In 1976, a resettlement coordinator at Catholic Charities of Tennessee named Bill Sinclair received a phone call from the national office. Would Nashville take some Kurdish refugees from Iraq?
Sinclair had been hired the year before to help resettle families from Southeast Asia — the aftermath of the fall of Saigon. He was good at the work: meeting families at the airport, finding apartments, enrolling children in schools, navigating a city that had not yet learned to think of itself as a destination for anyone who wasn’t already American. But when the call came about the Kurds, Sinclair had a problem.
He didn’t know what a Kurd was.
He went to the library and read National Geographic. He learned that the Kurds were a people without a country — an ancient ethnic group spread across the mountainous borderlands of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria, with their own language, their own culture, and no state of their own. They had been fighting for autonomy for as long as anyone could remember. In 1975, a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq had collapsed after the United States and Iran withdrew their support as part of the Algiers Agreement. Saddam Hussein had retaliated against the Kurdish population. Families were fleeing.
About fifty of them — roughly ten to fifteen families — were assigned to Nashville. Sinclair met them at the airport, found them apartments, helped them find work. Many of the men were former Peshmerga — Kurdish fighters — or professionals who had held positions of standing in a place that no longer existed for them. In Nashville, they took jobs in factories and warehouses. They learned a new city.
They also noticed something about the landscape.
The hills of Middle Tennessee are green and rolling, with hardwood forests that change color in the fall and a climate mild enough to grow figs and pomegranates. The terrain is nothing like the flat Southern lowlands or the dense urban corridors where most refugee resettlement happens. It looks, to a surprising degree, like the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq — the Kurdish homeland.
This is the kind of detail that doesn’t appear in any government resettlement document. No federal agency chose Nashville because the hills looked like Kurdistan. Catholic Charities chose Nashville because it was affordable, had manufacturing jobs, and had a coordinator willing to read National Geographic and figure it out. But when the first families arrived and drove south from the airport, through the rolling green country along Nolensville Pike, something in the geography registered. They told the families who came after them.
The second wave came in 1979 and 1980 — Kurds fleeing the Iranian Revolution, which had replaced one authoritarian government with another and made life in Iranian Kurdistan dangerous again.
The third wave came in the early 1990s, and it was the largest. In 1988, Saddam Hussein launched the Anfal campaign — a systematic military operation against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq that killed an estimated 50,000 to 182,000 people and destroyed thousands of villages. The campaign included chemical weapons attacks, the most infamous at Halabja, where Iraqi aircraft dropped mustard gas and nerve agents on a civilian town of 70,000. After the 1991 Gulf War, when the Kurdish uprising that the first Bush administration had encouraged was left to be crushed without American support, another wave of refugees fled.
Nashville took them in. Catholic Charities was still there. The infrastructure that Bill Sinclair had built in 1976 — the institutional knowledge, the apartment networks, the school enrollment systems — had been maintained and expanded. By the mid-1990s, Catholic Charities had processed over 10,000 refugees in Nashville, not all Kurdish, but the Kurdish community had become the largest and most visible.
The fourth wave was the strangest. In 1996, when Saddam Hussein’s forces attacked Kurdish areas again during a civil war between Kurdish political factions, the United States launched Operation Pacific Haven — an airlift that evacuated roughly 6,600 Kurds who had worked with American military and aid organizations. They were flown to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, processed in vacant military housing on a Pacific island thousands of miles from anywhere they had ever been, and then given a choice of where to resettle.
Many chose Nashville. The community was already there. The mosque was being built. The hills looked right.
The Salahadeen Center opened in 1998 on Elysian Fields Court, just off Nolensville Pike. It was the first Kurdish mosque in North America. It started small — a gathering place for Friday prayers and a school where children could learn Kurdish, a language that Saddam Hussein had tried to eradicate. It grew into a complex of three buildings: a prayer hall, an education center, and a commercial building whose rent helps fund the operation.
Around the Salahadeen Center, Nolensville Pike transformed. Kurdish bakeries opened, selling flatbread and baklava. International grocery stores stocked sumac and bulgur and pomegranate molasses. Gold jewelry shops appeared — gold is the traditional Kurdish store of value, the way families carry wealth across borders when banks are not an option and governments cannot be trusted. Tea houses opened where men played dominoes and watched Kurdish satellite television. The stretch of Nolensville Pike between Thompson Lane and Harding Place became, without any official designation, Little Kurdistan.
The 2000 Census recorded about 1,770 Kurds in Nashville. Community leaders said the real number was closer to 10,000 — the Census doesn’t have a box for “Kurdish,” and many identified as Iraqi or simply didn’t participate. By the 2020s, estimates ranged from 15,000 to 20,000. Nashville had become, without anyone planning it, the capital of the Kurdish diaspora in America.
In 2023, Nashville and Erbil — the capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, a city built around a citadel that has been continuously inhabited for over 6,000 years — became official sister cities. The resolution was introduced by Nashville’s Metro Council, and the ceremony involved officials from both cities acknowledging a connection that had existed for nearly fifty years without formal recognition.
In January 2023, a historical marker was installed at 3904 Nolensville Pike — believed to be the first marker in North America dedicated to a Kurdish community. It stands on a commercial strip between a bakery and a grocery store, in a neighborhood that exists because a man at Catholic Charities read a magazine article in 1976 and said yes to a phone call.
Bill Sinclair worked at Catholic Charities for decades. In 2017, the Nashville Metro Council passed a resolution recognizing his role in building the city’s refugee resettlement program. He had started with fifty Kurds and a National Geographic. By the time the resolution was passed, the community he had helped plant had grown into the largest Kurdish population in the Western Hemisphere.
Nashville did not set out to become Little Kurdistan. No one planned it. A federal agency made a phone call. A Catholic charity said yes. The first families arrived and noticed that the hills looked like home. They told the next families, who told the next, who told the next. Fifty years later, you can drive down Nolensville Pike and buy Kurdish flatbread and hear Sorani in the parking lot and see the sun emblem of Kurdistan on a shopfront in Tennessee.
The whole thing started because one man was willing to admit he didn’t know something and went to the library to learn.
Photo: Levi Clancy / CC0