Join us for this conversation with the Kurdistan Regional Government Representative to the U.S., Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, a great friend of the Tennessee World Affairs Council and homeland connection to the thousands of Iraqi Kurds who call Nashville home as new Americans. TNWAC thanks her for her previous programs with the Council including hosting our visiting student groups in Washington, D.C.

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There is a Kurdish proverb, "No friends but the mountains," that captures the sense of what the Kurds face as an ethnic group living across several international borders in the Middle East. The Kurds living in the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq have suffered at the hands of the Saddam Hussein government -- enduring genocidal campaigns -- and attacks from the Islamic State Caliphate.

At the end of the Operation Desert Storm, when a U.S.-led military coalition reversed Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, he turned his army on the Kurds in the north and the Shia minority in the south. The Kurds were being driven into the mountains. Here is how Madam Abdul Rahman described it during a 2016 program with TNWAC and Lipscomb University:

Saddam turned his weapons on us because he had by then been thrown out of Kuwait, and he committed terrible crimes during that period of the uprising. And this was just a couple of years after the chemical bombardment of Halabja, where five thousand people were killed, and the Anfal genocide campaign, where two hundred fifty thousand people were killed.

So when Saddam turned against the Kurdish people everybody thought he would use chemicals again. Everyone fled. They fled to the borders of Iran and Turkey. This was in the spring of 1991, an incredibly cold spring, severe weather conditions. People died on the mountaintops. People starved. They died of exhaustion and exposure.

The United States, Britain, France launched Operation Provide Comfort. It was the biggest military and humanitarian operation, and probably the most successful in history. I’ve met some of the military leaders, American military leaders who were involved in that operation, General Jim Jones, General Bob Barrow, General Jay Garner, and others who were involved in that operation, and they all speak of that operation with great pride because they saved lives. They saved hundreds of thousands if not one and a half million lives.

[Complete remarks here]

The United States went on to enforce a UN "No Fly Zone" that prevented Saddam from persecuting the Iraqi Kurds and allowing the Kurdistan Region to develop as an autonomous area. The 2003 invasion of Iraq permanently eliminated the threat from Saddam. In recent years the Kurds were again beset by the ominous threat posed by the Islamic State. The remarkably brave Peshmerga fighters of Kurdistan stood against ISIS with American and other coalition troops and support joining in the campaign. We commend to your reading the remarks of Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman during her April 2016 program in Nashville.

The KRG enjoys a special relationship with the United States. The Kurdish people have been reliable partners, seeking democracy and independence and looking to the West for partners.

We invite you to talk with Madam Abdul Rahman in this special program.