Land of warriors... where ‘honour' is sullied, respect is lost

Observer

07-06-2025

How can an ethnic group, rich in culture and tradition, and numbering more than 30 million people, not have a home to call their own? The Kurdish people are a proud people, gentle, yet, in protecting their 'honour,' become utterly mindless, brutal.
The Kurdish, says proud young Kurd Danyil Kamil, are people of the mountainous, stateless region, that spans four nations Iran, Iraq, Türkiye , and Syria, once known as Mesopotamia. Culturally strong, and mostly Sunni Muslim. Ironically, following WWI, the Western allies having conquered the Ottoman Empire, made provision for a Kurdish state, even giving it the name of Kurdistan, in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres. However, the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, which established the post-war boundaries of modern-day Turkey, saw the Kurdish homeland fractured and according to Kamil, 'out of sight, out of mind.' Autonomous governance of the Iraqi sector has been touted since 1946, when Mustafa Barzani created the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which 15 years later, frustrated with their political progress launched an armed offensive against the government.
In March1988, Saddam Hussein cruelly unleashed a chemical attack against Halabja, on the Iranian border, killing 5,000 Kurds. Iran's Ten million Kurdish Muslims, who have long sought formal allegiances with their fellow Levantine mountain-dwellers. However, successive Iranian governments have proven reluctant to cede a strong social presence, in country, and suppression of Kurdish autonomy and activism is widespread. Turkish Kurds too have suffered as successive Turkish governments have rejected autonomy since the 1920s, with Kurdish identity made unlawful. In 1978, Abdullah Ocalan inspired a bid for Kurdish independence, only to be arrested and gaoled in 1999. He is still imprisoned, alone, in Imrali Prison. It is conservatively estimated that more than 36,000 people have perished in the Turkish/Kurdish 'troubles.
Syria only has a modest Kurdish population, denied citizenship, homes, land, and businesses, they were victims of widespread genocide until in 2012, Bashir Al Assad was forced to protect urban Syria from other rebel forces. Even today, Syria's fractured leadership refuses to negotiate Kurdish autonomy. This then, is the adversity that is Kurdistan, and hardly of its own making. But that's no excuse... Maybe the earlier generations would settle for peace and quiet, but as in every society, there is youth, and with youth comes restlessness, and a desire to be seen and heard, maybe ill-disciplined and free-spirited, but undeserving of the pathos surrounding one lost soul. Fairooz Azad was a Kurdish teenager, living in Erbil, population 879,000, and Kurdistan's largest city. She was pretty, vibrant, and bold, who successfully blended her beauty, fashion, personality and opinions, influencing thousands of Kurdish followers on social media. Her posts offered a very different perspective to the normally mundane existence where the only local excitement was their football team. A pretty girl, Azad would 'dress to impress,' frequently blogging and posting on TikTok and Snapchat, becoming prominent across the region's social media.
Not everyone though, was impressed, and in November 2023, two rival influencers, feigning interest in her success, instead brutally assaulted and violated the 18-year-old and threw her from the balcony of Erbil's Eskan Towers. Miraculously, she survived with a broken leg, pelvic and spinal injuries. Incredibly, a tribal mediation saw her assailants given only a brief term of imprisonment, and they were released from jail before Azad was discharged from hospital. Then, in April 2024, believing Azad was now 'impure,' her father, uncle, cousin, a brother, and others, entered her bedroom and shot her dead while she was sleeping.
To think young Fairooz Azad is now little more than a statistic, one of an average thirty women who perish each year in this region alone, in the name of 'honour?' This is not honour! For any culture, any tradition, no matter how disappointed, frustrated, or bitter with their lot, to seek solace in ritual gendercide, is completely wrong! Nyala Ali Khan, author, lecturer, and a global advocate for women's rights, in an interview on 'Counterpunch,' in 2016, that the 'discourse of honour killings,' speaks only to the 'incorrigible bestiality,' of the practice.
How can a culture, a civilisation, a way of life, that regards honour so wretchedly, seek freedom, respect and independence so robustly?