A Deep Look at Iraqi Kurdistan’s ‘Republic of Dreams’

To really know a place is to see it through the experiences of those who live there. This is all too often lost in writing about global affairs that revolves around the high politics of security, trade, and great power competition. It is especially true for communities that are marginalized. Their authentic stories are crowded out in favor of narratives hegemonic powers craft to exclude them. Iraq’s Kurdistan Region suffers from all of these aspects, making it hard for outside observers to properly understand it and its people at a human level. Nicole F. Watts’s new book, Republic of Dreams, takes this problem head on.

At its core, her book is a political history of the Kurdistan Region over the past three and a half decades, a much-needed and useful resource. Still, what stands out is the book’s narrative nonfiction approach, a method that creates a vibrant and deeply engaging encounter with the everyday struggles of ordinary Kurds as they seek to build dignified lives in the face of more than their fair share of challenges.

Republic of Dreams follows the life of a young man named Peshawa Ahmed, who was born in an Iranian refugee camp just a few months after his pregnant mother, father, and family narrowly escaped the Halabja chemical attack on March 16, 1988. They were extremely lucky: an estimated 5,000 Kurdish civilians died when an Iraqi pilot dropped bombs containing sarin, mustard gas, and other chemical weapons on the town. He serves as the central character as he grows up and builds a life for himself. He is also our guide through the tumultuous events that led to Kurdish political autonomy, economic development, partisan infighting, and even the brink of independence.
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Watts’s approach reveals the changes and dynamics that are fundamental to understanding Iraqi Kurdish politics, some of which are lost in more traditional accounts. A key section of the early part of the book focuses on a protest in Peshawa’s hometown of Halabja in 2006. At annual commemorations of the chemical attack, prominent Kurdish politicians would flood into the city and use its tragedy to burnish their image, but then ignore the city’s development the rest of the year. Fed up with this two-faced neglect, residents staged a protest, only to facing shooting from the security forces. One young man died as a result. Enraged at this violent response to their legitimate grievances, the protesters set fire to the chemical attack memorial.

As a curious and impressionable teenager, Peshawa participated in the protest with his schoolmates and found himself caught up in its bloody repression. His decision to join the demonstration and subsequent feelings about his own choices and those around him are a vehicle for understanding. Through him, Watts explains the social, economic, and political forces that led a community to burn down a symbol of their own genocide. It is an act so shocking or ironic that it is hard to comprehend in a general way, but becomes perfectly understandable thanks to the context in Watts’s compelling methodology.

As we follow Peshawa as he grows up, goes to university, succeeds and fails to get jobs, and raises a family, he finds himself present at pivotal moments in the Kurdistan Region’s history. The key themes that define his society arise naturally through his life, giving Watts a chance to deftly deploy her deep understanding of Kurdistan and explain matters big and small.
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For example, Peshawa is a student in Sulaymaniyah during the massive anti-corruption protests that rocked that city in 2011. He is a young professional living in Erbil when Islamic State (ISIS) militants threaten to sack the Kurdistan Region’s capital in the summer of 2014 before resistance from the Peshmerga and US airstrikes turn them back. He is a new father considering his son’s future as he votes in the 2017 independence referendum. Facing disappointing economic conditions at home, he grapples with a decision about whether to migrate.

Many readers will recognize these headline-grabbing events, but will find Watts’s descriptions of seemingly ordinary things to be valuable in developing a real sense of what matters in Kurdish society. Peshawa experiences deeply relatable adolescent stress while studying for critical school leaving exams.

It speaks to the Kurdistan Region’s difficult balance between its secular nationalist politics and the social influence of religion.

They determine whether he can go to university and even the specific degree he can pursue. This gives us much to mull over about problems in the education system. Peshawa is a religious man and must navigate uncomfortable situations — both in Kurdistan and abroad — as a result of his faith. It speaks to the Kurdistan Region’s difficult balance between its secular nationalist politics and the social influence of religion.
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That said, Peshawa is not our only source in telling the story of the Kurdistan Region. Watts has worked on Kurdistan for decades, first as a journalist and now as a political scientist. The author deeply researched the book, which she wrote over a 10-year period, and it includes plenty of endnotes that document the events depicted. Not only does Watts’s account ring true, but it also digs deeper than the narratives the region’s ruling parties have advanced, while resisting the urge to take a political side.

While the reader can gain much from Watt’s decision to center Peshawa and his life, it nevertheless creates a bias in his favor that is evident throughout the book. Human beings are fallible, but we never see Peshawa when he is mean, arrogant, or rude — as we all can be at times. It is understandable that Watts shies away from describing him negatively and perhaps it would be gratuitous for her to go out of her way to dwell on any of those qualities. But, as a reader, it is hard to believe that anyone could come out so clean.

Republic of Dreams deserves a spot on the shelf of anyone interested in foreign affairs, not just Kurdistan: although it should join the ranks of required reading for any diplomat or journalist arriving in Erbil. It calls on us to better understand the people who live in the places that are the objects of geopolitical churn. As a writer, it must have been difficult to move into a new genre and take a methodological risk, but in the end Watts succeeds admirably and tells a complicated and difficult story with clarity and depth.
Winthrop Rodgers

Winthrop Rodgers is a journalist and researcher who focuses on politics, human rights, and political economy. He spent six years living and working in Sulaymaniyah in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region and currently serves as a Chatham House associate fellow.