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Kurdistan and the map-makers
17.3.2008
By Mark MacKinnon
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March 17, 2008
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq
I took my first flight on Iraqi Airways Sunday. I
don’t know what year the Boeing 727 that took us on
our bumpy ride from Baghdad to Sulaimaniyah 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 Sulaimaniyah 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,www.ekurd.net
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.
Sulaimaniyah, 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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