Nicole F. Watts, Republic of Dreams: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Struggles, and the Future of Iraqi Kurdistan (NYU Press, 2025).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Nicole F. Watts (NFW): Republic of Dreams is written as narrative nonfiction and is told largely through the eyes of one young Kurdish man. The book developed out of my scholarly research on protest and campaigns for political change in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where I have been working for about fifteen years. As I did this work I met a lot of people who—though they had come through deeply traumatic events—continually impressed me with their courage, resilience, and generosity. Many were working class, with perspectives that are not the ones that usually make it into print, especially in the United States. I wrote the book the way I did because I thought their ideas and stories mattered, and I did not want to bury them under an academic argument. Also, I very much wanted to write something on Iraqi Kurdistan for a nonspecialist audience, to share something of this place—and of the warmth and humanity of all these people—with Americans and others who had no idea about what life was like in this part of the world. I always thought, if they could just meet people like Peshawa (the book’s protagonist) and his family and friends, they would like them and care about them.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

NFW: I spent the first half of my academic career studying and writing about Kurdish activism in Turkey. After I began working in the Kurdistan region of Iraq in 2009, I published a number of articles and book chapters on protest and campaigns for political change under the Kurdistan Regional Government, especially in towns like Halabja. Intellectually, this book builds on my decades of research in Kurdish studies and on my expertise in state-society relations, mobilization and protest, democratization, and struggles over national identity. However, it departs from my previous work in its genre: narrative nonfiction, rather than an academic book. It is deeply researched nonfiction, but I use the techniques of fiction—character, plot, dialogue, setting, suspense, and the like—to immerse readers in the world of Iraqi Kurdistan between 1988 and 2022.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

NFW: As I have said, the book is written as narrative nonfiction, so it does not fit a typical academic mold. It tells three intertwined stories: of a boy (Peshawa) trying to do something big with his life, when all the cards are stacked against him; of a community (Halabja) trying to rebuild itself after a series of devastating attacks; and of a people (Iraqi Kurds) trying to govern themselves in the face of enormous internal and external challenges. It is a book that explores the limits and opportunities of human initiative in the face of sweeping historical and political forces. I ask what happens when people like this—who have so little in the way of advantages and material resources—go out into the world and demand a chance at a better life. 

On the more academic side of things, the book is informed by scholarship on ethnicity and nationalism, social movements and mobilization, state-building, historical memory, and democratization, along with Kurdish history and politics. It is also a book that drops us into everyday life in a place like Iraqi Kurdistan: it shows what it is like to go to a public high school in Halabja and attend a new English-language university when you barely speak a word of English; tells us about courtship and marriage in a pious Muslim family; about employment; the challenges of what scholars call “border bureaucracies” and visa applications; family life; emigration and return.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

NFW: I wrote this book primarily for nonspecialist audiences: for ordinary people who do not necessarily know much about the Kurds or Iraq or the Middle East and do not normally read nonfiction. So far, they say they’re enjoying it! At the same time, I wanted this to be a book that scholars and specialists could appreciate because of its original research, and because it was the kind of book professors could assign in classes and have students want to read. Finally, I wanted it to honor the experiences of the people in the book, even if some of them are illiterate, and I do not expect them to actually read it, in any language.

Most fundamentally, I want people to take away from it a message of hope, about how ordinary people can find the resilience to keep going even when things get very bad. I think that message is especially important right now, for all of us. I want readers to come away with an appreciation for the humanity of the people in the book: of Kurds, Iraqis, Muslims, and people from this region. I want them to learn something about the cultural, social, and political diversities within Iraqi Kurdistan and among Kurds more generally. I would also like readers to take away from it a deeper understanding of the power of home. So many of the narratives we have of peoples from this region are ones of illegal immigration and refugees drowning at sea. This story shows another side to that: how hard people will struggle to remain at home, to rebuild and return home, even when they have been forced out, and even when they encounter opportunities to go elsewhere. Through all of this, I hope the book will help shape readers’ views on the Kurds and the region in a positive way. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NFW: Mostly I am working on producing an audiobook of Republic of Dreams and getting a Kurdish-language translation off the ground! However, I am also exploring another narrative nonfiction project about a small group of Western news reporters who teamed up with local Kurds to make the world do something to protect Iraqi Kurdistan after the collapse of the 1991 uprising and its population’s mass exodus to the borders that spring, at the end of the first Gulf War. On a very different note, I am considering a sort of historical memoir about my time as a political science department chair in the run-up to what might be termed the crisis of American democracy.

J: In what ways does the book connect the personal journey of Peshawa’s family to the larger political history of Iraqi Kurdistan?

NFW: Put simply, they were there and had their lives transformed by all of them, and I write these events largely through their eyes. Their experiences let us see these events from a front row seat. Often, they were not personally invested in the events themselves and so give us a sense of how someone simply trying to lead their life would view them. At the same time, they show us that people are not simply victims of their circumstances. They are victims, yes, but they also find ways to push back and reclaim some level of agency. They do not necessarily simply accept the script that is handed to them, and they will often try and find ways to rewrite it. And in so doing, they can change the balance of power.

The book walks us through those events largely through their point of view and, I hope, helps us better understand what happened and why. For example, Peshawa and his friends’ involvement in the 2011 pro-democracy protests helps us break up essentialist ideas about “nation” and “the Kurds,” and shows internal struggles over the future of Iraqi Kurdish governance. Their considerations over how to vote in the 2017 Kurdistan Independence Referendum take us behind the scenes, showing us that—even if ninety-five percent of Kurds voted “yes” for independence—there was a a great deal of concern over how the referendum took place and the potential impacts of such a move.

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1, pages 3 to 5)

Peshawa survived the 1988 chemical gassing of Halabja by hitching a ride. Not in a pickup truck, whose passengers lived or died according to the will of God and the way the March winds blew through Kurdistan that morning, but as a pigeon-sized infant curled in his mother’s womb. Still, in the trajectory of his life he could mark it as his first notable achievement, since he might have been erased before he began, without even a name to inscribe among the 5,000 victims on the black marble wall inside Halabja’s Monument of Martyrs. 

That he lived, and was born to be given a name, could be chalked up to the forces of luck and determination. He couldn’t have said exactly how the two negotiated the fate of his mother, and thus his own existence. A man named Omar Khawr who lived just a few blocks from Peshawa’s house had tried very hard to save his own family, but he died anyway. When the gasses cleared, photographers found Omar Khawr face down on the street clutching the body of his infant son. If the Iraqi pilot had released the bomb just a fraction of a second later, or if the breeze had blown just a little harder, perhaps instead of Omar Khawr and his baby it would have been Peshawa’s mother and sister’s photograph published in newspapers around the world as evidence of the worst-ever chemical bombing against civilians in human history, and it would have been his mother and his sister’s cement statue lying prostrate in the center of the traffic roundabout they built years later. Peshawa never let himself think about it like that; it would have been too horrible, but you couldn’t grow up in Halabja, Kurdistan region of Iraq, without being at least dimly conscious of the perplexities of happenstance.

Neither of his parents had talked much about this when he was little, so it wasn’t until he was in his teens that he stitched together the story of how his family dodged martyrdom and how he, Peshawa of Halabja, came to be born under a tree in an Iranian refugee camp in the summer of 1988.

***

Peshawa’s mother Mahbubeh never went to school, but she didn’t need history classes to understand that being an ordinary Kurdish person meant that life could be upturned in the heartbeat between bathing a daughter and making bread; that, once again, Kurdish struggles to govern themselves were ending very badly. She knew it then, just as she had known it growing up in an Iraq where hundreds of thousands of Kurdish men were corralled onto trucks and driven away by soldiers, never to return, and where so many Kurdish villages had been flattened by Iraqi army bulldozers. As many as 4,000 towns, razed between the mid-1970s and the late 1980s. Officials in Baghdad called the Kurds traitors, if they bothered to say anything at all. 

On that morning of March 16, 1988 Mahbubeh was 23 years old, already a mother of three and with the baby-who-would-become Peshawa on the way. She had just begun cooking the dough over the open flame in the house’s courtyard when she heard the approaching aircraft. The planes sounded as if they were heading straight for Halabja. She threw down the bread bowl and ducked inside the house, scooping up two-year-old Shayma in one arm, catching little Taban by the hand, urging eight-year-old Shadan to hurry, hurry, hurry. They bolted down the street to her brother-in-law’s home, where she pushed open the front door and flung herself and the girls down the steps into the cellar. The cinder-block basement, normally filled with sacks of vegetables, was already crowded with family members. 

Her eyes found Ahmed, sitting against the wall on a bed mat. Peshawa’s father was in his 30s, twelve years her senior, but he remained lean and muscled, a coiled spring of a man with a square chin and chiseled features that belied the many years of his life spent in hard physical labor. Now his tan face looked drained of color. Two days earlier a bomb had fallen near him as he walked in their neighborhood. One man lost his life. Ahmed lived, but the shrapnel blew through his right leg just below the knee, leaving mangled tendons and a big hole. 

When Mahbubeh found him at the hospital the doctors insisted grimly that he’d be safer at home than in the large ward, which gave the Iraqi aircraft too easy a target. She had hesitated. Their small cinderblock home offered little protection from aerial bombardment.

“Bring him to my place,” her brother-in-law suggested. “The cellar’s safer, and at least that way you won’t have to move him if the bombers come back.”

There were rumors earlier in the week, warnings from those who whispered of terrible Iraqi retribution for the Kurdish alliance with Iran. Some townspeople had left, following the Kurdish peshmerga fighters who had filled the streets just days before. The others remained, hoping President Saddam Hussein wouldn’t punish ordinary citizens for the choices Kurdish leaders had made, hoping the regime’s wrath would blow over. It hadn’t. Now the clouds were raining bombs.

[…] (from Chapter 13, pages 129 to 131)

Peshawa woke early to his neighbor Karwan tapping on his door. 

“Let’s get over to the square and see what we can learn,” Karwan said. Peshawa nodded and threw on some clothes, relieved to have Karwan at his side. Some of his friends would be useless in a crisis, but Karwan was fit and smart and always acted with cool professionalism. When they arrived at the square he could see that the protesters’ tent had been torn down, and there were flyers and banners strewn underfoot where the security guys had tossed them. It didn’t seem to have deterred anyone; if anything, it seemed to him there were more people than the day before, even if there were more security forces than demonstrators.

No one knew what had happened to Dana, but a helpful student suggested they try the security headquarters. It was only a few minutes’ walk from the square, so they headed there.

Peshawa looked thoughtfully at the old building and its high walls topped with barbed wire, and then at the knots of people gathered out front. Civilians and uniformed police, asayish, and peshmerga streamed in and out. Many of their forces were out on the streets, and their offices were busy; they had detained a lot of protesters. 

“Follow me,” he told Karwan.

“What are we going to do?” 

“Just play along,” Peshawa said, hoping the idea forming in his mind wasn’t as ridiculous as it seemed. 

He strode up to the burly guys near the front doors of the building. “Good morning—we need to see the director. We’ve got some important business to deal with.” 

They looked him up and down, and he gazed steadily back at them. Calm and confident. If he played it right, they wouldn’t see an anxious student trying to get his friend out of jail before he was tortured; they would see a young bureaucrat in trousers and a button-down shirt who was accustomed to getting his way. In normal times there was no way this performance would have worked; the guards would have been bored and asked him lots of questions. One week into the protests, though, they were exhausted and the security directorate was in chaos. They didn’t have time to be suspicious.

The guards nodded brusquely and waved him and Karwan through.

Peshawa ignored Karwan’s sideways look of incredulity and hustled them through several sets of checkpoints so casually and with such an air of “of course you’re going to let us through” that the guards didn’t even ask him to leave his cell phone. He didn’t dare let down the act, even for an instant, and when they arrived in the central reception area he marched up to several people he saw working around a large table. 

“Who’s in charge here?” Peshawa asked a middle-aged man wearing the traditional camouflage of asayish security.

Lieutenant somebody or other, the man said. Peshawa didn’t quite catch the name.

“Can you please tell the lieutenant I’m here from the American University, on behalf of Prime Minister Barham Salih.” He flashed his American University student card, hoping they wouldn’t notice that it said nothing about him working with the prime minister. 

The man nodded, barely glancing at Peshawa’s identification card, and returned with the lieutenant.

Peshawa said hello to him in a casual sort of way. The way that said hey, we don’t want to be very formal, because you are important, but I am important too. “I need to find one of Dr. Barham’s students,” Peshawa told him. 

“Ok, sir. Let me go and check. What’s the student’s name?”

Peshawa told him, and the lieutenant disappeared for a moment. Peshawa made a show of chatting with Karwan, running down the rest of their Prime Ministerial “to do” list, as if this was just one errand among many. The lieutenant returned, looking distressed.

“Sir, I’m really sorry, but he’s not here.”

Peshawa swore quietly to himself. “Well, where is he? Wherever he is, if he is not released by 4 p.m. there will be a price to pay,” he said, doing his best to furrow his eyebrows and glare at the poor lieutenant.

The lieutenant scurried off again. Peshawa could hear him talking to a couple of men in another room. Then he came back. “He’s being held at Muaskar Salam Prison.”

Peshawa tried to hide his dismay. He and Karwan glanced at each other. This was bad news. Most of the time detainees at the security directorate were released quickly. But Muaskar Salam Prison was a different story. Located just outside Sulaimani, it had been Saddam Hussein’s military base before Kurdish authorities turned it into a prison. Once jailed behind its walls, it was difficult to get out.

Peshawa thanked the lieutenant and gestured to Karwan to follow him. They left, passing through the series of checkpoints the way they had come.