Kurdish New Year in Iraq

Norooz, the Zoroastrian New Year and the beginning of spring, is celebrated by Iraq's Kurds every March 21st. The holiday is a much bigger deal next door in Iran -- ancient Persia being the birthplace of the Zoroastrian religion -- where the government practically shuts down for weeks. In Kurdistan, there are fewer days off and fewer rituals, but Norooz is nevertheless an important holiday, in part because it is used to remember one of the foundational myths of the Kurdish people.

According to legend, Kowa, a blacksmith's son, killed a child-eating giant and, after slaying the beast, lit a fire as a signal to his terrorized people that they no longer need live in fear. Nowadays Kurds, the descendants of Kowa, light fires during Norooz -- often by burning tires -- as a symbol of uprising, of independence, and of survival in the face of tyranny. They also do some serious picnicking.

The struggle to survive as a people is a continuing theme among Kurds, who live as ethnic minorities in the mountainous border regions of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. I celebrated Norooz today with an Iraqi Kurdish friend who had several family members (also Kurds) visiting from Iran, where they live in Sanandaj.

Over lunch, they spoke about how oppression by the Iranian government has accelerated dramatically under the current government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran's ruling clerics have systematically discriminated against Kurds, whom they see as threats to the ethnic, linguistic, and religious unity of the Persian-speaking, Shi'ite majority, Islamic Republic. Not only do Kurds have their own language, but most of them are also Sunni Muslims. "They hate us twice," said a young cousin. "We are Kurds and we are Sunni."

Besides banning political activity and free speech, the Iranian government has been resettling Kurdish regions with members of the country's Persian majority, and tempting Sunni Kurds into converting to Shi'ite Islam with preferential jobs and treatment, according to my friend's family. They said that 40 percent of Kurds in Iran are losing their language or losing their traditional religion.

But the Iranian government hasn't always been so hard on the Kurds. In the 1990's, at the height of Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against Iraq's Kurds, Iran sheltered thousands of Kurdish refugees, as well as the Kurdish political parties that today run Iraqi Kurdistan.

Which is one reason why Kurdish leaders in Iraq are now taking a much more diplomatic approach to Iran than their confrontational American allies. Kurdish leaders protested when American special forces raided Iranian government offices here in Arbil earlier this year and captured several Iranians whom Americans claim are intelligence agents. And Kurdish leaders have built (or at least allowed for the founding of) a couple of Shi'ite Muslim community centers in Kurdistan, as a gesture of goodwill to their friends in Iran.

All of which are part of a larger campaign by Iraq's Kurdish leaders to reassure their much more powerful neighbors that an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq or some future independent Kurdistan will not be the start of a Kurdish uprising in the Middle East. The days of Kowa and giant killing are over.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Arbil