Before Michael Totten set out on his late February-early March trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, he made reference to a PR campaign called The Other Iraq, which touts the Kurdish region as safe and prosperous. “Here’s what I want to know,” Totten wrote. “[D]oes Iraqi Kurdistan live up to the hype? Is it actually a nice place? Or is Iraqi Kurdistan a backwater that is only pleasant compared to the rest of Iraq because it isn’t a war zone?” I think the answer’s somewhere in between, but leaning toward the latter. (Granted, Totten stayed longer and saw more than I did.)
As I’ve already argued, maintaining stability anywhere in Iraq is an achievement for which the Kurdish authorities deserve enormous credit. The people of Iraqi Kurdistan are kind and the atmosphere is relaxed, all things considered. One afternoon, we whiled away an hour in a lovely park in downtown Suli, watching people take family portraits of their kids in their Newroz clothes. (In the park were busts of Kurdish poets, pictured above.) At night we usually stayed in the hotel, but a couple of times we walked to nearby restaurants alone and never felt uneasy. And we’re two American Jews.
Much of the scenery in Iraqi Kurdistan is gorgeous, even if barren of trees thanks to Saddam Hussein’s rapacious rule. It’s important to remember that prior to the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s, Iraqi Kurdistan was a very different place, one that no present-day visitor will ever know. Totten has a point, however: Dohuk and Suli, both in Iraq, are now more pleasant than Cizre in southeast Turkey. Yet northern Iraq is still considered a no-go zone and Turkey is pulling for EU membership.
That said, Iraqi Kurdistan is rough-and-tumble and visibly unfinished. Construction is booming now that Saddam is gone for good. Next door to our hotel was a 50-foot hole in the ground where a building’s foundation will go. There were no safety barricades, no caution signs, no nothing. According to our sources, corruption is rampant. The whole place has a thrown-together feel, with half-built homes on unpaved roads near vacant, rubble-strewn lots. Conditions are peaceful but relatively poor. Remember when Paul Wolfowitz and others told us that oil revenues would pay for Iraq’s reconstruction? I thought about that every time we passed those rows of black-market gas cans at the roadside.
[Update: I forgot—electricity at our hotel failed several times a day, but usually not for more than a minute or two. The longest outage was a couple of hours late one afternoon.]
In comparative regional terms, Iraqi Kurdistan is democratic. This too is an achievement. But there are signs of backsliding, as I reported here and here. In the KDP areas there are pictures of Massoud Barzani everywhere. In the PUK areas, Jalal Talabani adorns the walls. These men, while hardly perfect, are far from monsters. But there is a whiff of cult-of-personality in all this portraiture, and it’s hard to see how it will bolster a democratic culture in the long term.
It almost goes without saying that the people of Iraqi Kurdistan could have it far worse. But one exchange in particular seemed to sum up the prevailing mood. One of the young soccer fans we spoke with about the Halabja riot had the gumption to ask his interviewers a question of his own. “Will you take us with you, wherever you are going?” My colleague Yigal nodded in jest, as if it were a perfectly reasonable request. “Oh my God!” the guy shouted, as his friends burst out laughing. “He said yes!”
[Go here to read the previous item in this series.]
[Go here to read a brief addendum to the series.]
P.S. – This concludes my series on Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. If you’ve enjoyed it, by all means visit the PayPal link (top right) and make a donation. Many thanks!
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