A FORBIDDEN MIDDLE EASTERN ROYAL ROMANCE

The Kurds are the largest ethnic group of people globally without their own UN recognized country. Some estimates suggest that 20 million Kurds live in the high plateau area which compromises parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia and Turkey, not to mention the diaspora of untold millions of Kurds to industural countries for work in the last 50 years.

The Ottoman Empire, a vast Turkish sultanate founded in the 13 centaury and on its last legs by the beginning of the 20th century, had fought in the first world war as an ally of Germany and upon its defeat in 1918, it was dissolved and divided into new countries by the British. However, the defeated Empires' province of Kurdistan, tragically, did not become a new country, but was parceled to become parts of the newly created “artificial” countries of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia, and Turkey.

The Kurds first entered the Western news during the 1990 Desert Storm, making headlines as they fled into Turkey as refugees from Hussein’s brutality, or were hunted down and murdered by Iraq Sunni troops. This ethnic group would re-surface periodically in the West's front pages over the next decade or more, and once protected by US forces no fly zone, come to represent one of a few very positive outcomes of Desert Storm for the people of Iraq, this history well documented by David McDowall.

Some two years past, a Kurd leader began to emerge as the nescient interim pre-constitutional government of the new Iraq began to form and the man with the name Jalal Talabani would later be elected interim President of Iraq, a man who a few short years ago was being hunted by Hussein. This man had played perhaps the most vital role in the affairs of the Kurds of Northern Iraq after Desert Strom and the political, economic and social flowering which had occured.

Jalal Talabani

However, Talabani's story is not without controversery, and after Talabani's "Tribe", The Patroitic Union of Kurdistan Party, primiarly from the Southeastern region of Iraq, acheived a peaceful détente with the other major Kurdish group, The Kurdistan Democratic Party, under Massoud Barzani, former enemies at war, now simply political opponents making a huge leap into the 21st Century from the rigid and often violent former world of warrior tribalism.

Talabani can now, with just the slightest lean toward hyperbole, be called "The King of the Kurds". And much to my supprise a Prince appears, a Crown Prince, an Heir Apparent, and the leading man in the Forbidden Middle Eastern Romance about to unfold.


At some point last fall, an off hour obscure political talk show was on cable and the guest of this show was a young man in his mid twenties introduced as Qubad Talabani, son of Jalal Talabani the President of Iraq. The son is the Washington based representative of the Patriotic Union Of Kurdistan to the US government.



Talabani the son, the Prince, speaks unaccented English, not quite American, but not quite British either. We'll say educated American with slight British public school overtones. Extremely self possessed, and with powerful presence, no matter the trick question, Qubad smoothly deflected and segued into the answer which fit the message he was presenting.

After the program was over, google delivered surprisingly few hits on the Prince, but inserting the name in Google's News Alert, a blurb would appear in e-mail every week or so
noting The Princes appearance at an International Business Convention or at some Investment Symposium held in Phoenix. All news alerts attest Talabani to be a very busy Prince selling the beautiful mythical land of the Kurdistan and the Kurds to powerful global investors.

Then came a Google News Alert......

DIPLOMATIC WEDDING IN CHIANTI

Qubad Talebani, son of the newly elected president of Iraq, chose the Chianti hills for his wedding with Sherri Kraham, a young Jewish American.

The Prince had chosen his future queen.
The wedding had been secret, and the announcement not released until several months after the wedding.
No photos on the net of Princes Sherri, but we find a bit of biography.
Law degree and a BA Political Science from Princeton, and has been employed by the State Dept.
And as the announcement rather crudely informed us........

"cultures that are not only different but also opposed and even in conflict politically. He is an Iraqi Sunni Kurd, but born in Beirut, and she is American and Jewish. I was speaking with the Talabani family in Arabic and with the Kraham family in English."

How extraordinarily futuresque and yet breathtakingly feudal.
May God and Allah protect them.