Monkey see...

Fun in Dohuk!

I'm here in Dohuk, a major city in northern Iraq, where there's a surprising amount to do, especially when the sun starts to set and the temperature drops. Lots of parents and kids head to either Dreamland, an old-fashioned amusement park with Ferris wheel and other rides; or to the Dohuk Zoo. I  found the zoo a bit depressing - it's old and the animals are kept in too-small cages. But it was wonderful seeing smiles on the face of Iraqi children, like this family getting their (and my) first look at a rare white pelican. They moved to Dohuk a few months ago to escape the violence in their hometown of Mosul.

Better than Publix?

Kurds don't have huge U.S.-style supermarkets, but they do have excellent  fruits and vegetables that haven't been bioengineered into tasteless indestructibility. Many Kurds buy their produce from little street-side stands like this one in Erbil, the Kurdish capital. My interpreter invited me to lunch at her home today and her mother put on a  feast - green beans, home-made fries, tomato and cuke salad, stuffed eggplant, stuffed grape leaves, stuffed tomatoes, stuffed peppers, stuffed squash  - needless to say, I tottered away from the table stuffed to the gills. Speaking of squash, the hotel buffet last night featured a delicious item simply labeled: Healthy Soup. It was yellow - could it have been squash?

Papers, papers everywhere, but not a word to read

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Iraq has had a fairly  free press, though many of the myriad newspapers are associated with one political party or another. Papers from Baghdad are delivered daily to the Kurdish capital of Erbil, and literally sold on the street, as shown here.

Unfortunately, they're all in Arabic or Kurdish. Here's a business tip for someone - now that Austrian Airlines is flying into Kurdistan so often, why not bring in some copies of the International Herald Tribune? I'd gladly pay a few dollars to read an English-language paper, and I'm sure they'd be popular with other Western ex-pats living and working here.

Meet Sami

As every foreign correspondent knows, llife is a lot easier if you have a good interpreter and driver.  I've found an excellent team in driver Sami, shown here, and Avan, a young Kurdish engineer who honed her English by working for the UN and a big American contractor after Saddam Hussein's  regime fell in 2003

Sami, who lives in a mixed Christian-Muslim village outside Erbil, agreed to pose in front of this daunting stone staircase that leads to an ancient tomb atop the mountain. Christians say a revered Christian religious figure was buried there centuries ago; Muslims say the tomb contains a revered Muslim figure! Whatever the case, I wasn't about to spend an hour in the heat climbing up.

Avan didn't want to photographed. Like many Iraqis, even those in the safe, Kurdish-controlled north, she fears being targetted by terrorists who consider anyone who works with Americans to be consorting with the enemy.

Fill 'er up

I have yet to see a regular gas station here - it seems that most people buy from roadside vendors like this poor fellow trying to make a dinar and grab a bit of shade in 109 degree heat. It's definitely convenient but the downside is that the gas is often adulterated with water or kerosene.

My driver, Sami, always does a simple test - he sticks his pinkie into the container and if it (the finger) turns white for a minute, he knows the gas is good. But if his finger feels oily, he knows the gas has been mixed with something, and so he looks elsewhere.

The highest quality gas sold here is from Turkey can costs about 21,000 dinars - one U.S. dollar equals 1,255 dinars so you do the math - for 20 litres (a litre is about a quart.) 

An alternative view of Iraq

Northern Iraq is like a different country in more ways than one - one being the scenery. This is the view from the back of my hotel, perched on a hilltop a few miles outside of Erbil. Other areas of "Kurdistan'' -- as the Kurds like to call it -- resemble the red rock country of northern Arizona and you can even find some Alpine looking lakes and snow-capped mountains near the Iranian and Turkish borders.

Willkommen to Iraq

After two and a half years, I'm back in Iraq. This is my sixth trip here since 2000 but the first by air, not car. The Kurdish-controlled north is now stable enough that Austrian Airlines has four flights a week from Vienna to Erbil, the Kurdish capital. Mercifully for us white-knuckle flyers, Austrian's flights don't stop in Baghdad, where pilots have to make those stomach-churning corkscrew landings to avoid rocket attacks, but instead glide directly into Erbil to the soothing strains of Strauss waltzes.

The Airbus was almost full, with the usual war-zone assortment of journalists, aid workers, contractors, shadowy looking figures and locals, including Nasren Mahmood, a young Iraqi woman who has been studying in Paris since 1999. After getting her luggage, she still faced a six-hour cab drive to her home near the Iranian border. "I'm nervous,'' she acknowledged - both about the taxi ride and what she would find in a country so radically altered from the time she left.

A different Hamas?

In a good analysis in Ha'aretz, Zvi Bar'el observes that Hamas' religious agenda seems to have disappeared, despite the Koranic citations quoted in the Mecca summit between Hamas and Fatah.  Here's the start of  the piece:

At the signing ceremony for the Mecca agreement last week, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Meshal and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh all vied so hard to outdo one another that it almost seemed as if they were competing in a Koran recitation contest.

Abbas, who spoke first, didn't know how far Meshal was about to go with Koranic citations, and so he quickly switched to discussing secular matters. Meshal, however, made a brilliant showing. The lengthy verses he quoted by heart resounded throughout the huge auditorium and, if anybody was looking around, they would have noticed at least three Saudi royals murmuring the verses along with Meshal and nodding their heads approvingly.

Meshal, apparently, cleverly chose the right verses. "You can't come into the home of the Saudi royalty without being able to quote some long verses," an Egyptian journalist once said to me. "In the West, everyone always has a joke or some witty comment ready. In Egypt, you have to come up with an eloquent phrase in praise of the host. In Saudi Arabia, it's just Koranic verses. You'd think everyone there is some kind of religious sage," he explained.

Yet the verses that served as a backdrop for the unity agreement could not obscure one particularly interesting detail: Nowhere in the entire agreement, in all the speeches, and in the entire past year since Hamas came to power, has a single religious statement been heard from it. It seems like even Article 27 of the Hamas charter has been totally forgotten.

This section says that "Despite our esteem for the Palestine Liberation Organization and what it is capable of developing into, and without belittling its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we cannot exchange the Islamic nature of Palestine in the present or future for the adoption of secular ideas -- Hence the day on which the Palestine Liberation Organization adopts Islam as its way of life we will be its soldiers and the fuel of its fire which will burn the enemy. However, until then -- the Islamic Resistance Movement will treat the Palestine Liberation Organization as a son treats his father, brother treats brother, relative treats relative."

Just scrapping by...

b RAMALLAH, West Bank - The next time you buy something metal that says, Made in China, remember this family. Abu Nabil and sons Nabil, Hamza and Hazem scour the roads and fields of the West Bank for scrap metal that they sell to dealers who in turn ship it to the Chinese. For a full day's work, the family can make 60 shekels, or about $13 although this particular Saturday was "not a good day,'' Nabil said. Until the start of a new wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence in 2000, Abu Nabil worked as a chef in Israel. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been barred from entering Israel and many are forced to scrounge for a living. Almost 70 percent of Palestinians now live in poverty, the UN estimates.