Vacation Kurdistan

My hosts and I at Zakho's hippest internet cafe.

A trip to the world’s most  in-the-way  getaway...

If I stood up in a café in Mosul, Iraq, and shouted “I am American!” about how much time might I have? “Five seconds,” says 25 year-old Ali, politely suppressing a smile. It is a crisp morning on the frosty Kurdish steppe and we are on a bus heading north into Turkey from Iraq.  Ali has a cool seen-it-all demeanor, but he can’t keep his eyes off of the passing crystal pastures and occasional rustic military base. He apologetically asks to trade for my window seat. Today, you see, is the first day of his life outside of Iraq.

That Ali’s first trip out of Iraq coincided with my first trip to Iraq makes us appreciate our few similarities. We are the same age, for example. We both like Eminem. We dislike al Qaeda. Yet you begin to appreciate our vaster differences when you consider what each of us was doing exactly nine years prior: Ali was pledging allegiance to a poster of His Excellency No. 1 Chairman Saddam Hussein, wondering whether his feigned ebullience would satisfy a Baathist teacher fishing for excuses to snitch to the Mukhbarat on any undermining of national sentiment. I, conversely, was with friends in St. Paul, Minnesota counter-protesting one of the world’s many concurrent “Peace Rallies” with basketball game chants of  “free-I-ra-aq (ba-ba—ba-ba-ba) to peacenik jeers of “fuck you.” Ian McEwan would later memorialize the London peace rally of that same 15^th of February, 2003, in his 24-hour novel “Saturday,” so “bothered” he had been “that so many people seemed so thrilled to be there.” Indeed, while I was hearing for the first time such self-gratifying simplifications as “no blood for oil” and “Bush is a war-monger,” I was guilty myself of adventurizing a cause with satisfying naivette: this was a time, for example, when Abu Ghraib, IED, and Mission Accomplished had not yet assumed their macabre connotations.

Nine years later I’m concluding a vacation to one of the places in Iraq that really did greet the US Army with flowers as liberators; and Ali is nervously anticipating the logistics of his plan to earn remittances renovating apartments in Istanbul. Was the war in Iraq worth it? “50-50,” he says matter-of-factly. Not as high as you’d hope to hear from a liberated Shia. But not bad, considering the reasons for the war require a nine-year memory of things better forgotten, and the reasons against it require waiting a day or two until the next crowd of diners blows up.

What exactly did we liberate in Iraq? What did the thousands of Americans who died in Iraq accomplish? To imagine how Saddam would have handled the Arab Spring is to begin to get an idea. And to spend a few days in northern Iraq with Kurds is to get one with even less strain on the imagination. Yet ironically, while most people think the war that secured Chinese oil interests in Iraq was about securing American oil interests in Iraq, few think the war that secured semi-autonomy for the world’s largest stateless minority was about securing semi-autonomy for that minority, the Kurds.

Whether the unsung cause of a free, secular, pluralistic, democratic Iraqi Kurdistan merited a single American life is another question. But there’s a moral evasiveness in opting for arms’ length realism, particularly when we backdate Colin Powell’s “you break it you own it” to the decades in which Kurdistan’s fate was up to Kissinger, the CIA, and “our kind of guy,” Saddam. It’s no wonder Kurds shifted their hopes for a state to Turkish soil in the 1980s. But there the cynicism of pre “Bush Doctrine” US policy was to prove borderless.

Fortunately, where solidarity is concerned Kurdistan’s slightly absurd self-description as a tourist hot-spot offers a convenient opportunity. Yet expressing your international fraternalism in Kurdistan with your tourism dollars is easier said than done: Americans will have trouble getting Kurds to accept full payment for anything, so appreciative they are of the US intervention against Saddam. But whatever the price of your Kurdish kidney beans or boiled peanuts, the geopolitics and culture clashes unique to a Kurdish vacation ensure something for everyone in the family: a close-up on US power as a force for good (and, alas, evil), on nationalism v. internationalism, on capitalism v. tradition, on insurgency v. counterinsurgency. Solidarity is worth this vacation deal – a getaway that will get you away from very little.

“To be born again, first you have to die,” sang Salman Rushdie’s Gibreel Fareeshta. And likewise to get to Iraqi Kurdistan by land, first you have to go through one of a selection of unsavory regions, such as Syria, Iran, or Sunni Triangle Iraq. I opted for Turkey, thus de facto enrolling myself as a civilian consideration of an increasingly deadly phase of the Turkish Army’s counterinsurgency against Kurdish Nationalist rebels in the southeast, though enjoying the peculiar arrangement of being endeared by both sides – feds and rebels – as a silly American. Indeed, even the Turkish Airlines agent at the Istanbul airport was amused when I asked for a ticket to Dyarbakir, the southeastern city with the largest Kurdish population whose occasional firefights are a national preoccupation (though a drizzle compared to the chaotic 1980s when the Kurdish resistance held sway).

But first, I had half-a-day to evaluate Istanbul: the city of West and East, of Christian emperors and Muslim sultanates, of imperial decline and, if you believe today’s Turks, a glorious near return to founding father Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s dream of regional hegemony.  Alas, this last premonition must be unavoidable for anyone hailing from a city where even the back-alleys are wrinkled with Neo-baroque mystique, as if the pale-faced, dark-eyed youths getting on and off the snow-covered 1920s trams winding between the bubbly majesty of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque were all extras in some Turkish soap opera.

It didn’t take long before one such extra overheard me asking for directions and eagerly requested an elderly English-speaking Turk to translate a question to me. “He wants to know what you, an American, think of Turkey,” the old man said, intonating that he himself was above such self-doubts (the type who, when asking where you’re from, finds it an affront to his accent-recognition if you answer “America” without specifying the city). Sensing balloons of nationalistic pride in the balance, I cited the splendor of the Ottoman Empire and the “modernizing” influence of Turkey in the Middle East. “Yes, thank you,” he beamed.

But having parted with Istanbul and found my seat on the flight to Diyarbakir next to a beautiful Turkish girl about my age, I began to appreciate the qualifications of Turkey’s modernization. On one hand, I was certainly not in Kandahar anymore, conversing a bit flirtatiously with an uncovered, eyed-shadowed Muslim girl who could remember the last time she had drunk Raki much more readily than the last time she had been in a mosque. On the other, she thoroughly debunked any allusions I had about her country’s political liberalism. Erdogan? “Arrests anyone that goes against him. Journalists, generals, politicians – even the lawyers that defend them.” And what of the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers’ Party)? “They are our Taliban.”

Diyarbakir brought yet more juxtaposition. The airport’s dank bathroom was perfumed with pot, which was promptly offered to me by a diplomatic young man on my bus to nearby Mardin. But this care-freeness contrasted with the familiar Turkish Army troop carrier tanks sprinkled along Diyarbakir’s outskirts. I had seen them before in Kabul, where I had wondered what Afghans – to whom all NATO forces are “Americans” – must have thought of an outsider tank stamped with the red crescent of Turkey’s Islamic flag. A most effective counter IED, perhaps.

Why all the tanks? We should know – we supplied them. US sales of jets planes, tanks, and guns to Turkey took off at the onset of the PKK counterinsurgency in 1984, eager as we were to satisfy a crucial Cold War ally. Of course, it doesn’t require a Soviet bogeyman to justify a fight against Marxist PKK death squads. But no matter how despicable one finds, for example, the now-imprisoned PKK ringleader Abdullah Ocalac, “the Pol Pot of Kurdish politics” as Kurdophile Christopher Hitchens put it, Turkey’s ethnic cleansing and destruction of thousands of Kurdish villages during the Clinton years with US weapons was a crime in which America was complicit (in the end, Clinton’s realpolitique was not quite enough to convince the Turks to allow a northern front in 2003, to the glee of the Sunni insurgency). One wonders what our threshold for geo-political flexibility must be when it comes to Turkey, from our bizarre anti-opium policy in Afghanistan to our acceptance of Turkey’s unapologetic massacre of 35 Kurdish civilians last January with American equipment, just a month after Congress approved the sale of new attack helicopters to Ankarra.

And yet: it is, in fact, this same Turkish military to which Turks turn when secular republicanism is most threatened. Confused? So are the Turks, judging by the coups-upon-coups (1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997). Fortunately the 1971 coup brought clarity to such procedures, being the world’s first streamlined coup, “The Coup by Memo.” The coups typically came with mass detentions and Lincolnesque justifications: break the constitution to save the constitution. As the Kamalist rebel in Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow puts it when accused of torturing Islamist madrassa students, “No one who’s even slightly Westernised can breathe freely in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them…When we go the way of Iran, do you really think anyone is going to remember how a porridge-hearted liberal like you shed a few tears for the boys from the religious high school?”

Arriving in Mardin and abruptly hastened onto a moonlit street-corner by the gruff bus driver, I ruck-marched my way uphill from the New City toward the hostels of the Old City. Perched above plains speckled with the green glow of minaret lights, the cavernous residential adobes of Old Mardin seem about two blocks wide and a mile high. Fortunately a gang of 14 year-olds observed me huffing and eagerly offered their complimentary broken-English hostel-finding services. I demurred when they pointed to one of the famous castle hotels. “Anything cheaper?” They didn’t understand. “Rahees,” I said in Arabic. “Ah, oojuz!” they said. Between my crap Arabic and Dari (which shares the Turkish word for “thanks,” for example), their crap English, and their second-language Turkish (they spoke Kurdish first, having been born after the Kurdish language ban ended in 1991), we probably shared a complete vocabulary, if only we knew how to splice it. “You know Turkish?” one asked. I recited “tashakoor” (thanks), “tuz” (salt…slang for “bite me” in Arabic due to Arab traders dismissing Ottoman tax collectors by claiming their entire covered cargo was “tuz,” the one tax-free commodity) and “ka” (snow). I knew ka from Pamuk’s book. “You like Orhan Pamuk?” I asked. “No, he is traitor. Not even live in Turkey.”  

As if on a time sensitive VIP movement, they rushed me through the Old City’s windy stone-step allies, chirping “oojuz, oojuz!”  We passed a statue of Ataturk, and they began manically saluting. “He is great man!” Indeed, the great chauvinist caricaturized as “Resident World Controller” Mustapha Mond in Huxley’s Brave New World maintains his omnipresence via statues, posters, and street names all over Turkey for having salvaged the lost empire. With their minds now on politics, one asked me “You like Bush?” I said yes, as I always do abroad (whether to an al-Qaeda loving Syrian in Beirut or bearded youths in Ramallah), but expecting a positive reaction for once, as these were Kurds. “We like Obama! He is a black man!” I didn’t quite follow the logic. At last they delivered me to my ideal $10 hostel, and I bid them thanks and joined in a salute to Ataturk.   

As my hamstrings cramped up ten minutes into a jog “up” Mardin the next morning, I stopped to stretch out when I realized I was not alone. Ten little wide-eyed faces were peering down on me from a ridge, imploring me to come play basketball. As I emerged onto the overcrowded courtyard, you would have thought I was Ataturk himself. Fifty little kids went ecstatic yelling all at once “hello Mister how are you where you from what you do you are married?” I began planning a hasty exit strategy, but now there were calls to dunk on the 7-foot hoop. I clumsily complied, and it is barely exaggerating to say that girls fainted.  Boys were tearing through notebooks to secure paper for my signature. Paper ran out so limbs were supplied. A girl shoved a piece of cardboard at my pencil. Signing rapidly, I asked the boys which basketball stars they liked. “Michael Jordan!” “Allen Iverson!” I pointed at a shy, sickly boy and said “Kevin Garnett?” and he staggered backwards in dazed ecstasy.  “Ok I gotta go!” I said. Where, where? “To Iraq!” Wooow. But when will you return? “Someday hopefully…goodbye!” And thus I fled for safe-haven in Iraq.

Getting into Iraqi Kurdistan is quite easy for Americans who don’t fit the suicide-bomber profile. From a bus station on the Turkish side of the border I waited with a few good-humored, giddy Iraqi Kurds who broke into a shoulder-locked Kurdish jig at one point. At last, with the sun now set, we left the station, left Turkey, and entered Iraqi Kurdistan’s immigration control building – one of those cold, hollow, stone buildings in which, if you’re not on top of a propane heater, you might as well be outside.  We were the only ones waiting, and a guard brought us cigarettes and sugary tea from a table flanked by massive posters of national president Jalal Talabani and regional president Masoud Barzani – the Ataturk of Iraqi Kurdistan. I was summoned to an empty inner-office. A confessional window behind my seat opened and a cigarette-smoking man with resigned eyes studied my face. Like some grizzled investigator who had extracted all the necessary confessions from his long-hunted fugitive and now just wanted a man-to-man, he asked, “So. Why do you want to go to Iraq?” For tourism, I said. Without looking up from my passport he asked, “Why did you go to Dubai?” For a layover on business travel, I said. He put out his cigarette and handed me my passport, Coalition of the Willing members not needing to obtain a visa (a gracious gesture suspiciously absent in Afghanistan). “Enjoy Kurdistan,” he said.

The fact that Iraqi Kurdistan is drastically safer than the rest of the country is hard to intuit when you’re actually there, driving on a dark road 60 miles from Mosul, with death-squad execution headlines swirling through your mind. But the earnest service taxi driver did his best to put my mind at ease, vowing that there are no Arabs in Zakho, the ancient town near the border where I’d be staying. He was set on me enjoying my stay, and when my first hotel selection proved overbooked, he waited and brought me to another, refusing the full fare.

My hotel was located at a motley round-about. Across was a 6-story abandoned building. To the right, a juice bar storefront in the shape of a giant apple. To the left, what remained of a Christian liquor store burned down after a mullah’s jihad sermon just months earlier. And in the middle, a soldier at his post. It was late, so I woke up the staffer in the smoky wood-paneled lobby. Joseph, an Armenian who spoke neither English nor Arabic and who looked not unlike the portraits lining the room of a melodramatic Chuck Norris-like Barzani gazing into the Kurdish meadows, took me to my room. I was satisfied and bid him good night. But something was troubling Joseph. He shut my room’s door behind us, breathed a bit heavily, and then…signed me the cross. “Christian?” he asked. I would have loved to delve into the nuances of my Spinozist pantheism, but for the sake of the poor persecuted wretch I said yes. Yet this caused him a bulge-eyed expression of disbelief: he held up his crucifix necklace, as if to emphasize a bare minimum flare requirement. “Oh, sorry,” I said, awkwardly returning his sign of the cross. Joseph tisk-tisked his crucifix at me once more and waved good night.

The omnipresent Kurdish flag.

Lonely Planet does not overstate this city’s case: “Zakho is pleasant but there is little of interest for tourists.” Yet interest in tourists abounded, whether because I was the only tourist, or because I was the only one they had ever seen with the audacity to jog the town, scandalously accentuating his gaunt height with under-armor.  As I ran past giggling kids, over the beautifully ancient yet precariously sideless Delal Bridge, and up into the river bluffs, I realized that if my sole exercise goal had been to run until there were no Kurdish flags in sight, I would likely die.  The sun-crested red, white, and green is everywhere: walls, car windows, clothes, arms, every other store’s logo, and (most unavoidably) a garrison flag blowing above the city square. And now, thanks to a street-merchant who gave me a flag patch which he refused to sell, it can also be found on my very backpack.

I spent the day wandering the markets and talking with Kurds in cafes.  35 year-old Karzan had me for a CIA spook, but was eager to talk and answer any question about Kurdistan. For being members of the largest stateless minority, and victims of multiple ethnic cleansings, it’s amazing how little Kurds such as Karzan expected me to know or care about their plight – a far cry from the Palestinian pre-school I had once visited, its walls covered with finger-paints of sad-faced clouds crying tears of bombs onto dismembered x-eyed Palestinian children. Without a hint of self-pity or jingoism Karzan delved into Kurdish history and politics, concluding that for all the bad the future was bright.

It emerged that though Karzan was no friend of the PKK, he was certain that if he tried crossing into Turkey he’d be detained. If the fate of Turkey’s largest Kurdish-language newspaper Azadiya Welat is any indication – six editors have fled or been jailed since its 2006 start – Turkey has mastered the art of totalitarian due process described so poignantly in Arthur Koestler’s Soviet show trial novel Darkness at Noon, where no crime is self-evident: “Perhaps he had laid a wreath on the wrong grave…” No comrade could be sure of his innocence when the commissars were free “to dot the i’s.” Indeed, even within the borders of the great modernizing NATO ally and EU-candidate Turkey, to be accused of writing one of the banned Kurdish letters x, w, or q is enough.  Forget Saddam: to have given Kurds an alternative from this is not nothing.

That night I went to an internet café – a social mainstay for Zakho youths. I chatted with six of them over tea and obligatory cigarettes, channeling everything through Warhin, the sole English speaker among them. They wanted to see my facebook profile, so I pulled up my feed, which included someone’s Valentine’s Day post. Warhin rendered the council’s Islamic verdict: “This is a foolish holiday.” Yes, I said. As I flipped through my photos I got a generally warm reaction of “wow, this is America?” They were not quite as impressed by the several photos including alcoholic beverages (though eager to “friend” me nonetheless). This reminded me to ask them what they thought of the “youths” who had destroyed Zakho’s liquor stores month earlier, as I had earlier talked to a young Christian running his parents’ pizza store who had confided that he was still afraid. The boys pulled up a youtube video of the chaos: lots of “allahu akbar” and smoke and camera shaking. “Idiots,” said Warhin. They were all embarrassed, but as usual in the Middle East, they also suspected a conspiracy.

Exiting Iraq, as they say, is difficult. All seemed to be going well when I arrived at the cross-border taxi station. But the taxi needed three, and I was alone.  I tried joining a threesome in another taxi, but obscure common law precedents and corollaries were recited. The whole lot reaked of monopolistic collusion and trickery. After an hour our foursome was complete: a Baghdad woman, her grandmother, and a Turk. Having tightly squeezed in our cargo, we were notified of a taxi reassignment. The only consolation was that our new taxi driver was a young slick-haired, squirrely, earnest boy named Abo. Between sprinting our passports in and out of the office and tripping on curbs he enjoyed moments of calm in the driver’s seat marked by turning up the Kurdish music radio and ensuring that the photos of himself and a generic Hallmark baby above the rearview mirror stayed well-taped. After several comedic moments when everyone was ready except the person sent to look for the person who hadn’t been ready, we set off for Turkey.

But to our disgust, the entire bridge to Turkey was full of cars. We would wait for nearly two hours to go half a mile. Abo passed the time throwing his candy wrappers into the polluted river, probably to wind up in some Syrian revolutionary’s mouth as he smuggled in weapons from Turkey downstream. Indeed, with the revolution in full-force, the long border wait was likely a result of special attention to the Syrian refugee problem. The Turks had offered to stave off the problem a month earlier by establishing a humanitarian corridor inside Syria, but the US said no. One can believe that the Syrian uprising had nothing to do with the 2005 Lebanese intifada. And one can believe that the 2005 intifada had nothing to do with our intervention in Iraq. But can anyone look at this region and argue that disallowing intervention is any less imperial than ordering it?

At last I was back in Turkey, and soon enough on that bus with Ali. I thought of Gen. Petraeus’ cryptic riddle during the 2007 surge years of the war in Iraq: “tell me how this ends.” 50-50 didn’t seem a good enough ending. But then again, it never does end.  Perhaps good endings lie in the appreciation of the chance for new beginnings, the hope that the status quo is never the end. If that’s true, then Ali and Karzan are off to a good start. As for Americans, both kinds of February 15^th revolutionaries might admit that an explanation of starts and endings in Kurdistan is easier chanted than understood.  And as guardians of the oldest revolution of one of the youngest nations, they might consider visiting one of the oldest nations with a revolution only just begun.