DUHOK: Repin Peshtiwan sits in the back of a truck, carefully scanning yellow pages one by one, as part of his mission to digitize historical Kurdish books in danger of disappearing.
Viewed as the world's largest stateless people, the Kurds are an ethnic group numbering between 25 and 35 million, most of whom are spread across modern-day Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.
In Iraq, Kurds constitute a large minority that has been persecuted, with thousands killed under the rule of the late Saddam Hussein, and many of their historical documents lost or destroyed.
“Preserving the culture and history of Kurdistan is a sacred act,” Pishtiwan said, leafing through volumes and manuscripts from the public library of the city of Dohuk in the autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.
“We aim to digitize old, rare and weak books, so they don’t disappear,” the 23-year-old added, holding a Kurdish teacher’s torn diaries published in 1960.
In Iraq, the Kurdish language was mostly marginalized until the autonomous Kurdish region in the north gained greater freedom after Saddam's defeat in the 1990-1991 Gulf War.
After the 2003 US-led invasion toppled the leader, the remaining documents were scattered among libraries and universities or kept in private collections.
Pishtiwan and his colleagues travel once a week in their small white truck from the regional capital, Erbil, to other Kurdish towns and cities to find “old and rare” books.
They are looking for texts that provide insight into Kurdish life, which spans centuries and dialects.
At the Dohuk Library, an archiving team scans wooden bookshelves in search of hidden gems.
With the help of the library director, they carefully collect a diverse collection of more than 35 books on poetry, politics, language and history, written in several Kurdish dialects and some in Arabic.
Peshtivan holds up a book of ancient Kurdish folktales named after the 16th-century Kurdish princess Zanzade, before gently turning the fragile pages of another religious tome, tracing the line with his fingers.
Back in the truck, equipped with two devices connected to a screen, the small team begins the hours-long scanning process before returning the books to the library.
In the absence of an online archive, the Kurdistan Center for Arts and Culture, a non-profit organization founded by the nephew of the region's president, Nechirvan Barzani, launched a digitization project in July.
They hope to make the texts available to the public for free on KCAC's new website in April.
More than 950 items have been archived so far, including a collection of manuscripts from the Kurdish Baban Emirate in today's Sulaymaniyah region dating back to the 19th century.
“The goal is to provide primary sources for Kurdish readers and researchers,” said Mehmet Fatih, Executive Director of KCAC.
“This archive will belong to all Kurds to use and to help enhance our understanding of ourselves.”
Dohuk Library Director, Masoud Khalid, provided the KCAC team with access to manuscripts and documents gathering dust on its shelves, but the team was unable to obtain permission from the owners of some documents to convert them to digital form immediately.
Khaled said: “We have books that were printed a long time ago, and their owners or authors have died, and publishing houses will not reprint them.”
The 55-year-old added that the digitization of the collection means that “if we want to open an electronic library, our books will be ready.”
Hana Kaki Hiran, the imam of a mosque in the town of Hiran, uncovered a treasure for the KCAC team – several generations-old manuscripts from a religious school founded in the 18th century.
Hiran said that since its founding, the school had collected manuscripts, but many of them were destroyed during the first war between the Kurds and the Iraqi state between 1961 and 1970.
“Only 20 manuscripts remain today,” including centuries-old poems, the imam said.
He is now waiting for the KCAC website to launch in April to refer people to view manuscripts.
“It's time to get it out there and make it available to everyone.”
