Kurdish Summer in Baghdad

It was a sweltering summer in Baghdad, and Chia N. Mustafa ’09 was bored.

The 16-year-old had come to Baghdad in April 2003 to join his father, then the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), he said.

He had skipped the last two months of school in London, he said, to witness the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He said it was a moment he had been waiting for “my whole life.”

“I wanted to be at the center of it,” he said.

But while his father, Nawshirwan Mustafa, moved from meeting to meeting seeking to promote Kurdistan’s interests in the interim government, Mustafa said he was left behind.

He said he would spend his days in his father’s barracks playing dominoes with members of his father’s armed Kurdish contingent, his Kalashnikov rifle close by his side.

Some nights, when Baghdad’s American-imposed curfew barred them from the streets, Mustafa and the Kurdish soldiers would amuse themselves by shooting their rifles into the air.

The bullets whizzed into the darkness.

Afterwards, he said, he would fall asleep in the courtyard of a looted house—once the residence of a member of Saddam’s secret police—that his father had commandeered as a central base.

A ROVER’S LIFE

Mustafa, a joint Economics and Government concentrator in Kirkland House, had spent most of his life in exile in Europe and the Middle East.

At the age of four, he said that he and his twin sister—along with more than 20 family members—were held as political prisoners by Saddam’s government.

“It kind of sucked,” he said.

Living with his father in Baghdad was a chance to stand at the front lines of history.

While he was there, Mustafa said, members of his father’s armed contingent engaged in battle to secure Kurdish interests in the capital.

He said he spent some of his time with members of his father’s militia, but he declined to comment on whether he had done any fighting himself. (“Awkward question,” he wrote in an e-mail.)

Mustafa remembers his time in the war-torn city as alternating between boredom and absurdity.

It was so hot that a cassette tape once melted on the dashboard of his Land Cruiser, Mustafa said.

Women in full Islamic garb would knock on the door, Mustafa said, and offer to clean his house. Even when he said no, they persisted, he said.

“These are, like, respectable Muslim women—why do they want to clean your house?” Mustafa said. “And they say, ‘We’ll clean your house for a cheap price.’ They’ll emphasize “your,” and you’d be like, ‘Oh.’”

The women, Mustafa said, were prostitutes.

Once he saw a camel tethered to the balcony on the top floor of an apartment building, Mustafa said.

“You know you’re in the twilight zone—that’s where you are,” he said.

The city had been so thoroughly looted after the invasion that the doorknobs had been stolen off the doors of their central base.

In the uncertain political situation, random violence started to consolidate into organized crime, he said.

“Slowly but surely, gangs were being formed,” Mustafa said. “Random little gangs—people who just decided they could make money off of killing other people.”

He would go to hookah bars in the afternoons out of sheer boredom, he said, even though there was always the risk that whichever bar he had chosen would be bombed.

Mustafa said he called his mother in Kurdistan only once during his five-month stay.

“What are you going to say to her?” Mustafa said.

She had warned him not to go to Baghdad.

FROM THE TIGRIS TO THE CHARLES

After returning to London for school in September 2003, Mustafa returned to Baghdad the following summer to join a better equipped Kurdish militia—now armed, he said, with American guns.

As his father attended government meetings, the contingent built into the hundreds, and “it was actually kind of fun,” Mustafa said. His father took him along to the meetings, Mustafa said.

But Mustafa’s next big move would bring him away from the chaos of a nation in transition to the bustle of Harvard Yard.

Titan M. Alon ’09, Mustafa’s suitemate, remembers that Mustafa spent much of his freshman year chain-smoking Marlboros outside of Holworthy while making long-distance calls to Iraq.

“You’d see him yelling in Kurdish,” Alon said. “He was like a jungle animal that had been brought to live in suburbia.”

But as a friend, Alon said, Mustafa proved to be loyal and generous, someone who would buy extravagant birthday gifts for his roommates and expect nothing in return.

“He’s lived in the ghetto, he’s eaten from a silver spoon, he’s been through war, he’s been through everything,” Alon said.

FUTURE PLANS

Today, Mustafa’s room is sparsely decorated, Alon said, except for a Kurdish flag and a photograph of his father—“the only things he owns that he doesn’t let anyone touch or move.”

The currents of Kurdish politics have continued in Mustafa’s absence.

In 2006, Jalal Talabani—the current president of Iraq—replaced Mustafa’s father as head of PUK.

“[My father’s] the head of the reform movement now in Kurdistan,” Mustafa said. “He’s leading a movement for change.”

At Harvard, Mustafa has found forums for political action that do not require a Kalashnikov.

Last year, he wrote an article in “The New Society,” the student Middle East journal, making the case for Kurdish sovereignty.

He also started a Facebook group called “Independent Kurdistan!!!” whose logo is a drawing of four knives—representing Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq—stabbing Kurdistan’s heart.

Mustafa said his current dream is to get a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, but his post-graduation plans will depend on the situation in Iraq.

He’s not ruling out a career in Kurdish politics.

“If it’s stable and good, I’ll go back to the States for grad school. If it’s unstable and there’s political strife, I’ll stay in Kurdistan to do my part,” he said. “Whatever is necessary.”

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.

For comprehensive coverage of the Iraq War's impact at Harvard five years later, check out The Crimson's Iraq Supplement.