To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise

by Ely Banister Soane

We were accompanied by an officer going to Khaniqin via Halabja, and he had been granted an escort of twenty soldiers as far as the latter place. These at last appeared, and assuming the dignities of escort to the caravan, blew a bugle several times in the hopes of inducing it to start.

Our caravan was a large one; half of its members were women returning from Sulaimania to their native places, villages along the Persian frontier—Kurds all, except for three blatant Bagdadiennes accompanying their husbands, Turkish officials, to Khaniqin. The little party to which I was attached had also its female element, an elderly woman of the mountain lands of Aoram, mother-in-law of the muleteer, and as such allowed to ride free of charge upon a minute ass, which expressed its unwillingness to proceed by sitting down frequently, in streams for choice.

Once under way over the rolling spurs of the Azmir mountains, our military escort began to display that zeal for duty which they never fail to exhibit. Their duty, however, when on the march and in towns has always seemed to me and to the inhabitants to begin and end with a practical study of the science of combined annoyance and roguery, theft and violence, as bearing upon the populace, and in this they attain remarkable proficiency.

On this occasion their first action was to cast from their donkeys three or four inoffensive Kurds, and appropriate their animals. An hour out from Sulaimania the sun began to grow hot, and the soldiers thirsty, and the water-pots of all travellers were emptied despite protest, and because of it in two instances, where the soldiers wantonly broke the pot and spilled its contents.

There was considerable talk of robbers, for the road skirted the country of the rebellious Hamavand Kurds, and the sudden appearance of some horsemen upon a hillock caused the guard some uneasiness and alarm. Being armed with Mauser rifles, they were forced to show some spirit, and retiring precipitately to a depression they fired a volley at the riders, fortunately hitting no one. The perfectly peaceable enemy stopped and shouted something sarcastic, and by their dress and dialect were recognised as fellows of our own half-dozen horsemen. On learning this the condition of the army became piteous. Some six or seven, whose fear of tribal reprisals overcame the influence of military discipline, made off at the double for town, forgetting the men they had fired upon. These, seeing from afar the situation, set off after them with shouts of well-assumed fury. The remainder were penned about by our own horsemen and were receiving a merciless pounding with the butts of rifles wielded wisely and ably from the superior position of horseback. The “yuzbashi”[58] screamed in vain Turkish for bugler and “bash chaush.”[59] But both lay, one squashed under a horse’s heel, and the other senseless beneath the belly of a donkey that answered the yuzbashi with vociferous braying.

Had it not been that among us were a number of people of the Jaf tribe, into whose lands we were entering, the riders would have now left us, and entrenched among the hillocks farther on would have attacked and looted the caravan. Fortunately their anger soon subsided, and the remaining soldiers, bruised, torn and pitiful, once more resumed their slouch towards Halabja, keeping as far as possible from the rest of us. Under the mounting sun we put the hillocks and gullies of Sulaimania behind us, till ascending a last long slope the plain of Shahr-i-Zur lay before us, a broad valley dotted with the black tent encampments of the Jaf tribe, and the many mounds that stand there, relics of ancient inhabitants and recent villages destroyed by the order of a famous shaikh, a Sulaimanian saint and notorious scoundrel.

HALABJA

The eastern edge of this mountain-bound plain lies under the shadow of the great mountain wall of Aoraman, frontier of Persia, a wall bounding the countries of the most secluded and perhaps mysterious of the tribes of Kurdistan, Aorami and Rizhoi, and of those worshippers of the Muhammadan saint Ali, who call him God.

Halabja, or Alabja, as it is written, a speck on the far-rising slope of the plain, was perfectly visible thirty miles away, and between us and it was the perfect desolation beloved of the Turk. His hand here nowadays is but feeble, and this district, once a fertile and prosperous Persian province and still Persian in everything but name, is entirely under the control of Uthman Pasha, head of the Jaf Kurds, who own little or no subjectivity to the Turkish Government, and with the worst possible grace tolerate the presence of the few Turkish officials at Halabja. Post and telegraph they abolished long ago, refusing to pay money for patches of paper to stick upon letters they could carry themselves, and finding a use for telegraph wire in the manufacture of chains and bullets; so that now, while Halabja possesses a full-blown post and telegraph master, the office is as much a sinecure as that of the tax collector, who sits in Sulaimania and begs crumbs of pay from Uthman Pasha.

This Shahr-i-Zur, whose mounds are full of the coins of Sasanian Persia and the tokens of Assyria, was till a few decades back the old sub-province of Gulambar,[60] “The Amber Flower,” from all reports one of the most beautiful of all the beauties of Kurdistan.