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Kevin
McKiernan has been a war correspondent for more than thirty
years. He covered the Iraq war for ABC News, in both Kurdish and
Arab areas. Prior to that, he co-produced the film, The Spirit
of Crazy Horse for PBS Frontline and wrote and directed
Good Kurds, Bad Kurds, the award-winning PBS documentary.
McKiernan has published articles about and photographs of the Kurds
in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek,
Time and other publications. He lives in Santa Barbara,
California.
“Written from
intimate knowledge and rich personal experience in war and peace,
laced with sympathy and understanding, this remarkable
memoir-history is at once painful and inspiring. It provides
incomparable insight into the suffering and courage and undying
hopes of people who have suffered far too much, not least at our
hands.” “Kevin
McKiernan turns an unblinking eye on the Kurds, warts and all, and
presents vivid accounts of some of their lives. He also tells us
much about the life of a journalist committed to tell his reader
truths obtained at great cost to himself.” |
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With a population
of more than twenty-five million, the Kurds are the largest ethnic
group in the world without their own state, but until recently their
long struggle for autonomy has received relatively little attention.
Following World War I, the Kurds were promised a homeland, but the
dream collapsed amid pressures of Turkish nationalism and the Allied
realignment of the Middle East. For the remainder of the century,
the story of the Kurds was one of almost constant conflict, as
Middle East governments repressed Kurdish culture, language and
politics, destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages, “disappeared” and
even gassed the Kurds–often as the West provided military assistance
or simply looked away.
McKiernan mixes Middle East history with personal narrative, as he comes face-to-face with Kurdish refugees in the mountains of Iraq and Iran, a hidden war in Turkey, guerrilla safe houses in Syria and Lebanon, backpacking trips behind army lines and scrapes with hostile soldiers and, finally, the discovery that his personal translator during the Iraq war was also a spy for Saddam Hussein. His complex portrait of the Kurds includes interviews with Jalal Talabani, the first Kurdish president of Iraq, members of the legendary Barzani family, and Abdullah Ocalan, the now-imprisoned leader of the long Kurdish uprising in Turkey. Interwoven throughout is the story of the author’s charming and resilient driver who survived a terrorist attack in Iraq, and the American doctors who nursed him back to health.
Praise
for The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland
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