On the Road to Kandahar by Jason Burke

Author:Jason Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9. Back to Kurdistan

I spread the photographs out and stood back. Ali Hamad Massood, the mayor of Qala Diza, looked at them silently, moving them around the glass top of his desk with the tips of his fingers with a delicacy I had not expected in such a large man. A minute passed. The office was the same as all the others in northern Iraq, indeed in all Iraq. There was a picture of a political leader on the wall, in this case Jalal Talabani, the veteran head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, several vases full of garish plastic flowers set on low coffee tables made of ornately carved, heavily varnished cherry-wood and several large green sofas on which sat around half a dozen slightly overweight men, all with moustaches and stubble and thick fingers that clicked orange or red prayer beads. In front of each was a small glass of tea, so heavily sweetened that its bottom third was pure sugar. There was a strong smell of stale sweat. The mayor looked up, walked round his desk, grasped my hand, threw an arm across my shoulder and pulled me to him.

‘I am very pleased to see you,’ he said, or rather he told Ala, my interpreter who was sitting a few feet away, who told me. ‘As you were here as a peshmerga then you are our great friend and very, very welcome to Qala Diza. And as you have come back after ten, no, eleven years we will consider you as if you have been a peshmerga for all this time.’

I had been trying to travel back to Kurdistan for several years but none of the surrounding powers on whom access to the Kurds depended were allowing transit. However, in the summer of 2002, old contacts in the Kurdish Democratic Party in London had been able to negotiate my passage with the Syrian authorities so I flew into Damascus from the UK and drove overnight across the desert to the far northeastern corner of Syria where a border crossing was open. Beyond the frontier, a semi-autonomous Kurdish state had survived for over a decade within borders that had pretty much been set by the fighting of the summer of 1991. I had been stamped out of Syria by a bored functionary and then had carried my bags down a sandy track between high walls of bulrushes to the banks of the Tigris.

This far north, the great muddy river of the Iraqi plains was cool, swift running and clear enough for me to see the pebbles, each a different shade of grey or brown, of the river bed. It was only a few feet deep. The boatman had beached his craft, a broad, flat-bottomed canoe, on the gravel of the far bank and, the only passenger, I had stepped out into what, according to a sign painted on a nearby wall, was ‘Free Kurdistan’. I had been extremely happy to be there and extremely happy, in a way I had not expected, to see that Free Kurdistan still existed.

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