SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Two years ago this week, Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan became a sister city to Nashville, Tennessee, here in the U.S. Nashville is, in fact, home to the largest Kurdish population in the United States. And a new podcast from WPLN tells the story of how that happened. It's a story of bloody genocide, freedom fighters, perseverance. And host Rose Gilbert is here to tell us about it. Hey, Rose.
ROSE GILBERT, BYLINE: Hey. How are you?
DETROW: I'm good. Thank you for joining us. Let's start with the title of your podcast - always a good place to start - "The Country In Our Hearts." Tell me what that means, where it came from.
GILBERT: Yeah, so it all goes back to the fact that Kurdistan isn't technically a country.
DETROW: Yeah.
GILBERT: It's a region spread across four countries - Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. And Kurds have their own history of oppression and struggling for autonomy in all four of those countries. And the way that one man explained it to me when I was reporting this project is that Kurdistan is a country that only exists in the hearts of its people, and that really stuck with me.
DETROW: Yeah. How did you first come across this story?
GILBERT: So as you said, Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish community in the United States. And if you spend some time here, you'll see it. You know, they are Kurdish restaurants. They are Kurdish markets. If you go catch a Predators game, a hockey game, there are Kurdish cultural theme nights. But the question is, how did they get here, and why did they come here? So that's really what drove this project.
DETROW: Can you tell me about one conversation you had in this project?
GILBERT: Yeah, there's one conversation in particular that really launched this podcast.
DETROW: Yeah.
GILBERT: Early on in my reporting, I spoke to a man named Nash Chalke who owns one of those markets in South Nashville. That's where I first met him, and that's where I sat down with him to have a cup of tea and listen to him tell his family's story.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE COUNTRY IN OUR HEARTS")
NASH CHALKE: So my dad, he was one of the Peshmergas that literally was on a list, you know, for them to catch. I mean, he was a warrior.
GILBERT: Everyone had to drop what they were doing - cooking, tending to the crops, laundry - and flee for cover. It was chaos.
CHALKE: My mom tells me the stories that I fell from her hand. So like, she literally left me behind. Some other people had to catch me and bring me.
GILBERT: They ended up fleeing to Turkey. It was the beginning of a childhood on the run.
CHALKE: You know, somebody would just shout, hey, helicopters. And, you know, everybody would just - you know, we just knew exactly - it was an instinct thing. Everybody knew how to hide.
DETROW: Wow. So he ultimately makes his way to Tennessee then, along with many others.
GILBERT: Yeah, you know, this is a common story, especially for families who were - had family members involved in the Peshmerga, always being on the run. But then there was this big landmark event that happened in 1988, called Al Anfal (ph), which was a military campaign from the Ba'athist Party from Saddam Hussein's armies to kind of drive out the Kurds. It was effectively ethnic cleansing. Entire villages disappeared into mass graves in, like, the span of a few short months. And that's what really drove hundreds of thousands of Kurdish people out of Iraq, and many of them ended up in America and ended up in Nashville.
DETROW: You know, when it comes to a family or when it comes to a community, I feel like there are the big stories that you tell everybody and you pass down. But often they get flattened out, and a lot of the details, especially painful details, might be kind of glossed over. I'm wondering, as you reported this story, did you get a sense of how many of the specifics were really well-known within the Kurdish community and how many were not? How many had been intentionally or unintentionally forgotten?
GILBERT: I mean, the outlines were really well-known. People were very proud of knowing where they came from. They knew their families had to flee. They knew why. But there was this kind of silence at the core of a lot of these stories, this trauma about exactly what went down. And I realized, so often, people's children were acting as translators for their older parents or grandparents. And there were these kind of incredible moments when I realized they were hearing these stories for the first time as well. That just blew me away.
DETROW: Yeah. We're obviously talking about the late '80s, but you're taking the story through the present day. And immigration, migration, people needing to flee where they're from, is a very front and present topic in 2025. How do you see all of that fitting together?
GILBERT: I mean, it's so relevant, right? I mean, the programs that brought these families to America were very notably frozen earlier this year. There were refugee flights frozen. The same programs that allowed people to come from refugee camps in Turkey and resettle in Nashville maybe wouldn't have been there for them. But it's even more relevant because there's this new wave of Kurdish folks coming to Nashville - this time from Turkey. And they're in a bit of a different boat than their Iraqi Kurdish counterparts because they're arriving as asylum-seekers over the U.S.-Mexico border.
And I sat down with one of their families to kind of compare their stories to what Nash Chalke and his family went through in the late '80s, early '90s. And I couldn't help but realize they were coming to a very different America, an America that was maybe less welcoming or harder to navigate. So that really brings the very current conversation about immigration into this project and kind of brings those stories from the '80s and '90s right up to the present.
DETROW: One of the scenes in this podcast is the traditional new year celebration, Newroz. Can you tell me what that looks like in Nashville?
GILBERT: Yeah, so Newroz, it marks the beginning of spring. It's a new year celebration, and we've had one here in Nashville since 1994. It's always outside or usually outside. There's music. There's dancing. There's picnicking.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GILBERT: It all centers around a symbolic flame, which represents kind of this light in the darkness, the beginning of the light season, the beginning of the warm season. And that was important to me for two reasons. One, Newroz, because it has become really symbolic of Kurdish identity abroad, has sometimes been targeted by governments and by ISIS in Syria. So one person put it to me as an obligation to celebrate it well because they can, but also because in a story and a history that has so many dark moments, Newroz is kind of very literally this light in the darkness. And that's what I wanted to emphasize - that with all this very painful history and all these troubles, there is this amazing resilience and joy as well.
DETROW: That's Rose Gilbert, host of the new podcast, "The Country In Our Hearts," from member station WPLN. Thank you so much.
GILBERT: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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