The largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland, 25 million Kurds live in the area around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In INVISIBLE NATION, BBC correspondent Quil Lawrence delivers an intimate and unflinching portrait of the Kurds’ quixotic quest for statehood and how it is reshaping Iraq. 

Quil is the Middle East correspondent for BBC news magazine The World. He has spent much of the last seven years in Iraq and Kurdistan, reporting for National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has won various awards for his journalism, including the Harry Chapin Media Judges Award and the Judges Award from the National Conference of Community Broadcasters.

He lives in Jerusalem, and we talked about INVISIBLE NATION by email.

What first interested you in the Kurds and their quest for statehood?

While I was a free-lance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia, I read in the Guardian Weekly about the capture in Kenya of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish rebel group in Turkey, the PKK.  Hundreds of Kurds around the Middle East and Europe were so passionate about Ocalan that they immolated themselves in protest.  I had no idea what a Kurd was at the time, but the protests made a deep impression and peeked my curiosity.

I made my first visit to Iraqi Kurdistan in early 2000, when I was a Pew International Journalism Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  I spent several months in Washington talking with policymakers about the subject - Paul Wolfowitz was conveniently dean of SAIS at the time, he would later become the principle architect of the Iraq invasion.  I made two trips to Iraq as part of the fellowship, in the days when foreign reporters were a rare sight.  The Kurds were desperate for media attention and afraid that without it Saddam might easily crush them again.  It was a good time to get to know people like Jalal Talabani - then a rebel leader and now President of Iraq.  I met and formed lasting relationships with key figures of what is now the Kurdish Regional Government.

I had no idea at the time what good preparation I was making.  After my fellowship in 2000 I began working for the BBC World Service radio on their news magazine The World, produced with PRI and WGBH in Boston.  In January of 2003 I found myself back in Northern Iraq, crossing-in through the mountains from Iran in a blizzard.  With no idea when the US invasion was coming, I waited out the war for three months.  In those days most of the world was convinced that Saddam had anthrax or at least mustard gas - Kurdistan had living proof of that.  As the war approached many Kurds fled population centers fearing a last ditch revenge attack by the regime.  I slept with a gas mask next to my pillow.

I did most of my research just listening back through the audio recordings I’d made over 7 years covering Iraq - hundreds of hours of interviews.  In 2006-7 I took a sabbatical from the BBC.  I made one two-month trip to Iraq for research and then moved home to Maine to write in the wintry seclusion there.  I was also commuting to visit my girlfriend in Ottawa, and I would listen to entire day’s worth of audio recordings while I drove across Quebec to see her.

Read Part Two of our Q & A with Quil Lawrence tomorrow.