‘Sacred job’: Iraq Kurds digitise books to save threatened culture

Preserving Kurdish history through digitising rare books to prevent cultural disappearance in Iraq's Kurdistan region.

Huddled in the back of a van, Rebin Pishtiwan carefully scans one yellowed page after another, as part of his mission to digitise historic Kurdish books at risk of disappearing.

Seen as the world's largest stateless people, the Kurds are an ethnic group of between 25 and 35 million mostly spread across modern day Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey.

In Iraq, the Kurds are a sizeable minority who have been persecuted, with thousands killed under the rule of late dictator Saddam Hussein and many of their historic documents lost or destroyed.

"Preserving the culture and history of Kurdistan is a sacred job," said Mr. Pishtiwan, perusing volumes and manuscripts from Dohuk city's public library in Iraq's northern autonomous Kurdistan region.

"We aim to digitise old books that are rare and vulnerable, so they don't vanish," the 23-year-old added, a torn memoir of a Kurdish teacher published in 1960 in hand.

In Iraq, the Kurdish language was mostly marginalised until the Kurds' autonomous region in the north won greater freedom after Saddam Hussein's defeat in the 1990-1991 Gulf War.

After the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 toppled the dictator, remaining documents were scattered among libraries and universities or held in private collections.