Life Begins in Leitrim: From Kurdistan to Croke Park

PROLOGUE

You already know me.

Maybe you’ve already heard me tell some of my story: the Kurdish lad who was born in an Iraqi refugee camp during the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and who ended up hurling for Leitrim.

There are thousands of others just like me. We’re your neighbours. We’re your colleagues. We’re your classmates, your team-mates, your friends. We’re engineers and plumbers and software developers and painters and everything in between.

We’re the lad who owns the restaurant down the road – you know the one, the place that does the best kebabs in town – and we’re the doctor who keeps telling you not to eat too many of them.

We’re the nippy fella in at corner-forward who is going to wreck your head for the whole afternoon because he’s simply not going to stop running. And we’re the lad who is back out there the very next morning, setting out the cones and the drills for the under-13s training session.

You see, you already know me.

I’m living proof of the céad míle fáilte. Because Ireland might not be the country of my birth, but it’s the country I love. Thousands like me came here with nothing, with no place to call home, hopeful that some country would accept us. And Ireland was the one. Ireland welcomed us with open arms. Ireland gave us every opportunity. We went to college here, got degrees here, got great jobs here. The community took us in as their own. We learned the history and the culture, joined the clubs, played the games. We started families here. We made a life. Ireland gave us something special, the greatest gift of all, and inside our hearts there is great love for Ireland.

I told you, you already know me.

I am Zemnako Moradi, but you can call me Zak. I am a refugee. I am Kurdish. I am Irish.

This is my story.

BORN INTO WAR

Iwas born on 16 January 1991. The bombing started the very next day.

I wasn’t born in a hospital. I never had a birth cert. I was born in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city of Ramadi in Iraq, in a little house made of mud. It wasn’t our home – it could never be – but it was all we had.

Ten years earlier, the Iran–Iraq war had forced my parents, my brothers, my sister, their relatives and their friends out of their homes and into this strange place where they didn’t belong and they weren’t welcome: Al-Tash camp, a refugee camp set up by the Iraqi government but a prison camp in all but name, where they were hemmed in by barbed-wire fences and strictly forbidden to leave.

War had already taken everything my family had. All they had left was the hope that this wouldn’t last for ever, and that some day they could go home.

And now war – the Gulf War – had found them again.

When Saddam Hussein ordered his Iraqi army troops to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990, America and its allies intervened. For thirty-eight days and thirty-eight nights in early 1991, the sound of bombs filled the air. They fell near us and they fell far away, on army bases and bridges and roads, crippling Iraq. They called it Operation Desert Storm.

Inside the refugee camp, the people sensed the danger that was coming in the weeks before those first attacks. Terrified, some families started to dig, realising that even a shallow underground bunker might give them some shelter and a better chance of survival than nothing at all. Others found whatever bits of wood they could and nailed them across the windows of their house. They didn’t do it to protect the glass; they did it to protect themselves. The fear of an attack using chemical weapons was never far from their minds.

But when the bombs landed nearby, they ran outside, panicked, not knowing where they might find shelter. The ground shook beneath their feet. The doors rattled on their hinges. The walls of their houses felt like they were wobbling where they stood. They ran, preferring to take their chances outside rather than run the risk of their house coming down on top of them.

An Iraqi army plane was shot out of the sky over their heads. They listened for each new explosion, desperately trying to place where it was, fearing that the rockets that were coming closer and closer would finally come for them. They didn’t even know if they would still be alive when that day came, or which was more likely to kill them: the bombs or the starvation.

Of all of the tough times that my family had to endure over the years, my mam, Gohar, often looks back at this time as the most brutal, the worst of the worst. She and my dad, Safar, had eight hungry children to feed, and now a new-born ninth in their arms, and in the midst of war, food was the rarest commodity of all. The laws of supply and demand have no pity or mercy, and whatever little food was available became extortionately expensive, even to those who did have money.

Because, to put it simply, there was none. The bombs wiped out almost an entire country’s worth of power plants and oil refineries. With very little electricity or fuel, it was nearly impossible to produce food, and even harder to distribute what little there was. To make matters worse, the economic sanctions placed on Iraq by America and its allies effectively paralysed any attempts to import food into the country.

Our family’s tractor was the only thing that saved us from an even more dire situation in those weeks. Somehow, my parents were able to get their hands on some wheat, and mill it using the tractor, giving my mam flour to make enough naan bread to keep us all from going hungry.

One of my dad’s uncles said that I would grow up to be tough because I had been born among bombs, born into war. That I would be clever. That I would hate any sort of fighting and rows and arguments.

In later years, when the war in Iraq had stopped for a time and the world’s eyes had moved on to another conflict in a different place, the Secretary-General of the United Nations became a familiar face on our television as he pleaded for peace. My family saw a resemblance in me: I was also a diplomat, a peacemaker. They nicknamed me Kofi Annan.

On 23 February 1991, the bombing finally stopped. A few days later, the Gulf War was over.

I was five weeks old.

THE KURDS

Don’t bother looking for Kurdistan on any map. You won’t find it. You’ll find Iraq and Iran, Turkey and Syria, but no Kurdistan.

Our homeland, which stretches across the Middle East and Western Asia, has existed in one form or another for almost a thousand years, but now it’s invisible. When Britain and France and their allies sat down to carve up the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, we were the people who were forgotten. A hundred years later, we’re still suffering the consequences.

That is our history, a history of broken promises and betrayal. This is why we say that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. We know where we stand. The mountains are the only ones who will help us, protect us and defend us. They are the only ones who will never abandon us.

It’s hard to even accurately count how many Kurds there are now because our history is a history of separation too, of heart-breaking goodbyes and families who didn’t know if they would ever see their loved ones again. Without a recognised home to call our own, we have been scattered to the four corners of the globe. There are close to forty million of us, if not more. Whatever the exact number, the Kurds remain the largest ethnic group anywhere in the world without their own country.

It shouldn’t have been this way. The first attempt to redraw the Middle East after the First World War, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, included provisions for an independent Kurdistan. But that treaty was never ratified, and when the Treaty of Lausanne was agreed in its place in 1923, there wasn’t a single mention of Kurdistan or the Kurds. It was as if we had never existed.

Instead, our homeland was split into four different regions, each belonging to a different country, and it remains that way to this day. Each region has its own name, named in Kurdish after the four points of the compass: Bakur to the north, which is in Turkey; Başûr to the south, which is in Iraq; Rojhelat to the east, which is in Iran; and Rojava to the west, which is in Syria.

Millions of Kurds live in each of these regions, but we will always be a minority wherever we are. The parts of our Kurdish identity that are most important to us – our language, our culture, our traditions – are feared and regarded with suspicion by the states we have been forced to live in. Our flag, a red, white and green tricolour with the Kurdish sun in the middle, is seen as provocative. Even our language is seen as a threat; but there’s a Kurdish saying that if our mother tongue shakes your nation, you’ve built your nation on our land.

For the last hundred years, we have been persecuted for who we are, for wanting to be ourselves. There have been brutal massacres and unspeakable atrocities, tens of thousands of men, women and children murdered for the crime of being Kurdish. We have suffered genocide. Entire villages have been wiped out in horrific chemical attacks.

You may not be aware of this history, you may never have heard of these atrocities, and I wouldn’t be surprised. It happened to the Kurds. Nobody talks about the Kurds.

HOME

Imagine what it’s like to lose everything. My parents did.

Before I was born, and before all the trouble began, they lived a quiet life on the outskirts of the mountain city of Sarpel Zahaw, which is in Rojhelat, the Kurdistan of Iran, only a few pucks of a ball from the border with the Kurdistan of Iraq.

Qadri, the rural part of Zahaw that my family comes from, isn’t all that different from your typical village in Ireland. It’s a small, tight-knit community where everybody knows everybody else. It has been home to the same few extended families down through the generations, and you generally don’t have to go too far before you bump into someone you are related to, whether by blood or by marriage. My parents were surrounded by family there. My dad was one of seven children and his dad, my grandfather, was a wealthy man with plenty of land to share out between them as they got married and started families of their own.

This was home: green fields nestled in among the Zagros Mountains, set against a postcard backdrop of peaks and valleys in the near distance. My dad’s side of the family have always been farmers: vegetables mainly, maybe some tomatoes alongside the cucumbers, with some sheep and goats as well, and, in recent years, a few beehives for good measure.

For most of my uncles, farming was life, but my dad was always more interested in pursuing an education, with a little bit of farming on the side. While his brothers sowed and harvested, he would travel into Zahaw city, where my grandparents owned a shop and a beautiful three-storey house with seven bedrooms, and he would study Farsi there. In later years, I realised that he could write in three languages, Kurdish, Farsi and Arabic.

Life in Zahaw was simple and it was peaceful. My parents had their own two-storey house, and their own car – at that time a luxury that very few people could afford. They had their family nearby, and that was everything that they could have wanted for a happy life.

But for Kurds in Iran in the 1970s, life could never be truly happy because they were missing the one thing that mattered to them above all else: their freedom. Under the Shah – the King of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – they were treated as second-class citizens.

The Shah celebrated Iran’s Persian past, and looked to build a Persian future, but this was a multicultural place full of many different people who already had their own identities, customs and traditions. They didn’t want to be Persian. They were proud of who they were.

Kurdish people had their land taken away from them. Kurdish leaders were executed. Even for the richest of the rich among the Kurdish community, for the people who seemingly had everything, life was tough because they couldn’t be fully themselves.

And then, in 1979, revolution came to Iran. War was not far behind it.

WE NEED TO GO NOW

Let me teach you a few words of Kurdish:

(‘We are in danger, we need to go now’)

The late 1970s was a time of unprecedented change and turmoil in Iran. People were taking to the streets to demand change. Opposition and protests became more and more widespread and turned into revolution. In 1979, fearing for his safety, the Shah fled the country and went into exile. After having ruled for nearly forty years, he lost his power and lost control of the country. Without him the monarchy quickly collapsed, and Iran was transformed into an Islamic republic led by its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

After the revolution, the dust gradually settled, but for the people the uncertainty continued. Tensions grew between Iran and Iraq. The Ayatollah hoped that his Islamic Revolution might extend across the border, but Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, viewed this new Iranian republic as a clear and present threat to Iraqi safety. In the cities and villages across Iran, nobody knew whether to expect war or peace.

Then, on 22 September 1980, Iraq launched its first air strikes on Iranian territory. That was the beginning of the Iran–Iraq war, which would last almost eight years until the summer of 1988, with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides.

As the Iraqi troops crossed the border and closed in on Zahaw, some people fled east towards Tehran, believing that a big city could offer them some protection. Others looked to the mountains – that was where they felt they could be safe. Others headed for the border, hoping to find shelter in Iraq.

My parents were forced to flee Zahaw in October 1980. They grabbed whatever they could, packed it into their tractor and trailer alongside my three eldest brothers, Raoof, Osman and Mokhtar, and my eldest sister, Ghazal, and they ran. The sleepy little farming village in the mountains wasn’t their home any more. Now it was an Iraqi army post.

Overnight, my family lost pretty much everything they had. In that first week they moved from village to village, frantically trying to figure out a path to safety. They first went to Qadri Jayran, a nearby village, where they stayed for two nights before moving on to a village called Serqela, and then on again to Taperash.

Every stop was a brief one, a moment to weigh up the danger and decide on their next move. After three nights in Taperash, they left again and, too frightened to stay in Iran any longer, set off into the mountains with the aim of crossing the border into the Kurdistan of Iraq.

As soon as they were safely across, they found a place to settle called Haji Lar and parked their tractor. It was barely a mile or two from the border, but that was where they wanted to be. They still held on to the hope that this might just be temporary. But even if that was true, even if they could have gone back, everything was gone, either flattened by war or robbed from the rubble that was left behind. They had lost everything. They might not have known it that first night as they tried to get some sleep, but this new and unfamiliar place was now the closest thing they had to a home. They would stay in Haji Lar for the next ten months.

At first they lived in a mud house, built by hand entirely out of bricks made of dried clay. It wasn’t much, but it did give them shelter, a little bit of privacy and protection. Two or three months later, as the winter months set in and the number of refugees climbed higher and higher, the Iraqi authorities tried to take some steps to address the crisis. The government allocated my family a house in Haji Lar. They lived there until the summer of 1981.

In the chaos of war that had swallowed up their village, the family had split up. While my parents and brothers and sister settled in Haji Lar, if only temporarily, my grandmother and some of her brothers had headed north to a town called Sirwan, where the only shelter they and their fellow refugees could find was in a little camp of tents.

They heard the sound of engines flying overhead, but they never expected that they would be the targets. An army plane bombed the tents they were living in. A piece of flying shrapnel struck my grandmother’s brother in the face; another hit my grandmother in the arm, leaving her with injuries that she never fully recovered from. She needed a sling to support her paralysed arm for the rest of her life, a permanent reminder of the day the rockets struck.

THE JOURNEY

The war raged on. My family had been living in Haji Lar for ten months when the Iraqi government sent the trucks for them. Whatever little sense of control they had managed to regain over their lives while settled there, whatever rhythm and routine their days had found, it was upended again without warning.