Return to Iraq
The land around Erbil, the capital city of the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, is mostly beige, flat and seemingly endless. The mountain has seen a lot of action. The terror group ISIS remains dug in around it and the Kurdish peshmerga, with whom I recently spent time, continue to battle against them. Iraq. Two syllables, almost two decades of conflict. When people think of Iraq they think of several things: the disastrous 2003 war, oil (like all Arab countries in the popular imagination), ISIS and, if they’re a bit older, the mustachioed features of Saddam Hussein that stood, in the early years of this century, for the type of dictator painted as the West’s greatest threat. I think of all those things, too. But they’re leavened by something else: family.
