Sunday, 20 April
CPTers Elizabeth Pyles and Chihchun Yuan traveled to Halabja to visit a local women’s center and community radio station for women and youth.

Naar-Obed spoke with the KRG liaison to the U.N. and learned that Turkey is still shelling along the Turkish/Iraqi border but villagers remain there. Villagers are affected economically and psychologically by the ongoing shelling but the recent bombings have not injured anyone. Iranian attacks against PEJAK (sister organization to PKK, an Iranian Kurdish resistance group) have displaced villagers and destroyed land and livestock. The representative supported CPT visiting villagers to do follow up stories and develop relationships so that, in the event accompaniment becomes necessary in the future, some trust will already be established.

“We are surrounded by hostile neighbors.” “ They want to destroy everything that we build.” These are two sentiments we frequently hear expressed in the Kurdish Region of northern Iraq.

This weekend, the Team went to Azadi Park, a spot of beauty in the heart of the city, all the more remarkable because it has been reclaimed (can land/space be resurrected? Redeemed, certainly) by the Kurds. It was previously a Ba'athist-only holding adjacent to one of Saddam Hussein's prisons where Kurds were routinely tortured. The prison is now a museum.

Join CPT's first delegation to the Kurdish north of Iraq. Hear first-hand stories of a people subjected to decades of violence and oppression by the Western-backed regime of Saddam Hussein, international economic sanctions, and the U.S.-led invasion, occupation and betrayal.