Running on my photo blog for several months, my Kurdish blog posts attracted wide attention, not least from the Kurds themselves. Seeing unknown, 50-year-old photographs of their own legendary founding hero, Mullah Mustafa Barzani (left), was a heart-warming revelation.

One non-Kurd who responded was Chris Kutschera, who runs a photo archive in Paris dedicated to his and others' photographs from Kurdistan, and to his several books and many articles on the Kurds. Chris has added a number of my 1965 photographs to his ongoing collection, which can be visited at http://www.chris-kutschera.com/  

These days I get up early to scour the headlines for the latest news of the Kurdish peshmergas' valiant struggle against the ISIS marauders in Syria and Iraq, helped by U.S. airdrops of supplies. Those of you who see the  New Yorker magazine can read Dexter Filkins' recent report in depth and detail on these special people. 

Over the years visiting journalists, including myself, have admired these proud and independent folks to the point of struggling to maintain professional objectivity on the ins and outs of their long-running struggle for "autonomy" within existing Iraq, Turkey, and Syria - or, one day perhaps, independence as a separate nation.

One Kurd who responded to my photographs of the ancient Mesopotamian stones was Kozad Ahmed.  A Kurdish archeologist born in Baghdad in 1967 (two years after my visit), he contextualized those stones in his detailed 2012 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Leiden in Holland, titled "The Beginnings of Ancient Kurdistan" (c. 2500-1500): A Historical and Cultural Synthesis." Evidently those stones were smuggled out of the village of Betwata the 1970s, auctioned in Geneva and are now in museums in Jerusalem and Baghdad.