Book
Being Kurdish in a Hostile World
2017, 350 p.
This book is about the life of a young Kurdish boy growing up under one of the 20th century's most brutal dictators, Saddam Hussein of Iraq. I lived every day of my life under bombardment either from Iraq's neighbor Iran or for fear of the regime's police who could take away my family at any time. Then there was the starvation days of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the UN for Saddam's belligerence nature and policies. This book talks about my people's struggle for freedom a life of dignity and the historic betrayal we the Kurds suffered under the British and French after WW1 who deprived us of a country of our own. The second half of the book is about how I witnessed with my own eyes as a journalist the collapse of Saddam's regime in 2003 under American bombs and how I felt optimistic for once in a long time about the future of my country, dreaming of true freedom and democracy now that the Americans were in Iraq. But then comes the bloody sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis on the one hand and the brutal war between Iraqi insurgents and US forces on the other. As a reporter traveling across Iraq and risking my life every day, I tried to make sense of things and why my country was going down that merciless and violent path more than I tried to report it to the outside world. It is a personal journey by a Kurd across Iraq and finding out that everyone in Iraq suffered during and after Saddam's regime not just the Kurds.
РУССКАЯ ВЕРСИЯ: Быть курдом во враждебном мире