One of the most surprising sights in all of Iraqi Kurdistan was Spice Platinum, a hardcore porn channel available on satellite in our hotel in Suleimaniya (Diyarbakir too). Dozens of channels were scrambled and unavailable, but not Spice Platinum.
In a bustling food joint right next to the hotel, I did a double-take at a conservative woman in a headscarf. She carried a small handbag with a Playboy Bunny insignia.
Compared to Turkey’s kaleidoscopic and multinational cuisine, the food in Kurdistan was basic. Good, but basic. There were kebabs and more kebabs—chicken, lamb, chopped meat. Every place served small bowls of rice with raisins or other dried fruit, along with side dishes of beans in a mild brown sauce. You’d scoop all this up with flatbread, piled in stacks directly on the table. No fork, no napkins, just a box of Kleenex. There was also delicious quarter-chicken, salty and well-done, with meat so tender it fell off the bone—a good thing, since you ate it with your hands. I had a bad cut on my knuckle from one of Istanbul’s tricky door latches, and Band-Aids were in short supply. Getting food in the wound wasn’t the best idea, but if this little boo-boo was my biggest problem in Iraq, I was doing great.
Yigal gets by quite well in Turkish, so we were able to have simple conversations with a couple of Turks staying at the hotel. In Kurdish, however, all we could say was “thank you” (s’pas or zos’pas). This came in handy, as people offered us tea at every interview. You’d finish a glass and they’d immediately bring more.
In a kebab restaurant down the street from the hotel, one waiter laughed when we asked if he spoke Turkish. Yigal managed to order chicken (d’jej) in Arabic. In the hotel restaurant, even that failed. Yigal abandoned language altogether and—I kid you not—clucked like a chicken. The waiter smiled and nodded in recognition. He brought lamb.
At Sitaq, which I wrote about here, one family offered us a plate of lamb kebabs with flatbread and Iranian cola. The meat was practically white—so fresh that the animal had to have been slaughtered that very morning. But the best meal was at our fixer’s parents’ house in Halabja. “I’m taking you to a restaurant,” he joked. We were led into a large living room with beautiful rugs and absolutely no furniture. There was a TV/DVD on a stand in the corner. We leaned against the walls, on pillows.
Our fixer, in his mid-20s, is the oldest of five brothers and two sisters. He is particularly close with the youngest boy, who is eight or nine. The mother greeted us warmly but spent her time in another room, preparing circular flatbread on what looked like a giant crepe-maker. She and the other siblings took turns serving us, first laying out a “tablecloth” directly on the carpet, then bringing a heaping plate of flavorful dolma, or stuffed grape leaves. They were bursting at the seams, not neatly wrapped like the store-bought kind. Before we left, the mother handed us a plastic bag full of her freshest bread. Then we walked less than a quarter-mile to our fixer’s house, still being built. (See the picture above for the view from inside.)
Later in Suli, we came upon four guys in their early 20s, looking hip and hanging around a downtown plaza. One wore an “Operation Iraqi Freedom” T-shirt. They were Kurds who worked as translators with the U.S. military in Tikrit. We talked briefly about the dangers of this, arguably the most harrowing job on the planet. Then one of the guys asked, “Can we take your picture?” Hmm… what’s a polite way to say “Absolutely fucking not”? Just what we need: our American Jewish faces on a camera that could be seized by jihadis. We declined and quickly left, before they could snap a photo on the sly.
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