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ʿAbd al-Sattār Nāṣir (1947–2013) belonged to the group of Iraqi writers and intellectuals called Jīl al-Sittināt "the Sixties Generation", which dominated the cultural scene at the time. This article examines Nāṣir as a driven writer, who initially wrote out of a morally induced reaction to expose the suffering and brutalization of all Iraqi peoples and ethnicities by a controlling totalitarian regime, and as a once-incarcerated author of brave novels he hoped would someday catalyze a popular overthrow of the lawless, abusive leaders, thereby ending the fears and violence possessing Iraq’s body politic. Two themes -- the destruction wreaked by those with extraordinary power and their use of lies and deception to control the people –- are central to the three novels chosen as representative of Nāṣir’s oeuvre: Abū al-Rīsh (2002), Niṣf al-Aḥzān 'Half Sorrows' (2000) and Qushūr al-Badhinjān 'Eggplant Peels' (2007). In these three novels, Nāṣir exposes the unimaginable terror, violence and cruelty of Saddām Ḥusayn and his henchmen, as well as their propaganda, which consisted of lies and deception. Saddām is depicted as a ruler who presents himself as an inspiring revolutionary, but in fact is a tyrant who deceives the citizens, subjecting them to brutal control and leading them into deadly wars. Following George Orwell’s 1984, Nāṣir’s literary corpus attempts to rip the masks from the faces of the dictator and his lackeys, who oppress the people, deny them any freedom of thought and keep them under constant surveillance.

Since 2011, the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) and its anti-Kurdish violence, the new cold war of Iran and Russia versus Turkey, and the Tayyip Erdogan regime’s coercive policies against the Kurds both in Turkey and Syria, entirely have redefined the century-long Kurdish issue in the Middle East. It also has affected deeply the Kurdish political elite and constrained it to remilitarize the Kurdish conflict and society. How does this elite define the Kurdish issue after years of stasis in Iraq and in Syria? Which senses does it give to the crisis of the previously strong Westphalian states in the region? How does the Kurdish trans-border space reconfigure itself amid heavy external and internal tensions? This article, which takes note that a long historical cycle starting with Mustafa Barzani’s rebellion in 1961, and a shorter one, that started with the 1991 Gulf War, will discuss the issue of the reconfiguration of the Kurdish political elite after the Arab revolutionary uprisings of 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]