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Saturday, March 15 – Baghdad-Sulaymaniyah
I took my first flight on Iraqi Airways today. I don’t know what year the Boeing 727 that took us on our bumpy ride from Baghdad to Sulaymaniyah was built, but the flaking paint on the right wing (can you guess which window I was staring out for 90 minutes?) had me convinced that it was assembled sometime around the twilight of the Ottoman Empire.
Much more impressive was arriving back in Kurdistan via Sulaymaniyah International Airport. Though the Kurds are officially taking a wait-and-see attitude towards the rest of Iraq (largely because Iraq’s president, foreign minister and one deputy prime minister are all Kurdish) – saying they’ll remain in so long as they’re granted broad autonomy in a federal Iraq, the reality is the Kurds are slowly but surely pulling away and setting up their own independent state.
For the first time in my traveling career – I’ve set foot in 52 countries and counting – I stepped off a domestic flight and had to go through passport control. The young woman who scanned my passport didn’t even look at my Iraqi visa as she punched my data into her computer and snapped a digital photograph of me. The message was clear: who the Iraqis let into Iraq was their business, who the Kurds let into Kurdistan was a different matter entirely.
The map I picked up at the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Tourism desk at the airport is even more to the point. A thick red line marks the boundaries of Kurdistan, a light purple one represents the edges of Iraq. The borders between Kurdistan and neighbouring Syria, Turkey and Iran are red, not purple. Iraq ends somewhere south of Kirkuk.
It's hard to blame the map-makers. Kurdistan remains the lone success story to emerge out of the past five years - in part because a line of Kurdish peshmerga soldiers mark the effective border between Kurdistan and the rest of the country, warily inspecting every car that tries to enter the region from the madness of the south.
Sulaymaniyah, in particular, is safe enough that you can walk the streets at night. Maybe I'll finally get that dinner out tonight.
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B Pushadree from Canada writes: The author is surprised to go through a passport control desk at the Kurdish city's airport even though he disembarked from a domestic flight. Has he been in a country where the state used chemical weapons against its own citizens? Has he been to a country where the government has no respect for the constitution? Has he been to a country where there were three official Iraqi flags; pre 1990, 1990-2003, and 2004 flags hoisted by three different groups, the Kurds, the Sunnies and the Shiite's, respectively?
Mark, you've entered a land of contradiction thanks to Great Britain's mistake of creating it. Don't approach things in a linear fashion when you go to Iraq, especially since its historical past is anything but a straight line.- Posted 16/03/08 at 5:29 PM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment
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Liz B from Ottawa, Canada writes: I was surprised when I first looked at the diary that there were so few comments. But when I finished I understood. This is too depressing for words. Thanks to Mr. MacKinnon for the report.
- Posted 17/03/08 at 5:53 AM EDT | Alert an Editor | Link to Comment
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