It was impossible to get it all, because these stories went back decades and they were talking about villages in a way that made the places seem like dead relatives. The men were worshipful when they said the names of the places where their families used to live. Most of the men I spoke to were, like the weeping, happy Zedu, originally from Kandala, a village where people grew olives. When I paused, a man sitting in the room would say, "Please, ask us more questions." They wanted to start at 1975, when their villages were mostly depopulated, so I let them. In a way, it was a collective interview about how they had come to be in Mahad. Many of the men told variations on the same story, and this is what came out in the first few minutes.

Mahad it seemed, was formed by the ethnic cleansing of Kurds from nine surrounding villages -- this explained why it was such a large town in the middle of rural Iraq. They were all settled refugees. Most of their families had had their farms taken away by Saddam Hussein's administration, and they were forced into Mahad. The regime spent no money on basic infrastructure, which left the Mahadis without essential services and decent healthcare. The men did not talk about systematic torture or arrest at the hands of the political authorities, though they did remember the names of two people who had disappeared.

I learned that the worst thing that can happen to a Kurdish villager, short of death, is to be forced from the village, to lose the place and the continuity of his family. The men talked about being unable to bury their family members in the old plots in the villages because the Arab settlers wouldn't let them. Kurdish, the first language of the town, was not allowed. Speaking Kurdish in public, and any expression of Kurdish identity, was also dangerous under the Arab administration. "Our village was destroyed by bulldozer!" said Khader Nazam. "We can only speak Kurdish at home. They changed our identity cards from Kurdish to Arab."

There was another twist. The people of Mahad, unlike the rest of Kurdistan and Iraq, are not Muslims. They are Yazidis, a group that adheres to Zoroastrianism, a religion that predates Christianity by 1,400 years. They worship an ancient deity, Ahura Mazda, by lighting a flame in the temple. For the Yazidis there is a heaven and a hell, angels, and concepts of redemption and righteousness. Much of what the Yazidis believe is familiar because it worked its way into major religions; it was theirs ages ago and now it is ours. Much of the doctrine relates the struggle between light and dark.

A man across the room said, "One of my family died and I wanted to take them to Kandala but the Arab man who lived there shot the graves there to keep me away. Yes, they destroyed temples and graves to keep us out of those places." His friend said, "It was better to move the grave of my father." The other men agreed. Later in the afternoon, when I went to the cemetery at the Yazd temple, I saw that it was recently built, and that the long dead had been moved there. The Arabs allowed them to practice their religion, but destroyed all the monuments they loved to get them to move to the camp. It had the twisted logic of an ethnic cleansing campaign, of a surplus of darkness.

I walked to the Baath Party security office and watched chickens and goats poke around in the refuse while sheep wandered down unpaved streets. Mahad was a shambles, not anything like the Kurdish villages across the border.

Sion was there taking photographs of defaced Saddam signs when the Special Forces convoy rolled up to the shouts of the locals. The arrival of the Americans set the crowd going again, and when they got out of their white four-by-fours, they were mobbed by the Mahadis and looked a little surprised by their reception. The soldiers moved around cautiously but treated the villagers with respect and shook hands and said hello. The kids wanted to get close to the soldiers and look at the dangerous things they carried in their cars, but the older men kept them back.

Mr. Robert, the officer we met earlier, got out and talked with the KDP man in charge, while the other soldiers started to set up shop. Sion told the soldiers about the locked doors in the Baath Party office and Mr. Robert thought it was interesting, so the men found a crowbar and tore the locks out and opened all the closed rooms. One room had cabinets in it that were full of printed material and handwritten files. The Americans loaded up their vehicles with Baath Party information, and Mr. Robert said to Sion, "We can't read it so we'll just have to take all of it." They took all the records and put them in the trucks, while the kids tore up pictures of Saddam.

Before we left, more than one man came up to me and asked me if they were safe. I told them all what I wanted to be true. "The bombs won't fall here now, and don't worry, darkness is gone."

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