Silent No Longer: Trump's Betrayal Stirs DFW's Sizable Kurdish Community to Action
In 1991, Saddam Hussein used tanks and helicopters to subdue rebelling Kurds in northern Iraq. Terrified that Hussein would again use chemical weapons, as he had in 1988, millions of the country’s persecuted Kurdish minority fled. Saman Gardy was one of them. He and his family were living in Erbil, a major Kurdish city in the region, and they escaped over the Zagros Mountains into Turkey. The trek took over a week. He was 10 years old.
Gardy remembers huddling in a mosque with hundreds of neighbors, praying for protection as mortars crashed overhead. Some, too old and too weak to cross the mountains, were left to die. He remembers seeing babies succumb to the cold. He remembers standing beside other young men as they were shot and killed. “If I were a little bit taller, they would have gotten me too,” he said.
His entire family survived, though, and after three years in a Turkish refugee camp, they were flown to the United States. Here, Gardy went to school, became a U.S. citizen, raised a son and joined a growing Kurdish American community in Plano that has quietly thrived. Quietly, that is, until President Donald Trump withdrew U.S. forces from northern Syria, leaving Kurdish lives threatened by their longstanding enemy Turkey, upending decades of U.S. foreign policy and outraging the local DFW Kurdish American community.
Sitting at a Starbucks in Plano, a weekly meeting spot for local Kurdish activists, Gardy explained the complicated relationship between the United States and the Kurds. The United States has long relied on Kurdish soldiers in its wars in the Middle East. Many have assisted U.S. forces as fixers or translators. About 11,000 Kurds have died fighting ISIS. In exchange, the United States has provided the Kurds with protection, which they have used to nurture one of the region’s most progressive democracies in an autonomous area of Syria. Erbil, the Kurdish capital in Iraq, was recently declared the Arab tourism capital.
Read more: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dallas-kurdish-community-stirred-to-action-by-trumps-abandonment-11799617
