I can be a liability in social settings. I often fail to recognize social norms. That’s how Claire found herself in Iraq with me talking about breasts, lesbians, and Mormons to a conservative Muslim family of imams, doctors, and lawyers. (Check out Claire’s resultant GlobalPost article and my photos)
Like any normal person, Claire hadn’t even wanted to go to Iraq. The U.S. State Department warns against traveling anywhere in a country that “remains dangerous, volatile and unpredictable,” even in relatively safe places such as the Kurdistan region in the northeast, where car bombs, drive-by shootings, and suicide attacks still regularly kill dozens of people.
But just because Iraq is on the U.S. “travel warning” list doesn’t mean it’s not safe to visit. After all, Lebanon and Syria are on the “travel watch” list and we safely hitchhiked around and those countries up and down. Thousands of backpackers have safely traveled through Kurdistan, known as “The Other Iraq,” since the 2003 U.S. invasion. They brag about it
So we went.
Iraq is the legendary home of the Garden of Eden. We didn’t find that, but, almost as surprisingly, we found peace.
Our journey started in southeastern Turkey, where we met a 20-year-old university student named Azad who spoke English, Arabic and Kurdish. He agreed to join us for the trip to Iraq, since it was the holiday of Eid and he had school off, anyway. We three rode a bus from Mardin to the border town of Silopi, where we found a taxi to the dusty Iraqi border town of Zakho. We happened to share the taxi with an Iraqi who was returning home to Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, for the holiday. He invited us to attend his family’s big holiday feast, in commemoration of when God ordered Abraham to kill his son.
“You can come to Erbil with me,” said Bilunt, the Iraqi, as we waited in the customs office to get stamped into Iraq. “And then I will kill you.”
He laughed. Claire and I looked at each other fearfully.
“We’d like to go to Erbil with you,” I said, “but I need to ask: will you kill us?”
He didn’t answer the question. We continued to talk, and he made a number of comments about America’s role in the Middle East before muttering something about Israel and the CIA secretly controlling the world.
“But will you kill us?” I repeated.
“I can only speak what is in my heart,” he said.
“But, hang on, will you kill us?”
“Killing one person is like killing all of humanity,” he said, which I thought sounded like a critique of the bloody U.S. invasion of Iraq, which has killed more than 100,000 Iraqis and 4,000 Americans. By now the conversation was getting ridiculous. I sized up Bilunt–he had said he was a dentist-in-training, and he had perfect teeth, which bolstered his story. And since I couldn’t imagine a dentist or even a dentist-in-training killing me, aside from Steve Martin in “Little Shop of Horrors,” we got in the cab with Bilunt.
“Will we pass through Mosul?” I asked.
“Mosul!” our driver exclaimed. “No! In Mosul, kushiiiit,” he said, drawing his thumb across his neck in a cutting motion.
“Never have I been in a car where one road leads to probable decapitation,” Claire whispered.
Our taxi cruised at 80 mph over Iraq’s newly paved roads, with snow-capped mountains to the north and flat farmland and desert stretching south. Bunkers appeared above the roadside and soldiers stopped our car at periodic security checkpoints manned by Kurdish soldiers. We’d stop in a line of cars, any one of them outfitted with a car bomb, I thought, and wait for an officer to peer inside our window, ask for our passports, and then wave us on with “Salaam alaikum.” At one checkpoint, a Kurdish officer peered into the driver’s window, eyed me and Claire, and said, “I think they’re terrorists with Muqtada Al-Sadr.” Everyone laughed.
When our taxi passed the turn-off to Mosul, less than 2 kilometers away, our driver pointed toward the city and again said “kushhhhit.” “That’s the road to hell,” added Bilunt, our Iraqi dinner host. We smiled, but we also realized how close this relatively safe zone was to the rest of Iraq. So when our driver asked my nationality, I considered lying, as most news out of Iraq concerns the anti-American insurgencies in Mosul and Baghdad. Hesitantly, I revealed I was American.
“I love Americans!” he exclaimed, which was surprising, but I guess it shouldn’t have been surprising, because Saddam Hussein’s genocidal policies killed more than 180,000 Kurds like himself. Kurdish forces backed the United States during “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and since then Kurds have earned regional autonomy and political sway in Baghdad, with Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani as president of the Iraqi administration and Massoud Barzani as president of the Kurdistan Regional Government. “Americans, good,” my driver said.
I looked at Claire incredulously. Thank-you, she said in Arabic: “Shukran.”
“No shukran!” the driver yelled. “Shukran is Arabic. It is the language of Saddam. We are Kurds. We say spaz.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Spaz!”
There was an awkward silence.
“What was life like under Saddam?” I asked.
“No freedom, no news, no information,” the driver said. “In the Iran-Iraq war, I was shot twice. I had to be a soldier. If I did not fight, Saddam would kill me and my whole family.”
The scenery changed from hilly to flat. I lost track of time staring out the window, and for a 10-minute span, I even forgot I was in Iraq. Then we came to another checkpoint with a dozen armed guards and I remembered, ‘O Lord, I am in Iraq, I am in Iraq, in Iraq.’
Arriving in Erbil four hours later, new road signs welcomed us into the regional capital. When our taxi driver dropped us at Bilunt’s house, I was sure to say “spaz.” Aside from a graffiti-painted barricade surrounding the regional government offices, security appeared minimal.
Bilunt’s father shook our hands and welcomed us inside. While in America you’re rarely invited inside a stranger’s home for copious meals and long conversations, such is normal in the Middle East. Bilunt’s mother spread a table with food, including baklava from Ashtar Sweets, which they called Iraq’s most famous patisserie and a former favorite of Saddam Hussein. Founded in Baghdad in 1980, the shop closed in 2003, they said, and only recently reopened in Erbil.
Bilunt’s father was kind, but he had some wild ideas. He and his sons were convinced that 1) Mohammad jumped into heaven from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, 2) that this opened up a tunnel from Earth to Outer Space, and 3) that all rockets into Space must be rerouted through this tunnel if they want to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, otherwise they’ll burst into flames.
“This is incredible,” I tried to say politely, “I must look it up on Google!”
When power cut at 8 p.m., the family switched on their private generator. The national grid supplies only eight hours of daily electricity, they said, and they purchase an additional 16 hours from private generators. With Erbil powered independently, with the Kurdish flag—and not the Iraqi flag—flying over the city’s airport, and with a different word for “thank you,” it seemed I was hardly in Iraq.
Bilunt’s father invited me to attend prayers with him the next day, before the big evening meal, with the caveat that I was clean when I went to the mosque. “No make sex,” he said sternly. “If make sex, wash. You must wash face, feet and neck.” I chuckled awkwardly and said the request sounded reasonable.
The next morning at 7 a.m. we went to morning prayers. I stood in line between Bilunt’s brother and father and mimicked their motions, putting my hands to my ears, then crouching down on my knees to touch my forehead to the rug. Then we returned to Bilunt’s home and sat in front of the television while his mother prepared breakfast. Bilunt turned on “The Ellen Show.” It was dubbed in Arabic.
“Ellen DeGeneres was one of the first women to come out and say she was a lesbian,” I said. Bilunt and his brother Hussein looked puzzled. “Ellen was open about her sexual orientation,” I said. “You know, she liked women. Like, she had a female wife.” That’s when Claire walked into the room, heard me talking, and shook her head.
That same day, we attended noon prayers in a mosque inside the city’s 8,000-year-old citadel, where some 800 families lived until 2005, when they were evicted to make way for a multi-million dollar revitalization project aiming to bring restaurants, museums, and art galleries to the hilltop fort. I went inside the mosque to pray, while Claire waited in the foyer. She later said she was then scared out of her mind, as on Eid in 2004 and 2005 suicide bomb attacks targeted gatherings of public officials. Lonely Planet had warned in its Iraq chapter: “Avoid any place that might present an attractive target to terrorists such a military bases, government buildings, and large crowds.”
A number of regional government officials were with us at the mosque that afternoon. One of the them was Kanan Mufti, head of the citadel’s restoration project and general director of the Kurdistan Ministry of Culture. He invited us back to his home for tea.
Kanan offered us a drink of a strong, syrupy coffee, and then a big lunch. Several of Kanan’s armed bodyguards stood outside his home’s entrance, armed with Kalishnakov rifles. Inside his home, we sat and ate rice and chicken with several other guards. Two Kalishnakov rifles leaned against a chair near my seat. A pistol sat on the floor.
His brother, Adnan Mufti, the former speaker of the regional parliament, walked into the room with his own contingent of bodyguards. Both men are Big Dogs in Iraqi politics, and both were lobbying hard for why Kurdistan deserves to become an independent nation. “Kurdistan is the only place in the Middle East where all faiths are welcome,” Adnan said. “Kurdistan is different and should be free.”
Iraq’s violent reputation had made me hesitant to visit, I said, and I expected that Westerners who fail to understand the political and cultural distinctions between Kurdistan and greater Iraq feel similarly. During previous Eid celebrations in 2004 and 2005, I pointed out, suicide bomb attacks killed more than 150 people in Erbil. The U.S. State Department warns against traveling anywhere in Iraq, as even in relatively stable places such as Erbil “violence persists and conditions could deteriorate quickly.”
Kanan shook his head. Unlike the rest of Iraq, he said, Kurdistan is safe, with regular visits from foreign diplomats and businessmen. Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Armenians, live side-by-side in here, he said, and the region isn’t subject to the anti-American insurgency as in nearby Mosul.
“Mosul, Mosul, Mosul, the news always talks about Mosul,” Kanan said. “Kurdistan is not Mosul. You don’t need to be nervous.”
But I just couldn’t forget the image of our own taxi driver, pointing toward Mosul and sliding his finger across his neck in a cutting motion. No matter how Kanan spun it, we were still incredibly close to terror.
We left the Mufti brothers and went for a walk around the city. We passed the citadel again, with old men sitting on benches and children selling sunglasses. We passed a number of cafes, restaurants, and knock-off designer stores such as “Benetton” (one less ‘n’ than the real United Colors of Bennetton). We walked through the rose-filled Minaret Park, which was bustling with adults and children, some smoking nargileh, some tumbling inside big inflated balls atop a pool of water, and many just sitting back on a park bench. I’d never seen so many roses in one place. It was nicer than most parks in America, and no doubt funded by American taxpayers’ dollars. Across the street at Shanidar Park, thousands more Iraqi’s strolled the grounds and perused the nation’s first arts gallery.
“Ten years ago, this would not have been possible,” the gallery’s director, Hawker Reskn, told us.
We took a taxi to the Christian borough of the city. We knew we were there when shops starting selling alcohol (most Muslims do not drink). We looked into two churches, neither striking for their architecture but instead for their location, which was in Muslim-dominated Iraq.
I picked up a 36-pack of Seven-Up and a pound of cashews for the big Eid feast that night, and we drove back to Bilunt’s home. On the way, we passed myriad construction projects that are turning the city into, as Bilunt’s brother put it, “the next Dubai.” The world’s largest mall and Iraq’s tallest tower are reportedly going up in Erbil.
Though tired from a long day of mosques, talking and touring, we were tossed into a home filled with some 30 family members, and it was here that my social ineptitude caught up with me again. Claire was quickly ushered into the kitchen to help dice vegetables and prepare the meal, while I was given a seat in the men’s sitting room for a manly discussion.
The son of an imam, appropriately named Muhammad, starting talking with me about world affairs, but as we were both sons of religious leaders, the conversation quickly turned toward religion.
With Islam, he said, you get Jesus AND the Muhammad, two for one! In that case, I said, why not update your religion to Mormonism, because then you get Jesus, Muhammad and Joseph Smith!
Let’s start with God, he said. This tea that we’re drinking, he said, did someone make it? Maybe, I said, but there’s a miniscule chance that it all just came together in a miraculous confusion of materials. Muhammad looked puzzled.
Think about the difference between animals and humans, he said; animals have instincts while human babies do not–they need a mother’s nurture. Maybe, I countered, but when you put a baby to the teet it certainly starts suckling! They looked puzzled. You know, I said, the teet, the mother’s breast.
That’s when Claire walked into the room.
“Why is it that every time I leave you alone you start talking about something inappropriate?” she said.
Finally, the feast was served.
The next morning we took a taxi back to Turkey. Back in Zakhu, the taxi driver said he’d give us a discount if we smuggled cigarettes across the border. Claire and I said sure. He gave us each a shopping bag with six cartoons, telling us that we had to say they were ours or he would get a $150 fine. We said sure. Crossing through customs, the driver was freaking out, chain-smoking and fidgeting and nearly blowing our cover.
But after bombing his country into chaos earlier this decade, smuggling a few cigarettes for an Iraqi seemed the least we could do.
Books read during four months of travel: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Brothers Karamozov, The Road to Kathmandu, The Red Tent, GRE Practice Exam Book, The Afterlife and Other Short Stories by John Updike, On The Road, Blood Meridian.
