*Originally published in the January 2015 Portraits issue of Al Jazeera Magazine*

Kurdistan is a kind of dream

It is an ancient dream that floats across cities and valleys, through crumbling souks and oil fields, stretched across four nations. Nestled between empires, surrounded by conquerors, the in habitants of “Greater Kurdistan” have shared this dream for hundreds of years.

The dream is buoyed by memories of a glorious past: the great crossroads leading to the Citadel of Erbil and its rich markets; the poets of Sulemaniyah, dreaming of their hidden nation. It winds down the streets of Mahabad – where the Kurdish hopes of independence bled briefly into reality. The memories relive and celebrate the invasion of Iraq – which was, for most, liberation after the injustices of the past.

On some nights, the dream is little more than a delusion; on others, it is a nightmare. It is the anger in a stone thrown at Turkish police by a teenager who can’t understand her own language. It is the betrayals of the west and the memory of Saddam’s terrible vengeance, of the bodies lining the streets in Halabja. It is the quiet end of Mahabad - too small to factor into the great games at the end of a world war. The nightmare is the Islamic State, just across the mountains, waiting to tear down what the Kurdish people have built.

But no one knows how the dream ends. While some are desperately trying to awaken and see the dream made real, others are happy to live in the memory of the past and the reality of today. And as the forces sweeping across the Middle East pull communities in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran further apart, Kurds may no longer be dreaming the same dream.

ERBIL

On a Monday evening, after a long day at work, Akar Ahmad Shareef eases his cloud-white Mercedes SLS AMG GT down Gulan Street in Erbil. The 6.2 liter V8 rumbles and snaps as Akar inches along, bumper to bumper. Turning down onto 100 Meter Street, he opens up the engine, going 80, then 100, then 120 kilometers per hour. Tonight he’s going to Dream City for dinner.

Akar is opening a restaurant in Shaqlawa, 50 kilometers outside Erbil, and today there were problems with the contractors. There are always problems. It’s a stressful undertaking, and the speed helps him relax. But he knows his limits. He slows down as he points out a speed camera. “They know me. Always: ticket, ticket ticket,” he says grinning.” His last ticket was 20,000 Iraqi Dinars for speeding just outside the airport.

The Mercedes rumbles in to Dream City, a gated residential complex in the sprawling, nouveau-riche, northwestern suburbs of Erbil. The streets are lined with playgrounds and new, two-story townhomes. One garage sports a Lamborghini and a stuffed ibex. Akar says each house sells for at least 500 thousand dollars. Children play on one of the gated football fields as the streetlights blink to life in the dusk.

At Barista, a kind of Starbucks-cum-restaurant, Akar slides into a booth and orders. He kicks up a Gucci loafer onto his knee and talks business. Last year he opened a laundromat across the street from Dream City and it’s doing well. Before that, he started an employment company to help bring in the workers needed to keep Erbil booming and a travel agency to ferry in yet more visitors.

“When you make your own business you have more freedom. I read once – I don’t remember where – but there’s an idea: for every 10 people in this world, nine of them are working for the tenth. So why don’t you be the tenth?” For him, being a Kurd means self-reliance, and a kind of adventurous and optimistic capitalism that typifies Erbil’s new moneyed class.

Akar has spent most of his life in Erbil – called “Hawler” in Kurdish – and comes from a prominent “business family,” as he describes it. In the 1996 – during the civil war between Iraqi Kurdistan’s two main political parties, the PUK and the KDP – his family fled to Damascus and stayed for six years. When they returned home, they joined the investment spree that began after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Before 2003 Erbil was nothing, nothing,” he remembers.

For many in Kurdistan, Erbil represents possibility – the dream is of glittery Kurdish capital infused with money from across the Middle East.

The city itself is shaped like a circle, with wider and wider ring roads centered on the Citadel – an ancient fortress atop a hill, where narrow allies and stone houses overlook the cranes dotting the landscape and the expanding rings of the city. Though Erbil stakes a claim as one of the oldest inhabited cities on earth, it is a city looking eagerly toward its future.

Only one family still lives in the Citadel – kept there to maintain its claim as world’s oldest, continuously-inhabited city – and the rest is being remodeled for tourists, complete with hotels and boutique shopping. The renovation is part of the boom, and the new hope that infused Kurdistan after the war. "All of these skyscrapers and the expansion of the city started in these past 7-8 years," says Dara Alia Khubi, Head of the renovation Commission "With our renovation of the citadel we are trying to bring back some habits, some cultures, some traditional life."

Just below the citadel is the ancient souk, where everything from traditional Kurdish clothes to light sockets is sold. The passages are narrow and winding, lined with tiny stalls bursting forth with fabrics, spices, novelty lighters and menswear. The labyrinth guides shoppers to a domed, yellow-brick atrium ringed with shops. There, a young stall owner named Nehad flags down two women – potential customers – and directs them to his walls lined with shoes. He guides them to back and starts pulling shoes from the wall in rapid succession: red sequined flats, then blue. Two-inch black heels. Maybe boots? All the latest fashions. According to Nehad, the most popular for winter are flats and black boots with fur lining the top.  Just 25 years old, he pitches with enthusiasm, slowly winning over his skeptical customer and her dinars. Nehad was born in Erbil, and he says he’ll die here.

"Since 2005 Erbil has started to boom in growth and things began to change so quickly," says Nehad outside his shop. "Many bridges and buildings were built, and the souk was renovated. All this happened in a very short period of time. Before everyone used to know each other, but after the changes a lot of foreigners came and suddenly the population also became something foreign where you don’t even know the people you’re living with."

As the city spreads out from the Citadel, Erbil’s new towers and luxury apartments dot the landscape, announcing the arrival of foreign investment as well as Kurdistan’s middle class.

Hanging off of the 21st floor of one of those towers, Bahram is installing windows on the Erbil World Trade Center. Barham is a Kurd from Iran and he’s in Erbil – like construction workers from across the Middle East – for the opportunities the boom has created. As his winch swings from side to side, Erbil’s flat neighborhoods reel out towards mountains in the distance and he remembers not to look down. “The first time I did this, I was freaked out but I do it out of necessity” he says.

The Erbil World Trade Center is one of the newest symbols of Kurdistan and Erbil’s boom. The project is financed by Turkish investors and relatives of the President of Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani.

“There is also work in Iran,” says Barham, “but here they pay in dollars. I’m going to go back to Iran and buy a car for myself or a house or get married with the money I get from here.”

Casting a shadow over the new Hardees restaurant across the street, the World Trade Center will soon house offices and luxury apartments. “We are past the dark period in our history,” says project manager Adil Asmar Hasan. “We want to show the world we like to build.”

But the project is entangled in much of Kurdistan’s recent history, evoking the glorious, glass and steel era of the past 8 years, as well as the painful memories of the previous decades. “This area was the headquarters for Saddam [Hussein’s] army,” Hasan explains. “Sometimes we find mines or weapons during excavation.”

The buildings’ share a name with perhaps the most powerful symbol of the War on Terror – the destruction of which precipitated Saddam’s downfall as well as Erbil’s ascension. Scattered around the steel beams and rebar, wiring floors and laying foundations, the War on Terror’s most recent victims are helping to build the new World Trade Center.

The relentless advance of the Islamic State throughout Iraq and Syria has sent refugees from Sinjar, Mosul, Kobani and Kirkuk flooding in to Iraqi Kurdistan.

26-year-old Wisam Yusuf is a Yazidi Kurd from Sinjar and one of the workers at the World Trade Center. After the ISIS attack on his home, he fled with 22 members of his family to the refugee camps at Zakho, not far from where the Iraqi, Turkish and Syrian borders meet. “You can’t even imagine what the people suffered. Everybody was trying to save himself,” he says, recounting the nightmare he lived through.

Wisam says his older brother was captured trying to carry out his two-month-old daughter and has not been heard from since. As the situation grew more desperate, he saw things he finds almost too difficult to recount.

“I, myself, saw a woman give birth to twins and she had to leave them under a tree – ” Wisam’s voice cracks recounting this last detail and he looks away. He cries, unable to hold back his despair with either his fist or his clenched jaw.

“I’m coming here to make money so we can leave Iraq. Even if peace comes, we will never go back.” 

DIYARBAKIR

Erkan Özgen dreams in Turkish. An artist and teacher from Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, he is one of many Kurds there who speak Turkish first and Kurdish second. Many more can’t speak Kurdish at all. Sipping a thick Turkish coffee next to a wood-burning stove in one of Diyarbakir’s many dimly-lit cafes, he explains that the Kurds are the moderates of the Middle East. “For me, Kurdish is not only an ethnic identity anymore, it means to oppose these ideologies of those people who cut off the heads,” he says.

As Erkan speaks, Iraqi Kurdish forces – the Peshmerga – are being allowed to travel through Turkey to engage Islamic State forces in Kurdish Syria after weeks of political wrangling with the Turkish government. 

Relations between Turkey and its Kurdish community are mutually suspicious in the best of times. The emergence of ISIS and the fighting in Kobani have fanned tensions stemming from a long-running conflict which Kurds in Turkey call a liberation struggle and Turks call a campaign of terror. In the Turkish press, Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Öcalan is sometimes dubbed a “baby-killer”

The Kurds in Turkey are by far the largest of the four populations that comprise “greater Kurdistan.” Their relationship with, and opposition to Turkey often defines them. At the café, Erkan – a visual artist – shows off some of his more recent work. There is a photo portrait of a woman wearing teargas canisters in her hair like curlers. There is a picture of two women on a raft wearing full niqabs – only their eyes visible behind black veils; the boat is piloted by a scarecrow looming over the passengers.

He loads a video on his phone, turning up the volume to be heard over the din of the coffee house. On screen, two lines of African men march in formation. In Turkish, in unison, they chant “How fortunate is the one who says ‘I am Turkish.’”

The line is from a pledge of allegiance that was recited every morning by school children in Turkey until a few years ago. Erkan says the actors were illegal immigrants he met in Barcelona. “Africans and Kurdish are a similar color.” He says.

As night falls, Erkan finishes his coffee and heads out into the cold, rainy street. Old concrete apartment-blocks rise up from every direction. In the mist, the ancient city looks almost soviet.

Diyarbakir is a city without flags. In a country so proud of itself, the absence of the of the red and white Turkish flag is striking. One flies behind a high, stone wall topped with barbed wire. It is a barracks.

Visible through the late-fall mists are the perimeter ramparts that once surrounded the city in Roman times. The ancient wall separates the new, modern Diyarbakir from the old.

In October, the streets of the old city burned as angry Kurdish youth protested the Turkish government’s refusal to help their fellow Kurds in Kobani, just over the Syrian border. Kobani was under attack by the Islamic State, and many feared it was days away from capture.

Young men with masks lit fires with anything they could grab, while others hurled stones at Turkish police.

On the afternoon of October 7, the second day of the protests, Nezhat heard the gunshots from her small apartment. Someone was chanting the Takbir – “god is great.” She knew her 19-year-old son Suleyman was out there, somewhere.

Her husband was out there too, trying to bring Suleyman home. “I tried not to be tough. I thought: he’s young, if I’m too tough with him he’s going to be angry,” explained Sait.

Sait works in construction around the city. He is small but powerfully built, with a square jaw and thinning, gray hair cropped closely to his scalp. As he remembers that day he starts to stutter. He clears his throat and forces the words out.

He pleaded several times with his son - who had tattoos for the Kurdish PKK party on his hand – to leave. “I asked him again, ‘lets go home’ and he said ‘okay,’ but when we got close to the mosque he just disappeared and that was the last time I saw him.”

As he recounts the story, Nezhat looks on with an exhausted face and eyes filled with anguish. She is breathing in sharp, short breaths. For Sait, that moment is over. But Nezhat is reliving it, like a dream that is too real.

The power in their house goes out and a small, battery powered lamp is switched on. Nezhat pulls out a photo of Suleyman. It is the only one she says she has of him.  

“Suleyman was killed because of who he was, for his language. He was really a good boy.

Language is perhaps the most significant battleground between Kurds and the Turkish state. For many Turkish Kurds, language, politics and identity are one and the same. 

Until very recently, the Kurdish language was banned in Turkey. Speaking it on the street was forbidden until 1991. For years, teachers and organizations have been teaching the language in secret, often risking arrest to do so. In 2012 – the same year peace negotiations began between the rebel Kurdistan Worker’s party, or PKK - parliament passed a law allowing schools to teach the language as an elective course. But many Kurds say this is not enough.

This year, some educators and prominent businessmen have simply decided to start teaching children in Kurdish.

Surrounded by concrete apartment blocks and cracked streets, the Ferzad Kemanger Primary School is trying to educate a new generation of Kurdish children. The school – named for a Kurdish teacher executed in Iran in 2010 - opened this year, for children from ages 6 through 10.

Moving quickly through the playground outside the front doors, School Director Mazhar Aktaş hustles the students in for their mid-morning snack. With shock-white hair, a sweater and a blue blazer, Mazhar looks like a teacher. He has bushy grey eyebrows and a face that can shift from caring and paternal to stern in an instant.

He has a lot to worry about these days. Ferzad Kemanger has 112 students, 24 of which came to Diyarbakir from Kobani, after the attacks by the Islamic State. Not even a half-year into operation, the school has already been closed four times this year by Turkish authorities.

Mazhar says police used to come in and lock the doors, while asking him why the school administrators did not ask permission to teach in Kurdish. Every time the school is closed, Mazhar gets it back open. He’s hoping they won’t have to send their children home again this year. “It’s linked with the peace process [between the government and the PKK]” he says. “If it’s going well, we won’t be closed.”

No matter the difficulties, Mazhar believes there needs to be Kurdish education in Turkey. “Your mother language is like your skin, and a foreign language is like your clothes. You can’t change your skin.”

Inside the classrooms, the young children are typical balls of energy, one second slowly and carefully drawing the curves of the alphabet, the next ricocheting to their teacher, Julider Pasha, and jockeying for her attention.

Ladybug backpacks hang on hooks, feet swing impatiently above the floor and Kurdish words are spelled out. Their teacher, Julider Pasha, is glad the students don’t notice how unusual it is. “The parents want to send their children to this kind of school because the for many years other children have been educated in Turkish and they have lost many things about their culture, their identity.”

Pasha says she also benefits from the lessons she gives her children. Though she speaks Kurdish, she only recently receive formal training to teach her students the language. “We are learning together,” she says.

Mazhar hopes to eventually have around 300 students at Ferzad Kemanger Primary School. There are two other schools like it around eastern Turkey, and he hopes more will open. “I speak Turkish very well. I also speak Arabic. But when I speak in my language, when I cry in my language, I feel better. It comes from inside.”

But most Kurdish teachers don’t teach in Kurdish.

In the open square at the center of Diyarbakir’s old bazaar Semra is reading a book in Turkish: A Journey to the End of Life by Tezer Özlü. Semra is a teacher at a local school, but it’s Saturday and she is relaxing. During the week she watches her children juggle with issues of identity. “Sometimes really funny things happen and sometimes really painful things happen,” she says.

“Because I have to speak Turkish, sometimes I feel like I’m assimilating them.” Semra likes Turkish culture and doesn’t mind teaching in Turkish, “but its not the same, it’s impossible to say it’s the same.”

She doesn’t know what the future holds for Kurds in Turkey, and wonders if it is possible to be both Turkish and Kurdish. “We know in the past it was not good and today it’s not good. So me, I want to be hopeful. I hope but I’m not hopeful.”

Either way, language will remain at the heart of the issue, and the beating heart of Kurdish culture in Turkey. “The people who speak Kurdish,” says Semra, “can dream in Kurdish.” 

SULEMANIYAH

As dusk falls over mountains surrounding Sulaymaniyah, the city lights begin to blink to life in the distance. Its Friday, and groups of people have made their way up mountain switchbacks, parking cars and setting up barbecues, laughing and drinking beers and sharing a hookah pipe as the sun sets.

Off to the side, a little bit away from the nearest group, Lukman Hassan Salah is sharing some Crown Royal with a friend. Lukman is a veteran of the Peshmerga. He’s 42 now, but says he’s never retired. “I will be a Peshmerga until I die.”

Lukman says he was shot seven times, while in the military. The bullets hit him in the jaw, the back, the shoulder and the neck. There is evidence of it, in the form of a long, dark scar running from his mouth down under his chin. “I was driving an important politician,” he explains, without elaborating.

In the past days and weeks, the fight against ISIS has stalled in Iraq, and the fight for Kobani has just begun. With the Kurdish troops proving the only effecting fighting force against the new ISIS threat, breathless editorials have been written around the world about the possibilities – and perhaps inevitabilities – of an independent Kurdish state

These predictions mean nothing to Lukman. He says the international community won’t allow Kurdish dreams to come true. “The British took it from us [after World War I], I’m not optimistic it will change.”

Night has fallen and now the late-fall chill is creeping in. Lukman pours another glass and sweeps his hand out over city. “Each of these lights is a person,” he says. “All these people died fighting for Kurdistan.”

Even still, he believes the fight will go on. “[ISIS] has new equipment, new weapons. The only reason we can fight them is we are fighting for our home.” As the night deepens, some cars start to pack up and wind down the road into the city. Lukman stays behind and keeps staring out over the city.

There is no hand-wringing about Kurdishness in Sulaymaniyah. It is the home of Kurdistan’s poets, at the heart of its culture.

The streets are named for literary greats. Today’s poets revive their country’s ancient dreams with modern phrase in the city’s cafes. There is pride here. This is the “other Iraq”: a city of neighborhoods and local markets and gently curving, tree-lined streets. The children in Sulaymaniyah study in the universities and their parents chat in the tea-houses after work.

But many are not in school or at work today. It is Sulemaniyah’s Establishment Day, the city’s 230th birthday. There are normally big celebrations in Sulaymaniyah, but this year the government is starved for cash because of a dispute with Iraq’s central government over oil revenue. And with Kurdish forces fighting ISIS across Iraq and Syria, officials said the celebrations would not be appropriate.

For many though, that doesn’t matter. At Bakhi Gishti – General Park – a crew of young women is strutting down the cobbled path, under broad shade trees, past busts of Kurdish heroes. One of them is named for her country: Kurdistan Eymat. 22 years old, she is a student at the University of Sulaymaniyah.

“These things, ISIS and the [dispute with the central government] don’t affect us. We will still continue. We are proud of our city and we will keep our culture,” she says. “No enemy can affect us or destroy our dreams.”

Kurdistan and her friends are dressed in traditional Kurdish clothes. They are flowing, airy robes of pale gold, aqua, sequined orange and bouquets of red. Only one is out of character. Standing in the middle, Linda Latif is dressed as a Kurdish commando, complete with black boots, a Special Forces beret and crimson lipstick. She says she’s wearing the fatigues out of respect for the Peshmerga.

If Sulaymaniyah is the home of Kurdish culture, it is also the home of Kurdish memory. The city looks neither ancient nor modern. It feels lived-in and comfortable and is marked with many reminders of the great and terrible past.

One obvious reminder is Amna Suraka, the Red Museum, off Sulemaniyah’s Salim Street. The former headquarters of Iraqi Intelligence during Saddam Hussein’s reign, the compound is now a museum, commemorating the thousands that were tortured there. There are statues chained to dank cell walls and rusting artillery outside the main building.   

“Hundreds of soldiers were killed here when this building was captured,” says Peshawar, a guide at the Museum. He is standing in a hallway lined with broken glass and twinkling lights on the ceiling. He says each piece of glass represents a village destroyed during Saddam Hussein’s 1988 al-Anfal campaign, while each light on the ceiling is a person.

“It shows our current generation how the previous one was living. We have to know that more. It’s a kind of honor for us. We have to continue to complete their message, we have to continue to press for the right of the kurds to have their own homeland,” he says.

Many believe the al-Anfal campaign, constituted genocide. Al-Anfal dominates Kurdish consciousness, especially in the region around Sulaymaniyah, where many of the largest attacks and abuses took place. Just one hour away is Halabja, where a poison gas attack killed more than four thousand people. When it was over, television crews broadcast footage of silent streets lined with the bodies of women and children.

More than 25 years later, Halabja and the Anfal campaign also dominate the imagination of Sulaymaniyah’s poets.

For a large part of the literary world, Choman Hardi is “the Kurdish Poet.” She has been published across Europe, but says she is little read in Kurdistan. She writes in English. “In a way I’m recreating Kurdish culture in English.”

Though her family fled the violence in Kurdistan in the early 1990s, Choman never lost touch, and traveled back frequently to do research. Her studies in trauma led her to the victims of the Anfal.

“In the late 1990s the Kurdish satellite channels started broadcasting and many of them had documentaries about Anfal and they were interviewing Anfal survivors in particular,” she says. But none of the documentaries went deep enough. “I had various questions about women’s intimate experiences in the prison camps and mass graves and during gassing and afterwards.”

And though the Anfal is a central pillar of Kurdish history, Choman says nobody, either inside or outside Kurdistan, truly understand it. “What happened between February and September 1988 is a large part of the story but what happened afterwards is also part of the story and that tends to get not much notice.”

One thing that rose from the ashes of the Anfal was Kurdish nationalism, something that has always been defined, in part, through its relation with the outside world. “History proves that national wounds create demands of national independence,” she says. “Kurdish identity has formed in relation to threat.”

Choman recently moved back to Sulaymaniyah after two decades in Europe, to take a position at the American University of Iraq. She is waiting for the bus that will take her from the new apartment block where her family lives, to the university, to begin her day.

She says both her and her husband – a journalist – felt they needed to be in Sulaymaniyah. “We both thought, its time for us to get home. All the work that we do as writers involves people here, involves making social change happen.”

They arrived not long after ISIS swept across Iraq and Syria, but Choman says they want to make it work. Sulaymaniyah is home.

She is under no illusions about the independence of Kurdistan. Over the course of her travels and research, she saw firsthand how different the Kurdish experience has been in each of the four regions.

“For me personally – and I know many people will think that I am a traitor – I don’t believe that we need to have an independent united Kurdistan, from the four different parts. I want to see the Kurds’ situation improve in all the places they live. Not just in Turkey and Iran and Iraq and Syria.”

Choman says if countries in the region become more democratic and more welcoming of their Kurdish populations, the cries for an independent Kurdistan could quiet down. “Of course the way it is now – in particular the way Kurdish identity was attacked in Turkey and forced assimilation - its very difficult to see how that, suddenly, overnight could change.”

For anyone listening, Kurdish novelist Sherzad Hassan has even worse news. “I think the Kurds are the only nation who have no god in the sky,” he says. “When you have nothing now, you think about what you were in the past.”

He has just finished giving a talk at Ghazal Nus, a bookstore in the old section of Sulaymaniyah. Ghazal Nus holds these talks with Kurdish authors and poets every Friday, and people pack the seats. Other days of the week, people come to browse the selection of books in Kurdish. The store’s owner, Fawaz Hama Salah says the most popular foreign writers are Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Franz Kafka. He says the most popular Kurdish authors are Baktiar Ali and Sherzad Hassan.

Ebullient and teeming with opinions, Sherzad is happy to tell anyone who will listen the problems that Islam and traditional values have wrought on Kurdish personality. He is sitting under dim lights in a private room at the Wooden House – a quiet log-cabin café in central Sulaymaniyah.

“In an emergency case, in a tragic moment, like now, it is not easy to define yourself,” he says. “Some people here – I can’t count them – really they are dreaming of a new life.”

Sherzad sports a mischievous grin most of the time. Tonight he is wearing a blue a scarf and a khaki blazer with rolled up sleeves. He explains that he enjoys pushing the collective buttons of the Kurdish nation. “You have to say the truth, even to yourself.”

Sherzad says after so many years of oppression, the country many dream of may not end up as the hoped-for Kurdish utopia. “All people here have the possibility to be a victim [and] at the same time can be a dictator.”

He is talking now about the civil war that tore through Iraqi Kurdistan during the mid-1990s. As many as 5,000 people were killed in under three years, and tens of thousands more fled. The conflict was just a few years removed from the massacres of Anfal and the fight to remove Iraqi forces loyal to Saddam Hussein. Newly autonomous, the country split in two.

The leaders of the two factions - Masoud Barzani of the Kurdish Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – are still Kurdistan’s most powerful politicians. The invasion of Iraq by US Forces and the past decade of prosperity have helped many forget the clashes, but rifts that the conflict created remain.

For now, the forces are working together to push back fighters from the Islamic state, which Sherzad calls the “faithful boys of their forefathers.” The Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq recently reached a deal with Baghdad over contested oil revenue and Iraqi Peshmerga are fighting in Kobani. Across Iraqi Kurdstan, the red, green and white flag with a sun in the center flies over the buildings.

Sherzad likes to quote Talabani who – when he was president of Iraq – told reporters that greater Kurdistan was a “dream in poems.” Sherzad laughs as he remembers it. “If you say it is like a dream, that means it’s not real.”