The
road to one front of the war against the Islamic State winds through miles of
barren, cracked-clay ground. The landscape is occasionally punctuated by
marshes—mostly dry this time of year—fed by the manmade Hawijah River. A
bridge, destroyed by the fighting, once spanned the river about 12 miles from
the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Now it lies in giant chunks of stone around the
water.
At
a nearby outpost, Halat Karim Agha, a slender, bald man with a thick mustache,
gestures toward two soldiers manning a heavy machine gun. They are fighters in
the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia battling the Islamic State.
"This
is what we use to kill Daesh," Agha tells VICE, using an
Arabic term for ISIS. "When they see something move, they shoot."
The
men fire off a few rounds to demonstrate, puncturing the air with rapid
staccato gunfire. Agha smiles patiently.
"Now
we wait," he says.
The
Peshmerga, backed by coalition forces that include the United States, is
currently attempting to advance toward the
Islamic State–controlled city of Mosul. Near Kirkuk, the fighters of the
Kurdish regional government are also gradually retaking land, village by
village, from the self-styled Islamic caliphate. There's a team of US Forces
stationed at the Peshmerga headquarters close to the city, led by a commanding
officer who wears traditional Kurdish dress. So the Kurds aren't in this fight
alone, but it's still a fierce struggle against a powerful foe.
Agha
is no stranger to war, though. As a scion of the Hamawand tribe, one of
Kurdistan's oldest and most venerated clans, this is essentially his
birthright.
The
Hamawands have a reputation for stubborn resistance that dates back centuries.
Fiercely dedicated to their homeland, they've clashed with the Ottomans, the
British, Saddam Hussein, and an al Qaeda–linked group in
Iraq. But now the Hamawands face what they say is the most brutal enemy they've
ever encountered, one that would destroy their homes and render their lands
unrecognizable.
Given
their autonomous nature and single-minded commitment to their own clans, though,
tribes in this area have historically troubled not just invaders, but Kurdish
nationalists determined to unify their people. Which gets at the tricky
question of what role the tribes—rather than Kurds as a broader ethnic
group—play in the Peshmerga fight against ISIS, and whether they will put aside
their factionalism if and when the group is defeated. But the tribesmen themselves tell a
rather different story about the period. Agha, along with his brothers, Mariwan
Karim and Farooq, sit in folding chairs on the lawn at Mariwan's house. When
the air in this part of Kurdistan cools at night, the sun baked plains almost
appear to sigh in relief. A nearby manmade lake, spanned by a rickety bridge,
chirps with frogs and insects. Over the horizon, lights from the nearby town of
Chamchamal gleam faintly, but out here there are few houses, and they all
belong to Hamawands.
"The
origins of the Hamawand tribe go back six hundred fifty years," Mariwan
explains. He is now the tribal leader, following the death of his beloved
father, Karim Agha, two years ago. Also slender and sporting a mustache, he
looks very much like his brother Halat, and plays with one of his tiny nieces
as he talks. Children scamper all over Mariwan's large property, but this
little girl is the clear favorite, he says, because she has his mother's eyes.
"About
three hundred fifty years ago, the Hamawand tribe came to Kurdistan," he
says. "After that, we had many battles with the Ottoman Empire, which was
occupying our lands. We were the only tribe to fight the empire successfully.
We weren't making our forces obvious; we were hiding on the roads and using
guerrilla tactics. Eventually, our leaders were invited to negotiations with
the Ottomans in Adana [a city in Turkey]. But the Ottomans tricked them and
captured nine hundred Hamawand families as slaves, then redistributed them all
over North Africa and the Middle East.
"After
twenty years, most of the families left Africa," Mariwan says with a
smile. "They traveled back to these lands on foot. The journey took nine
months."
More
recently, the tribe teamed up with US forces during the Iraq war, battling Ansar al-Islam, a local affiliate of al Qaeda, as it
began to emerge along the border with Iran.
"[Ansar
al-Islam] killed many young Peshmerga fighters," Mariwan explains.
"They would make them line up and then record their murders on video.
Later on, we discovered that they sent these videos to people in other countries
in order to receive funding from them."
Mariwan
frowns suddenly. "Now they're back here as Daesh," he says.
"They would destroy everything about our way of life, so we must defend
our land."
At
this moment, however, the Hamawands don't seem particularly interested in
political affiliations—they're more focused on the existential fight against
ISIS for the preservation of their heritage. In Chamchamal, Mariwan erected a
small museum to honor his father, where he displays the Hamawands' impressive collection
of Mesopotamian artifacts dating back to the Stone Age. Mariwan even recreated
his father's bedroom to look just as it was before he died, down to a plate of
food on his desk.
"After
the death of my father, I couldn't open the door to his bedroom for eleven
months and two days," he says, his eyes going bright and wet for a moment.
"He had a pure soul. The entire city loved him, not just the Hamawands.
When he died, ten thousand people were at his funeral. They walked ten
kilometers carrying his coffin."
Mariwan
takes a minute to compose himself, looking at Karim Agha's bedroom, preserved
under the florescent lights of the museum.
"My
father always taught me to honor our past," he continues. "It's our
responsibility to keep our tribe's legacy alive, because we sacrificed much for
Kurdistan throughout history."
SULOME ANDERSON