Away from the herd

 Erbil, Iraq

The Kurds here are fighting Isis — everyone knows that. Most of us are at least peripherally aware that the brave Peshmerga (Kurdish militia) have proved an effective force against the Islamists, and we cheer them on. What we don’t realise is that as they battle the world’s latest bogeyman, the Kurds are also simultaneously suffering from another sort of crisis.

Traditionally the Iraqi Kurds are nomadic pastoralists. They’ve herded sheep since biblical times, leading their flocks from the mountains to the lowlands and back. The passion they feel for their land is rooted in this pastoral tradition. It’s a weird irony, then, that as their dream of a separate state grows close to being realised, their way of life is dying.

Outside Erbil, you can see the two natures of Kurdistan, traditional and modern, existing side by side. My guide, Reb, and I watch as a herder in a black leather jacket leads his sheep behind two camouflaged men with guns resting on sandbags. The land is dotted with refineries, and every so often spires of flame tower up into the sky, silhouetting the soldiers against the distant city, with its skeletal half-constructed concrete buildings surrounded by crowds of cranes.

It was Saddam who began altering the age-old Kurdish identity. He and his cousin, Chemical Ali, conducted a brutal campaign, — codenamed Al-Anfal — gassing civilians and razing Kurdish settlements. Reb and I pass many shattered villages, still just piles of rubble.

The land, once full of animals grazing, was badly damaged by Saddam. During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war he destroyed the trees so the Peshmerga couldn’t hide from the Iraqi army. Now there are only small, newly planted pine trees on the mountains. ‘Hussein also put mines along the Iran-Iraq border; another obstacle for herders,’ Reb says.