So I tracked down the staff of Hawlati, the only inde­pen­dent news­pa­per in Kurdistan, to get their take on press free­dom in this coun­try so utterly dom­i­nated by two pow­er­ful polit­i­cal par­ties. Editor Faisal Khalid says that only Hawlati will tackle sto­ries related to gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion, of which there is a lot in Kurdistan. In retal­i­a­tion, Hawlati staff have been threat­ened and, in a few cases, bribed by the gov­ern­ment to become infor­mants.
If the Hawlati staff believes an employee’s loy­alty is waver­ing, that employee is promptly fired. Recently three Hawlati reporters were jailed for cov­er­ing cor­rup­tion sto­ries; all three are out on bail await­ing trial. What makes this legally pos­si­ble is the absence of Miranda Rights in Kurdistan and a law pro­hibit­ing loosely-​​defined “slan­der”, which edi­tors have told me might include crit­i­cism of the major polit­i­cal par­ties.
Incredibly, even the coura­geous Hawlati staff cows away from cer­tain sub­jects. “Past the red line,” is how Khalid describes them. When I asked what sub­jects were past the line, he refused to answer, say­ing only that every­one knows what sub­jects are absolutely taboo. If gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion is fair game in this place where gov­ern­ment is wor­shipped, what in the world is off-​​limits? My cyn­i­cal Western mind sus­pects that these sub­jects are related to sex and reli­gion. More on that later.
– David Axe

There are few things rarer than an old Kurdish man. Decades of oppres­sion, poor nutri­tion and med­ical care, war, flight and start­ing over have taken their toll. The low life expectancy of Kurdish men goes a long way to explain why the sur­vivors are so revered.
More than most, Kurdish cul­ture is patri­ar­chal and personality-​​worshipping. And no patri­archs’ per­son­al­i­ties are more wor­shipped than the Barzanis. In every office, shop and home hang por­traits of Mustafa Barzani, the deceased Kurdish rev­o­lu­tion­ary, and his son Massoud, the cur­rent head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dom­i­nant party in Erbil and, with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan based in Sulaymaniyah, the heart of the Kurdish coali­tion that has been kick­ing ass at the polls since January.
Extremely high birth rates — an arti­fact of Kurds’ obses­sion with nuclear fam­i­lies — mean that despite his­tor­i­cally high death rates among men, Kurdish pop­u­la­tion is explod­ing. All Iraqi peo­ples have very very young pop­u­la­tions. (That many Arabs have mul­ti­ple wives con­tributes to this.) High birth rates aren’t all good. Feeding, cloth­ing and edu­cat­ing all these kids is a real chal­lenge. At the pub­lic hos­pi­tal in Shaqlawa, a resort town north of Erbil, Dr. Bestum Ali is doing all he can to keep thou­sands of kids healthy. That means up to 50 innoc­u­la­tions per day and aggres­sive chil­drea­r­ing edu­ca­tion for new moth­ers. Ali says things are get­ting bet­ter, espe­cially since the fall of Saddam. Medicine, per­son­nel and exper­tise move more freely, inter­na­tional aid is up, and expa­tri­ate doc­tors like Shaqlawa head of pedi­atrics Dr. Yusef are return­ing to Kurdistan from places like Zurich. The result of all this and of Kurdistan’s new era of peace, hope­fully, is that old Kurds will one day be as com­mon as young ones.
– David Axe

At the Erbil Ministry of Culture’s media hall, the Iraqi-​​Kurdistan Symphony Orchestra has just struck the final chord of the Kurdish national anthem, and the audi­ence — Kurdish Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Turkomens, maybe even an Iraqi Jew or two, all in black ties and gowns — bursts into loud applause, foot-​​stomping and cheers. It’s Christmas Eve in the old­est city in the world, and the city’s million-​​and-​​some res­i­dents are in a pretty good mood. Maybe it’s the suc­cess­ful elec­tion they had just two weeks ago.
Maybe it’s the Christmas cheer of the city’s size­able Christian minor­ity rub­bing off on every­one else. Or maybe it’s just that Kurdistanis love being Kurdistanis.
Sure, Iraqi Kurdistan’s got trou­bles. Corruption ham­strings the econ­omy. Intense secu­rity lim­its civil rights. A dearth of nat­ural resources has min­is­ters beg­ging for for­eign invest­ment. But despite all this, and against the back­drop of a coun­try descend­ing into an Arab civil war, Kurdistan is pros­per­ing. People are mak­ing money, rais­ing their kids, going to school, trav­el­ling abroad, mak­ing plans, dream­ing and enjoy­ing life.
This is it folks, this is what a peace­ful, demo­c­ra­tic, multi-​​ethnic and religiously-​​tolerant Iraq looks like. The Western media’s myopic focus on Baghdad and Arab Iraq means it’s missed a quar­ter of the story, the north­ern quar­ter, where five mil­lion peo­ple are build­ing the Middle East’s first indige­nous democ­racy from scratch. Every day Kurds thank me, believ­ing I rep­re­sent all Americans. They thank me for free­ing them from a mur­der­ous tyrant. They thank me for sav­ing their lives and their fam­i­lies’ lives. They tell me that they under­stand we went to war for many rea­sons, some quite bad. Still, they say, no American has died in vain here, for even if there were no weapons of mass destruc­tion, even if Iraq had noth­ing to do with Sept. 11, there is at least one good rea­son to fight and die in Iraq.
In fact, there are five mil­lion.
Merry Christmas, America. Merry Christmas, Iraq.
–David Axe