Inside the Zagros Mountains, the forgotten region of ​Iranian Kurdistan

The classroom is small and cramped. There are perhaps two-dozen students inside. Although the desks are for children, the students range in age from pre-teen to post-menopausal. A peroxide blonde woman in her late fifties, dressed in white with a beige shol, clinking gold jewellery, and Cleopatra-esque eyeliner, retrieves a notebook from her camel-skin tote with one hand. In the other, she brandishes a Chinese fan in a fruitless effort to alleviate the summer heat.
On the other side of the room, two 12-year-old boys scramble to their seats. We are in a historic district of Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province, and the students have come to learn Sorani, the Kurdish language of their forefathers.
But first, the entire class have swivelled in their seats at the command of an energetic young teacher in clear-rimmed glasses and a thick moustache, to look at me.
“How is Kurdistan?” they enquire. “How are the Kurds?” These are not perfunctory niceties: where Iranians worry about the baggage I might have brought with me about their country, Iran’s Kurds worry that their own compatriots routinely malign them.
Iran’s Kurdistan region is a small chunk of land bitten out of the Zagros Mountains, a craggy range that separates the Islamic Republic from Iraq. But this nominal “Kordestan” is only a small area within what Kurdish nationalists understand to be “Eastern Kurdistan,” Kurdish-dominated zones in western Iran that, along with communities of Kurds in the west (Rojava, in Syria), north (Turkey), and south (Iraq) make up Greater Kurdistan, an imaginary homeland with a combined population of 30-40 million. While Kurds in Rojava struggle to maintain independent enclaves amidst Syria’s bloody civil war, and those in Iraq battle against encroaching Islamic State forces, Turkey’s Kurdish separatists are engaged, yet again, in increasingly violent clashes with the state.
Iran’s is the one Kurdish region that remains relatively quiet - all but absent from international news feeds. This, despite the fact that the Sunni Kurds, an ethnic and secular minority in Shia-majority Iran, are politically sidelined and face persistent discrimination. Calls for autonomy, as manifested in violent protests that erupted in May after the mysterious death of a Kurdish woman in Mahabad, are an exception to the rule of polite indignation in the face of cultural marginalization.
Into the mountains
By the time I enter Kurdistan, I have spent one and a half months traveling alone through Iran. Having visited Turkish Kurdistan, I anticipate warmly hospitable people and baggy trousers. Shoulders cramping under a heavy pack, I am not disappointed when I find myself struggling to find accommodation in the burgeoning mountain metropolis of Paveh.
Vendors carrying wide wicker baskets piled high with cherry tomatoes stop to stare as I plod by, making my way along the narrow main road that snakes lackadaisically across several ridges. Customers hang around outside hair salons, and men in typical Kurdish pantsuits (wide-legged, drop-crotch trousers that taper at the ankle, worn with a matching cropped jacket and thick cummerbund) gather in the square.
My sources - Lonely Planet, 2012, damn them - inform me that a khanum mo’allem (female teacher) hostel offers cheap accommodation in town, so I am determined to discover it. I ask salespeople and passers-by for directions. Everyone offers different advice. Much of this is given in Hurami, an ancient, poetic language linguistically distinct from both Farsi and the Sorani of Sanandaj (and the Kurmanji of Turkey’s Kurds).

I remain lost and wandering. Help appears in the form of Makwan, or “Mike,” as he introduces himself, a skinny Kurdish man, late 20s, in a stripy black-and-white t-shirt, worn black Kurdish pants, and a buoyant black quiff that would make Elvis proud.
Peeling himself away from a group of older men, Makwan, who speaks English he has taught himself, primarily by watching American movies and reading an esoteric illustrated dictionary, pledges to assist me in my quest.
A glimpse of village life
By nightfall, we have made our way to Nowdeshah, the family’s ancestral village, some 20 mountainous miles north of Paveh, where Makwan’s parents tend a market-garden that grows, precipitous but abundant, on a steep incline on the side of a narrow valley.
We arrive, accompanied by two sisters and a brother with his family, after sunset, and are led by Makwan’s sprightly elderly father down to the garden house: set below the stepped pomegranate orchard, beside the tomatoes, melons, cucumbers and squash, and directly beneath towering mulberry and fig trees.
The entire clan sleeps on the balcony, under the stars, as a cauldron of white mulberry molasses bubbles and spits on a fire in one corner, the scent of caramelized fruit mingling with the musk of sun-warmed fig leaves. In the morning, the sticky brown syrup will be eaten with wafer-thin Kurdish flatbread and salty white cheese, washed down with glasses of tea. Nearby, an irate cow is lowing dolefully.
The family’s garden is surrounded on all sides by other small agricultural endeavors. “The people here are so poor,” Makwan tells me as we arrive, gesturing to the stepped sanctuaries on either side of the road. “Only they have gardens.”
Life in the mountain village putters by at a much slower rate even than that of Paveh. The family spends long, leisurely days in the garden with meals a focal point. For Friday lunch, a fire is prepared and kebabs assembled. One skewer spears tender, glistening globules of sheep’s testicles, which are roasted lovingly on the flames, and presented to a young nephew. I am not invited to sample the delicacy.
“Testosterone,” his mother explains to me, with a shrug.
A mile up the winding road, Nowdeshah proper clings to the sides of the implacable valley, earth-colored houses riding piggy-back in a charming, vertiginous conglomeration. A shorn-headed woman completely devoid of hijab potters disconsolately through the town’s narrow alleyways. “Mad,” Makwan mutters, to explain her attire.

Aside from gardening, smuggling seems to be the town’s key industry, private cars regularly running canisters of oil across the nearby border with Iraq. Although the gasoline trade may historically have travelled in the opposite direction, the expansion of Isis in Iraqi Kurdistan has caused oil-shortages in the normally resource-rich region, creating a profitable demand for Iranian fuel. In many ways, smuggling is the only business here. Youth unemployment - high throughout Iran - is particularly marked in these impoverished western reaches, where industrial development is essentially non-existent and poor infrastructure hampers job creation. During our wander, a burnt-out, windscreen-less shell of a truck screeches to a halt beside us. The driver had stocked the car with fuel when an electric fire ignited, Makwan explains. However lucrative the trade, it hasn’t yet earned him enough to buy a new ride.

On my slow exit from the mountains, Makwan drives me high into the mountains above the Iraqi border, and gazes dreamily down. Iraqi Kurdistan, he tells me, is like Europe, because it is free. Changing the subject, he asks whether I’ve seen America’s “beautiful city.” It turns out he’s referring to Las Vegas.
Whispers of discontent
Our own gamble pays off and I pick up a good lift north, in the back of a pick-up commanded by an Italian-speaking Kurd. Tucked between a cool-box of Nowdeshah figs and two small children, I watch black hawks wheel overhead amidst the soaring grey rock, and duck discreetly each time we pass a police or military station.
It is evening by the time I reach Sanandaj. My host - a self-described “modern-day smuggler,” university administrator and promoter of Kurdish culture - is immediately taken away on business, and I am left in the care of his three sisters in the comfortable family home.
Distantly descended from the Zand dynasty, which ruled over southern and central Iran in the 18th century, the clan is presided over by Saddaq (quiet, twinkly-eyed, gray-haired), and Fereshte (a maker of excellent yoghurt, vivacious despite her aching joints), who between them have produced a brood of six children, all of whose names begin with “F.” They are, by their own admission, an unusual family amongst their kin: Saddaq left home at 8 or 9, and fended for himself in the city. He served as a military officer throughout the brutal Iran-Iraq war - echoes of which pervade this border region - and this dedication spared his two sons from having to complete full military service. All of the progeny are highly educated (e-commerce, teaching, urban planning, bio-medical science), and all evince a sharp intellect and a deep love for local Kurdish culture.

That love starts with the clothes. Both Farimah and Farzaneh, women in their early 20s whose room I share, have closets bursting with a rainbow array of spangled outfits intended to be worn at weddings. Farzaneh has spoken with me about her hopes to move to Germany to study - quickly dismissing the idea of marrying and settling in Sanandaj - and praised the open-mindedness of her parents. Female genital mutilation is still practised in certain parts of Iranian Kurdistan. We are worlds away.
But when the husband of Farnoosh, an elder sister, visits the family home, both Farimah and Farzaneh retreat into their room. Thinking they want rest, I apologize for disturbing them. “Oh no, we’re not sleeping,” Farzaneh says. “But our brother-in-law is here, and we prefer not to have to wear hijab.”
In a family where hijab is considered necessary even amongst relations, the women complain instead about the irritation of having to wear bras in the hot summer months. The sisters are reading The Useless Sex (1968) by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, fascinated by her account of the female condition across the globe, apparently taking solace in the fact that Korean women in the 1960s were struggling against patriarchal oppression too (but seemingly unaware of Fallaci’s later vitriolic Islamaphobia). Farnoosh practices aerobics in the small private courtyard behind the house but confides to me, “I dream of being able to wake up one day, and go out the door, and do these exercises outside.”
Around town, an image of female Kurdish courage recurs: a woman in the jumpsuit of the Kurdish militia, leaning insouciantly against a reclining lion - reproductions of a sculpture made by Sanandaj artist Hadi Ziaoddini to commemorate the female fighters killed in the assault on Kobane. As we walk along the main drag, Farzaneh tells me that the news of Kobane’s liberation brought Sanandaj residents out in droves, but the police kept a close, suspicious eye on the celebrations. In another part of town, she gestures to a housing complex obscured by high walls. “Shia,” she whispers to me, indicating that this impenetrable block contains the families of sepah (revolutionary guard) and basij (volunteer militia) officers.
Despite the absence of overt ethnic or sectarian tensions, such comments evince an enduring, embittered sense of occupation. This low-level antagonism exists even in the mountains. Having been introduced to a Nowdeshah neighbour, I mentioned to Makwan that this was the only Omar I had met in Iran. Makwan snorted. “Omar is a Sunni name,” he said. “You will not hear it anywhere else. They hate us.”
In Sanandaj, the sisters rail against the region’s underdevelopment, seeing the glacial rate of construction and the poor economy as symptomatic of Tehran’s marginalization of the Kurds. Farimah, who graduated a year ago, is patiently waiting for a new hospital to open, for a chance to put her bio-medical degree to work.
Back to school
Nevertheless, Kurdish resentment in Iran seemingly differs from the Turkish Kurds’ sense of disenfranchisement. The people I meet in Sanandaj demonstrate a sense of solidarity with their brothers throughout Greater Kurdistan, but the desire to actively strive for autonomy is markedly absent. Most Kurds here seem both passionately Kurdish and, in some ways, proudly Iranian. “The Iranian Kurds have benefited from their contact with Persian culture,” one man tells me, referencing Iran’s illustrious history. “Our culture is perhaps higher compared to other Kurds.”
Mulberry leaves whisper outside, as the Sorani class that Farzaneh brought me to draws to a close. Adnan Barzanji, the teacher, rapturously recites Nali with eyes closed. Later I meet with him to ask about the new Kurdish literature and language program that will be debuted at University of Kurdistan this fall - the first time such a course has been allowed by the government at tertiary level. Barzanji, who has been privately teaching Kurds the language of their heritage for a dozen years, will be a member of faculty. I ask him to explain the significance of this breakthrough, the reason it is important. “It’s not important for me,” he shoots back. “Children should go to school and learn this. This is just a move by the government to make us feel happy.”
“Why now?” I ask.
“They always thought that Kurds are dangerous,” he says. “They didn’t give us our human rights, and now they are afraid of the world hearing about these restrictions… [T]hey think that giving us our rights will help the safety of the government.”
With bigger threats, such as Isis, the government can ill afford Kurdish insurrection. Barzanji delineates the boundaries of his project, carefully rejecting any broader political motive for his committed teaching work. “This is a cultural movement,” he says. “That is a kind of political act that they can’t stop.”