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NOT IRAQ, KURDISTAN (PART 2): The Peshmerga, Yazidis, Saddam’s Palace Ruins, and the City in the Sky
If you haven’t read Part 1 of this story, I would suggest starting there. Disclaimer: this story isn’t full of the cute narrative misadventures that I typically do. But nevertheless I was sure that there was a story here, somewhere buried beneath the facts, a considerably more important one. Some names have been altered to protect the identity of sources. “ کاروان.” reads as an insider guide who introduced me to his homeland. Peshmerga soldiers furrowed their brows in skepticism when we presented them with our passports. “Tourists? . . . In Kurdistan?” They seemed surprised but waved us through each checkpoint. This particular checkpoint sat at a Peshmerga training…
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Not Iraq, Kurdistan (Part 1): Preserving the Cultural Identity, Millennia Old History, and Natural Beauty of Disputed Kurdistan
This article was originally posted in The Mountain- Ear Newspaper, Nederland Colorado. The author lays claim to all original intellectual property here in thereof. Nomads Who Want A Home Our preconceived expectations of what northern Iraq might have been like couldn’t have been more wrong. Kurdistan, one of the most controversial “countries” in the world, lays in the heart of the Middle East, north of the Fertile Crescent, sandwiched between the hotbed of Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. The Kurds, 35 million strong, are an ethnically homogenous population dispersed throughout the four countries; the largest stateless group in the world. Neither the U.N. nor the U.S. recognize Kurdistan as a…
