[Welcome to continuing coverage of my recent trip to Istanbul, southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Link below for previous posts.]
On the evening of March 19, my colleague Yigal Schleifer and I took a Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to Diyarbakir, a mere 90 minutes but seemingly a world away. The largest city in southeastern Anatolia, Diyarbakir has long been a hotbed of Kurdish unrest. Turkish authorities recently tried to prevent Osman Baydemir, the city’s Kurdish mayor, from meeting with the U.S. State Department and the Brookings Institution. (As Henri J. Barkey points out, the Turks had no qualms about meeting with Hamas and Moqtada al-Sadr.)
Diyarbakir is a hardscrabble town that struck me as more Middle Eastern than European. Its small airport is adjacent to a major Turkish air force base. We quickly hooked up with a gregarious fixer/translator/driver who was anticipating violent clashes on the occasion of Newroz, the Kurdish New Year, which would begin in two days’ time. As it turned out, the violence didn’t occur until the end of March. It continues into early April and involves such other locales as Batman, Mardin (a grand city on a hill, pictured above) and Silopi (on the Iraqi border). It’s strange to read about these events now, having just been there. It’s also too soon to say whether this is the return of all-out war between the Turks and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has laid relatively low since the capture of its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, in 1999.
The fixer said to me, “You look Iraqi—Middle Eastern face, leather jacket.” He glanced at my baggy jeans and added, “The pants, I don’t know—maybe some hip-hop thing.” I laughed, but made a mental note to switch to my dull tan corduroys.
At 7 a.m. we began our car ride to the Iraqi Kurdistan border, four hours to the southeast. The weather was fantastic. Our driver, the chatty Husni, blasted Usher, Shakira and assorted regional pop on the stereo. The Turkish Jandarma was everywhere, but we weren’t stopped once. Most of the terrain was hilly and rocky but very green. Passing through Cizre (pronounced jihz-ray), the site of a 1992 massacre, was a sobering experience. The vast majority of women were covered head-to-toe in black, although I saw one or two totally uncovered and seemingly unconcerned. From here you could practically throw a stone and hit the Syrian border; in fact, Yigal’s phone, equipped with automatic roaming, read “Welcome to Syria.” Just outside the dusty town we crossed the Tigris River.
In Silopi, the last Turkish city on the route, Husni pulled over, made photocopies of our passports and switched our bags to his older brother’s car. It was the taciturn, unflappable Haji who would take us across the border. He drove us through the Silopi outskirts, past a sprawling truck graveyard and a Turkish military base brimming with tanks and heavy artillery. The mountains just ahead? Iraq. Our destination.
[Go here to read the previous item in this series. Go here to read the next.]
**Update: David Bloom has an interesting report on the southeast here.
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