While Jumbos returned home or went on vacation over the winter break, a student delegation headed across the world to northern Iraq in January to conduct research and meet with regional leaders.
Eleven Tufts students with the New Initiative for Middle East Peace (NIMEP) spent two weeks in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq on a fact-finding mission in January. Participants met with several local leaders, including Kurdistan's regional president Massoud Barzani.
NIMEP is an Institute of Global Leadership (IGL) program that aims to find solutions to conflicts in the Middle East.
Part of NIMEP's mission is to perform an annual fact-finding mission, according to IGL Director Sherman Teichman. The Kurdistan trip, part of the Robert and JoAnn Bendetson Public Diplomacy Initiative, is the eighth in the group's history, Teichman said.
The NIMEP trip this winter was the first American student delegation to visit Iraq, according to senior Amit Paz, one of the trip's three co-leaders.
Teichman, Trustee Robert Bendetson (A '73) and Shahla Al-Kli (F '09), a Fletcher graduate and the current senior advisor to the speaker of the Kurdistan Parliament, proposed to NIMEP the idea of traveling to Kurdistan, according to Teichman.
The Kurdish president addressed the group at his presidential palace. Barzani spoke about Kurdish history, focusing specifically on the importance of forgiveness and tolerance in Kurdish culture, according to senior Khaled Al-Sharikh, a co-leader.
"It was really an honor because if you read about the history of Kurdistan, what's particular about it is that there's been one family that really fought for the Kurds, and it's the Barzani family, so for us to be able to meet him was a total honor," senior Patricia Letayf, the third co-leader, said.
Barzani at the meeting expressed support for NIMEP's research, according to Mark Rafferty, a sophomore who participated in the trip.
"I was happy to see that he expressed a willingness to support our research even if it wasn't necessarily going to be complimentary to his government," Rafferty said. "He told us that he was willing to allow us to research objectively and hear both sides of the story, and whether or not that was true in practice, we appreciated him saying that."
The group also met with Director of Security and Intelligence Masrour Barzani, who is President Barzani's son, and the Speaker of the Kurdistant Parliament, Kamal Kirkuki.
Each student in the group researched individual topics related to the region prior to leaving for Iraq. The students' goal in Iraq was to collect new perspectives on their research, according to Letayf. Their reports will be published in the NIMEP journal Insights in the spring.
"We like to be challenged," Letayf said. "It's hard not to come into these trips with preconceived notions, because we come in feeling like we're experts on our topics."
Some students saw a different side of the Iraq war after visiting the region.
"I was very critical of the war in Iraq, and you get to this place and you meet people who say, not with any regrets, thank you for liberating us," Paz said. "It's not a narrative that you encounter at a university like Tufts."
Paz said that the trip to the region opened his eyes to a far wider view of the war.
"You really have to step back and look at the big picture and see what this war is really all about. While there are still very different interpretations about what this was all about, this is an example of a positive aspect of the war. That was a very important thing to see," Paz said.
Kurdistan offers a valuable model for the rest of the region, Letayf said.
"It was the perfect opportunity to visit Kurdistan because it's a budding democracy and a model for the rest of the Middle East because they are secular," Letayf said. "They want the rest of the world to recognize that they are different and that they are developing at a faster rate than the rest of Iraq and that they have suffered a lot in the past."
The trip offered the students a chance to see what is often an overlooked part of the country, according to Letayf.
"There is a story there that not a lot of people hear about," Letayf said.
Rana Abdul-Aziz, the Arabic language program coordinator at Tufts, and IGL fellow Zach Iscol, a former Marine infantry officer and Iraq war veteran, also accompanied the students.
The trip was sponsored in part by the Kurdistan Parliament as well as the IGL, though participants still had to pay for part of the trip, according to Teichman.
"This is the beginning of what may be a long-term relationship with the Kurdish sector of Iraq on education and other initiatives," Teichman said.
