all my friends are mountains.
in diyarbakir i couchsurfed with guys that taught english to their young students in mandatory turkish but reckoned they found little ways to sneak kurdish in. one told me he used to be an anarchist until he realised he couldn't be a kurd & anarchist at the same time. his friend said they'd seen enough of what states did to foster a healthy distrust, but. the kurdish anarchist forum are iraqi kurds that immigrated to europe at some stage or another. they were keen to talk liberation & beaming, showed me the kurmanji books it had only become legal to print six years earlier. traces of palestine were hidden down alleyways. i picked at the surface, wishing for more time.
i went to mardin. i stood on a cliff & for the second time, looked at syria from across a border.
i took a bus to iraq. i've traversed the length of continents before, but never a bunch [two] at once. watching their transformation is a joyful thing. i sat in one of the tea stop shops & smelt roses.
cizre is a dusty (aren't they always dusty?) border town. it lives in the foothills of the zagros, who had begun soaring from the horizon halfway along our long, impossibly straight highway, which down hundreds of trucks bored to iraq.
getting off the bus i am suddenly submerged in a deluge of cabdriver flies. "baghdad? you go to baghdad?" yells one guy. "mosul! mosul!" says another. one tries to spirit me on to a waiting bus bound for kirkuk. "sprecht du deutsch?" another cuts in. "uhh, englisch" i stammer. "aw arabi?" i end up in a car with an ear nose & throat specialist & a watch salesman bound for the border. we clear the tigris river.
the borderlands are stunning. we careen through the mountains beginning to jut out beneath us, the tigris shimmering alongside us. the sky is bright blue. our driver jokes around. approaching the turkish border we slow to a halt, to give our passports to the first inspectors. another car, clearly a friend of the driver, tries to edge his way in the queue ahead of us, to which our driver responds by stamping his foot down on the accelerator, cutting the other guy off & almost crashing in to the van ahead of us, & an elderly man inching his way across the street at the same time. the old man chuckles & peers through squinted eyes at our car, grinning. everybody is laughing, including the border guards. you'd never guess where we were off to.
we come out the visa office on the iraqi side & come face to face with three off-guard american soldiers, striding around puffchest & eerily resembling caricatures of, um, american soldiers. my eyes are popping. nothing at all on earth prepares you for the setting of eyes on american troops in iraq.
"are they american soldiers?" i balk. "sure" says ear nose & throat. "there are many here. you know, after they liberated us, they like to come here for holidays."
we walk past four american holiday tanks to the taxi line.
the watchman is headed for sulaimani, so we bid ear nose & throat goodbye & set off across the hills. gently undulating in all directions. hues of rich brown glow red as the sun begins her descent.
we drive for hours. we clear 15 or 20 checkpoints. there are two different peshmerga, one for duhok & erbil governorates & one for sulai. i make out a huge blanket of stars in the sky through the sandy window, winding our way through the tiny, spiralling backroads to sulaimani.
finally we descend in to the city, its lights sprawling out over a flat plain, encircled by the zagros mountains. i can't see them, but i can feel them there. the next morning they rise like glowing, rumpled bedsheets of sleeping giants from all around.
black humour dominates the nature iraq office, a happy mix of kurds & arabs [& the occasional ajnabia]. i ask the fauna girl what she meant in one report with "the cold war of 1994", to which she replies "the kurdish civil war". guy next to me pipes up with "that was a cold war? are there any cold wars in this country? i thought they're all pretty hot". everyone is laughing. she fixes him with a stare. "thousands of people died in that war". "just thousands??" the room erupts with laughter again.
another guy mentions something about what he was doing in 2003. "you know, in 2003, when america..." & trails off. "invaded?" i say. "liberated us," he replies & stares at me for a second before we both burst out laughing.
prying curious eyes inside the NGO beast, furiously noting everything & trying to assess if change is sposedtobe better instigated from this angle or the other one (that decidedly unstructured rejectionist stuff i was doing in palestine, morally pure but infuriatingly bumbling at times). nature iraq actually faces the prospect of having to survey for oil companies to stay afloat. i guess we're pretty much middle-men for the same ends already - current funders (the italian government - berlusconi - holy moly) are possibly not financing environmental conservation & restoration in iraq out of giving a shit. everything is so circular. what do you do? nature iraq does good work. nature iraq is paid for by people drilling the oil or people who want contracts with people who drill the oil. oil fucks up the environment. people like nature iraq come along & do good work. egads.
we work on a report on iraq's thriving illegal animal trade. it gives me terrible dreams & i struggle to comprehend the infinite reach of the war's devastation. there are animal markets in every city. everything from budgerigars to african lions. i hate this. i hate this. i hate this. i feel those first desperate pangs of wretchedness that gripped me in palestine.
my boss takes me up my first kurdish mountain. we keep running in to people on the way up, dancing. we run in to the same family three or four times, driving up & getting out to dance on different parts of the mountain.
i love mountains.
the sun sets & we drive east to watch the moon rise over the zab river. we are thirty minutes from iran.
i learn that "chinese restaurant" in iraqi kurdistan means "youknowwhat massage parlor". there are a couple thousand migrant workers here, whose boss snatched their passport off them at the airport. like dubai, except it's iraq. my heart is heavier than ever.
there are over four hundred species of bird in iraq.
10% of sulaimani used to be jewish. most jewish kurds made aliyah to israel in the early 1950s. synagogues were turned in to mosques. people say there are still jews here, somewhere.
at a restaurant one of the guys asks the waiter what he is. he whispers that he's a yazidi. he looks about fervently.
there are three churches in sulaimani. two for kurds, & one hidden secret inside a hotel, for people who converted. apparently it's run by americans. they do those kind of sermons where everybody sings & jumps about a lot.
i went to mardin. i stood on a cliff & for the second time, looked at syria from across a border.
i took a bus to iraq. i've traversed the length of continents before, but never a bunch [two] at once. watching their transformation is a joyful thing. i sat in one of the tea stop shops & smelt roses.
cizre is a dusty (aren't they always dusty?) border town. it lives in the foothills of the zagros, who had begun soaring from the horizon halfway along our long, impossibly straight highway, which down hundreds of trucks bored to iraq.
getting off the bus i am suddenly submerged in a deluge of cabdriver flies. "baghdad? you go to baghdad?" yells one guy. "mosul! mosul!" says another. one tries to spirit me on to a waiting bus bound for kirkuk. "sprecht du deutsch?" another cuts in. "uhh, englisch" i stammer. "aw arabi?" i end up in a car with an ear nose & throat specialist & a watch salesman bound for the border. we clear the tigris river.
the borderlands are stunning. we careen through the mountains beginning to jut out beneath us, the tigris shimmering alongside us. the sky is bright blue. our driver jokes around. approaching the turkish border we slow to a halt, to give our passports to the first inspectors. another car, clearly a friend of the driver, tries to edge his way in the queue ahead of us, to which our driver responds by stamping his foot down on the accelerator, cutting the other guy off & almost crashing in to the van ahead of us, & an elderly man inching his way across the street at the same time. the old man chuckles & peers through squinted eyes at our car, grinning. everybody is laughing, including the border guards. you'd never guess where we were off to.
we come out the visa office on the iraqi side & come face to face with three off-guard american soldiers, striding around puffchest & eerily resembling caricatures of, um, american soldiers. my eyes are popping. nothing at all on earth prepares you for the setting of eyes on american troops in iraq.
"are they american soldiers?" i balk. "sure" says ear nose & throat. "there are many here. you know, after they liberated us, they like to come here for holidays."
we walk past four american holiday tanks to the taxi line.
the watchman is headed for sulaimani, so we bid ear nose & throat goodbye & set off across the hills. gently undulating in all directions. hues of rich brown glow red as the sun begins her descent.
we drive for hours. we clear 15 or 20 checkpoints. there are two different peshmerga, one for duhok & erbil governorates & one for sulai. i make out a huge blanket of stars in the sky through the sandy window, winding our way through the tiny, spiralling backroads to sulaimani.
finally we descend in to the city, its lights sprawling out over a flat plain, encircled by the zagros mountains. i can't see them, but i can feel them there. the next morning they rise like glowing, rumpled bedsheets of sleeping giants from all around.
black humour dominates the nature iraq office, a happy mix of kurds & arabs [& the occasional ajnabia]. i ask the fauna girl what she meant in one report with "the cold war of 1994", to which she replies "the kurdish civil war". guy next to me pipes up with "that was a cold war? are there any cold wars in this country? i thought they're all pretty hot". everyone is laughing. she fixes him with a stare. "thousands of people died in that war". "just thousands??" the room erupts with laughter again.
another guy mentions something about what he was doing in 2003. "you know, in 2003, when america..." & trails off. "invaded?" i say. "liberated us," he replies & stares at me for a second before we both burst out laughing.
prying curious eyes inside the NGO beast, furiously noting everything & trying to assess if change is sposedtobe better instigated from this angle or the other one (that decidedly unstructured rejectionist stuff i was doing in palestine, morally pure but infuriatingly bumbling at times). nature iraq actually faces the prospect of having to survey for oil companies to stay afloat. i guess we're pretty much middle-men for the same ends already - current funders (the italian government - berlusconi - holy moly) are possibly not financing environmental conservation & restoration in iraq out of giving a shit. everything is so circular. what do you do? nature iraq does good work. nature iraq is paid for by people drilling the oil or people who want contracts with people who drill the oil. oil fucks up the environment. people like nature iraq come along & do good work. egads.
we work on a report on iraq's thriving illegal animal trade. it gives me terrible dreams & i struggle to comprehend the infinite reach of the war's devastation. there are animal markets in every city. everything from budgerigars to african lions. i hate this. i hate this. i hate this. i feel those first desperate pangs of wretchedness that gripped me in palestine.
my boss takes me up my first kurdish mountain. we keep running in to people on the way up, dancing. we run in to the same family three or four times, driving up & getting out to dance on different parts of the mountain.
i love mountains.
the sun sets & we drive east to watch the moon rise over the zab river. we are thirty minutes from iran.
i learn that "chinese restaurant" in iraqi kurdistan means "youknowwhat massage parlor". there are a couple thousand migrant workers here, whose boss snatched their passport off them at the airport. like dubai, except it's iraq. my heart is heavier than ever.
there are over four hundred species of bird in iraq.
10% of sulaimani used to be jewish. most jewish kurds made aliyah to israel in the early 1950s. synagogues were turned in to mosques. people say there are still jews here, somewhere.
at a restaurant one of the guys asks the waiter what he is. he whispers that he's a yazidi. he looks about fervently.
there are three churches in sulaimani. two for kurds, & one hidden secret inside a hotel, for people who converted. apparently it's run by americans. they do those kind of sermons where everybody sings & jumps about a lot.