Erdewan Zaxoyî

About Erdewan Zaxoyî

Erdewan Zaxoyî was a Kurdish singer, songwriter and composer from Zakho in the Badinan region of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, remembered as one of the great political voices of Badini (Kurmanji) song in the late 1970s and 1980s. He was born Erdewan Elî in 1957 in Zakho and was drawn to singing from childhood. In the late 1970s he released his first cassette of songs on Kurdish political themes, at a time when such recordings were banned by the Ba'ath regime.

His songs spoke of justice, freedom and love of homeland, and many of them celebrated his hometown of Zakho and its old Delal Bridge over the Khabur river. Under pressure from Saddam Hussein's government he spent years away from home and in the mountains alongside the Peshmerga, whom he supported with songs such as Peşmergekê Çelengim. Other songs credited to him include Delala Min Zaxoyê, Zaxoka Rengîn and Dayika Kurdistan.

In January 1986, shortly after the death of his fellow Zakho singer Eyaz Zaxoyî, he was seized in Baghdad by agents of the Iraqi security services. He was never seen again and his fate has never been established; he is presumed to have been killed. Four decades later his voice is still widely loved across Badinan and the wider Kurmanji-speaking world, and his name is still spoken together with that of Eyaz Zaxoyî as one of the region's lost artists.

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