On Growing Old (and Being Young) in Kurdistan

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

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