Mid-East Junction

In Iran, it has been obligatory for women to wear a head scarf, or hijab, since 1983, in the wake of the 1979 revolution. Since then, women have been forced to wear the long, loose-fitting chador, and the hijab. To make sure the law is respected, morality police patrol the streets. But two major online movements are showing people -- inside and outside the country -- that Iranian women want to choose.

The movements are known as #MyStealthyFreedom and #White Wednesdays. The women in the videos are not necessarily opposed to wearing the hijab, but they are opposed to being forced – by law – to wear it. And they are willing to risk everything for the right to choose.

Birth of the movements

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist now living in exile in the United States, is the woman behind these two movements. In 2014, she had posted a photo of herself running down a street in London with her hair flying in the wind. Beneath the photo she wrote “every time when I run in a free country and I feel the wind in my hair, it reminds me of the time when my hair was like a hostage in the hands of the Iranian government”.

That message connected with many Iranian women across the country. Soon Alinejad posted another photo of herself driving unveiled in Iran. This time she added the caption "I am a woman and I know there are many other women in Iran who do not believe in hijab [and] they have such pictures“. Soon enough “I was bombarded by pictures and videos from women inside Iran unveiling themselves, walking in the streets taking pictures of themselves in the streets, in front of police cars or in [the] seaside, or nature” explains Alinejad. And so the movement my Stealthy Freedom was born.

To keep the momentum and the pressure on the Iranian government to end compulsory hijab, Alinejad says she decided to launch White Wednesdays last year on 24 May. White, because it’s the colour of peace.

In this movement she asked the women to identify each other in public while taking off their white headscarves. Again, she got “many videos of women…..sometimes walking shoulder to shoulder with their husbands, their fathers, their boyfriends and saying no to compulsory hijab in public”.

Punishable crime in Iran

Not wearing a hijab in Iran is a punishable crime. Women risk ten months to two years in prison for being caught without being properly covered. Alinejad explains that from the young age of seven, girls are forced to wear the hijab.

Without it, a girl will not be able to access school, to get a job, or just generally to live in the country, because at all times you are being monitored by the morality police. In short, she says “being a woman means that you live in a dangerous situation in Iran”.

Obligation of the hijab

In 1979, Iran deposed its Shah and established a theocracy. Since then, the laws of the country have been tied directly to Islamic law, or Sharia. It's the job of the top religious cleric, the Supreme Leader, to ensure the government’s interpretation of Islam is respected – particularly by women.

But where did this obligation for women to cover their hair come from?

Koran

In Islam the main beliefs come directly from the Koran, the holy book. For Muslims, the word of god was dictated directly to the prophet Mohamed. Religious leaders point to its verses to explain why Muslims have to behave in a particular way.

Merryl Wyn Davies is an Islamic scholar and former director of the Muslim Institute in London. She says that although there are eight references to the hijab in the Koran, none of them have anything to do with clothing or refer to terms that one would understand to be a hijab, a chador, or an abaya.

The verse that many point to as a reference for the hijab is in chapter 24, verse 31 which calls upon women “to lower their gaze and be mindful of their chastity and to draw their head coverings over their bosoms”.

But, stresses Davies, the passage actually begins in chapter 24 verse 30 where it calls upon men “to lower their gaze and be mindful of their chastity”.

The conclusion taken from this, she explains, is that the Koran is speaking about modesty within a person, and less about “uniforms and pieces of cloth” which reduce both men and women to objects based on appearances.

Hadith

Another major source for Muslims is the Hadith, a record of the sayings and life of the Prophet Mohammed. “The hadith is debatable territory” adds Davies, as it opens up room for interpretation, rather than it dictating specifics.

It’s for that reason she believes if you were to sit down a group of Muslim and Islamic scholars and ask them if it is obligatory for women to cover their hair “they will tell you ‘well actually not’.”

In the case of Iran, the religious clerics have interpreted the Koran to include this obligation on women. It has also been extended to women not being allowed “to be a judge, to ride a bicycle…to sing solo…to travel abroad” or get a passport without permission from their husbands or fathers explains Alinejad.

And to the Iranian government, says Alinejad, these rules come from Sharia and must be respected. In response to such rules, which are only enforced mainly in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the creator of the movement says if there is an overriding interpretation of such laws “then this is their responsibility to condemn anything that is happening in the name of Sharia laws and Islamic laws inside Iran and other Islamic countries”.

Davies stresses that the Koran is about helping a person make the world a better place and not about “how you lead narrow, prescriptive lives and think you’re going to get to heaven”.

Momentum of online movement

Until such overriding authority is removed, women have started to speak up. A similar online media movement has pushed certain boundaries already in Saudi Arabia, such as the right to drive. And this current movement in Iran continues to gain momentum, despite the risks. Already one activist in March was sentenced to two years in prison for protesting without her hijab.

But as Alinejad highlights, the surge in women risking everything for change has forced the Iranian government to take notice.

“For 40 years they were just the people of Iran, especially the women that had the fear inside their hearts. But now it is the government that fears its own people; especially the women of Iran."

You can follow these movements on instagram and twitter at #mystealthyfreedom, #whitewedensdays, #mycameraismyweapon and #girlsofrevolutionstreet.

Can art change society? It's not clear whether it can or not, but a group of artists in Egypt believed it could and set off to create such a vision hidden in the oasis governorate of Fayoum, just south of Cairo. Rfi's Anne-Marie Bissada has this report from the village of Tunis in the Fayoum.

Just a two hour’s drive south of Cairo, away from the Nile, one comes across the governorate of Fayoum, an oasis in the middle of the desert.

As Egypt modernized, Fayoum lagged behind and remained one of the poorer agricultural regions in the country. Even today, farmers tend to their fields using traditional, outdated, means and the pace of life remains slow.

It’s also here where you’ll find the small village of Tunis –of a  population of under 1000 -- nestled among the green landscape at a slight incline looking out to the lake.

The village itself began to grow after a group of like-minded artists came to establish a kind of utopia away from the chaos of Cairo.

Heavy metal music with a middle eastern twist is not common place, but since 1991, the pioneers of such a genre, the Israeli band Orphaned Land has been using its music to spread the message of peace and tolerance across the often tense Middle East. In this month's Mid-East Junction, RFI's Anne-Marie Bissada speaks with Chen Balbaus, the guitarist of the band, just before their show in Paris.

"What happened after 2014 is another chapter of what happened to this city" say Omar Mohammed, when speaking about his home city of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq.

Mohammed was born in Mosul during some of the worst moments of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

“I was born on 8 April, the Baath party was born on 7 April, and the fall of the regime was on 9 April. I turned 17 when I saw the [US] invasion ... 2014 changed everything in my country," he explains.

Mohammed was in Mosul under the corrupt Iraqi army, after the US invasion and while the Islamic State (referred to as ISIS: Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, pre-2014) was beginning to strengthen and grow.

At the time they already had a foothold in Mosul: “We were used to seeing [car] bombs, weekly there were dead bodies in the street, people gett[ing] kidnapped, people paying taxes to the jihadists. The corruption among the security forces [was] something that was being normalised in the city for about 10 years. The city was terrorised I would say,” explains Mohammed.

Even then, heading out to work was not an easy situation. “When I wake up and go out, the first thing I think about: am I going to die?”

One story in particular - which is well known among Mosul residents - is about a businessman who refused to pay IS before they seized control of the city in 2014. So to send the man a message "they put a bomb in the car of his son on his wedding day", some time in 2011 or 2012. "After that they told him that if he was not going to pay he should prepare another grave for his other son."

Although the Iraqi security forces were in Mosul until 2014, Mohammed points out that such threats were common. “If I get threatened by ISIS, I can’t go to the Iraqi security forces or to the police because they are corrupted and my name will go directly to ISIS and they will come to kill me. So we were blocked in the middle of this corruption and ISIS.”

IS enters Mosul

Although news of the newly-formed Islamic State armed group in nearby cities was known across Mosul, many chose to stay. In fact, when they arrived, even the Turkish consulate stayed while the former governor appeared in public telling people not to worry  and that everything was ok, explains Mohammed.

He adds that as the diplomatic staff didn’t leave, most people didn’t see the need to run away.

Even after IS arrived in June of 2014, it didn't show its true colours. "At the very beginning, ISIS (Islamic State of Syria post-2014) wanted to give the people [the impression] that they were there to protect the city, to take the city from the control of the corrupted government. It was very misleading.The people didn’t understand,” adds Mohammed.

But then in three weeks things had changed.  “It’s like they pressed [a] button. Everything changed in two days."

Mohammed remembers receiving a list of what was permitted and the consequences if people refused to obey.

Public executions started, beheadings in the streets, arrests, lashes for not attending mosque, throwing LGBT people off buildings and stoning women on allegations of adultery - actions which took Mosul back to the Middle Ages, he says.

Everyone was expected to attend public executions if they were being filmed. A crew of camera men would often repeat the scenes, explaining that a given camera angle or position was not good enough to take a decent shot.

Mosul Eye launched

The day IS arrived to take over the city, Mohammed says he was using his personal account to post everything. The attack came at 3:00 am on 6 June, an account of which he posted on his personal account as Omar. However, a friend who saw his post told him to be careful. Mohammed erased his personal profile and created an anonymous one called Mosul Eye.

“It wasn’t just to share info with others, it was more telling the truth about what’s happening in the city” he explains, adding that the people of Mosul were in a black box.

"They couldn’t get out and people couldn’t get in. If no one knew the truth about what was really happening to them, then how would future generations know" he asks.

“If there wasn’t another narrative, people would only suspect what happened, they would start investigating and they would find only the narrative of ISIS. So we [would have] lost the truth.”

As a trained historian, Mohammed risked his life and that of his family’s to chronicle the day-to-day life in the city. Every day, he would post on his blog stories about how the people lived, the crimes of IS, what IS have done to the people, along with the names of the victims, the impact of the airstrikes. He also listed the names of IS fighters who were killed - in fact, everything that happened.

At times he would push his own security boundaries of risk to take photos or videos. But all of this was done to ensure the history of the city was accurately being recorded.

Writing about Mosul

No one knew of his blog. Not even his family. While Mosul Eye was intended for English-speakers, he had other blogs under various names to target Iraqis. He wanted to clarify a misunderstanding amongst Iraqis outside Mosul that the people of Mosul supported IS, something which was clearly not true.

So his blogs became a trusted platform, especially his Mosul Eye among the international community. Even those in his own city were reading his blog through the help of family and friends who could access them outside of the city and report the news.

But shouldering the responsibility of such a chronicle became a burden and one that he couldn’t share.

“I was so tired, that I couldn’t express my feelings to my mother, to my brother, to my sister. It was heavy on my shoulders, so I thought the only option is to die” he explains.

"So I went to the Tigris River, drinking tea, wearing red, smoking publicly,” says Mohammed. He waited for IS to kill him. But to his surprise, no one noticed him. A few months later he decided it was time for him to leave.

He had been receiving numerous threats on his blog from IS, and they were getting more active within the neighbourhoods, by searching houses.

There was an IS leader living in the house next to his. His neighbourhood in particular had become surrounded by IS.

“If they find me, I’m ready to die, but this is my family. I’ve been protecting them for more than a year, so why should I give them up?" he asked himself. The result is that he made arrangements to be smuggled out of the city.

Mohammed explains that he left with his notebook and his hard drive that contained every observation about his Mosul under IS.

While the car waited for him at six in the morning to sneak him out of the city, he quickly woke his mother up to say a quick good bye without offering any details so as ensure her safety.

Even in the safety of Turkey and elsewhere, Mohammed continued to update Mosul Eye until the city was liberated. In November of 2017, he finally decided to reveal his identity and in doing so relieve himself of the burden he had been carrying for nearly two years.

He explains that while he had initially vowed to never reveal himself, the liberation of Mosul meant there was no longer a threat to his family. He also wanted the people of his city to learn to trust again.

How could they could learn to do so if he didn’t make that first step to reveal his identity,  he asks. On top of all those reasons is the most basic one: “I was also tired of hiding.”

Since he revealed his identity, Mohammed has been telling his story to different media outlets and working on his doctoral thesis. He also writes in an effort to move on and find security amongst people.

“I’m writing now, writing from the beginning of my life and will continue until the end," he explains. "Writing is helping me to get all of these ideas and images out of my mind."

He’s also trying to be as involved as possible from a distance with the cultural revival in his city; a city he hopes to go back to very soon.

You can follow Omar Mohammed on Twitter on @omardemosul and @MosulEye

When a mosque in Egypt’s Sinai region was attacked by affiliates of the Islamic State armed group in November leaving over 300 people dead the attackers said they were targeting what they described as 'heretics of Islam', known to the wider world as Sufis.Who are the Sufis and why have they been singled-out by some other Muslims?

The term ‘Sufi’, will, for many, conjur up images of poets like the Persian Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī from the 13th century, or the Abū 'Abdillāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn `Arabī from Andalusia in Spain from the 12th century, or even Turkey’s whirling dervishes.

While poetry and dervishes can be part of different Sufi orders, at the heart of Sufism, is Islam, and its interaction with the prophet Mohammed.

Sufis, however, have always differed because they have evolved and adapted their practice of Islam. According to Hamza Malik, a lecturer in Sufism at the department of the Near-and-Middle-East at SOAS, University of London, Sufism strarted to distinguish itself from mainstream Islam in the 1800s.

Malik explains that those studying Sufism often sought something that didn’t resemble the strict interpretation of Islam, but instead included some elements closer to Christianity.

Such differences become more apparent during the wave of colonization in the 19th century. It's at this point that Muslims began to question where they had gone wrong since they were losing control of their lands.

"The answer generally lay in [the fact that] they had moved away from [the] original teachings of Islam” explains Malik.

21st century Sufis

Getting a true number of practicing Sufis is hard to come by, since it depends on the order and how one defines a Sufi. In fact, many do not consider themselves Muslim.

One article by Stephen Schwartz, a practicing Sufi himself, says out of the roughly 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, five percent are Sufis. But much of the confusion in defining Sufis as Muslims stems from the fact that Sufism evolved differently than mainstream Islam.

Malik explains that this willingness to look deeper into the “spiritual essence of Islam” rather than just its literal adherence to routine, is what attracted people.

Different Sufi communities follow different Sufi orders. The orders are based on individual Sufis in history who inspired followers. Rabia and Hasan are two practicing Sufis who grew up in the United States as Presbyterian Christians, but later converted to Sufism. They practice the Sufism developed by Hazrat Inayat Khan, an Indian musician who worked in the early twentieth century.

“He [Hazarat] was a court musician in India and was also a Sufi. This was [in] 1910, and he believed very strongly that Islam and Hinduism and [other religions] and Christianity were all facets of the same thing” explains Hasan.

“They were all trying to reach something deeper. So he felt that you didn't have to be a Muslim, or a Hindu as such. You weren't being locked into one thing.”

Not being locked into one thing is why Sufism was never about a religion, adds Rabia. “Sufism was never a religion. Islam is a religion.”

Sufism and Islam

But most specialists disagree and insist that Sufism comes from Islam and the Koran. Hisham Hellyer is a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic council and a professor at the Centre for advanced study of Islam, science and civilization in Malaysia. He says the two cannot be separated because he believes it's “historically not true”. He adds:

“Very basic practice of all Sufis is to read the Koran and that's the Islamic revelation part par excellence and to imagine that is something that can be separated from Islam, I'm not sure how you can do that."

But for hundreds of thousands of people around the world, Sufism has become a means of achieving a spirituality that is rooted in Islam, but that is not necessarily part of the religion.

This ability of Sufis to draw in more followers by adapting the religion to the local culture is how it was able to adapt to local cultures and taken in those customs.

“To give an example, when Islam came to India, they conquered the original people, but a lot of the people who became Muslim became Muslim through the Sufis. And what the Sufis did was they learned the local languages, and then they wrote poetry in the local languages,” explains Malik.

The fact that Sufism has an ability to evolve and to adapt, unlike traditional branches of Islam, means it is criticised by some conservative Muslims.

“…In essence the Sufis don't do anything too different in their day shift, they don't do anything too different than normal Muslims do, but they definitely have a particular kind of outlook. And historically they've always been quicker and faster in taking the local culture and be able to see what's not harmful about the local culture and try to bring it into focus” adds Malik.

Sufis as targets?

But at what point did Sufis start becoming targets for fellow Muslims?

Malik points to when Sufis began introducing changes to the religion. Such deviation from the “pure form” was seen as something to be purged. “So Sufis began to be seen perhaps as a people who were stuck in their own ways and promoting more cultural aspects and aspects from other religions” which in turn gave fuel to those hardliners who believed “we must cleanse and go back to a pure origin”.

Many of the main opponents to Sufis are conservative Muslims, like the Salafists or Wahabbis in Saudi Arabia. Hellyer points to a more recent emergence of Salafism beginning in the 1700s, which was “very critical of Sufism” and put itself in direct opposition to what mainstream Sunni Islam had actually relied upon.

But what exactly is the basis for Sufism in Islam? Hellyer says the starting point is in the life of the prophet Mohammed.

The story goes that at one point in his life when he is out with some of his companions a man comes upon them who is dressed in white. This man is the archangel Gabriel and he proceeds to ask the prophet to define Islam.

He does so referring to the five pillars of Islam. Gabriel then asks Mohammed to define Iman, which means faith. And Mohammed provides an answer referring to certain articles and the belief in the day of judgement. A third question is then put to Gabriel asking to define Ihsan, which means perfection.

This “third dimension relates to spiritual matters, excellence. And from that you'll get Sufism. And they'll be other names of disciplines, sometimes not Sufism but it all relates to that dimension of Ihsan” explains Hellyer.

This story is a pivotal moment for Sufism according to most Islamic authorities, because it is the basis for correct form and practice for Sufi Muslims.

But, for Malik, it’s not the only basis. “There's quite a few different verses and traditions that are used and the Gabriel one is definitely often used as being the third aspect that fits in nicely.”

While many practicing Sufis today may not consider themselves Muslims, Sufism has always been an element of Islam for some who are trying to reach a higher level of spirituality.

It has had the room to interpret and question its evolution and this has given it a place in modern times, but also, as we've seen, a reputation for being something separate, and something different, to mainstream Islam.

When the French President Emmanuel Macron opened a new Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi this month, he said it would show how beauty was more powerful than hate. The museum wants to promote cultural exchange between West and East – as Amanda Morrow found out, when she was one of the very first visitors to the new Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Iraq’s Kurds have been making international headlines since September after forging ahead with their independence referendum, despite regional and international warnings. They are the only one of the Middle East's Kurdish communities to have their own regional government. The other notable communities are in Turkey, Iran and Syria. So who are the Kurds?

• Origins

“They are a separate ethnic group, living in the Middle East where Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq meet. They have been there as long as we know,” says Michael Gunter, a professor at the Tennessee Technological University, who has been researching and writing about the Kurds for over 30 years.

And as Gérard Gauthier, an anthropologist and researcher at the Kurdish Institute of Paris, adds ”You also have Kurds in the former Soviet Union [….] There have been Kurds in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Georgia, you even have Kurds, I suspect, in China as well. So they are present in a lot of places. But basically the heart of their area is the Middle East.”

While an actual Kurdish state is harder to trace in history, the fact remains that the Kurdish people have been in the Middle East region since as far back as 400BC.

• Contact with ancient Greece

In fact, an ancient Greek general by the name of Xenophon details this in his work, Anabasis (The March Up Country).

“Xenophon was the head of a troop of 10,000 Greek mercenaries and they were working for a Persian king," explains Gauthier. "And they were defeated and they had to leave Tsifphon, which is near Baghdad, at the time and had to walk all the way back to Greece. At one point they found a tribe of mountain people who blocked their passage, and those people described themselves as Kardokhoy.”

It's hard to verify 100 percent if the Kurds were in fact this Kardokhoy or Karochi group and another theory states they are descendants of the Medes, an ancient people who lived in the north-west of what is now Iran.

“The Kurds themselves claim to be the descendants of the Medes," adds Gunter. "The Medes were an Assyrian empire in 612BC. But we're not absolutely sure of that. The origins of the Kurds are lost in history. But they certainly have been there for a long time."

• Tribal allegiances

The Kurds speak a language that is similar to Persian but unrelated to Arabic or Turkish. In fact, Gunter points out that the Kurds are a “separate ethnic group, completely different from the Turks and Arabs. [They] speak an Indo-European language, so they are related to the Iranians.”

Even though there was a common language and culture among the Kurds, as was the case among other ethnic groups in the area, Kurdish unity was often based on tribal lines.

This idea of fidelity to tribal lines goes back as far as the Middle Ages, says Gauthier, as it was important in “ keeping the communities together in times when you had the big wars and destruction” such as the Crusaders and the invasion of the Mongols. He adds that such events brought along destruction to the Middle East and so divisions along tribal lines would have been reinforced.

• Arrival of Islam

During the seventh century, Islam spread from the Arabian Peninsula, bringing another unifying element to the Kurds: religion. Although uniting the Kurds under one banner was not really what was happening. “Because at the time of the empires -- Ottoman empires, Persian empires -- even before when it was the Caliph and you had a united Middle East with a Muslim caliph, then you had a lot of different communities in there. You had Turks, you had Arabs, Persians, Kurds, and the people they had unity and the banner of Islam basically,” explains Gauthier. He adds that like the other groups within the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds would also have spoken several languages.

One famous Kurd from the Abbasid Muslim Caliphate was Saladin; he was a sultan, though he also received the title of king, but he was known for leading Islamic forces against the European Crusaders. After his big victory, however, he was revered not for his ethnicity as a Kurd but simply for being a great fighter.

• Independence

So we see that the Kurds have always been a part of the regional history of the Middle East.

But have they ever had independent states?

“Well into the 19th century there were Kurdish immigrants who by today's standards meet many of the criteria for independence,” says Gunter. “And there's an ancient Kurdish history called Sharafnama, written by Sharaf al-Din Bitlisi in 1596, in which he talks about at least five Kurdish dynasties or emirates in the past that had the attributes of what we would today call independence. So it's possible to say that in effect there were independent Kurdish entities four to five hundred years ago which were eventually wiped out by the Ottoman and Persian empires.”

Gauthier notes that al-Din Bitlisi was in fact a Kurd, although the manuscripts were written in Persian, since he was an administrator in the Ottoman Empire and also with the Savafid shahs, the rival Persian dynasty at the time. He began to put to paper the history of the Kurdish local dynasties. As Gauthier explains, Bitlisi wondered if they, the Kurds, had their own prince who could lead them; perhaps they would no longer be exploited by the Turks, Persians and Arabs.

So already by the 16th century, we see that the Kurdish people, under Ottoman rule by then, were feeling the pinch.

One mustn’t forget that under Ottoman rule, different ethnic and cultural groups were living side by side; but no one had independence. Each province, such as Syria, or Egypt, was ruled by a chosen representative of the Ottomans.

• The idea of the nation-state

The notion of the nation-state as it is currently understood is a modern idea, appearing at the end of the 19th-century.

It was really after World War I, which saw the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, that the push for nation-states took effect in the Middle East.

“Obviously there was a big push for the idea of a nation-state with Kurds at the end of the Ottoman empire because the people had to choose,” says Gauthier. “A lot of those Kurds, they were generals, officers, administrators to the Ottoman empire, they had Ottoman identity.” And so when the Ottoman empire ceased to exist, many Kurds had to make a choice.

And this is where the Kurds may have had a chance to have a state. But don’t forget they had spent years spread out over the region. So when Turkey, Iraq and Syria all pushed for independent states in response to the mandates run by Western powers that replaced the Ottomans, the Kurds found themselves in the middle of it all.

“Then in 1918 when the modern state system was created, you created another division between Kurds: Turkish Kurds, Iranian Kurds, Iraqi Kurds and Syrian Kurds” explains Gunter. “That's been going on for a 100 years now. So that's another way the Kurds are divided between the four states that they live in.”

In fact, the Kurds almost had a state.

As the big Western powers were carving up the Middle East, the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres proposed a Kurdish state in part of what was to become Turkey, although the Kurdish nationalists themselves could not agree on what its borders should be.

But the treaty was rejected by the creator of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who launched a war against the Greeks, Italians, British and French.

“He [Ataturk] first recruited them [Kurds] against the imperialists, saying we are going to set up a state, which will be a state of brotherhood between Turks and Kurds and when he won he told them there [are] no Kurds,” explains Gauthier.

Added to that problem was the fact that the Kurds didn’t have a central figure to bring them together to push for their own state at the time.

So they turned to the British. The British were in the north of Iraq and were initially interested in creating a Kurdish state, as a kind of buffer state between Iraq and Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey. “But then they discovered the oil, so they forgot about this buffer state,” says Gauthier.

So the Kurdish populations were absorbed into Iran, Syria, Iraq and Turkey.

But constant tensions between the Kurdish communities and their country’s governments have always been a reason for them to push for their own state.

In the case of Iraq’s Kurds, the US's 2003 invasion of Iras gave them outside support to set up their autonomous region, says Gunter.

But as Iraqi’s Kurds face the consequences of pushing ahead with their quest for independence, Falah Mustafa, the foreign minister of the Kurdish Regional Government says that the Kurds are “a different nation”.

Their efforts for independence have not worked out thus far, but “we tried our best, we went to Baghdad, we played a positive role. …. we should not be punished. We have to be realistic.”

The climate of media, particularly across the Middle East, is constantly changing and facing different challenges than in other regions. But up until now, no one has ever tried to put the habits of Middle Eastern nationals onto paper to truly understand what’s going on in terms of how people are getting their news.