BY Mat Wolf
03.25.15
AKRE, Iraqi Kurdistan—The festival of light and hope is drawing to an end, and the horror that everyone here feared, and thought almost inevitable, has not yet happened. Most of the 21 Kurdish sons and brothers and fathers captured by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) earlier this year, seen in videos wearing the orange jumpsuits of the soon-to-be-slaughtered and shown in cages like those about to be burned alive—may yet be in the land of the living.
But ISIS is the cruelest of captors, knowing too well how to use hope to deepen anger and despair. Suspense is one of its weapons. And few of the people here have any illusions about that. So the Kurdish New Year celebration of light at the beginning of spring, Newroz, has gone on in the shadow of ISIS and the desperate but determined war to defeat it, even as the Kurds draw strength from its mythology of defiance and endurance to go on.
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