. Tiny houses pile up the hill on top of one another behind a central courtyard. Large cobblestones fade into hard, packed dirt.

To the right as you enter is the sanctuary of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, a Sufi mystic born in the 1070s in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. Sheikh Adi traveled to Kurdistan and developed a following in Lalish, where he died and was most likely buried around 1160. For Yazidis, he is accepted as the avatar of Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel.

In the 1840s and 1850s, the writing of British supertravelers like Sir Austen Henry Layard and G. P. Badger introduced Yazidi culture to the west. Yazidi belief structure and traditions reflect an affinity with branches of all three Abrahamic religions, especially Nestorian Christianity and Sufi Islam, and a deep connection to Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, and Manichaeism. Belief in reincarnation is fundamental. But when we arrived, none of us knew much more than the stigma: for a millennium, Yazidis have been defamed as devil worshippers.

It was our first audaciously sunny day in Iraq and children would occasionally push past to chortle up the path around the sanctuary carrying picnic trimmings to the top of the hill. A holy man was playing with the squirrels. He was dressed entirely in layers of simple white with a black sash tied around his waist. The soft white band of his hat separated its black cap from his equally black, thick hair and beard. A heavier gray robe with red lining draped over his shoulders all the way down to wool slippers checkered in orange and black. When he held out an almond, a squirrel would stretch itself upward on its back legs to paw it from him—if it couldn’t, it would latch on to his hand and hold on for a ride.

With the squirrel waiting for its chance to pounce from the entablature, the man introduced himself as Baba Chawish and offered us the grand tour. “Muslims?” he asked, in Arabic. “I’m Jewish,” I said. He nodded in his placid way, oozing calm. “Many Yazidis have Jewish friends on the Internet.”

AS INSTRUCTED, we took our shoes off before entering the sanctuary complex, but I made the mistake of stepping directly on the threshold. Two girls giggled, half-hiding behind the corner and motioned for me to step over. Down the first set of stairs, there is a second courtyard. In the far corner is a high stone arch, decorated with small treelike adornments like little spiky teeth. A religious man leaned faithfully against the plinth, wearing brown robes and a black coat under a red and white keffiyeh. A wooden door was propped open beside him, the entrance to the temple proper, and we shadowed close behind the guide that Baba Chawish had charged with leading us three Americans through the mazes.

The long entrance chamber is supported by a span of arches whose pillars are wrapped in lustrous cloth. The wrappings are made of smaller and larger pieces in no strict pattern—the first pillar was dressed in a big swath of electric pink with a shoulder covered in a shiny green, the next in overlapping drapery of purple and yellow and red and orange. A row of tombs stands against the wall, each one fully covered in bright colors. On these fabrics, and the slack hangings that run from pillar to pillar, Yazidis tie a knot and make a wish.

There are no windows in the shrines, and as we followed deeper into the rounded tunnels through tiny doorways it grew darker and darker. On one tunnel’s mural, a woman in an Indian sari gazes intently at a bronze depiction of a peacock. A few naked lightbulbs stick out from a cable fixed to the wall. Underneath, in a trough along the walls of some sacred chambers, are hundreds of ceramic jugs, Greek amphorae. They hold locally made oil used to feed the holy lamps in and outside the sanctuary. On the path up to the top of the hill, there are dozens of nishan, smooth niches in hollowed-out stones painted white for lamps to be lit.

From the top of that hill, two conical spires shoot upward from the roof of the sanctuary. The tallest is directly above the tomb of Sheikh Adi; the lesser tops the room holding the remains of Sheikh Hesen, the third leader of the following at Lalish after Sheikh Adi, and the incarnation of the Angel Darda’il. A local man was standing by a second exit from his chamber—from there, a damp staircase descends underground into the cramped “Cave,” which is linked by tunnel to the larger “Cavern.” Philip Kreyenbroek and Khalil Rashow, devoted scholars of Kurds and Yazidis, mention these spaces with little detail in their definitive book God and Sheikh Adi Are Perfect: “These caves are felt to be extremely sacred, and their existence is normally hidden from outsiders.”

But the man at the top of the stairs beckoned impishly and I ducked into the staircase. (Archeologist-spy Gertrude Bell described just the same thing a century earlier, departing from a group to sneak down into the caves in her visit to Lalish in 1910.) At the end of the tunnel I could hear the sound of water gushing into a pool. The man moved toward the sound. The Cavern is pitch-black but for one lightbulb that reveals rippling water, undeniably clear even in the dark. I could hardly tell how large the space was, and I could barely see the source: a fast-moving cascade roars chest high out of the back wall, filling the room and channeling out through somewhere I couldn’t see. The man bent and splashed his face, inviting me wordlessly to do the same. My time in Iraq had been almost exclusively cold, but I closed my eyes and splashed too, feeling the crisp bite of my first attempt at bathing in Kurdistan. Then he dipped his hands into the pool and slurped a cupful, urging me to follow.

This was the Zemzem Spring, named for the miraculous well that appeared to Ishmael and Hagar, Abraham’s second wife, as she ran back and forth through the desert near Mecca. According to legend, this life-giving water is sprung from the same source, a thousand miles away.

I was really, really thirsty. And to drink from a sacred spring . . . but I held back, on an impulse I almost never have. It was still Iraq, I remembered, and there was a lot I didn’t know.

Back above, the tightening passageway through the sanctuary opens into its final chamber. I moved slowly behind a small group of Yazidi visitors, who kissed each doorway as we passed from room to room. In this stark marble space, square under the high spire, the sarcophagus of Sheikh Adi is alone and covered like the others in a bricolage of knotted linen. Airier than other spaces, Sheikh Adi’s tomb doesn’t have walls so black and suffused with the throaty smell of oil fumes. We took a moment to breathe.

In three years, the sanctuary would be overrun with refugees, escapees of the siege on Mount Sinjar and other acts of genocidal violence in the province. ISIS made a particular target of the non-Muslim villages, killing thousands of Yazidi men, selling thousands of women as slaves.

In a plain room toward the outside, I joined the group crowding around a lumpy wall like basketball players around the key before a free throw. Fellow visitors, Yazidi Kurds making the pilgrimage from their home in Sweden, knew what to do, and I watched as a man in a gray sweater closed his eyes and tossed a blanket with one hand (remember: underhand) with his wife and small daughters looking on, riveted. A girl in a striped Hello Kitty shirt was standing partway up the wall to retrieve it. If the blanket stuck atop a rounded shelf about ten feet high, the thrower’s wish would come true. Three tries. Mulligans allowed.

Success! At least for the Swedish family; Sue and Charlotte were less lucky, and I remember opening my eyes to watch the blanket slide cruelly off the wall’s protuberance after each of my vain entreaties to the Yazidi angels.

So we traded answers to prayers for answers to questions, reuniting with Baba Chawish at the edge of the sanctuary. Only later did I learn what his name meant: it was an office, not his given name, and it established him as the guardian of the sanctuary. The Baba Chawish is appointed by the Mir, literally “prince,” the highest Yazidi authority in matters both civil and religious. According to Kreyenbroek and Rashow, “Theoretically, at least, the Mir is the supreme living source of spiritual and temporal authority, the earthly vicegerent of Melek Tawus and Sheikh Adi.” The home of the Mir is in nearby Baadre.

He brought us into a comfortable room with an upright air conditioner and uninterrupted couches along all four walls. A man appeared from a kitchen carrying a tea tray.

“When did the religion start?” I asked—a softball as if I had a fastball.

“We don’t have any certainty,” he said. I could have listened to him read the Terms and Conditions of a thousand banking apps. In his Arabic, it seemed he had shaved away every harsh sound and replaced it with butter. “We don’t know when the world was created, or Adam’s age. We don’t know.”

In Yazidi hymns the word mystery is an exclusively positive term that refers to the souls of the angels or other holy beings, or sources of divine power, or the absolute understanding man seeks. Because Yazidi texts are written in Iraqi Kurds’ native language, the Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish, the use of their word sur, “mystery, secret” (a cognate in Turkish and Arabic and Persian), seems to imply an acceptance of the incomprehensible. In my discussions of faith with new acquaintances, I knew I could always rely on this uncertainty: Well, no one can say they fully understand God, right? Across the Middle East, everyone always agreed. There is great solidarity in mutual confuddlement.

The district of Sheikhan, “Land of Sheikhs,” where Lalish is nestled, is the Yazidi homeland and heartland. “Before it was all Yazidis,” Baba Chawish said coolly, with a Northern Kurdish accent. “Syrian, Turkish, Iraq, Irani, Kurds—before it was all Yazidis. But the attack of Islam—what’s it called, ‘al-Fatuhat al-Islamiyya?’—replaced the religion and it became Islam, but the language stayed.

“We stayed. In caves, in mountains, in areas they didn’t reach, we stayed. All the rest, killed, and the religion became Islam.” Metal spoons clinked in armud glasses of apricot tea. Charlotte translated simple summaries for Sue.

“The four nations of Kurdistan, all of them were Yazidi. And Islam came and said . . .” Baba Chawish didn’t finish the story. “Violence of the sword,” he explained. There was no sadness left in this destruction; he spoke as if this were something he thought about always, or not at all.

There is no absolute data for Yazidi populations. A report commissioned by the UNHCR cites worldwide estimates ranging from less than two hundred thousand to more than a million. Communities in Iraq, mostly in Sheikhan and the Sinjar District near Mosul, are the majority, with numbers in the tens of thousands in Turkey, Syria, Armenia, and Georgia. Baba Chawish also mentioned Russia and Ukraine. He didn’t claim that Yazidis were ever the only population in Kurdistan, but he distinguished them from non-Kurdish Christians—descended from ancient Iranian roots rather than ancient Mesopotamian ones. In fact, the sanctuary of Lalish (since destroyed and rebuilt) was once a Christian monastery. Kreyenbroek writes that the Baba Chawish “represents” the monk who oversaw that cloister.

He recalled that calm moment in history. “They were there, Christians, Jews, even them. Everyone just did his work; there was work. Each one was on his way—all that’s important for religion is God; each religion is a path, but every path worships God. It’s all the same path.”

While the Yazidi origin story is unique, the Bible and the Quran are both considered holy books and the lion’s share of Abrahamic stories are compatible with Yazidism. Yazidis deeply respect Jesus and Moses and Muhammad (“124,000 Prophets have come and gone,” it reads in the Hymn of Babeke Omera). These traditions are protected by the same seven angels, our host explained, rattling off their names automatically. Azra’il, Jibra’il, Mikha’il, Darda’il, Shimna’il, Israfil, Azazil.

Although I could find no cognate counterpart for Shimna’il in other traditions, the other names are familiar in Hebrew and Arabic. But the source of much confusion—of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western obsession with alleged “devil worshippers”—can be traced to the Yazidis’ relation to the first and last angels on Baba Chawish’s list. While all seven are linked with a particular Yazidi leader believed to be their incarnation, Azra’il and Azazil—names affiliated in other religions with the Angel of Death and with Satan—may be one and the same, both used as monikers for Melek Tawus, the Peacock King. Melek Tawus is certainly the character Muslims recognize as Iblis, later known as The Shaitan, the worst of all creatures that defied God. But their stories have one crucial difference. God reacts differently in the Muslim and Yazidi tellings. Baba Chawish started from the beginning:

Tawus Melek is a king at the side of God. He is a deputy of God, Lord of the Worlds. Before Adam, God said, “Do not worship anyone but me.” The Angels were worshiping god. After 400 years, God made Adam and said, “Worship Adam.” God said to the angels, “You must worship Adam.” Six of them knelt to Adam, but Tawus Melek said “I will not kneel.”

So God, Lord of the worlds said to Tawus Melek, “Why do you not kneel?” He said, “Before 400 years, you said to us ‘Do not worship anyone but God, Lord of the worlds.’ This is what is in my mind.” He said, “You created Adam from clay. I do not kneel to that which is from clay—I kneel only to Your Name. Prostration is but for you, for the Lord of the worlds. I do not prostrate to things made of Clay.” And Adam was made from clay.

And God said, “You are a guide, to be leader of angels.”

Charlotte made the connection—in mainstream Islam, Iblis answers God, “I am better than he: Thou didst create me from fire and him from clay.” In this seventh Sura of the Quran called Al-A‘raf, “The Heights,” God responds, “Get out, for thou art of the meanest [of creatures].”

For Muslims, this fall from grace is crucial. Iblis was not an angel—he was a jinni, a spirit that God once held in special esteem. (Melek Tawus was also created apart from the angels.) Islamic tradition says jinni and men are given free will, while angels are not, and Iblis, the original shaitan, was eternally punished for willing against God. The Arabic shaitan is borrowed from the original Hebrew, ha-Satan, “the Opposer.”

The only difference is that for Yazidis, this opposition is not such a bad thing. The Peacock King may have satan-ed, but he was no Satan.

Baba Chawish held his glass steadily on the plate. “You say this, but this word is a mistake if you say it to him—he is an angel. This word is not good. The story in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, the word they say to God is an error if you are consistent with the Truth. Why is it an error?” The guardian of the sanctuary didn’t pause for us to answer. “He is an angel. If one is bigger than you, it is an error to say something like that to him, no? How can you call someone bigger than you a bad word like that? It’s criminal.”

Sir Layard never heard this word in Lalish during his nineteenth-century exploration: “The name of the Evil spirit is, however, never mentioned; and any illusion to it by others so vexes and irritates them, that it is said they have put to death persons who have wantonly outraged their feelings by its use.” (He continues to use “Satan” to describe the object of Yazidi affection.)

Melek Tawus is a king, approved by God and superior to our judgment. Yet his thought process is not beyond our comprehension, and his resistance is considered deeply important to Yazidis. Melek Tawus’s choice indicates the power each individual has in making his own decisions; here are strong traces of Manichaeism, the binary struggle of light against dark. “I know a path not good and good,” Baba Chawish said. “Everyone is in his own hands, the issue is with the individual.”

In Yazidism, this is especially true. The religious experience cannot (and arguably should not) be communalized as it is in the practice of many other faiths. Rumors of the existence of sacred texts began to swirl around the community in the wake of the first Western explorations. As curiosity mounted, texts miraculously began to appear. A Christian dealer of old books began dealing Arabic translations of the intriguingly titled Jilwe (“Illumination,” or “Revelation”) and the Meshaf Resh (“Black Book”). In the early twentieth century, a Catholic priest claimed to have discovered the originals in ancient Kurdish, and they were promptly published by a German scholar and disseminated in various renderings around the world. But they were forgeries. The “original” language was a Kurdish dialect unknown to Yazidis, and while many of the stories rang true, their status as scripture was rescinded.

The heart of the written tradition today is in the Qewls, the sacred hymns that were documented over centuries as Yazidism was codified. These are recited or performed to music by a Qewwal, always an unordained Yazidi from one of two particular tribes. Until recently, only the Qewwals had access to the hymns—literacy was discouraged among the general population, supposedly by virtue of a cultural taboo against the common folk gaining access to higher truths. For the community, Yazidism was a wholly oral institution.

Most hymns allude to narratives known as chirok that have no written basis and are passed down from generation to generation through storytelling. Rashow and Kreyenbroek explain: “Both genres come together in the mishabet or ‘sermon,’ in which a Qewwal normally recites part of a hymn, tells the relevant story in prose, and generally draws some moral conclusions.”

Still, the belief in the two ersatz holy books has not fully dissolved. Yazidis themselves may now believe in lost or stolen texts by those names. In 2006, traveler and journalist Michael Totten spoke with the Baba Sheikh, the high authority of all mystical teachers, appointed by the prince and known as the Old Man of the Sanctuary. Totten recounts his assertions: “Our book is called The Black Book. It is written in gold. The book is in Britain. They took our book. That is why the British have science and education. The book came from the sky.”

As Kreyenbroek told me:

As to the fact that the Baba Sheikh believes in a lost Black Book, it is typical of largely oral cultures (at least in the Iranian-speaking sphere) that they believe that the ancients, who were so much better that they are, naturally had written books. Many traditional Yezidis believe this, but that does not necessarily make it true.

The Quran is read by many Muslims as the exact word of God as revealed directly to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel (in Arabic). Muhammad, who grew up illiterate, would memorize the chapters and relate them later to a scribe. The Torah has similar origins: God dictated the Torah directly to Moses to transcribe. While all religious Christians would believe the words in the New Testament are divinely inspired, branches of Christianity differ in their exact assessment: in 1978, American Evangelicals issued the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (“Scripture is without error or fault . . .”), while the Presbyterian Church around the corner from where I grew up taught that the Bible can still be infallible without all the details being factually correct.

For Yazidis not pining for that certainty, the lack of an absolute text read in public and private is twofold: it encourages the Sufi ideal of individual closeness with God and it unites the community in mutual understanding that is refreshed every generation by living people. But as literacy expands, and young Yazidis avoid the archaic profession of a Qewwal, the written word becomes increasingly important.

IN LALISH, HISTORY IS still more tangible. Yazidis in the diaspora are called to visit Lalish at least once in their lifetime, just like Muslims are to Mecca. Yazidis around the world once even prayed in the direction of the sanctuary. (They now pray toward the sun.) At one time, the Yazidi scholars say, “the early community may have regarded Lalish as ‘essentially’ identical with the holy places in and around Mecca in the same way as two distinct historical figures may be seen as incarnations of the same ‘mystery’ or ‘essence.’ ”

The “mystery” of Mount Arafat, where Muhammad gave his Farewell Sermon, simultaneously sanctified Mount Erafat in Lalish. On the day hajis visit this mountain in Mecca, high Yazidi religious officials climb their Erafat. The Zemzem Spring, then, not only sprung from Mecca—it was the same as the Mecca well. (And after my rejections at every Saudi visa attempt, I accepted this as a small consolation.)

“I am a lover of the Tariqa, a guide to Haqiqa,” it says in the Hymn of the Mill of Love. This is written as if taken directly from the mystical Sufi Islamic playbook: an individual Sufi order is known as a tariqa, “path,” whose members strive toward haqiqa, “truth.” (Lalish is also nicknamed “The Truth.”) But according to Sufis, Sharia, “(Islamic) law” (also translatable as “path”) is the first step to Truth; for Yazidis, Sharia is mere “law,” divorced from the Truth at the time of creation and symptomatic of Islam’s misguided worldliness. Sharia is based on regulations derived from the Quran and Muhammad’s example and teachings, and is considered infallible by those who subscribe to it—Yazidis discard that level of absolutism entirely.

Sufism bloomed in the seventh and eighth centuries, at the time of the expansive Umayyad Caliphate (whose second caliph, Yazid ibn Mu’awiya, is the Yazidis’ generally accepted namesake). In the time of Sheikh Adi, Lalish was likely another tariqa seeking truth and responding to local traditions. Instead of sprouting directly from an Islamic community, however, this Sufism would have been superimposed on eons of Kurdish, Zoroastrian custom. Since then, the path seems to have wandered very little.

“We don’t affect any one,” he said. “Everyone has their religion—God made you Jewish, stay Jewish. God made you Christian, stay Christian. God made you Yazidi, stay Yazidi. This is for you personally the word of God.” It makes sense that he wouldn’t proselytize—Yazidis do not accept converts. “It is closed,” Baba Chawish said matter-of-factly. “It is forbidden for anyone to become Yazidi.”

Our host spoke plainly. “From the first day until the last day, a Yazidi remains Yazidi. From a different place, they cannot enter. For example, the origin of many Muslims before were Jews or before were Christians, no? Or Yazidis, for example. But from Adam originally—those are Yazidis.” The first of his dramatic pauses, and then: “Yazidis remain Yazidis.”

This is different from a species of tolerant Chosen People elitism. It is not simply because God has picked an individual path for everyone that Yazidis do not accept outsiders; instead, they see themselves as cut from a different cloth, or rather, sown from a different seed.

Yazidi legend traces their lineage neither to Isaac nor Ishmael, nor to any fabled child of Abraham. As the story goes, Adam and Eve deposited their seed (or spit, or blood from their foreheads) into separate jars to see if they could make a child without the other (the remainder of humanity issues from mutual offspring). After nine months, Eve’s jar was full of vile insects, but Adam’s held the ancestor of all Yazidis, Shahid ibn Jerr—Shahid son of the Jar. The preservation of this bloodline is vital to the community.

They hope Yazidis remain Yazidis when reincarnated, but this may not always be the case. “Of course there are differences,” he said when I asked how spirits returned to the earth. “Everything is in the hands of God.” If their path is a different one in the next life, it will still be what God chose, unlike straying by conversion.

Meaning continues to be made from difference. The boundaries are enforced from within—in 2007, a seventeen-year-old girl named Du’a Khalil Aswad was murdered by her own community for her connection with a Muslim boy—and from without: in 2014, ISIS began its genocide in earnest. Unlike Christians and Jews, Yazidis were not even considered people of the book, the Quranic tag for pre-Islamic Abrahamic faiths.

“They have made destruction. Our religion—most people, they do not want killing. Ever. One brother kills another human—he has a son, a mother, he has a father, he has a family. This is an error, by God.”

In a moment that fleeted like a second thought, he added: “The world has developed some from the time of the conquest.”

The Baba Chawish looked to be in his fifties, or forties, or early sixties. He could have been centuries old. Çawush is in modern Turkish a military word for “colonel.” One linguist’s camp suggests that the “Baba” titles do not come from Persian bave, “father,” but rather from the Aramaic/Kurdish/Arabic/Persian for “gate.” And it is perhaps because they are this kind of gateway between divine and profane worlds that they held to higher standards of purity: the Baba Sheikh abstains from alcohol, though wine is a religiously significant part of Yazidi culture (“Oh friends, drink up, it is part of your duty!” says Sultan Ezi in a chirok); our host was chaste and unmarried, as required by his post.

“On earth there is marriage, but in the afterlife there is no marriage,” he had told us. “Why? Jesus was not married, true or no? Moses was not married. The angels are not married, true or no?

“In heaven there are no children of marriage,” he said.

In the cyclical nature of Yazidi tradition, it made sense that heaven—for those who transcended the cycle of rebirth—would echo creation: Shahid ibn Jerr was no child of marriage either. Like this, its tombs and shrines remembering men whose “mysteries” were those of angels, Lalish mirrors a kind of Platonic form, perfect in the heavens and printed on the earth.

The venerated leaders are considered divine, but the angels themselves are superior. “All of these are degrees,” said Baba Chawish. “There is nothing bigger than God. After the protectors and the prophets . . . the last thing is us!” He laughed a hearty laugh. As a sheikh recited in a Yazidi sermon at the turn of the millennium: “We are deficient. God and Sheikh Adi are perfect.”

Slowly, the conversation came back to earth. Would Jews accept converts? Were there good doctors in Israel? Sue was from China, how many religions do they have? How many millions of people? He clapped his hands when he heard the answer. “Mashallah!”

And why did we come to Iraq? “Someone told you Kurdistan was good?” A friend did, I said, and I had to see for myself.

“The baab is open any time,” he said.

The Baba Chawish walked us back through his dominion; a delegation was gathering in the inner courtyard of the sanctuary. The German consul was visiting, escorted by the prince himself. Embassy vehicles and attaché cars clogged the area at the foot of the hill, where the most divine of all men on earth had just found a parking spot.

As we exited the temple, I noticed something—I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever missed it. On the right side of the entrance, there is something prominent and peculiar: a black snake zigzags upward in low relief, the tip of its tail in an orange-sized hole in the mortar. For Christians, Satan is manifested more directly than anywhere else in scripture as the trickster serpent in the Garden of Eden. For travelers, this image was a mystery. Layard writes in 1849: “The snake is particularly conspicuous. Although it might be suspected that these figures were emblematical, I obtain no other explanation from Sheikh Nasr, than that they had been cut by the Christian mason who repaired the tomb some years ago, as ornaments suggested by his mere fancy.”

In some religious traditions the snake is cursed, substantiated by its slithering and undeniable scariness. But in the Qewle Afirina Dinyaye, the Hymn of the Creation of the World, a snake plugs up a leak in the ark that was carrying the very first creatures, man among them, across the ocean. Not a trickster, but a savior.

Yazidis have woven threads through a world of stories, deliberate or not, acknowledged or not. As long as you aren’t hell-bent on converting in or out of Yazidism, you are fine by them. As long as you seek truth and follow your path, you do right. Beliefs of the believers are all close enough. But alas, the devil is in the details.

AT EVERY CHECKPOINT we had passed through as passengers, I watched the driver and the guard drown out each other’s pleasantries with more pleasantries, never leaving time for an answer to a question. “Salaam aleykum choni bashee?” (“Peace be upon you, how are you, good?”) the driver would say, partially rolling down the window and waving his hand. Now in the driver’s seat myself and detesting the car searches that followed most disclosures of our citizenry, I began to try the same thing.

Salaamaleykumchonibashee, I mumbled, partially rolling down the window and waving my hand. The occasional squint from the soldiers . . . and like a charm they motioned us through.

The murmuring smoothed the borders between languages as we left the dominion of Sorani (the Central Kurdish spoken in Erbil and to the east and written in a variety of Persian Script) for Kurmanji territory. I could suss most Sorani letters out from Arabic, but I got vowels wrong all the time, and often spoke past the limits of my reading skills. Kurmanji, Northern Kurdish, is written in the Latin alphabet and is far more widely spoken outside of Iraq.

In a place where political borders are perfectly satisfying to almost no one, I saw the linguistic lines as extra meaningful. We drove westward toward Norah’s brother Fady, and his home in Kurmanji-speaking Dohuk.

FOR LESS THAN A DOLLAR, any juicy chicken shawarma stuffed into a crescent-shaped pocket of fresh, chewy bread can be yours. On the side, the vendor offers “Family Sauce,” an inauspicious brown condiment bottled with an ambiguous label of fruits and vegetables that is, without fail, sticky and stained. It is magical. From the U.S. military to Robert from Baghdad waiting in line behind us, nobody didn’t love Family Sauce.

The ingredients are hardly secret: seasonal fruits, coconut, vinegar, onion, garlic, seasoning, dates, water, mustard, thickening agent, caramel, salt, starch, tomato paste, black pepper. Seasonal fruits, we joked: there’s the secret.

Across the street a colorful shop squeezes fresh fruits, Kurdish custards, ice cream, and that three-millennia-old treasure of Mesopotamian desserts, likely born in the swelling Neo-Assyrian empire around the time they were conquering the Kingdom of Israel: baklava. A string of plastic bananas hangs from the awning.

Sue raced to the airport, and back to work. We lost our president. And still, with Charlotte, I was far less alone on the road than usual, sharing thoughts with native tongue to native speaker in a way that left less unsaid. I was better able then to live the moments as they came; less scribbling and recording and documenting as if the experience would be nothing without carving it in stone.

I reminisced out loud, I think, so Charlotte would remember with me. So that her brain would pair with mine like a backup hard drive. Fady blasting Rihanna . . . the hours of café backgammon in a smoke cloud . . . remember that lamb quzi, comically oversized and served over rice and raisins?

My memory of Dohuk is sparse and disjointed—above the city there was a dam that abuts a big, blue man-made lake. On one postcard-esque hillside of long golden grass, a small cluster of whitewashed tombstones decorated in Kurdish and flowers underneath a single tree. Across the road, we drank tea with a beekeeper in plastic chairs high above the water. He stirred the pot for us and his friend over a solid campfire, and white pigeons flapped through the smoke.

Properly stuffed, we rebounded toward the far east of Kurdistan, from Dohuk back to Erbil, and then on to Sulaymaiyah. We passed two of Dohuk’s several amusement parks on the way to the highway, waving good-bye to Mazi Mall, ila al-liqaa’ to Dream City.

As we drove, I remembered the ubiquitous NO GUN signs—in hotels, at the carnivals. No Glocks. No Kalashnikovs.

THE NORTHERN ROUTE to the capital runs parallel to the Turkish border from scenic overlook to scenic overlook, past picnickers and illustrious cities. I hunted out the window with my camera. The eyes and movements were something to study, and I aimed out the window as if to ask how I looked to them. As we snaked through the tight streets of Amadiya—an ancient city-cum-summer-getaway sitting high on a pedestal of sheer cliffs—a boy craned his neck to follow us, away from a foosball table that had been dragged onto the street, and framed from behind by the posters of soccer stars. I didn’t take a picture, but that image stuck with me as a freeze frame—his look, the game and the reality, the dream. If I didn’t write him down, I’d lose him soon.

Somewhere in the greasy control room where I file these images away, a connection was offered: the girl from Dragon Valley—black mascara and shaved head, red dress and blue eyes-like-sapphires—remember her?

Near Amadiya, a side road leads to a small monastic village; a blue highway sign declared this in Arabic, Kurdish, and Syriac on top. We followed until the road went no farther. There: a church remade recently of large sandy stones hid from view in a thick grove of walnut trees, and a spot to park our car and venture inside.

A diminutive woman lived in the monastery complex—the two-room church about the size of a school bus and its one adjoining building—and she shuffled to push open the metal door, guiding us silently from room to stone room and waiting while we looked. She wore black socks rolled up above black slippers, a long black sweater draped over a brown dress that stopped at her shins, and a faded cloth tied tightly around her head. Light leaked around heavy window curtains.

The woman pointed to an object propping a door open. It was a solid metal cone, maybe forty pounds, with grooves on the base to screw into something else.

A rocket.

Through hand gestures, she explained that the church had twice been destroyed by rocket attacks. “Saddam,” she said.

His anti-Kurdish, anti-Christian campaign destroyed four thousand villages in Kurdistan in the late 1980s. Underneath the stairs to the church, they had stored other souvenirs of war—another rocket cone, some warped missile casings, shreds of metal, a faded church bell. She pointed again, smiling weakly.

All my chasing the scent of violence; this was its wake, in one form.

From the early 1970s onward, America had a habit of encouraging the Kurds to fight Saddam, and then flaking on promises for support. James Akins, former attaché at the American Embassy in Baghdad, has called this relationship “one of the more shameful stories in our diplomatic history.” It had always been like this: “they came to us, and the position that I took was, ‘You’re great people. You’re really awfully good, and you really should have your rights inside Iraq, and probably other countries. But you’ll never get any support from the United States, because we have great interests in Iran, and in Turkey.’ ” It’s amazing Americans are still such welcome tourists.

The churchkeeper walked us through the church kitchen to the porch where her husband sat in a blue plastic chair, cracking walnuts with his eyes nearly closed as the late afternoon sun hooked into the crannies of his cheeks. We drank tea. The man was jolly, wearing two sweaters and a mustache, placing walnut after walnut on plates for us to eat.

Soon, it was dark, and we got lost easily. We knew we would have to cross back over the Great Zab, a river that comes from Turkey and joins the Tigris south of Mosul. For hours, we attempted to match the headlights tracing nearby hills with the shape of the roads on our maps. After a few bouts of desperation and only walnuts as sustenance, we belched from the dark underbrush onto the highway north of Erbil, reseeking the refuge of the faded pink room.

THE NEXT MORNING we preloaded phone maps and stapled crumpled paper ones together for the simple journey east. Our only creative choice was to take the faster southern route that skims the outskirts of Kirkuk, a city that has remained at the very core of Arab-Kurdish conflict since before Saddam’s time. With a population estimated at around a million, the city may sit on 7 percent of all the world’s oil reserves.

For a half hour, we had been outside official Kurdish territory as recognized by the 2005 Iraqi Constitution—as soon as we’d entered the Kirkuk governorate, we were in a disputed territory under central Iraqi government control. Whatever had changed was invisible from the highway, like crossing a state line.

Especially since the Baathist government returned to power in a military coup in 1968, policies of Arabization had been enacted to reduce the number of Kurds in the area. Kurdish civil servants were transferred and dispersed in the southern Arab governorates of Iraq, neighborhoods were renamed in Arabic, major roads were constructed that destroyed Kurdish homes for very little compensation. After 2003, though, Kurdish numbers may have doubled. No one knows. From the New York Times in 2010: “The number of Arabs who have left since the American invasion in 2003 might be 250,000, or not; the number of Kurds who have since arrived is said to be far higher, or not. Turkmens once made up 60 percent of the city of Kirkuk, compared with 30 percent now. Maybe.”

The 2005 Iraqi Constitution outlined solutions for the “disputed territories,” all to be accomplished before the end of 2007. First: “normalization,” the reversal of ethnic redistribution policies. Next, a “fair and transparent” census. (While Kirkuk was last tallied in 1997, Iraqi census numbers have been disputed since 1957.) Finally, a referendum; disputed territories would be allowed to choose their own destiny, Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan. After countless delays, the census has yet to happen.

As we rounded a bend in the highway, I saw the city sprawl, flat without a single tall building. There is very little security in Kirkuk; violence, kidnappings, car bombings are still all too common. Fire glinted at the refineries, and black plumes puffed from the smokestacks of oil wells like tall candles on a cake.

But no sooner is the city revealed than the ring road jerks away over an overpass. We were too curious to take it. Just a little farther, I thought.

There was Turkish on the signs now, the written language of Iraqi Turkmen. There were signs for the Baba Gurgur oilfield a few miles away, once the largest in the world, where Iraq’s first oil gusher was struck in 1927 and the contest for Iraqi oil took root. Natural gas had been flaming in the fields for thousands of years at Baba Gurgur, where expecting mothers came to pray to have baby boys, and where, as a kind of party trick to light Alexander the Great’s walk home for the night, Plutarch wrote, the Babylonians had set a street on fire. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar throws three Jews into a “burning fiery furnace.” Legend has it that was in Kirkuk, too.

The knowledge that this was too far for foreigners was scary and indulgent—I had goosebumps on my arms and vinegar in my belly, pushing us forward. If I wasn’t held back, then I would follow infinite directions for infinite lengths. Without a barrier . . . why stop when there is road ahead? It’s the nemesis of honor and all good things, isn’t it—giving up?

CROSSING THE BORDER into a wholly separate country invites a change in interpretation: whereas Kurds in Kurdistan enjoy certain parliamentary rights and freedoms, Kurds in Kirkuk, though they may have the same history, exist in a vastly different political climate. Though they all have survived Saddam’s genocidal campaigns, Kirkuk’s uncounted have yet to see peace.

Kurdish flags flew here, as they did everywhere in Kurdistan. Red, white, green, the yellow sun. Our visas, guarantees of our security and freedoms as Americans, were valid only for Iraqi Kurdistan. We passed through the first checkpoint. The guard asked no questions.

Suddenly, on the houses overlooking the highway, I saw that the flag’s green had turned black—and the yellow sun was replaced with three green stars and the words Allahu Akbar. I had only seen the Iraqi flag on government buildings in Kurdistan, and then always side by side with the Kurdish ensign.

Soon, a second checkpoint. This guard wore a different blue, camouflaged uniform that read “US ARMY” on the lapel. His face and voice were Iraqi, and as we feigned confusion, he showed that he had no English to offer. We didn’t want to go farther, but we didn’t want to get arrested either. Pretending that we thought we were still on the road to Sulaymaniyah (despite the WELCOME TO KIRKUK highway sign) seemed like our best bet.

The soldier was bemused. He waved his hands at the territory in front of us, making identifiably “dangerous” motions and struggling to convey to idiots what a wrong turn was. We mimed idiocy (perhaps it wasn’t miming) until we knew we weren’t in trouble. If we revealed that we had knowingly trespassed into Iraqi territory, we faced unknowable consequences. Had I really been that stupid?

A blue, camouflaged arm waved in a U-turn. Giving us our leave, the guard tried once more to explain.

“Ghalat,” he said.

It was a word I didn’t know. Charlotte translated, one ripple of a laugh of relief caught in her throat: “Big mistake,” she said.

Black smoke seemed to be coming from everywhere. Yellow containers of gasoline lined the roads, available for purchase by the jug. Retracing our steps, I pulled over at a small grocery to treat a hunger that had come to fill the space where my nervousness had been, and, after long deliberation, we left with a package of bone-dry wafers, a sheath of chocolate sandwich cookies, and a banana.

A crowd of children and an older man looked in through the car window as I put the car in drive. We waved, and took the first exit out of town.

IN THE SUMMER OF 2014, the Iraqi army fled their posts in Kirkuk as ISIS mobilized nearby. The more cohesive, arguably more committed Kurdish forces seized the opportunity to assume full control of the city; the Disputed Territory Under Iraqi Control is now a Disputed Territory Under Iraqi Kurdish Control.

Yet all over Kurdistan, whatever transformation may be under way, at shawarma stands and cafés and salad bars, we and the local populations exercise our freedom to put the magical cocktail of Family Sauce on anything and everything as we damn well please.

Although the condiment is made in Erbil, its label is written only in Arabic. Its ingredients, those seasonal fruits, are mysterious and immeasurable. At the very bottom of the squeeze bottle, there is a rare stamp: “Made in Iraq.” Just above this, a disclaimer: “We are not responsible for poor storage.”

WE MET REBAZ at night outside Azadi Park, the biggest and brightest of Sulaymaniyah’s obligatory amusement parks. I’d reached out to him on Couchsurfing, like a free version of Airbnb with a mission of international hangouts, and he’d invited us to stay with him in his parents’ house. Before we met, Rebaz listed Suly’s—the five-syllable city goes by its nickname—major attractions. Azadi Park (“Freedom Park”) was “the place of torturing kurdish ppl but now its a good park to rest and breathe.” Suly is bleeding with this kind of history; the deepest scars of war and Saddam’s genocide are in the city and province of Sulaymaniyah.

Ali, a friend of Rebaz’s, was waiting for us at a chic, spacious café in the center of town. He was tall and thin with a lean face and closely cropped hair. Rebaz was much shorter, in his late twenties and a pink cable-knit sweater. It looked like you could order alcohol, but we followed our hosts and ordered exotic-sounding teas.

For some reason, maybe because Suly is thirty miles from Iran, I had expected this eastern edge of Kurdistan to be more strict. It was the opposite. “In Suly it’s more open than the other cities. It’s like that from a long time ago,” Rebaz told us. If it hadn’t been Eid, the city’s massive outdoor bazaar would’ve been buzzing. As it was, Suly was taking the week off.

With museums and art galleries closed, we had spent part of the day cajoling our way into the courtyard of Amna Suraka, Saddam’s nightmarish Red Prison. On each side of the black, gutted entry, three columns of dirty white brick ran ground to cornice, overlaid and capped with rows of heavy orange-ish concrete, every inch pockmarked with bullet holes. As one of the city’s major tourist attractions, the prison was closed, too, so we did not see the prison chambers themselves, or the famous hall of mirrors, where each of 182,000 shards of glass remembers a victim of Saddam’s genocidal al-Anfal campaign.

“My cousin is there,” Rebaz told us. “He was executed. His portrait is there.”

Targeting mostly Kurds, this place for political torture, interrogation and unending imprisonment was the northern headquarters for the Iraqi mukhabarat, the secret police. During the fight for Kurdish independence in 1991, the Peshmerga put an end to the operation for good. Our lenient soldier guide, keeping an eye out for superiors, led us around back to where tanks are parked rusting in straight lines, adorned with chains that say “Made in China.”

Rebaz had just finished a biology degree and was looking for work. He initiated us in regional history like he was catching us up to date with a TV show. “It’s a bit tough in this region, like, all the guys around us. For Kurds, they just consider them an enemy—all of the Kurds living under the tyranny of Arabs, Farsi, Turks. Like when you talk to any Kurdish people, they say they are Kurdish. They are not proud to be part of Iraq.”

While Erbil is the political capital of Kurdistan, Suly is its cultural heart, at the frontlines of the fight for Kurdish independence, and so it was unsurprising that we had arrived so quickly at the topic of Kurdish statehood that popped up so frequently in conversations around the country. I was probably stirring them up by reflex—everywhere I was fascinated by identity and nationality and language. I often thought of nations like people, butting heads and saving face and connecting just like we individuals did; territorial constraints on the national identity, then, were like an affront at the most personal level—a restraint on the freedom to define oneself.

Since the failure of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres to establish a contiguous Kurdish state from the remains of the Ottoman empire, Kurds have been divided; there are majority Kurdish regions in Iran, Syria and Turkey, none of them autonomous as they are now in Iraq. Almost everywhere, Iraqi Kurds answered with the same patience and detachment to the question, What should Kurdistan be? It had two prongs: Should you leave Iraq? Should you join with other Kurdish regions?

Ali said it: “It’s impossible.” He had just come home from his job in Baghdad. He described the regular bombings in the capital, sounding more annoyed than anything, worn out but good-humored in a c’est la vie kind of way. During just one week a month earlier, there had been 250 casualties of suicide and roadside bombs in Baghdad. (“Sometimes I feel it in the morning and it wakes me up,” he said.)

“It’s impossible right now, but it’s our hope, right?” said Rebaz.

Ali spoke of independence activists obliquely: “They just want to get rid of the country. It’s not logical right now to do that. I mean, you don’t have order in some places, like—we don’t have sea, we don’t have friends. All we have is the United States, our only supporting country.”

It was true that Iraqi Kurdistan was not ideally situated to be its own nation; American support, too, has never been a guarantee. When the United States and Israel first encouraged the Peshmerga to fight Saddam in the early 1970s, and then changed their minds, collapsing support drove a wedge between two factions. Conflict between the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) still undermines nationalist unity.

“The vision is that it should be the great Kurdistan, all parts going together,” Rebaz reported, never adding his own opinion. It’s impossible, after all, so who cares what I think? Almost everyone invoked the vision. I wondered if Iraq’s three million Kurds felt they were supposed to dream of the day when the world’s thirty-five million Kurds would live in a united country—as if it were the more noble ideal—but didn’t really want it, or care.

“We are surrounded by enemies, man,” Rebaz said. “They don’t want Kurdistan to be a—union country. It will be the most powerful country in the Middle East, because of petrol.”

I noticed the whir of central air. “They say maybe Kurdistan is going to be a kind of Second Israel in the—you know, man?” As Rebaz said this, his face looked willing to try it out. “The US can stay here and do some foreign policy,” he said vaguely. “But it still needs working.”

Both Ali and Rebaz spoke clear English; Ali worked with foreigners in the bomb-ridden capital; they had traveled. And it was clear that through these exposures, opinions had been revised. Rebaz had lived for a short time in India, where he reacted first to surprising linguistic communality between Hindi and Kurdish. Rega meant street for them both; “Panka means ‘fan,’ parda means ‘carton,’ ” he said, grinning as he taught.

“Before going to India, no—I said, ‘I’m a Muslim.’ Only me who is being in God, not even Christian or Jewish. But after going to India, no, I said ‘No: humanity. Then religion.’ ”

“I have friends online from Israel,” he said. “I have three, four friends, they are coming here.”

Like most in Erbil, Sulaymanians speak Sorani, Central Kurdish, written in a variety of Persian script. When I asked what its influences might be—Sanskrit, Persian, Turkish, Arabic?—Rebaz reacted with an uncharacteristic jolt, “No no no no, no Arabic.” Rebaz took a terse sip of tea, as if to wash away the mere hint of a suggestion of an aftertaste of Arabic. Kurdishness was clarified faintly for what it was not.

Syria, before it was a government slaughtering its people, had its fault lines drawn along religious borders. The Kurdish population is predominantly Muslim, so the conflict is portrayed as an ethnic one supported by ancestry. Rebaz narrated a variation on a familiar story while Ali nodded affirmation behind his glass: “We are from different roots. The beginning of the story is one old man had three guys, three sons from different tribes. Sami is Arab ancestor, Hami is European ancestor, Ari is our ancestor. They are calling them ‘Hindo-European’; this part is Kurdish people, Persian people, even Pashto—Pakistan and Afghanistan—part of the Soviet Union, now Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan—all they come through same ancestor.”

His retelling outlined the story of Noah’s three sons, known in the Abrahamic tradition as Sham, Ham and Japheth. Sham (Sami) is the mythological father of the Semitic races; he is Abraham’s great great great great great great great grandfather; in Persian and Arabic, Sami means “Semite.” In Arabic, it also means “supreme.”

Biblically, Ham is the son who moves into Africa, while Japheth relocates toward the Mediterranean. Rebaz had forgotten about Africa, but with one minor change the story matched: Ari was Japheth, the forefather of Indo European peoples. “Our ancestor is called Ari—in Kurdish language, in Sanskrit language, it means ‘fire.’ Born of fire. Because we have even our own prophet and our own religion, which is called Zardasht, Zoroastrian. They are worshipping, they respect fire.”

In Sanskrit, arya means “noble.” These are the world’s Aryans. And in the words I could see the migrating populations: Zoroastrian Aryans brought fire temples to Persia, giving Iran its name. Later, when Zoroastrians moved into South Asia, they were dubbed Parsi—the word Persian in Persian. The word for the people became the word for the place. Then, the word for the place became the word for the people.

Nationality invoked a mythical lineage and language evolved to support its supremacy. Words and identities and religion aged in constant feedback with one another, and soon, the seams of this social stitching were cloaked in imagination and history.

“It’s not about belief,” Rebaz said. “It’s about story.” But, he admitted: “Even I don’t know much about it because I’m into science more!”

Kurds consider themselves the indigenes who survived Islamic conquest, even though the Islamic influence stuck. Rebaz described a familiar case: “My uncle is Muslim but he believes Zoroastrian religion more than Islam.”

Whatever Rebaz’s uncle called himself, he was a marvelous proof of how impossible “Kurdish” or even “Iraqi Kurdish” tradition was to simplify. He was a true citizen of the country that didn’t exist yet, a landlocked nation both separate and linked, Iraq and not-Iraq, a piece of Greater Kurdistan and standing-on-its-own-Stan. Against the backdrop of ten millennia of visible history, everyone was free to construct his own narrative—and to redact it at any moment. The narrative was being constantly written and read, and spoken and heard, and remembered and reremembered and forgotten. It was as if he could change his mind in an instant. And it was beautiful to see borders between identities collapse, but then . . . the absurdity . . . what were we? I was back in the Emirates Palace, flitting about the golden seats, pretending I was anyone I wanted to be. Was I anything but the story I told myself?

The more Iraqi Kurdistan became this and this—not this or this, or this but not this, or this and maybe someday this—the more it frightened me with the excitement of a world blown open.

FOR REBAZ, LEARNING SOME Hindi helped blur the fences he had drawn around himself. After the linguistic wall fell, others followed.

“When you go, when you read, when you deal with them you come to know they have a great story behind them, this worshipping—it’s not just statues right? They have amazing stories.”

I LOOKED UP FROM our table and saw that we were the only ones left in the room. The café was closing.

“Shall we make moves?” Rebaz said.

We scuttled back into the cold car and thought of sleep, of tiptoeing back into the home of Rebaz’s parents. We would never meet his mother and father, whose approval he’d solicited for our sleepover. Individuation came late here in all its forms.

But before we snuggled up for tea, we fired up the heat and followed Rebaz’s directions to an idea for the night’s last stop. “Whenever I get upset or have tension after reading, I want to get relaxed, I go there. I have my own place that I’ll show you.”

The road climbed up into Azmar Mountain, past the land and gardens and new houses owned by Saudis who weekend in Suly during the summers. Ali thought he saw a wolf dart through the headlights. Suddenly, there was no more hillside to block the view, and we saw Suly as if from a plane landing.

“Whoever comes here, I just take them to a prison—maybe they had an idea about those places,” Rebaz said. “Finally I take them to the mountain to see Suly and they say ‘Wow, we should have come here at the beginning!’ ”

We stood on the exposed hillock of the Goyja panorama, or squatted for survival by a small log fire someone had left. But we bore the cold for beauty: in the darkness we couldn’t even see the mountain we were standing on, and I felt as if we might fall off the planet, and yet we could look down on the gold and green lights of the entire city without so much as a neck swivel. The bright outline of the highway wrapped around all of Sulaymaniyah.

A native of nearby Halabja, Rebaz didn’t seem to mind the lunar cold or the wind whipping up over the mountain’s shoulders.

“During my bachelors, my nickname was Tarzan because I used to shout same as him.”

“When you were happy?” I asked.

“Anytime. Even when I was sad.” The wind had made our eyes wet, and Rebaz’s caught the light of the fire.

He howled.

JUST AFTER DAWN the next morning, we drove east as early haze baked off under the sun. The road is straight; the scenery marries geometric power lines and autumn streaks. Leaving Suly, the hills were burnt red and smooth, growing taller and greener as we shot toward Iran and the fringes of the white Zagros Mountains.

The first glimpse of Halabja is the hundred-foot-tall sloping cone of its major monument, topped with the struts of an angular orb curled around a wire sphere. The base is a single-story circular building, with the outer rim layered in giant fake pebbles. I thought the cone looked like giant forearms stretching skyward, wrists pressed together with the fingers making a protective shell, or housing an offering. Two modest Kurdish flags flank the driveway, those stripes of red, white and green with a bold yellow sun in the center.

On the evening of March 16, 1988, Saddam’s Iraqi planes conducted a dozen bombings over five hours. First came the rockets, the shelling, the usual. And then something different—silent, smoking bombs filled with chemicals that killed instantly upon inhalation, or slowly and torturously. Others, as a university student named Hewa said in 1991, “died of laughing.” Many thousands were injured, and five thousand civilians were killed in an act of genocidal madness.

Some say the bombing of Halabja was disguised as a wartime attempt to drive out Iranian forces. (On March 16, 1988, no Iranian troops were in Halabja.) During the Iran-Iraq war, many Iraqi Kurds did side with Iran, as Iranian Kurds sided with Iraq. Each group had good reason to reject its own state. But this made it clear: whichever identity Kurds chose, they would lose friends even among their own. These are people with a history of abandonment and they have a saying to prove it: Kurd dosteki naya ghayri chaya, “Kurds have no friends but the mountains.”

Compensation from the Iraqi government was more symbolic than useful, and targeted families only of the deceased. Survivors are very often delayed victims of the long-term effects of chemical weaponry: respiratory diseases, deformities, miscarriages.

The golden Halabja Memorial, built in 2003, fifteen years after the attacks, offered no more solace than it did a solution. The first building the regional government had constructed in a decade, the monument stuck out like a trophy for broken promises. Foreign and domestic aid for local reconstruction was funneled and misfunneled through aid agencies to corrupt politicians, and Kurdish representatives leaped to exploit solemn occasions. Visiting diplomats who made this first turn off the highway never witnessed the destruction in the town itself. Iraqi journalist Mariwan Hama-Saeed was clear: “They were paying a visit to the dead people, but neglecting the living.” In 2006, townspeople revolted in riots that left a boy dead and others injured; the memorial was burned but didn’t fall. (The building has been reopened, but the exterior is plain metallic silver now; they didn’t repaint it in gold.)

In the entryway, leafy plants spring out of upended rockets that have been poetically repurposed. Black and white pictures show the town in its heyday: a parade for the last king of Iraq in 1956, dancing primary schoolers, mustachioed soccer players—“The strongest team in Halabjah in 1970s.”

The next room is a brutal diorama. Visitors to the museum walk through a re-creation of the March 16 evening. Papier mâché corpses lie on the floor with blood trickling out of their mouths, lips blue or black as they were reported. A famous photograph is modeled here, of an old man shielding his grandson in vain. Over the loudspeakers, an eerie soundscape.

A friendly guide met us at the door leading out of the room, where a sign reads in Kurdish and Arabic and Persian and English: LIFE AND VICTORY FOR ALL NATIONS / DEATH FOR ALL KINDS OF RACISM.

He led us pleasantly to the next hall, where the museum takes another turn for the unsparing. Here, there are real pictures of the dead, collapsed, frozen, in piles. He pointed out members of his family. He repeated something I had read, something that became a twisted trademark of the Halabja massacre—that the smoke that came and the death that followed were coupled with “the smell of sweet apples.”

Charlotte courageously followed him through toward the TV screen showing footage of the immediate aftermath; I slumped onto the floor, staring across at a wall of pictures that blurred into abstract colors. Red, white and green curtains hung from the tip of the spire above the central hall. Names were engraved in white on reflective black stone like a small, circular Vietnam Memorial, grouped together in families. The man identified his relatives again, distantly running his finger along their names. He was used to this. He seemed gratified, almost contentedly showing us through the museum and sending us off with gifts of literature and a grim pamphlet, smiling and shaking our hands. We signed the guestbook, and took the turn toward town.

HALABJA LOOKED LIKE many other small towns along these roads outside Kurdistan’s major cities, assuredly smaller than it once was. Scaffolding stuck to the side of a mosque painted gray, and children rode Big Wheels by the walls of houses. A sign was fixed to a telephone pole at the entrance to the cemetery in Kurdish, Arabic and English: BAATH’S MEMBERS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO ENTER.

In this last resting place of the victims of their genocide, it seems understandable that supporters of Saddam’s party (banned in Iraq in 2003) would not be welcome. The Halabja attacks were a piece in the “anti-insurgency” al-Anfal campaign of the late 1980s in which an estimated hundred thousand or more Kurds, and significant numbers of other ethnic minorities, were murdered in systematic bombings, firing squads and concentration camps. The murders targeted able-bodied men. Almost no village in Iraqi Kurdistan was spared Saddam’s attention; the name al-Anfal, “loot” or “spoils of war,” was borrowed from the title of the bellicose eighth chapter of the Quran. The word derives from a root that means, “to do more than is required by duty or obligation.”

A wide brick walkway curves around the plots with green-brown hills as a backdrop, whitecaps farther away. There are mass graves here, for as many as fifteen hundred bodies each, under short, white marble monuments. And there are thousands of tombstones, most written upon, some engraved, some with prayers, some with no names, some colored blue or pink, some decorated with the flowers and greenery they say is in paradise. There are spaces where sharp stones appear scattered on the grass, but serve as markers nonetheless. There are many aboveground tombs with a tall headstone and footstone, and a layer of soil along the length. We met Fatima at one of these, picking out weeds from the soil.

She was with her sister and her cousin, and two girls younger than the tragedy. Fatima came three or four times a year from Suly fifty miles away, and she was smiling as she pulled out the weeds on the grave, crouching in her black dress, black leather jacket, lustrous black head scarf pulled back to let her hair show. Her sister in all black leaned forward over the footstone, holding her phone loosely.

At the neighboring tomb, the much younger cousin was silently resting her elbow in a nook of the carved stone. A dark, floral headscarf hung down over a light blue sweater as she stared out at the mountains.

I had my camera out in the cemetery, and couldn’t resist framing the scarves against the stone slabs against the Kurds’ only friends, snowcapped in the distance.

The kids watched their mother work. They smiled at us shyly and grinned at my camera, one all in red with a long overcoat, the other in a pink hoodie that said Beautiful! across the front. We walked toward our cars, talking about important things and trifles, and Fatima invited us to tea.