5The city of Kirkuk in the North of Iraq lies right at the border between the autonomous Kurdish region and federal Iraq. The city also sits on the biggest oil reservoir in the country, and is therefore at the center of attention of other countries outside of Iraq–namely Iran and Turkey.
Following the independence referendum held in three governorates of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the Iraqi army backed by Iranian military forces and Shia militia regained control of Kirkuk. They did this after driving Kurdish Peshmergas out of the city’s perimeter in yet another confrontation over the so-called disputed areas.
But what is it like to live in Kirkuk?
When people step out of their houses in Kirkuk they tell their loved ones: “I hope to see you again” – there’s no guarantee they will make it back. I was born in Kirkuk, a city of northern Iraq where Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Christians, and foreign workers used to live together.
Back in the day, Saddam Hussein initiated several campaigns to ‘Arabise’ Kirkuk, evicting Kurdish families and giving their homes over to families from the south of Iraq. But when the US-led invasion of 2003 reached my hometown, Kurdish forces worked to reverse this process. The city fell within the so-called disputed areas; responsibility for administration and security was shared between Baghdad and the Kurdish authorities.
The security situation has been bad since 2003, but it took a turn for the worse with the war against ISIS. The economy went down, there were fewer jobs, and people only bought the bare necessities. Arabs are suspicious of the Turkmen and Peshmergas, and the other way around.
Photographing Kirkuk is difficult for many reasons. Most of the time, officials don’t understand what I’m doing, or don’t trust that I am journalist. People don’t want to be photographed because of security reasons. I also fear for my personal safety: journalists are big targets for terrorists and militias. Every character in my photo stories has a different story, a different religion, a different language. They are all important to me. These people used to live together, marry each other.
Now, nobody trusts each other.
What I find the most interesting is that people don’t leave Kirkuk. I met a woman who told me she lost her only son in an explosion. She hopes for better times but still won’t leave. Through my photographs, I want to show the world how it is to live here. I try to see the beautiful side of Kirkuk and how strong its people are, how easily they can adapt. People have always found new way of living their lives, constantly aware of the war and that everything can change at any moment.
About Hawre Khalid
I was born to a Kurdish family in the city of Kirkuk. At the time of my birth, tensions between the Kurds and the government of Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, were extremely high. My father was a manager in Kirkuk’s hospital, and my family had been in the city for several generations. But in that era Saddam began his program to remove Kurds from Kirkuk and “Arabize” the city, and so we were forced to move to Diyala province. My father brought us back to our home a couple of years later, but the peace did not last. In 1991, after the Gulf War, we were forced to leave again and become refugees in Iran for 6 months during the Kurdish civil war. I do not remember much from that time except fluidity, coming and going, a sense that nothing was permanent.
Some of my earliest memories take shape in the mid-90s, when my uncle began sending us photographs from his life in Holland. He had moved there to escape conditions in Iraq, and his photographs showed me another world. I became interested in photography, and I wanted to take pictures and send them back to my uncle, to show him our life. But I didn’t have a camera. Eventually my uncle sent me one, and in the early 2000s, just after the United States invaded Iraq, I started taking photos of my own. Since then, photography has become the art through which I try to understand the world—my life, my family, the chaos of my country and my people. The sense of motion and displacement that I experienced early in my life is one of the major themes of my work, and I try to capture it and represent it in the stories I tell.
I received a degree in photojournalism from the University of Sulaymaniyah in 2008 and I started working as a professional photographer in 2007. My work has appeared in print and online in many places, including The New York Times, Time Magazine’s “Lightbox,” The Washington Post, National Geographic, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde.
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