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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Badolato: The town where Kurds find peace

This is the second part of a Courthouse News report on how a small town in Calabria became Italy's first experiment with hosting refugees and trying to integrate them into Italian society.

BADOLATO, Italy (CN) — There is no war in Badolato.

Instead, it is the peaceful old town in Calabria where the children of war feel at home.

On a warm July evening, the young Kurds who've fled their war-torn homelands met as they often do on the benches of a large square in Badolato, a fortress-like Norman town perched on a ridge with views onto the Ionian Sea.

The Kurds, all of them from northern Iraq, hardly spoke a word of Italian or any language other than their native ones. Their English was spotty at best.

Fortunately, one among them was fluent in Italian, a 24-year-old agriculture student who's studied in Italy since 2014.

Jamal Abdulqader introduced himself and spoke for the others, translating each of the men's stories about how they made it to Badolato.

Several told a common story: They left Iraq after the Islamic State attacked. They departed on foot and took months to arrive in Italy after crossing Turkey. One of the young men said his father was killed by IS fighters.

“We want so much for there to be a Kurdistan,” Abdulqader said, referring to the unrealized nation Kurds want so badly.

Kurds make up one of the largest ethnic groups in the world without a nation. There are roughly between 30 million and 45 million people of Kurdish ethnicity spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, former Soviet republics and Europe.

Kurds, who are united by language and customs, are generally Muslim by faith, but for historical, ethnic and religious reasons were rejected by much of the Muslim world. They have suffered genocide, persecution and other horrors.  

“Everyone around Kurdistan doesn't like the Kurds,” Abdulqader said. “They're all enemies: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Arabs, Turks, Persians.”

The story of the Kurds is as old as human civilization.

Erbil, a city of 1.5 million people in northern Iraq, is considered the Kurdish capital. It also may be the oldest human settlement that continues to be lived in.

Today, Erbil is the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq and its 5 million people, most of them Kurds. Effectively, this is the first Kurdish nation, but the young men said it has deep problems and the threat of violence hangs over it.

“It's a beautiful country,” Abdulqader said of Kurdistan. “I would like to live there. But it's the [Kurdish-Iraqi] government that doesn't work.”

With a glint of hope in his eyes, he added: “If there is peace there, it will become the most beautiful country in the world.”

A painting inside a refugee center in Badolato, a Calabrian town in southern Italy, symbolically depicts a refugee being saved from drowning in the sea. (Cain Burdeau/Courthouse News)

At the conclusion of World War I and with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Western allies began carving up lands once ruled by the sultans of Istanbul.

This led to the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 and in this division of spoils the allies made room for a new nation called Kurdistan. But two years later, further defining new national boundaries, the allies crafted a new treaty — the Treaty of Lausanne — and in it there was no provision for the state of Kurdistan.

“Kurdistan was divided into four parts: one part was in Iraq, one part in Iran, one part in Syria and one part in Turkey,” Abdulqader said.

Since then, he lamented, no country has been willing to give up lands to make way for a Kurdish state.

“I am tired of living there,” he said. “There is no future. The government is against me. All the other countries are against me; I wouldn't be able to find a job because they don't leave you alone.”

Jamal Abdulqader reads old newspapers pinned on a board inside a refugee center in Badolato, a town in Calabria in southern Italy, that talk about how the town became a model of welcoming refugees into Italian society. (Cain Burdeau/Courthouse News)

From the square, the young men headed for dinner at one of two stone houses that the town of Badolato has set aside for them. They sleep in shared bedrooms on cots, eat together and study at a small refugee center below town.

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Settled around the table, they eagerly ate rice and meat in a spicy soup made for them by another Kurd, a former soldier called Peshkawt Rashid.

The room filled with talk as they broke bread, drank tea and water and smoked cigarettes. Rashid looked on contentedly at his comrades slurping up his delicious meal.

With the help of one of the men who speaks English, Rashid talked about the horrors Kurds have suffered. He said the fight against IS militants was ghastly.

The world owes the Kurds a nation, they said.

“The Kurds were fighting for the whole world,” Abdulqader said of Kurdish soldiers like Rashid who took on IS fighters.

Kurdish forces, long among the Middle East's most fearsome, are credited with halting the IS advance. More than 11,000 Kurds lost their lives in that conflict.

“Do you know why no one in the Middle East likes the Kurds?” said Mohammid Ahmid Ibrahim, the son of a Kurdish commander and the young man who speaks English. “Because Kurds support Israel. Kurds and Israelis are friends.”

In this turbulent moment in global affairs, the young men said they were afraid for the future of Kurds and Kurdistan. They said they felt abandoned by the United States and potential targets for their enemies.

Kurdish peshmerga — literally, a term meaning “facing death” or “those who face death” — forces were heavily involved on the side of the U.S. in both the Gulf War in 1991 and in the Iraq invasion of 2003.

“Without the Kurds, would it have been possible to take Saddam Hussein?” Abdulqader asked rhetorically. “Would America have been able to invade Iraq if the Kurds had been with Saddam Hussein? Were the Kurds thanked for all this? For all these wars? I'm not going to say anything else.”

Nogdar Majid Hussein, a Kurdish refugee, shows a picture of himself with other Kurdish refugees who arrived in southern Italy aboard the Ararat ship in December 1997. (Cain Burdeau/Courthouse News)

Sitting on a chair inside the refugee center the following morning, Nogdar Majid Hussein talked about how he had returned fortuitously back to Badolato.

The 47-year-old was among the 836 people who arrived on the Calabrian shores near Badolato on Dec. 26, 1997, aboard the Ararat ship. He was 23 years old at the time.

By 1997, Kurds in Iraq had come under attack by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's forces. He was furious at Kurdish support for the Americans during the Gulf War.

Nogdar Hussein's family paid about $1,800 for him to be taken to safety in Europe. With others sharing his fate, he was taken across Turkey and placed in the Ararat. His passage across Turkey was, he said, approved by Turkish police.

Once aboard the Ararat, he said it took 13 days in heavy seas to make the crossing to Calabria. Packed inside the ship, the crossing was terrifying as huge waves struck the vessel.

“Three or four times it was God that saved us from those huge waves,” he said, speaking through a translation by Abdulqader.

“A pregnant woman from a town near mine lost her child,” he recalled.

“We were able to sleep very little — three, four hours a day,” he recounted. “We slept on the ship's floor. They gave us nothing to eat, just some salty cheese.”

Finally, when he exited the Ararat on a cold December day on the shores of Calabria, he knew he had made it to safety.

In 1997, he stayed only a few nights in Badolato before he was transferred to a large makeshift refugee camp. Without a family of his own, he was not eligible to be part of the experiment at that moment being born in Badolato.

While he was sent off with other Kurds, about 20 young Kurdish families were given homes in the old and abandoned part of Badolato. That project became a pioneering experiment in Italy to host refugees and integrate them into society.

After arriving in Italy in 1997, Hussein's life took many twists and turns: He stayed with Kurdish aunts and grandparents in Sweden and the Netherlands; he moved back to Turkey to help his ailing mother; he met a woman who'd become his wife; he worked as a truck driver. He lived a good life.

But by 2018, the situation in Turkey had become dangerous again, he said, and he moved his wife and three children to Kurdish Iraq. He then decided to try his fortunes once again in Italy, the country where he was still registered as a refugee.

Badolato took him back him.

“Now I am proud,” he said about being one of the Kurds aboard the Ararat, a ship that made history.

He showed pictures on his smartphone. In the photos, he was among others from the Ararat. He lit up looking at the memories and grinned.

“I still don't have a future,” he said. “I want to bring my family here. This time, I want to stay right here in Badolato. I don't want to leave.”

He said Badolato feels like home.

“It's beautiful for a person who doesn't have anywhere to go, who doesn't have a chance to live anywhere.”

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

Follow Cain Burdeau on Twitter

Follow @cainburdeau
Categories / Civil Rights, Government, International

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