Translator: Ivana Krivokuća Reviewer: Mile Živković
I'd like to tell you a story, actually, I'd like to tell you three stories,
but don't sweat it, I talk fast.
My Southern cousins say that I talk fast like a Yankee on drugs.
(Laughter)
So we will get through it all in two, three hours.
There is a people group on the Earth
who are 35 million strong.
They are the largest people group in the world who do not have
a homeland of their own.
They are likely to be the world's next new nation.
They're called the Kurds,
and I'd like to tell you just a little bit of their story.
Now, you probably know more about the Kurds than you think you do.
Perhaps you've seen the beautiful faces of their lovely children
all over the internet and magazines, they're used often.
If you eat yogurt, you already know something about a Kurd.
This is the founder of the Chobani yogurt company, Hamdi Ulukaya.
He's a Kurd.
You may, even if you're not willing to admit it,
be one of the followers of the female Peshmerga,
the guerilla fighters for the Kurds.
The word "peshmerga" is the Kurdish word that means "those who face death".
And some who face death in Kurdistan are women,
and they have many, many Western followers.
The men in Kurdistan have been known as fierce fighters for centuries
and many of them are just ridiculously handsome.
Apparently, that starts rather early.
Look at this little guy. Come on. I should stop now.
What they all want is a place among the nations.
What they all want is a country of their own.
And this is what they dream of. This is their ancient homeland.
They are in the belly of the Middle East
where the Zagros Mountains form the spine of their land
and where they're between Iraq and Iran and Turkey and Syria.
This is what they want, a homeland,
a free and independent Kurdistan that they can call home,
thirty-five million of them.
Now, I'd like to tell you a little bit about the Kurds
and I'd like to use the stories of three women to do it.
It may sound unusual that I would use the stories
of three women,
but the Kurds are proud of the fact
that, thought they are a 97 percent Muslim country,
women are extremely prominent in their society.
Women sit on the Supreme Court. Women command troops.
Women are leading entrepreneurs.
Women are diplomats, as you'll see in a bit.
And they are proud of this, so it's appropriate
with the Kurds particularly that I would use the stories of women.
Let me start with the story of a rather unusual woman,
a British woman, not a Kurdish woman.
Her name is Gertrude Bell.
You may not know that name, but look into the face here for a moment
of Gertrude Bell.
This delicate, Victorian looking face belongs to the woman
who is credited with really being the mother of modern Iraq.
She was born in 1868, she attended Oxford.
A brilliant scholarly mind -
she mastered six languages in the early part of her life, at eight,
and before she was done -
she was not just a great mind, but a courageous soul.
She has mountains in Europe named after her
because she was a brilliant mountaineer.
She once spent 52 hours
hanging by a rope off of a cliff during a blizzard.
That's why they named a mountain for her.
And that's also why there will be no mountains named for me.
(Laughter)
She went to visit an uncle out in Persia, fell in love with the Arab world,
fell in love with the desert, fell in love with the people,
and she became really an expert on the Arab world,
recognized all throughout the British Empire,
and during World War I,
she actually was asked by the British government
to take the soldiers across the desert because she was so good at it.
Now, she did it in typically British style.
Though she was in the middle of the desert,
sometimes in the middle of a war,
she would insist upon stopping and having high tea
and eating her meals off of the finest china from London.
Then she would pack them back into her saddle and storm off across.
You can see in the photograph here.
She's got Arab headdress, a dress from London,
she's sitting in an English saddle and she's having tea.
So this is a beautiful part of who she is.
She had phenomenal impact
upon the configuration of the Middle East after World War I,
because she was such a brilliant woman.
She also had some very influential friends.
One of them was named Winston Churchill, who was, as you can see,
minister of air and war right after World War I.
And another one is T. E. Lawrence. You know him better as Lawrence of Arabia.
These were her hanging buddies.
So she had some influence that others did not have.
She would've had influence anyway
because nobody knew as much as she did about that part of the world.
But I have to tell you, they made a mistake.
These three heroes made a mistake.
They had it in their mind to found a new country.
This was during a time
when the Ottoman Empire had been removed during World War I
and now the Arab's moment was coming in history and the Arabs were emerging,
all of which was to be celebrated.
But these three, these architects of modern Iraq forgot about the Kurds.
Or, if they didn't forget about the Kurds, they at least forgot who the Kurds were
and who they had always been.
Because the Kurds are an ancient people.
The Kurds are people with an incredible heritage
and incredible culture.
They are also not Arabs, they're happy to live in a friendly way,
amongst their Arab friends, but the Kurds are not Arabs,
they're from the Persian side of the Middle Eastern ethnic tree
and they have an intense sense of identity.
If you're Bible readers,
you may know that the Kurds are descendants from the ancient Medes.
They're part of much of the story of the Old Testament,
they're part of the story of Prophet Daniel, for example.
They were there on the day of Pentecost, the ancestors of the modern Kurds,
there on the day of Pentecost,
and Jerusalem and the Christian church was born.
Just a different heritage, a different background
than a lot of those who were around them.
They are a storied people, a covenanted people, a passionate people,
a people who don't want to lose their heritage and their background
and just simply be merged into another culture,
however friendly they might be with that culture.
So, what our three European heroes did -
Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell -
was they fashioned a nation called Iraq
that had never existed before in the world.
And they used the Kurds in the northern part of the country
as a buffer against Turkey,
which was newly emerged from the Ottoman Empire
and still somewhat aggressive.
Notice my words - they used the Kurds.
And they used the Kurds to defend and to protect, to be a buffer
for the Sunni and Shia in the south.
Kurds are friendly with Sunni and Shia, many of them are Sunni and Shia,
but they had no desire to not have a homeland of their own.
President Wilson had promised them one,
European treaties had promised them a homeland of their own,
and so this becomes the basis of much of the trouble that we have today.
This becomes the part of the problem for the Kurds,
because they were used by Europe to protect against Turkey
and not given the homeland of their own that they were promised.
Gertrude Bell,
essentially a mentor to King Faisal,
who became the European-placed king of Iraq,
was well-intentioned.
We can't criticize from this distance, we can't look in this face,
this Victorian delicate face that I mentioned
and think that any harm was intended,
but it laid a basis for great harm,
brilliant and magnificent, though, Gertrude Bell was.
Let me tell you about another woman.
I cannot tell you her real name and I cannot show you her real picture
because it could cost her her life, but we're going to call her Nishtiman.
Nishtiman ended up living in the Iraq as a Kurd
that Gertrude Bell and Lawrence of Arabia and Winston Churchill fashioned for her.
She was born in 1980.
That means that she spent the early years of her life
under the reign of this man, Saddam Hussein.
Saddam Hussein hated the Kurds
because they would not assimilate into his dreams,
for an Arab-Iraq dreams for a Neo-Babylonian Empire.
And so he committed horrible atrocities against them.
Let me warn you, I'm about to show you some pretty gritty pictures.
And on March 16th 1988,
he decided to drop chemical weapons
on Nishtiman's hometown of Halabja.
Perhaps you've heard of Halabja.
And in 1988, on March 16th,
Saddam Husein ordered his airforce
to drop mustard gas, sarin gas, tabun gas,
other forms of gas on a largely defensive people -
his own people, the Kurds, part of Iraqi Kurds.
You see in this photograph here the beginning of it.
He instructed his airforce to drop gas on the perimeter of Halabja,
that would hem the people in, and then he dropped
the serious gas right on them.
These are the billowing clouds of mustard and sarin gas.
People died and died horribly.
Their organs liquefied,
they began to contort in wild ways
and broke their own backs and separated their own joints
and crushed their own skulls.
They went insane, literally, some of them laughing themselves to death.
It sounds horrible to describe that in such a way,
but that's exactly what happened.
Now, prepare yourself.
Deaths were immediate, horrible, 5,000 people died in about two hours,
10,000 more would be horribly disfigured and damaged,
and many of them would die in the following weeks.
This is the photograph of a dead man.
His two sons are alive, but grabbing him, don't want to leave.
Grandpa is trying to get them to leave that site.
The elderly died instantly and froze in place.
The sad tragedy of this particular couple is that they died instantly,
but stayed in that vehicle for days,
the neighbors thinking they were alive and sometimes waving to them.
That's how the death occured.
At this photograph, a man in a home,
when the gas began to come into his home, grabbed his son, ran to a neighbor,
didn't make it, they both died.
What's interesting is that this is now the carving for the statue.
This picture is the basis for the statue
of the monument of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan.
So they literally took that picture of a man holding his son
as the symbol of the entire affair.
Nishtiman lost her father in that gassing of Halajba.
Her eight-year-old flesh burned for months.
Some people's burned for years.
Her mother survived, but then later,
her mother was taken captive by Saddam's troops,
and buried in a mass grave.
There are many of them that dot Iraqi Kurdistan.
Saddam knew how to do this well.
But the Kurds are a unique people.
They intend to honor their dead, they know how to find these mass graves.
Nishtiman's mother was found and DNA confirmed who she was,
and she was buried.
Nobody intends in Iraqi Kurdistan
for the dead not to be honored.
They grieve, they put them all, all the remains in coffins,
and they celebrate their lives and offer them to God.
This is what they do, because that is their history and their tradition.
So what happened to Nishtiman?
Well, I told you she was born in 1980, that means she's 36 now.
What is she doing?
Well, you might enjoy knowing, given what you've seen of her sufferings,
that she is now - and by the way, the pictures I'm about to show you,
none of them are her.
These are people she is like, because I cannot show you her picture.
She is one of these awesome female Peshmerga,
and her tribe of warriors are feared by ISIS,
because ISIS has an unquranic, unusual belief
that if they are killed by a woman, they will not go to paradise.
These women enjoy that thought immensely.
(Cheers)
(Applause)
Some of them are the best marksmen and snipers amongst the Peshmerga,
and my male Kurdish friends are going to get on my case about that,
but it's just true, I'm telling you.
And they are just magnificent, and Nishtiman is among them.
What's interesting to watch,
for those of us paying attention to these trends,
is how so many of these female Peshmerga have got Twitter accounts,
how they have a huge following in the West.
Many of them, as you can see, are pretty. You see this woman holding an iPad.
She's shooting during the day
and then checking in with her friends and followers at night.
(Laughter)
And for some reason I can't really imagine,
they get many, many marriage proposals
from Western men. (Laughter)
I mean, I met them, I think they're awesome,
but you better be a good spouse, that's all I got to say.
(Laughter)
You better hang in.
So that's Nishtiman. Let me tell you about one other woman.
Her name is Bayan. B-a-y-a-n,
a woman I deeply admire.
Bayan was raised by the man you see on the right and his wife, of course,
Sami Abdul Rahman.
It's this man, a Kurdish hero.
He was a leader of the resistance against the regime, as the Kurds will say,
which largely means Saddam, but all of the years that the Iraqi regime
was oppressive to the Kurds.
This man was brilliant, well-educated, spoke English,
but because he was part of the resistance, he ended up living in the mountains.
That means that little Bayan ended up living in the mountains,
and so they, on the one hand,
had their homes filled with Western journalists,
because, again, they spoke English and could articulate their Kurdish cause.
On the other hand, they lived a hard and rugged village life
of the Zagros Mountains,
and you can just picture little Bayan here,
nibbling bread with hardened soldiers and them loving her like a little mascot.
This is sort of the culture that she grew up with.
Zagros Mountains are beautiful, but hard and treacherous.
This is the native homeland of the Kurds.
They're called Mountain Kurds, in fact,
by those who try to be a little bit insulting,
but it's actually true.
Her father - unbelievably influential,
helped to build what we now know of Iraqi Kurdistan.
When more freedom came - Saddam was dealt with -
he became a Prime Minister of his own party.
Really a pretty amazing man.
Unfortunately, in 2004,
there was a double bombing by an Islamic extremist group
and Dr. Sami Abdul Rahman was killed along with his son.
A very, very violent moment.
Now, by that time, Bayan had gone to England to be educated.
Part of it was to keep her safe.
She had become a journalist for the Financial Times -
very prestigious role.
She was assigned to do her journalism by the Financial Times in Japan,
where she spent many, many years.
She always thought of Kurdistan,
always followed, of course, what her father was doing,
always cared for Kurdistan.
But she didn't know exactly how she should live that out.
Well, eventually she knew
that she would have to live out her parents' legacy,
that she would have to live out her love for Kurdistan
and what her parents had embedded in her soul.
And so today, little Bayan is actually Madam Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman.
She is the representative to the Washington DC
of the Kurdish regional government.
She is arguably the most powerful Kurdish woman in the world.
Unbelievable.
(Applause)
She's about that tall.
It's all dynamite.
She's a cross between Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher
and Oprah and Pink, I guess, if you want some attitudes drawn in there.
(Laughter)
She's pretty amazing.
She spends her time telling the US government in Washington
how they need to stand up with the Kurds against ISIS,
and how they need to be prepared for independent Kurdistan.
And that, I think, is what is important for you today.
What does this mean to you? Why is this relevant to you?
Well, you're smart, you're educated, you're here.
You're socially conscious.
And 35 million Kurdish people
are waiting to be born into the family of free nations.
I intend to help them. I hope you will too.
Thank you.
(Applause)