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With the Kurdish Bravehearts
5.4.2008
By Vicki Woods
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April 5, 2008
'What the hell are you doing in Iraq, love?" asked a
man in a Chelsea shirt on the airport shuttle bus.
Touring, I said. Looking forward to lovely mountain
views. And what was he doing so far from Manchester,
come to that?
And wearing a Chelsea shirt? I was only about 10
yards into Iraq at that point, waiting on the Tarmac
at Erbil International Airport at five in the
morning.
It took an hour to pass through security at
immigration (under signs saying "ALL WEAPONS MUST BE
DECLARED"), but I finally got an Iraqi stamp in my
passport.
I've wanted to get into Iraq since Lt-Col Tim
Collins (as he then was) made that ringing, romantic
speech to his paddies in the Royal Irish Regiment.
"Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the
Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood, and the birth of
Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will see things no
man could pay to see and you will have to go a long
way to find a more decent, generous and upright
people than the Iraqis," etc, etc.
Ooh, thrilling. And for about 10 seconds, I thought
the mad Bush-Blair plan might actually work.
Maybe they would tread lightly there. Maybe the
coalition forces would simply secure Baghdad, depose
the dictator, hand the country over "to the Iraqi
people" and make a thousand democratic flowers bloom
with their merry plans for the reconstruction of
Iraq.
For another 10 seconds, I thought Baghdad might turn
into an Iraqi Dubai, with luxury resort hotels
offering day trips up the Tigris. Perhaps Mosul,
with the ruins of ancient Ninevah close by, could
imitate Amman, with its air-conditioned buses
running tours to Petra?
But once I saw that the 101st Airborne was rather
heavy-footedly turning the ruins of ancient Ninevah
into hard-standing for tanks and troop transporters,
I realised that the "reconstruction of Iraq" was a
bigger fable than the weapons of mass destruction.
Anyway, I still wanted to go. Not as a war
correspondent, for which I'm far too wimpy, but as a
tourist-traveller.
I spent the month before Christmas 2005 trying to
get into the north of Iraq, via Erbil, which was
promising to get an international airport up and
running in weeks, according to a nice man working
for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
It took another two years before scheduled flights
started running regularly, and now you can go
non-stop from Amman via Royal Jordanian or from
Vienna via Austrian Airlines.
My son, who spent three years in Iraq from June 2003
onwards, idly offered me a birthday trip last year
(when it was my birthday) and I held him to it.
We stayed safely inside the Kurdish region, which is
a bit like saying you've visited Britain by only
going to the Highlands of Scotland. But it was a bit
like Scotland,www.ekurd.net
actually (Braveheart is
the Kurds' favourite movie): it's a favoured holiday
place for Iraqis because it is green in summer.
Erbil, with the 7,000-year-old citadel rising over
it, is in the middle of a flat, agricultural plain,
but the mountains are only 10 miles away. "Kurds
have no friends but the mountains," is a
Braveheartish Kurdish saying.
We stayed at the "Sheraton" (it's not a Sheraton),
which is an unhandsome businessman's hotel inside
the city, and at the Khanzad Hotel, which is perched
on a small hill five miles outside Erbil. Both these
hotels have prominent signs in the lobby saying, "We
take Visa, Mastercard, Maestro". This turns out not
to be true: what they take is American dollars, in
large bundles. Or Iraqi dinars, obviously, but you'd
need much bigger bundles.
Still, the Khanzad is a handsome enough hotel (and
would be quite Dubai-like if it wasn't for the wads
of cash).
The back is entirely glass and gives a stunning
horizon-to-horizon view of the ridge of mountains in
the near distance. It's like being on a ship at sea,
approaching Dover. On the top of the ridge is
President Massoud Barzani's headquarters. And an
awful lot of peshmerga.
A local journalist told me that the Khanzad (which
is so super-secure it could act as a regional seat
of government) was the favoured hotel for world
statesmen doing their
I've-been-on-the-ground-in-Iraq tours.
"See the helipad to the right? That's where Jack
Straw landed, and Dick Cheney." They fly into Erbil
International, which is 20 minutes away by road, but
there is a fleet of Black Hawks to get them here in
five minutes. Then a limo carries them 500 yards to
the hotel door.
Then straight into the lobby, here, while we're
penned up in the bar, there, and then we're let out
to watch them shaking Kak Massoud's hand and listen
to the speeches. Then the Black Hawks rise up again
like wasps and they go back to America saying
they've been on the ground in Iraq.
Kak means "brother" in Kurdish. It's a respectful
designation. It was the only Kurdish I learnt in
five days, apart from the phrase "Nawruz piroz be".
But it was enough. For Kurds, Nawruz is New Year
(which falls around Easter), so it means Happy New
Year and every time I trotted it out, it was
exuberantly received.
Kurds hold their Nawruz festivities on the
mountains, and we were invited to join some. Each
child in the family would be lined up to chime:
"Thank you!" and "Welcome!" (in English) and proffer
cheeks not once or twice but four times for seasonal
kisses.
Erbil is booming to an extent that Dick Cheney must
have loved as he whizzed over it in his Black Hawk.
Brand new car showrooms (Toyota was the first, then
Volkswagen), new shopping malls rising up. The first
one, briskly called Nawa Mall (nawa = new), isn't
exactly a mall, but a massive great store, packed
with Chinese-made clothing.
But proper, American-style malls are half-built.
Also banks, though the cash-only problem seems to
affect the banks as well as the hotels.
The suburb of Ainkawa was the city's Christian
quarter; it still is, though diluted by rapid
expansion and gentrification: entire brand-new
terraces of five-bed, two-bath housing is being
built.
The Christian church at Ainkawa's heart is as
fiercely guarded as the Khanzad Hotel, and, as we
strolled through the green gardens my son nudged me.
"Listen to those people talking," he said.
"Aramaic." If the rest of Iraq could even begin to
work like the Kurdish region, I'd forgive Bush and
Blair.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
telegraph co.uk
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