Christina Lamb - The Girl From Aleppo - Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom

I hate the word refugee more than any word in the English language. In German it is Flü chtling , which is just as harsh. What it really means is a second-class citizen with a number scrawled on your hand or printed on a wristband, who everyone wishes would somehow go away. The year 2015 was when I became a fact, a statistic, a number. Much as I like facts, we are not numbers, we are human beings and we all have stories. This is mine.

My name is Nujeen which means new life, and I guess you can say I was unexpected. My mum and dad already had four boys and four girls, and by the time I came along on New Year’s Day 1999, twenty-six years after my eldest brother Shiar, some were already married off and the youngest one Nasrine was nine, so everyone thought the family was complete. My mum almost died giving birth to me and was so weak afterwards it was my eldest sister Jamila who really looked after me, and I always thought of her as my second mother. To start with, the family was happy to have a baby in the house but then I didn’t stop crying and crying. The only thing that would stop me was putting a tape recorder next to me playing Zorba the Greek , but that drove my siblings almost as mad as my crying.

We lived in a dusty neglected desert sort of town called Manbij in northern Syria, not far from the border with Turkey and about 20 miles west of the Euphrates river and the Tishrin dam which gave us electricity. My earliest memory is the long swish of my mother’s dress – a light-coloured kaftan which fell to her ankles. She had long hair too, and we called her Ayee and my father Yaba and these are not Arabic words. The first fact to know about me is I’m a Kurd.

We were one of five Kurdish families on a street in a town that was mostly Arab; they were Bedouin but they looked down on us and called our area the Hill of the Foreigners. We had to speak their language at school and in the shops and could speak our Kurdish language Kurmanji only when we were at home. This was very hard for my parents, who didn’t speak Arabic and were anyway illiterate. Also for my eldest brother Shiar, who other children made fun of at school because he couldn’t speak Arabic.

Manbij is a folkish kind of place and strict about Islam, so my brothers had to go to the mosque, and if Ayee wanted to shop in the bazaar, one of them or my father had to accompany her. We are Muslims too but not so rigid. In the high school my sisters and cousins were the only girls who didn’t cover their heads.

Our family had moved from our lands in a Kurdish village south of the city of Kobane because of a vendetta with a neighbouring village. We Kurds are tribal people and my family are from the big Kori Beg tribe, descended from a famous Kurdish resistance leader Kori Beg, which seems to mean almost every Kurd is a cousin. The next village were also Kori Beg but a different clan. The problem with them happened long before I was born, but we all knew the story. Both villages had sheep and one day some shepherd boys from the other village brought their flock to graze on our grass, so there was a fight with our shepherd boys. Shortly after that some of our relatives were going to the other village for a funeral and on the way were fired upon by two men from the other village. When our clan fired back one of their men was killed. They vowed revenge, so we all had to flee. That’s how we ended up in Manbij.

People don’t know much about Kurds – sometimes it seems to me we are completely unknown in the rest of the world. We are a proud people with our own language, food and culture and a long history going back 2,000 years when we were first recorded as Kurti. We are maybe 30 million people, but we have never had our own country. In fact we are the world’s biggest stateless tribe. We hoped we would get our own homeland when the British and French divided up the defeated Ottoman Empire after the First World War, just as the Arabs thought they would get their own independence as promised after the Arab Revolt. The Allied powers even signed an agreement called the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 which recognized an autonomous Kurdistan.

But the new Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk who had led his country to independence, would not accept it, and then oil was found in Mosul in what would have been Kurdistan and the treaty was never ratified. Actually two British and French diplomats called Mark Sykes and Georges Picot had already signed a secret pact to split the Levant between them and drawn their infamous line in the sand, from Kirkuk in Iraq to Haifa in Israel, to create the modern states of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. So the Arabs were left under colonial rule, between borders which paid little heed to tribal and ethnic realities, and we Kurds were left divided between four countries, none of which likes us.

Today about half the Kurds live in Turkey, some in Iraq, some in Iran and about 2 million of us in Syria where we are the biggest minority, about 15 per cent. Even though our dialects are different I can always tell a Kurd from any other person in the world – first by the tongue, then by the look. Some of us live in cities like Istanbul, Tehran and Aleppo, but most live in the mountains and plateaus where Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran meet.

We are surrounded by enemies, so we have to remain strong. Our great Kurdish Shakespeare Ahmad-i Khani wrote in the seventeenth century that we are like ‘towers on four corners surrounding the Turks and Persians … both sides have made the Kurdish people targets for the arrows of their fate’. Yaba believes that one day there will be a Kurdistan, maybe in my lifetime. ‘He who has a history has a future,’ he always says.

The funny thing is many of the famous ‘Arab’ heroes are Kurds and no one admits it. Like Saladin, who fought off the Crusaders and kicked the Europeans out of Jerusalem, or Yusuf al-Azma, who led the Syrian forces fighting the French occupation in 1920 and died in battle. There is a huge painting of Saladin and his Arab armies in the reception hall of Assad’s palace and we have so many squares and statues named after Yusuf al-Azma, but no one says they are Kurds.

Instead the Syrian regime call us ajanib or foreigners, even though we have lived here since before the Crusades. Many Kurds in Syria don’t have ID cards, and without those orange cards you can’t buy property, get government jobs, vote in elections or send your kids to high school.

I guess Turkey is the hardest place to be a Kurd. Atatürk launched a campaign called Turkification, and Turkey doesn’t even recognize Kurds as a people but calls them mountain Turks. Our family live both sides of the border, and one of my aunts who lived in Turkey told us she couldn’t even give her son a Kurdish name but had to call him Orhan, which is Turkish. Nasrine went to stay with her once and told us they don’t speak Kurdish and turned off the radio when she played Kurdish music.

Here is another fact about Kurds. We have our own alphabet which Turkey does not recognize, and until not long ago you could be arrested there if you used the letters Q, W and X, which don’t exist in the Turkish language. Imagine going to jail for a consonant!

We have a saying, ‘Kurds have no friends but in the mountains.’ We love mountains and we believe we are descended from children hidden in the mountains to escape Zuhak, an evil giant with two serpents growing from his shoulders, each of which had to be fed the brains of a boy every day. Finally, a clever blacksmith called Kawa, fed up with losing his sons, started feeding the serpents with sheep brains instead and hiding the boys until he had a whole army of them to slay the giant.

Kurds together always tell stories. Our most famous story is a Kurdish Romeo and Juliet called Mem and Zin . It’s about an island ruled by a prince with two beautiful sisters he keeps locked up, one of whom he calls Zin. One day Zin and her sister escape to go to a festival disguised as men and meet two handsome musketeers, one of whom is Mem. The two pairs of sisters and musketeers fall in love and a lot of things happen, but basically Mem is imprisoned, then killed, and Zin dies of grief at her lover’s grave. Even after death they are kept apart when a thorn bush springs up between them. The story starts by saying, ‘If only there were harmony among us, if we were to obey a single one of us, he would reduce to vassalage Turks, Arabs and Persians, all of them,’ and many Kurds say it symbolizes our struggle for a homeland. Mem represents the Kurdish people and Zin the Kurdish country, separated by unfortunate circumstances. Some people believe it’s true and there is even a grave you can visit.