DOHOK, IRAQ – Everyone I talked to in Erbil said the city of Dohok, near the border with Turkey, was both safer and prettier. So I made the three-hour drive through the mountains, partly so I could see the spectacular scenery and also because I didn’t want to drive through Mosul. Mosul is part of Iraq’s greater red zone, so to speak. The scumbags of Al Qaeda still operate there.
It shouldn’t be a big deal to just drive through a place for ten minutes where Al Qaeda hides out. But a brief conversation I had with a driver and translator in Erbil made quite an impression on me. After driving around the city for two hours, my translator said “If we were doing this in Baghdad we would be dead by now.”
Leave a comment
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.