Two hours into my first tour of Erbil, my guide for the day taught me to feel lucky. “If we were doing this in Baghdad, we would be dead by now,” he said.Read the rest over at Reason magazine »Our driver nodded vigorously.
“It’s that dangerous?” I asked.
"With your face,” my guide replied, “and with our Kurdish license plates on the car, we could not last two hours.”
So goes the capital of Iraq. But I was touring the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where the war is already over.
There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. A hard internal border between the Kurds’ territory and the Arab-dominated center and south has been in place since the Kurdish uprising at the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Cars on the road heading north are stopped at a series of checkpoints. Questions are asked. ID cards are checked. Vehicles are searched and sometimes taken apart on the side of the road. Smugglers, insurgents, and terrorists who attempt to sneak into Kurdistan by crossing Iraq’s wilderness areas are ambushed by border patrols.
Bless Michael Totten for his willingness to go exploring in the various nooks & crannies of the Middle East, and telling us about what he sees there. This article sounds like a compilation of some of his website articles, but it is good to see a print media crowd getting exposed to his words.
This article was the typical Totten piece. Reported without cynicism or rosy optimism or condescension, the good and the bad of the situation in Kurdistan is laid out for us. Some things are going well, even going well for the USA. Some things are not going so well, and will give the USA headaches later on. What is going to be the outcome? We don't know yet, but there are some clues for those among us who want to make an educated guess.
it's interesting to note though, that Kurdistan is safer to move around in than the rest of Iraq because the Kurdistani provincial government makes security its #1 issue, and conducts non- politically correct security profiling to a high degree. Note that Totten never mentions a US military convoy or patrol, so prevalent in the center & south of Iraq. The Kurds are in charge, and are doing well...for now, anyway.
Go, Kurds! Anyone know any Kurdish blogs?
There were a number of English-language Kurdish bloggers blogging from Iraq. They're all inactive now. At this point all of the English language blogs by Iraqi Kurds of which I'm aware are being written by Iraqi Kurds outside of Iraq.
A pretty fair source of information about the Kurds and Kurdistan is KurdishMedia.
The most sobering prospect to me about the Kurdish "success story" is the PKK-vs-Turks angle.
Not to bring on flamage, but when the US/coalition presence is reduced, as almost veryone hopes it will be in times to come, Turkey might be emboldened to try to "improve" or "resolve" their "Kurdish question".
And the reported Kirkuk-repatriation-killings are hard to assess in general impact, too.
I wish the Kurds all the best in making their (own) way. But as Blackstone wrote, a crucial part of Western jurisprudence (and thus culture) is the notion that there must be an end to disputes.
Any further commentary on the deterioration of that principle here at home is left as an exercise for the student... :\ :|
Isn't it about time that we admitted that some countries are not nations and are held together only by the thinnest of threads? From everything I have read the three major groups in Iraq have totally different agendas. In any conflict the sooner belligerents can be separated the better. Let the kurds have kuridstan, the shias shis territory and the sunni's sunni territory. The sooner the top dog in each given area is acknowldeged the sooner the violence subsides.
You might want to read Michael's article a little more closely, pacific_waters. Neither the Turks nor, in all probability, the Iranians will put up with a completely separate Iraqi Kurdistan. It would inevitably be viewed as a staging area for a Greater Kurdistan that would include big chunks of Turkey and Iran.