With the independence referendum of Iraqi Kurdistan set for 26th September 2017, The Frontline Club will be hosting a film screening of No Friends But the Mountains along with a Q&A with the makers of the film to discuss the possible outcomes.

No Friends But the Mountains is an insightful personal tale from Kae Bahar, a Kurdish asylum seeker who explains how many wars and the ever growing refugee exodus from the Middle East are fuelling the call for an independent Kurdistan.

Kae himself endured torture under the regime of Saddam Hussein and was forced into exile in 1980. 35 years on, Kae returns to Iraq to win first hand insights into the war against ISIS and explore whether independence in the Kurdish region could become a reality. Along his way he meets Ezidi Kurds who escaped the 2014 ISIS massacre in Sinjar and ended up in Iraqi refugee camps or in Germany.  He also interviews those who are still fighting on the frontline – the Peshmerga and the PKK.

In exile, Kae dreamt about Kurdish independence during all his life and with this film he wants to conduct a reality check back in his homeland. Are the 6-7 million people who are living in the Kurdish region of Iraq also keen on independence? Or could there be a more nuanced attitude to dealing with the real-politik of the region? Kae is also asking how best to prevent further conflicts and more refugee dramas.

Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/230207480

Speakers

Kae Bahar (via Skype): Presenter

Kae is UK based, Kurdish writer and documentary filmmaker. Over the past 25 years he has been producing and presenting films with broadcasters such as BBC, Channel 4 and Al Jazeera. In 2015, Kae’s novel Letters from a Kurd  was published to great acclaim.

Claudio von Planta: Director

Claudio von Planta is a Swiss freelance documentary filmmaker who started his career in 1985 with reports about the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Occupation. From 1990 onwards Claudio worked on many TV news features and longer current affairs programmes for all the main UK broadcasters. In 1996 Claudio filmed a Gwynne Roberts report for Channel 4 Dispatches where they tracked down Bin Laden in Afghanistan. The same year he also shot KARZAN’S BROTHERS for BBC Inside Story, his first Kurdish film with Kae Bahar where they documented the smuggling of Kurds from Iraq to the UK. Ever since Kae and Claudio continued to produce films about the fate of the Kurds.

John McCarthy: Narrator

John McCarthy is a writer and broadcaster.  On his first foreign assignment, to Lebanon in 1986, he was abducted by Islamic Fundamentalists and held hostage for over five years. This experience was explored in the book Some Other Rainbow (co-written with Jill Morrell). His other books are Between Extremes (with Brian Keenan), A Ghost Upon Your Path: An Irish Journey, You Can’t Hide the Sun: A Journey through Palestine. Alongside his writing John has worked in television for the BBC, ITV, Sky Arts and Al Jazeera, and on radio for the BBC World Service and Radio 4. In 2014 John presented a documentary for Radio 4 ‘Kurdistan: A State of Uncertainty’. He was awarded the CBE in 1992 and is a Patron of the charity Freedom From Torture.

Tom Hardie-Forsyth: Recent Senior Advisor to Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)

Tom Hardie-Forsyth is the recently retired Senior Advisor, Capacity Building to the Prime Minister’s Office, Kurdistan Regional Government, Erbil Iraq, a post he has held since 2005. He remains the Senior Advisor to the KRG UK Representative Office, and a team member of the Genocide Memory Project.

Will 2013 see an escalation in tensions between Israel and Iran?  The Frontline Club in association with BBC Arabic brought together an expert panel to decipher the drumbeat of war and predict what 2013 may hold.

Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow began by telling an audience at LSE’s Sheikh Zayed Theatre on 12 December, that the consequences of military strikes would be “unbelievably catastrophic”.

From left: Meir Javedanfar, Azadeh Moaveni, Jon Snow, Abdel Bari Atwan, and Scott Peterson debate war and peace between Israel and Iran in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre at the London School of Economics.

Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in chief of the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi, opened the debate by stating he feels war is imminent.  Iran is tripping into the same fate that awaited Iraq during the last two decades, he said:

“When I say the comparison with Saddam Hussein and Iran, it is because the Israelis…want these weapons actually to be exclusive to the Israelis so they can scare the people from the Middle East and they can actually expand as they like…

The Israelis are preparing themselves…  The war against Gaza, which lasted about eight days, it was to test the Iranian missiles [from Hamas]…to test the Iron Domes, which [are] supposed to actually intercept all kinds of missiles…from Iran in particular.”

Toward this agenda, America supported Israel, Atwan said:

“[The U.S.] doesn’t want any regional superpower to possess nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in order to threaten [its] domination of the oil fields in the Gulf. That’s facts…  Saddam Hussein tried to do so, and he paid the price – his regime [was] deposed. The Iranians are repeating the same mistakes in the eyes of the Israelis and the Americas.”

Israeli-Iranian analyst Meir Javedanfar disagreed:

“It’s not because we don’t want the Iranians to have nuclear weapons. It’s because of this regime…  [It] has called for Israel to be eliminated, time and time again… [It] has put its hatred into action. We saw in the Second Intifada, 700 Israelis were killed by suicide bombings paid by Iranian money, half of it at least… You would not want that regime to have a nuclear weapon.”

Moreover, Javedanfar added:

“I don’t think there will be war…  We see that the sanctions and the diplomacy are [already] hurting the Iranian regime very badly…

[And] I don’t see Ayatollah Khomeini having the confidence to tell his officers that, ‘tomorrow we’re going to kick out all the IAEA inspectors, we’re going to take that enriched uranium…and we’re going to make a bomb with it,’ because the moment he does that, that’s the moment he’s going to risk an American attack.”

Other panelists Azadeh Moaveni, former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine and Scott Peterson, journalist and photographer, agreed with Javedanfar that war seems improbable.

Javedanfar thought injustice in Palestine, rather than nuclear saber-rattling in Tehran, was ultimately Israel’s greatest danger:

“Israel’s security? You know what? We can beat the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime doesn’t scare me. [But] if these guys, the Palestinian people, don’t have a state, that is an existential threat to the security of the state of Israel.”

The panel mostly agreed, with relief, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been particularly vocal in antagonizing Iran, seems somewhat isolated on this issue within Israel itself.

When the topic turned to sanctions against Iran, echoes of Iraq reemerged.  Moaveni argued that they destroy goodwill and are excessively cruel.

“It is becoming impossible to be middle class anymore in Iran,” she said. “This is the slow dying of the Iran middle class…  Do we want to impoverish another major Middle Eastern middle class the way we’ve done [in Iraq]?”

Snow ended the discussion by highlighting the need for the West to engage Iranians with the respect he thinks they crave.  And to resolve tensions, he offered his own alternative:

“When you spend time on the streets in Shiraz, in Tehran… you meet young people who look west.  This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the region.  These people look remorselessly west… And, you go around, and you ask people, and they want ipads!  That’s why I’ve always said:  if you want to bomb Iran, bomb it with ipads…  That’s what people want…  They want life. And they want joy…  It isn’t as if they crave a prayer-mat.”

Watch the full event here: