during the most recent jewish holiday, sukkot, i decided to take a trip to iraq! alone, for fun! because as the kids are saying, "yolo", right?! it was a fascinating time. not least because the tourism scene there is nonexistent, so it was impossible to know what to expect. no such thing as a reliable lonely planet book, advance hostel bookings, or atms that will take your card in iraq! indeed, i was the only caucasian that i saw during the 4 days i was there! i should disclaim that i really only visited iraqi kurdistan, which is a completely autonomous region in the north of iraq. it is populated by kurds, not arabs, and they love america. love it to the extent that they paste huge american flags onto the back of their gas-guzzling suvs. i'd be too scared to go to the "real" iraq :)
flew first to istanbul, then to diyarbakir in eastern turkey, where i was lucky enough to find a bus heading for iraqi kurdistan that very night (apparently half the time the buses arbitrarily decide not to make the trip). crossing the border into iraq in the middle of the night was relatively painless - they asked me simply "tourist?" and "how many days you kurdistan?" before giving me back my passport, which had already been stamped! this was lucky, as i was hoping they weren't going to ask too many questions and find out that i lived in israel, which they probably wouldn't be too happy about (second passports come in handy :). for the rest of the night and into the morning, the bus slowly meandered deeper and deeper into the remarkable land that i had previously heard about only in the news. above i said that i "really only" visited kurdistan, but the main roads between different parts of kurdistan go through some majority arab cities, including mosul and kirkuk, known as two of the most dangerous cities in the world. driving through those cities was rather exhilarating! its a good thing the bus didn't break down, as word is that the expected lifespan of a white man on the streets of mosul (who isn't "rolling heavy" with armor and guns) would be less than 15 minutes. but the kurdish cities - as i reassured my mother repeatedly - completely safe! :)
i arrived in sulaymaniyah in eastern iraqi kurdistan in the late morning, and decided to take a nap for the rest of the day, as by that time it had been about 55 hours since i had last tasted the sweet bliss of sleep. in hindsight it was really stupid to go 55 hours without sleeping, because i ended up getting quite sick for the rest of the trip and beyond. but i was just so excited to get to iraq asap! sulaymaniyah is known as the cultural capital of iraqi kurdistan, and is surprisingly liberal considering it is so steeped in islam. more than enough liquor stores line the main street, for example. i went to one of saddam hussein's political prisons for kurdish dissidents, amna suraka. saw tiny rooms where innocents would be held alone in complete darkness for months on end, removed only to be hung from hooks on the ceiling while they were shocked with electrodes connected to their ears and genitals. absolutely horrid. saddam hussein - so-damn insane. that night i watched a film called "battle for haditha" on youtube on my iphone. i would highly recommend it - a poignant and complex look at the harsh realities and inevitably/invariably twisted ethics of war in general, and a particular incident in the iraq war specifically. it was rather surreal watching it while in iraq. it made me profoundly thankful that i was lucky enough to be a tourist there in 2012 rather than as a soldier in 2005, or an innocent iraqi civilian in 2005 or 2012 for that matter. life for any of us could easily be so different.
the next day i took a crowded little minibus thing even further east to an infamous town called halabja. this place was where saddam massacred 5000 kurds with chemical weapons in one day in 1988. they have a powerful little memorial there, with a plethora of rather gruesome photographs of what sarin and vx nerve gas can do to the human body. again, absolutely horrid. after viewing the memorial, i walked into the town, which is actually only a few miles from the mountainous border with iran. this border apparently happens to be both unmarked and unguarded. i briefly thought about taking a little hike to flirt with the line, but i didn't, mostly because my mom made me promise i wouldn't. also, because a few americans tried it a few years ago, and even though they didn't actually enter iran, they were captured by the iranian military and incarcerated for 3 years for being "spies". also, because as i was walking through halabja, i was apprehended by a kurdish soldier wielding an ak47. after showing him my passport, which he "inspected" (upside down) for a few minutes, he decided that i needed to be escorted to the police station. eventually found someone who could understand that i was just looking for a ride back to sulaymaniyah.
my next stop was the capital of iraqi kurdistan, erbil, where the temperature seemed stuck at well over 40 degrees celsius (100 something fahrenheit). checked into a "hotel", only to find that there were no sheets on the bed, just some disgusting blanket that looked like it had been... cough... very heavily used. of course the guys who worked there had no idea what this white guy blabbering in white person language was trying to say. i slept on my towel :/ that hotel might have been an anomaly though, as the economy of iraqi kurdistan, and erbil especially, is booming. i found the newest and largest shopping mall in town, which was actually quite nice (for iraq). there was even an extensive theme park surrounding it, and they're building iraq's first multiplex cinema! (but it wasn't open yet). the following day i made my way back to the turkish border, stuffed into a series of share taxis with some really friendly kurds who i managed to have extensive "conversations" with despite the fact that we didn't share any vocabulary. the kurds have a reputation for being the friendliest ethnicity in the world, and they didn't disappoint. genuinely super nice people, and completely honest. where else in the middle east could you reliably get into a taxi, get to where you wanted to go and then ask the driver how much, and never be overcharged? definitely not in israel. it blew me away.
another fascinating thing about the kurds is that a sizable number of them belong to unique ancient religions that i didn't even know existed. for example, the yazidis, who worship a "peacock angel" (that they believe is good) named something similar to "satan", causing many of their muslim countrymen to label them as devil-worshipers. they make pilgrimages to an isolated temple in the mountains north of mosul. or the mandeans, a gnostic religion that reveres noah of biblical fame and his son shem, from whom they claim to have directly descended. kurds in iraq also speak one of two endemic languages - languages which happen to be mutually unintelligible. all this to say, clearly iraq is mind-bendingly complex, and even a single ethnic group such as the kurds that one would expect to be relatively monolithic is, in reality, far from being so.
getting out of iraq and back into turkey was a joke that took essentially an entire day. i had to hire some lanky turkish teen who appeared to work for some kind of border cartel to escort me across in a rusted out van. he insisted on continually retaining my passport. we waited for many hours amidst literally thousands of trucks to finally be searched by some preteen to make sure we weren't smuggling cigarettes out of iraq. promptly after which my escort used my passport to buy a bunch of duty free cigarettes. by this point i was too tired to argue. the adventures continued in turkey, but i think that may need to be another blog post as this has become about long enough!
flew first to istanbul, then to diyarbakir in eastern turkey, where i was lucky enough to find a bus heading for iraqi kurdistan that very night (apparently half the time the buses arbitrarily decide not to make the trip). crossing the border into iraq in the middle of the night was relatively painless - they asked me simply "tourist?" and "how many days you kurdistan?" before giving me back my passport, which had already been stamped! this was lucky, as i was hoping they weren't going to ask too many questions and find out that i lived in israel, which they probably wouldn't be too happy about (second passports come in handy :). for the rest of the night and into the morning, the bus slowly meandered deeper and deeper into the remarkable land that i had previously heard about only in the news. above i said that i "really only" visited kurdistan, but the main roads between different parts of kurdistan go through some majority arab cities, including mosul and kirkuk, known as two of the most dangerous cities in the world. driving through those cities was rather exhilarating! its a good thing the bus didn't break down, as word is that the expected lifespan of a white man on the streets of mosul (who isn't "rolling heavy" with armor and guns) would be less than 15 minutes. but the kurdish cities - as i reassured my mother repeatedly - completely safe! :)
i arrived in sulaymaniyah in eastern iraqi kurdistan in the late morning, and decided to take a nap for the rest of the day, as by that time it had been about 55 hours since i had last tasted the sweet bliss of sleep. in hindsight it was really stupid to go 55 hours without sleeping, because i ended up getting quite sick for the rest of the trip and beyond. but i was just so excited to get to iraq asap! sulaymaniyah is known as the cultural capital of iraqi kurdistan, and is surprisingly liberal considering it is so steeped in islam. more than enough liquor stores line the main street, for example. i went to one of saddam hussein's political prisons for kurdish dissidents, amna suraka. saw tiny rooms where innocents would be held alone in complete darkness for months on end, removed only to be hung from hooks on the ceiling while they were shocked with electrodes connected to their ears and genitals. absolutely horrid. saddam hussein - so-damn insane. that night i watched a film called "battle for haditha" on youtube on my iphone. i would highly recommend it - a poignant and complex look at the harsh realities and inevitably/invariably twisted ethics of war in general, and a particular incident in the iraq war specifically. it was rather surreal watching it while in iraq. it made me profoundly thankful that i was lucky enough to be a tourist there in 2012 rather than as a soldier in 2005, or an innocent iraqi civilian in 2005 or 2012 for that matter. life for any of us could easily be so different.
the next day i took a crowded little minibus thing even further east to an infamous town called halabja. this place was where saddam massacred 5000 kurds with chemical weapons in one day in 1988. they have a powerful little memorial there, with a plethora of rather gruesome photographs of what sarin and vx nerve gas can do to the human body. again, absolutely horrid. after viewing the memorial, i walked into the town, which is actually only a few miles from the mountainous border with iran. this border apparently happens to be both unmarked and unguarded. i briefly thought about taking a little hike to flirt with the line, but i didn't, mostly because my mom made me promise i wouldn't. also, because a few americans tried it a few years ago, and even though they didn't actually enter iran, they were captured by the iranian military and incarcerated for 3 years for being "spies". also, because as i was walking through halabja, i was apprehended by a kurdish soldier wielding an ak47. after showing him my passport, which he "inspected" (upside down) for a few minutes, he decided that i needed to be escorted to the police station. eventually found someone who could understand that i was just looking for a ride back to sulaymaniyah.
my next stop was the capital of iraqi kurdistan, erbil, where the temperature seemed stuck at well over 40 degrees celsius (100 something fahrenheit). checked into a "hotel", only to find that there were no sheets on the bed, just some disgusting blanket that looked like it had been... cough... very heavily used. of course the guys who worked there had no idea what this white guy blabbering in white person language was trying to say. i slept on my towel :/ that hotel might have been an anomaly though, as the economy of iraqi kurdistan, and erbil especially, is booming. i found the newest and largest shopping mall in town, which was actually quite nice (for iraq). there was even an extensive theme park surrounding it, and they're building iraq's first multiplex cinema! (but it wasn't open yet). the following day i made my way back to the turkish border, stuffed into a series of share taxis with some really friendly kurds who i managed to have extensive "conversations" with despite the fact that we didn't share any vocabulary. the kurds have a reputation for being the friendliest ethnicity in the world, and they didn't disappoint. genuinely super nice people, and completely honest. where else in the middle east could you reliably get into a taxi, get to where you wanted to go and then ask the driver how much, and never be overcharged? definitely not in israel. it blew me away.
another fascinating thing about the kurds is that a sizable number of them belong to unique ancient religions that i didn't even know existed. for example, the yazidis, who worship a "peacock angel" (that they believe is good) named something similar to "satan", causing many of their muslim countrymen to label them as devil-worshipers. they make pilgrimages to an isolated temple in the mountains north of mosul. or the mandeans, a gnostic religion that reveres noah of biblical fame and his son shem, from whom they claim to have directly descended. kurds in iraq also speak one of two endemic languages - languages which happen to be mutually unintelligible. all this to say, clearly iraq is mind-bendingly complex, and even a single ethnic group such as the kurds that one would expect to be relatively monolithic is, in reality, far from being so.
getting out of iraq and back into turkey was a joke that took essentially an entire day. i had to hire some lanky turkish teen who appeared to work for some kind of border cartel to escort me across in a rusted out van. he insisted on continually retaining my passport. we waited for many hours amidst literally thousands of trucks to finally be searched by some preteen to make sure we weren't smuggling cigarettes out of iraq. promptly after which my escort used my passport to buy a bunch of duty free cigarettes. by this point i was too tired to argue. the adventures continued in turkey, but i think that may need to be another blog post as this has become about long enough!
