mis à jour le Mardi 11 avril 2023 à 18h32
A FIGHTER OF the Iranian Kurdish Komala movement looks toward the border with Iran from a base near Suleimania.
(photo credit: JONATHAN SPYER)
KAWTHAR FATTAHI, an official of the Komala movement.
(credit: JONATHAN SPYER)
Jpost.com | By JONATHAN SPYER
In the 1980s, thousands of Kurds made for these mountains and for Iran, to escape the poison gas attacks of the Saddam Hussein regime. Now, the traffic is in the opposite direction.
“When you grow up in Iran, as a woman, and especially as a Kurdish woman, you notice immediately that things are not – normal,” Kawthar Fattahi tells me in her clear and fluent English. “That you have no place. So you think about it. Why don’t I have basic rights?” she continues. “We have to wear a hijab from the first days. And step by step, you start to learn that you are nothing. You are told how to walk, how to sit, how to eat, even. It was even forbidden for a woman to eat in the street in Iran.”
We are sitting in Fattahi’s drafty office, at a base of the Iranian Kurdish Komala movement, on high ground about 50 km. from Iraq’s border with Iran. The mountains that can be seen in the distance mark the border itself. These are the Zagros range, a region saturated with memory and history for the Kurds of Iran and Iraq.
In the 1980s, thousands of Kurds made for these mountains and for Iran, to escape the poison gas attacks of the Saddam Hussein regime. Now, the traffic is in the opposite direction. Hundreds of young Iranians, Kurds and others, have made the perilous trip across the mountains to avoid the attention of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Most of them are veterans of the unrest that has gripped Iran, and Iran’s Kurdistan province in particular, since the killing of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, at the hands of the Iranian authorities on September 16, 2022.
Fattahi made the same journey a few years earlier. She is 33, and hails from the town of Bokan, in Iran’s western Azerbaijan Province. Fattahi is an official of Komala, a revolutionary party engaged against the authorities in Tehran. The path that would lead her eventually across the mountains began in her mid-teens, when she became aware, as she put it, that things were not “normal” in Iran.