Going through old papers recently, I came across a few folded sheets on BBC letterhead. The first is dated 12 June 1994. It is a handwritten brief from Eamonn Matthews, then a senior producer with BBC News and Current Affairs in London, and it came with a letter of accreditation certifying that I was “researching on behalf of the BBC into the history of the war in Kuwait and the Uprising” and asking anyone who sees the letter to “assist him in every way possible.” Kurdish and Arabic translations were added underneath, so the letter could do its work at a checkpoint or in a village on either side of the line.

The brief leaves no doubt about what he wanted to be researched. “Please find ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell,” it begins, “the most horrific, the most intense: the stories you will want to tell your friends.” I was to meet them, write each story in 150 words, and fax the batch to London by 18 July. He would ask Latif Rashid, then the PUK’s representative in Britain and, many years later, president of Iraq, to get me permission to use a fax machine. That one line says a lot about how cut off Kurdistan was from the rest of the world in 1994.

The list itself reads like a map of the previous four years. For the uprising, he wanted someone from Ranya, where the first shots of March 1991 were fired when security men tried to arrest deserters who had come home from Kuwait. He wanted a prisoner freed from the torture cells when the jails were thrown open, a man or a woman who had killed Baathist officials and was willing to explain why, and families who were attacked from helicopters as they fled to the mountains. He also asked for Shia from the south with similar stories. For Kuwait, he wanted Iraqi soldiers: special forces men who had stormed the Emir’s palace, conscripts who had sat under weeks of bombing and then faced American and British armor, survivors of the attack on the retreating columns at Mutla Ridge, and soldiers who went home humiliated to Basra, Najaf and Nasiriyah and started shooting. He wanted a pilot who had flown his jet to Iran and could say why, and a Scud crew who could describe how they kept ahead of the aircraft hunting them. “Concentrate first on the war in Kuwait,” he wrote, “that’s the most difficult.” Then, underlined: “Talk to people. Meet them. Travel to them. Forget politics.”

I was not paid in advance, and I did not expect to be. When Matthews left Erbil, I had a full assignment, with a deadline attached. At the time I was working as an interpreter for the Prime Minister, Kosrat Rasul Ali, and this assignment was something I took on alongside the day job because it was precisely the kind of work I was drawn to. Unfortunately, it never got past the agreement stage. The first round of fighting between the PUK and the KDP had broken out at the beginning of May, a few weeks before the letter was written, and over the following months the conflict intensified. The roads I would have needed to travel became front lines, and the people I would have needed to locate had other things to worry about. To my knowledge, Matthews never came back to Kurdistan to follow it up, and I never wrote the stories.

According to my recent follow-up, the project went ahead without me. In January 1996, The Gulf War aired on PBS Frontline as a co-production with the BBC, written and produced by Matthews. A companion BBC radio series built from the same research included one episode on Iraqi soldiers on the road to Basra and another on a family that fled to the mountains during the Kurdish uprising. Some of the people on his list did reach an audience in the end, found by someone else.

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Reading those pages thirty-two years later, what stays with me is less the assignment than the appetite behind it. In 1994 we were barely four years past the invasion of Kuwait. Iraq was under the UN sanctions imposed in August 1990, and Kurdistan carried a double load because Baghdad had pulled its administration out of the region in late 1991 and put us under a blockade of its own. We had elected a parliament in May 1992 and were trying to run a government on almost nothing. With this backdrop, journalists came with an appetite to write.

They came for different reasons. Some followed the work of international NGOs that were rebuilding the villages Saddam’s army had flattened in the 1980s. Some came to record what the sanctions were doing to ordinary families in Kurdistan and in the rest of Iraq. Some were looking for the untold stories of Halabja and the Anfal, which much of the world had looked away from when they happened in 1988. And some, like Matthews, were after the politics and the human cost of two wars in one decade. Enough of them passed through our office that I learned to read them quickly.

Political scientists have a name for the pattern I was watching. In 1972 Anthony Downs described what he called the issue-attention cycle (IAC): a problem bursts into public view, draws a rush of concern, and then fades as people realise how hard it is to fix and their attention moves on. Kurdistan has gone around that cycle more times than anyone could count. The exodus of 1991 brought the cameras, and the pictures of civilians, the elderly, women, and children spread across snow-covered mountains did a significant deal to push Western governments into creating the “safe haven.” Then the cameras thinned out, came back when Iraqi tanks entered Erbil in 1996, left again, and returned in 2003, in 2014 when ISIS reached the edge of our cities, and in 2017 for the independence referendum. When the temperature here rises, politically or in terms of security, the coverage rises with it. When it cools, the reporters go home, and the slower stories of culture, economy, and institution building rarely make it onto anyone’s schedule.

Kurdistan has come a long way since a foreign producer had to arrange permission for me to send a fax. The interest from Western media has changed along with it, and so have the people who come. Some are hired pens, invited and looked after so that they show only the rosy parts. Some are hunters, here for a story that was half written before their plane landed and gone as soon as they have it. And some keep coming back. They cover the good, the bad, and the ugly; they are fair to everyone involved, and they are a large part of why Kurdish issues have not dropped out of sight between crises. I know several of them personally. I will not name them here, because they would rather have their work speak for them.

Matthews wanted the horrific and the astonishing, and in 1994 there was no shortage of either. But he also wrote “Forget politics,” and he wanted ordinary people. That is still the right instinct, and still the hardest thing for a visiting journalist to get right. The extraordinary stories here have always belonged to ordinary people. The ones worth telling now are not all horrific.

I kept the letters for no particular reason at the time. My own brushes with the media did not end there, and years later when I was in the US, I ended up reporting for the Kurdish service of the Voice of America. That is a story for another time.

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I came across this photograph recently; I had not looked at it in many years. Here I am standing next to Susan McCormick Pond at the residence of Jalal Talabani in Erbil. I cannot date it more precisely than sometime between 1994 and 1996, which in the Kurdistan of those years covers a great deal of history. I was working then as an interpreter for the Prime Minister, Kosrat Rasul Ali, and Susan was a familiar face. We knew her as the political advisor to the Military Coordination Center in Zakho, and she also turned up with State Department delegations when they came through.

The MCC was the small allied post set up in 1991 under Operation Provide Comfort, after the uprising collapsed and more than a million Kurds fled into the mountains along the Turkish and Iranian borders. For years MCC was the closest thing Washington had to a presence on the ground in all of Iraq. There had been no American embassy in Baghdad since the invasion of Kuwait, and our dealings with the US government ran through the State Department and the CIA. Our joint agenda was defined and limited. Keep watch on Iraqi military movements around the 36th parallel, the line above which Allied aircraft kept Baghdad’s planes out of the sky, exhaust the Iraqi army, and wait, with more hope than evidence, for a coup that would remove Saddam from inside his regime.

Among those of us who worked with the Americans, there was a piece of trivia about Susan that we passed around half in disbelief. It was said that she kept a photograph of Saddam Hussein hanging in her office at the State Department. When we finally raised it with her, she confirmed it. Her explanation was simple. She recognized Saddam as a strongman, and the picture had nothing to do with any affection or admiration for him.

At the time I could not make sense of it. Halabja and the Anfal campaigns were only six or seven years behind us. Saddam’s army sat a short distance from Erbil, and the whole point of our relationship with Washington, as we understood it, was to see him gone. Yet here was an American official, one of the people we were counting on, with Saddam’s face on her wall in the building where Iraq policy was made.

I understand it better now than I did then. Realists have long argued that states deal in power as they find it, not as they wish it to be, and that the statesman’s first duty is to see the other side clearly. A portrait on the wall is one way to do that. It is a reminder of who you are dealing with: a man who had survived eight years of war with Iran, a catastrophic defeat in Kuwait, and uprisings in the north and south at once, and who was still sitting in Baghdad. Respect for durability is not the same thing as approval, and Susan was drawing exactly that line when she answered us.

There was also a longer history behind the picture that we tended to forget. In the 1980s Washington had taken Iraq off its list of state sponsors of terrorism and restored diplomatic relations in 1984, while the war with Iran was still running. The man in that portrait had been a partner of convenience before he became a target. For American policymakers, recognizing Saddam was a professional habit long before it became a puzzle for a Kurdish interpreter in Erbil.

Looking back, the same logic governed how Washington treated us. We were supported because we were useful against a strongman, and the limits of that support were set by American calculations about the region, not by any sentiment about the Kurds. The anticipated coup never came, and at the end of August 1996, in the middle of our own civil war, Iraqi forces entered Erbil. Within months the MCC was gone, and Operation Provide Comfort wound down at the end of that year. Saddam stayed in power until 2003, and in the end he was removed by invasion rather than from within.

There is an irony in where this photograph was taken. The house belonged to Mam Jalal, then secretary general of the PUK, who in 2005 became the first Kurdish president of Iraq. Saddam was tried and executed during his presidency, and Talabani, a lawyer who was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, declined to sign the order himself. He died in October 2017, nine years ago this month.

I look at the two of us in that picture and think about how differently we were reading the same situation. I saw a dictator who had to fall. She saw a strongman who had to be understood. Both of us were right, and it took me most of the following thirty years to appreciate that the second view was not a betrayal of the first.

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Every year, as the anniversary comes around, the conspiracy theories come back. This year they arrived with AI-assisted production. Now, videos generated in response to prompts show the towers from angles where no camera existed at the time. They show slow-motion footage that no real camera recorded. Some of these productions are so good that people who have never doubted anything are forwarding it to me and asking what I make of it.

What I make of it is that the technology has changed but the argument has not. A generated video is not evidence of anything except that somebody typed a prompt with intent. These videos cannot tell you what happens to structural steel at eight hundred degrees. What they can do is make a claim feel like a memory, and that is a new problem attached to an old claim.

I have my own reasons for not crossing into the conspiracy camp, and they are tied to my career and geographic location, not to patriotism or sentimentality. A few years after the terrorist attack, I moved to San Diego. The nature of my work put me close enough to fragments of the investigation to know what the raw material of this story actually looked like, and it did not resemble a well-planned plot. Rather, it looked like a mess.

Two of the men who died on American Airlines Flight 77, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, landed at Los Angeles International Airport in January 2000 and settled in San Diego. They rented an apartment in Clairemont. Hazmi opened a bank account in his real name. In the spring of 2000, the two of them went to Montgomery Field, on Aero Drive in San Diego, and took flying lessons at Sorbi’s Flying Club. They were terrible at it. The 9/11 Commission Report is blunt about their performance. They wanted to fly jets, yet they took no interest in takeoffs or landings; their English was too weak to absorb instruction, and by the end of May they had quit the classes. Neither of these two was at the controls of an airplane on 9/11; instead, they were assigned to be the muscle in the hostile hijacking. Hani Hanjour, who had trained in Arizona, flew the aircraft into the Pentagon.

Anwar al-Awlaki was the imam at Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami in San Diego from 1996 until 2000; the two of them attended his mosque. The Commission examined that relationship and, in the end, wrote that it could not determine the nature of their relationship. With the spotlight of the US Intelligence Community on him, Awlaki left the United States and resurfaced in Yemen in 2004. On 30 September 2011, he was killed by an American drone in Jawf province, the first American citizen deliberately targeted and killed by his own government. If you want something from the past twenty-five years to chew on, that is a stronger candidate than a controlled demolition.

That is the texture of the thing up close. Men who could not learn English well enough to fly a Cessna. Men using their real names on lease agreements and bank forms. A car left in an airport parking lot with documents inside it. The conspiracy that is being floated around requires thousands of people to execute a technically flawless operation and then hold their silence for a quarter of a century. The documented record describes the opposite kind of institution, one that lacked coordination and communication. The CIA knew in January 2000 that Mihdhar held a valid American visa and did not pass the name to the FBI until August 2001, when he was already inside the country. That is not the signature of an organization capable of secretly wiring three towers for a demolition on that day.

I do have questions, but my questions are different. I would still like a full answer on why that name sat unshared for eighteen months and on who exactly Omar al-Bayoumi was and who was paying him when he helped two Saudi nationals settle in my city. Those questions are about negligence and about Saudi conduct. They are not about explosives in a basement, and unlike the other kind of question, they have answers that can in principle be produced.

What nobody disputes is the damage, in human lives, in numbers. On a single morning, two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven people died. Three hundred and forty-three New York firefighters went up the stairs while everybody else was coming down, and they did not come back. Out of that morning came at least two wars, a surveillance architecture that is now simply a fact of modern life, a permanent change to how every human being on earth boards an aircraft, and twenty-five years of rearrangement in my own part of the world, most of it paid for by people who had never heard of lower Manhattan.

Fidelity to the dead is a matter of precision, not feeling. The families of those firefighters have spent a quarter of a century receiving gray and shady narratives. What they are owed is the plain record, corrected where it is wrong and completed where it is thin. A story that turns that morning into a special effect, however professionally rendered, takes something from them that the fire already took once.

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Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for any nation. But anniversaries have a way of making you think not about the country’s age but about your own relationship with it and when exactly that relationship became real.

For me, it became real over a ticket.

I was working as a manufacturing engineer at ICON Health and Fitness in Logan, Utah. The company made treadmills and ellipticals, and I spent my days on the production floor troubleshooting assembly lines, doing what engineers do. It was my first engineering job, which I had taken just a few months after finishing my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. I had arrived in the United States in 1997 as a political refugee, processed through the UNHCR in Ankara, Turkey, and Logan came later, a small city in northern Utah that I had ended up in because of that job. I was, as far as anyone knew, the only Kurd in town, which made me a kind of rare specimen in the eyes of my colleagues. They were curious, mostly kind, and overwhelmingly Mormon.

The warmth of Mormon communities often surprises people who have never spent time among them. It surprised me too, but in the best way. These were people who genuinely believed in looking after their neighbors, and they extended that to me without hesitation.

In 2003, after years of paperwork, appointments, and waiting, the agency that was then the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, made it official. I was an American citizen. I had an alien number that had defined me for years, and now I had something more. When I came into work after the ceremony, my colleagues and management congratulated me warmly, sincerely. Many of them told me they had never known anyone who had gone through naturalization before. They did not quite know what the process involved, but they understood it mattered.

The event was only a couple of years after September 11th. My colleagues had witnessed something during that period that stayed with me. Someone had gone through the Yellow Pages, picking out foreign-sounding names and calling to threaten people with death in their voice. That kind of ugliness exists everywhere. But the people I worked with in Logan were nothing like that. They were the ones who had stood by me when it happened, and they were the ones now shaking my hand and asking what it had felt like to finally become a citizen.

The Herald Journal, Logan’s local paper, had come to interview me around that time. The story they ran was titled “Escape to Utah,” and it felt like an accurate description of what had happened, even if the word “escape” did not quite capture how much I had come to love where I had landed.

The following Fourth of July, the first one I would celebrate as a citizen, the management at ICON did something I did not expect. They gifted me a ticket to the town’s Independence Day celebration, held at a large stadium. The celebration was something you normally paid to attend, and they handed me a ticket without me asking, without any fanfare, just as a gesture. You are one of us now. Come celebrate with us.

I went. I sat in that stadium and watched the fireworks and listened to the music and felt something I had spent most of my life not feeling. I felt like I belonged somewhere.

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That probably sounds simple to someone who has always had a country. But I had grown up a Kurd in Iraq, which meant growing up as something the country around you does not quite recognize, a foreigner in the only place you have ever known. When I left in the 1990s, I was not leaving a home. I was leaving a place that had never really claimed me.

America claimed me. Not through the document the INS issued, though that mattered too. It claimed me through a ticket handed over by people who had decided I was worth celebrating.

Two hundred and fifty years in, that is still what this country is capable of. I have not forgotten it.

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October 19, 2005. I was in Baghdad when history walked into a courtroom, and I was watching it on CNN.

I had been offered a seat in the observer’s box. I turned it down, not for lack of access, and not out of fear. The day before, I had been part of an official inspection team that toured that same courthouse inside Baghdad’s Green Zone. I had sat in the very seat they were offering me, looked through the bulletproof glass that separated the observers from where the accused would stand, and taken it all in. I knew the room. I just couldn’t bring myself to be inside it for that moment.

I am a Kurd, born in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and the regime facing judgment that day was not some distant political chapter for me. It had shaped my life directly and had cost my people enormously, in blood, in displacement, and in a generational grief that doesn’t have a clean ending. By the time I reached Baghdad, I had spent months sitting with survivors in Portland and Seattle, listening as they described what happened to them, and I wasn’t sure I could hold all of that together in the same room as the man responsible for it. So I watched from a distance, on CNN, and let the moment land the way it needed to.

What I haven’t shared until now is the full picture of why I was there at all.

I arrived in Baghdad in September 2005 on a 90-day mission that was, in scope, much broader than any single role. I was there as part of the U.S. government’s wider effort to support the stabilization of post-invasion Iraq, a mission that touched everything from institutional reconstruction to legal accountability and that placed people with specific expertise inside a web of agencies working, often under considerable pressure, to build functioning structures from the wreckage of a collapsed state. One significant part of my mission was embedded within the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the RCLO, a unit established by the U.S. Department of Justice to support the Iraqi High Tribunal in prosecuting Saddam Hussein and the senior architects of his Ba’ath regime. But the RCLO was one thread of a much larger tapestry, and it’s important to say that from the start.

Within the RCLO, my role was as a language and cultural analyst. That title understates what the work actually required. Yes, I was translating documents, but much more than that, I was helping investigators understand what they were looking at. The geography of specific military operations. The cultural logic behind how Ba’athist forces moved through Kurdish territory and why certain villages were targeted in the sequence they were. The meaning carried by particular words and phrases that only someone who had lived inside that world could accurately read. I had that background because I had lived it. I came to the United States in 1997 as a political refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan. The regime I was now helping to document was the same one that had made leaving the only viable option.

The groundwork had begun before I ever set foot in Iraq. In Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, cities that had become home to large Kurdish refugee communities, I spent time sitting with survivors of the 1988 Halabja chemical attack and the Anfal campaign. These were people who had lived through events that the world has still not fully reckoned with. Halabja remains the largest chemical weapons attack on a civilian population in recorded history, with mustard gas and nerve agents dropped on a city, killing up to five thousand people within hours. The Anfal campaign, the broader military operation of which Halabja was the most visible atrocity, killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds. In those rooms in the Pacific Northwest, survivors walked me through maps, pointed to where their villages had stood, and told me what they saw and heard and smelled on the days that changed everything. What came out of those conversations didn’t stay in those rooms.

There is something I want to say here that has not been said publicly before. The Kurdish genocide cases, Halabja and Anfal, were the strongest cases in the RCLO’s arsenal. Everyone inside the process knew it. The evidentiary foundation was overwhelming, and a conviction on those charges alone would have determined the outcome of the trials. But they were not the first cases brought to trial. The deliberate decision to open proceedings with the Dujail case, concerning the killing and torture of Shia Arab civilians following an assassination attempt in 1982, was not purely a matter of legal strategy. It was a political calculation and one I was aware of through my position. The reasoning was that prosecuting an Arab Sunni leader first on charges of Kurdish genocide risked inflaming ethnic and sectarian fractures in an Iraq that was already dangerously unstable. Justice was being ordered around political survival. I understood the logic. It didn’t make it easier to sit with.

But 2005 was not where my story with this regime began, and that’s what I’ll leave you with for now.

In the mid-1990s, I was part of something that was covert and that has only ever been partially surfaced in public. Former CIA officer Robert Baer touched on it in his book See No Evil. I was not the architect. I was not the one giving orders or setting strategy. But I was there, in a role that mattered, one whose absence would have been felt. That story is for another installment, when I’m ready to tell it fully.

What I will say is this: by the time I landed in Baghdad in September 2005, more than a decade of my life had been quietly pointed in that direction. I watched the opening of the trial on CNN, from a room in the same city where it was happening, and it felt like the only honest place I could be.

This is the first in a series of personal accounts from inside efforts that shaped one of the most consequential chapters in recent history. Future installments will go deeper into the 1995 covert operation, the Anfal evidence process, what it meant to walk through places in Baghdad that almost no one else had seen, and what carrying all of these memories looks like when you’re a Kurd who once had no choice but to leave.

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