Silêmanî (Sulaymaniyah)

Silêmanî was founded in 1784 by Ibrahim Pasha Baban, prince of the Baban emirate, who chose its site with care: a fertile valley guarded by Mounts Goyîje and Azmir to the east, the springs of Çelî Şar running through its streets, and close to the trade road between Baghdad and Kermanshah. He named it after his father Sulaiman Pasha. The Baban court quickly became a magnet for poets and scholars: Nalî, Salîm, Kurdî and Hacî Qadirê Koyî all worked here. After the Babans fell to the Ottomans in 1851, Silêmanî did not dim — it lit with a different fire: cultural resistance. The house of Sheikh Mahmud Hafid in the twentieth century became the qibla of every Kurdish nationalist dreaming of a state. Sheikh Mahmud proclaimed himself King of Kurdistan in 1922, was crowned in a Silêmanî palace, and led three successive revolts against the British before being exiled to the south. In 1926 Silêmanî printed the newspaper Jiyan ('Life') in clean Sorani Kurdish, the start of a Kurdish press in the people's tongue. There followed an unbroken line of journals: Karwan, Roşinbîrî Nwê, Aweyne. In the 1950s and 60s Silêmanî became the headquarters of the Kurdish left, producing major political leaders such as Jalal Talabani (born nearby) and Nawshirwan Mustafa. Silêmanî bore the worst of the Anfal campaign of 1986–89; more than a thousand villages around it were destroyed, and the chemical massacre of Halabja on 16 March 1988 took place seventy kilometres away. After 1991 the city breathed freedom; the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) under Talabani moved its base here, and Silêmanî became the axis of a new Kurdish politics. Today Silêmanî is a city of 800,000, holding Kurdistan's most important public library (the Zankoy), theatres and opera houses, the oldest university, and the Amna Suraka Museum that documents Ba'athist crimes. Its bazar is the largest open Kurdish market, alive with the scent of spices and tea. Around the city Mounts Dukan, Penjwen and Halabja host summer resorts visited by Kurds from all of Iraq. Silêmanî breathes in two tongues: Sorani Kurdish as the mother and English as the future.