Let me tell you about 2003. Specifically, 13th December 2003.
My parents, sisters, and I were on the second day of our two-day journey to Hewlêr (Erbil) Kurdistan with our cousins. It used to take two days due to the no-fly zone imposed across airspace within the border of Iraq - we'd fly to Istanbul then to Amed (Diyarbakır) in the Turkish-occupied region of Kurdistan on the first day, then drive from there on the second day past those borders to Hewlêr.
As per usual, there were stops on the way for a break from being in the car, for food and snacks, and for yours truly to puke her guts up again. I got travel sick very easily as a child - so many times in one trip it's not worth counting. It's worth noting that my sisters, cousins, and I were all children - the eldest two were 15 years old and the youngest was 6.
Our last stop before Hewlêr was Duhok in the Iraqi-occupied region of Kurdistan. It was one last meal at a restaurant for that final stretch home.
After we'd finished, we headed back to the cars (yes plural, there were 12 of us and no minibus). The street was busy with people going about their daily business but more were steadily running out of shops and buildings. By the time we all got into the cars, the street was full of people yelling, crying, and cheering.
That was when the news had been announced that Saddam Hussein had been caught.
My sisters and I each have varying memories of what we remember seeing that day. One of my sisters remembers seeing people with pictures of Saddam's face being put in shoes and waved around - a more than appropriate sign of disrespect for the man. I remember my dad talking to people in the street through the car window. Our driver could barely move the car because of the crowds, it took a while to get past. As great as it would have been to stay, we were 12 people made up of a total of 3 adults and 9 children on the last leg of a two-day tiring journey.
It's been 20 years and I was 7 years old but it is still one of my most vivid memories. It was my third trip to Kurdistan but it was the first time I learned who Saddam Hussein was. It was when I first started to understand why we didn't live in our own country. Why my parents left their home 17 years before. It is something I am still learning more about every day as they've started to open up more about the events that led up to leaving.
When we arrived at my grandmother's house in Hewlêr, I sat with her while everyone else got cleaned up and settled to get to bed. It was late and I was still quite poorly. It was when I learned from my grandmother a simple remedy after throwing up - hot water and sugar, something I have relied on to this day. She had it made for me while I sat with her and watched the news. Looped footage of Saddam's medical exam which is now burned into my memory. If we were watching TV any time during that trip, we most likely saw that clip at least once an hour. That, and the music video for Nancy Ajram's debut single.
I don't know how much of my grandmother's reaction or emotion I really registered that first night. I just remembered her sitting quietly with her tasbih in her hand watching the TV screen. She wasn't cheering or smiling with joy. And thinking about it now, I'm not surprised. One of the oppressors of our people may have been captured and the regime may have fallen, but that didn't undo the damage it had done to her family. It didn't undo the fact that one by one, her children were forced to leave their homes and find asylum abroad. It didn't give her those years she missed out on in her children's and grandchildren's lives because they weren't in the same country. It didn't undo the torture my grandfather had been subjected to that broke his body before I ever got to meet him.
Until that point, I used to think it was some sort of requirement that when people grew up and got married, they had to move to a different country from where they grew up. That was the situation most of my relatives I knew were in. The school I went to was very ethnically mixed so a lot of my classmates had parents who came to the UK later in life. I was extremely confused when I talked to the English kids and they said their parents grew up in England. Weren't people supposed to go to another country to visit their grandparents like I did?
Though all my grandparents are gone now, I still sometimes feel that resentment I did as a child when my peers would grumble about seeing their grandparents on the weekend and the fact that they didn't have to get on a plane to another country to see them. It would take a whole weekend for me to get to them. In total, I spent less than half a year of my life seeing my grandparents. Didn't they understand how lucky they were?
At 7 years old, I was already living in a post-9/11 world when things were already changing for Muslims around the world and people became more hostile towards us. 2003 made me begin to understand that I was even more isolated as a Kurd and I started learning why it was difficult for people to understand where I was from when they asked. At 7 years old, I started learning why when people asked me where I was from, I had to explain it to them rather than just be able to say "I'm from Kurdistan". At 7 years old, I started to understand why my parents would tell me not to speak in Kurdish at the borders. At 7 years old, I felt my blood boil for the first time when people referred to me as Nothern Iraqi seconds after I would tell them I was Kurdish.
That year had been one of the worst in Iraqi and Kurdish history - the US-UK coalition invasion of Iraq had started and officially ended earlier in the year, taking thousands of innocent lives, and destroying a beautiful country, all based on a lie. That lie was a betrayal of everything the people within those borders had already suffered and the devastation they had caused was only the beginning. That day in 2003 was one where people felt just a little bit of hope that maybe the horrors of recent decades might be over.
We learned soon enough that there was still more to come. And even now, there is still more to come.
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