The “Hamilton route”, named after the New Zealand engineer who designed it, links both Iraq and Iran through astonishing mountain landscapes, deep in the heart of Kurdistan.
Sabotaged oil pipelines have been burning for a few days, so there’s a brownish-grey haze over the horizon. South of Baghdad, on the way to Kufa, cars are stopped on one side of the highway. My cab driver, following many other cars, crosses the median and drives on the other side, against oncoming traffic. This [...]
Another day in Kirkuk. I go out in the morning to speak to people about their reactions to Saddam’s first television appearance since his dental exam. While watching the broadcast, there was no sense of celebration, but a silence that was hard to interpret. Saddam-era television was rife with controlled propaganda, using his image repeated [...]
June 27th 2004
I arrive at Attaturk International Airport in Istanbul. This is the fourth time I’ve flown into Attaturk from New York, but I’ve never seen such a high level of security, which is due to the NATO Summit being held here. TV monitors show mass demonstrations on the streets of Istanbul, protesting President Bush’s [...]
Hanim is fifty-one years old, but she looks at least thirty years older, and for good reason: She’s the leader of the Hasasori, a small family of semi-nomadic Jelali Kurds who eke out a simple existence farming sheep on the southern slopes of Mount Ararat in East Turkey, and life is far from easy.
The region [...]
