Forfatter: Kevin McKiernan
Forlag: St. Martin’s Press, March 2006.

Kevin McKiernan has reported on the Kurds of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria since 1991, but he began his career as a journalist in the 1970s covering armed confrontations by Native Americans. In The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland he draws parallels—using examples of culture, language and genocide—between Native American history and the experience of the Kurds.

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.

McKiernan’s coverage of the war in Iraq includes a visit to the camp of militants linked to al-Qaeda who were responsible for a series of suicide bombings in the Kurdish region, and he examines how U.S. preoccupation with toppling Saddam Hussein allowed many of these insurgents to escape to Iran, regroup and later turn their jihad against the American occupation. McKiernan also examines the role of journalists in the run-up to the war as he tells how his “scoop” about Iraqi scientists, obtained from Kurdish sources, came to be used in U.S. claims that Iraq possessed WMD.

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