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INTRODUCTION
What is Kurdistan? It is a more difficult question to answer than it might sound at first. One of the hardest things for someone to do is to sum up a place. A region. Potentially an entire country. That is particularly true when it is a place they know well, because there is too much detail in what they know to ever sum it up in just a few words. Which details are the ones that will really capture the essence of a place? Which ones only skim the surface?
I could refer to some of the things that have been done to Kurdistan and my people, the Kurds, in the past. It is the way that so many people have viewed Kurdistan before, and it is the topic I intend to explore in this book. Yet to begin that way would be doing the region a disservice. It would mean that the only impression those readers who have never visited Kurdistan will get is of a region defined by the violence done to it, and that is not acceptable. Kurdistan is so much more than that.
So instead, let us begin with what a visitor to Kurdistan would see. Arriving either by air or travelling over the border by road, they would quickly find themselves at the heart of one of Kurdistan's modern, prosperous cities. They would see the constant signs of building and probably note the wealth around them in many areas. Landing in Erbil or Sulaymaniyah, they could look around and think that they were in any of the world's major urban centres. They would see prosperous surroundings, safe, orderly environments, and the hectic pace of ordinary life the world over.
They could see all this, in what is currently a region of Iraq.
That's the dichotomy of Kurdistan. It has been in the middle of one of the most reported on conflicts on the planet, yet it is also a comparatively safe, booming region. It is a region that has, in a very short space of time, almost entirely reinvented itself. It is a region where there are. new houses and projects going up every day, and where strong natural resources provide the potential for future growth. There are even those who are starting to refer to it as a potential 'second Dubai'. All that, in an area of the world that continues to be war tom, and where surrounding countries currently face significant political, social and economic difficulties.
It's a level of transformation that can be shocking. In 2010,1 returned to the country for the first time in almost twenty years. When I left, there was literally nothing there. Not in the sense that someone in a developed Western country might say that a town or region has nothing in it; this wasn't a case of lacking a few luxuries, or perhaps being short on opportunities for youth. Instead, there were no real hospitals. There was no airport. There weren't hotels or universities. There were very few schools. Most of the houses consisted at least as much of earth as of modem building materials. There weren't even good roads. All that had been destroyed. That's how little there was when I left.
When I came back, that had changed so much it almost didn't seem like the same place. Areas that had been literally nothing but desert were now thriving with multiple construction projects. There were two major airports in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, and a third being started in Dohuk so that suddenly I wasn't faced with a dangerous, hour's long drive to get into the country. There seemed to be private universities everywhere I looked, with people so eager to do well that they've driven a boom in demand for higher education. Even abroad, you now find Kurdish students succeeding in universities in all comers of the globe.
I saw a group of children on their way to school, wearing identically neat, perfect uniforms. That probably doesn't sound like much, but when I was a boy, I had to make do with clothes that my mother had patched up repeatedly, wearing them until they were either worn through so …
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