Ten Years Ago.

Here's the report I filed from Baghdad on the day the Iraqi capital fell to US troops. It ran in The Globe and Mail under the headline "Fear melts away at last in the heart of Baghdad."

You can read what I wrote when I returned to Baghdad five years later, in 2008, here.

BAGHDAD -- Suddenly, in the heart of Baghdad, it was okay to laugh.

For 19-year-old Zara, the moment came yesterday morning, when from behind her headscarf she let slip a derogatory remark about Saddam Hussein.

"His heart," the young woman said, still afraid to give her surname to a reporter. "It was like an air conditioner."

She looked momentarily stunned by what she had just said, until her 16-year-old sister Sara started to giggle. Zara also began to laugh, and soon the sisters were doubled over in gales of hysterical, alleviating, laughter.

And so, it seemed, was the heart of Baghdad, where for much of yesterday statues and posters of Mr. Hussein were toppling, crowds were cheering U.S. soldiers and people were laughing, often at the man they had feared for so long.

The dictator was gone, they knew, and life in Baghdad was different.

Though it may take longer to erase from people's memories, Saddam Hussein's 24-year reign over the Iraqi people came symbolically crashing down before noon, three weeks from the start of the war, with the screech of twisting metal and the roar of an elated crowd, as American troops seized the centre of Baghdad and toppled a signature statue of the tyrant.

Groups of Iraqis loyal to Mr. Hussein continued to fight in other parts of the capital and the country -- as they may for weeks or months to come -- but those living in the centre of Baghdad gradually began to get the sense that the worst of the war was over, and their long nightmare finished.

After enduring concussive air strikes day and night, they awoke this morning from the first night without U.S. bombs dropping on the city in three weeks.

Fighting resumed today, however, as U.S. troops battled Iraqi fighters at a palace to the north of the capital and at a mosque in the city. Marines later were searching the mosque, believing that Mr. Hussein might be hiding inside, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported.

At first, the coming together of the U.S. soldiers and the people of Baghdad yesterday was a nervous one. Like two teenagers at a high school dance, unsure of how the other felt, they watched each other from afar -- the Iraqis daring only to peek from the balconies of their homes, the Americans looking back cautiously over the barrels of their raised guns.

But early yesterday morning, as a column of U.S. tanks and armoured personnel carriers rolled down National Theatre Street, toward Mr. Hussein's statue on the square, the mood began to lighten.

In those early hours, when Iraqi defences seemed to evaporate in the spring heat, only a few Iraqis dared to appear on the street. Some hurled debris at the statue, which featured Mr. Hussein in a business suit with his right arm raised. Their actions emboldened a few more, and within minutes the square was filled with perhaps 200 Iraqis chanting for the statue to come down.

The first attempt to topple the statue with a sledgehammer failed, as did a subsequent try with ropes.

A U.S. armoured vehicle, fitted with steel cables and a pulley, intervened and soon, the monument fell, sparking a gush of joy in the crowd. Some danced. Some sang. Some threw flowers and kisses at the American soldiers.

Dhaffar al-Mansuria, a 25-year-old university student whose father had been killed in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, rushed to stomp on Mr. Hussein's likeness, nearly falling over several times in his enthusiasm to kick at what he saw as a symbol of evil.

"Saddam killed many, many Iraqis. He raped many girls. He is a very bad man and now he is gone," Mr. Mansuria said, panting to catch his breath.

"Even though my father was killed by Americans, I am not angry with them. I am angry only at Saddam. He did this to us."

Hassid Nouri, a 55-year-old who stood back from the crowd, said he was thinking of a friend who disappeared in 1978, shortly after taking part in a protest against the regime, and has not been heard from since.

"Everybody was waiting for this day to come," Mr. Nouri said. "We want to build a statue for Bush in the middle of Baghdad, for freeing us from Saddam."

There were an angry few, however, watching the scene from the sidelines and warning those around them that they would pay for their displays of dissent.

"You are not allowed to do this. This man is Iraq," a woman in a business suit told a group dancing on the pedestal where the statue once stood.

She was wearing a badge that identified her as a government official.

"This man is not Iraq," a man wearing a tattered jogging suit shot back. The crowd cheered. "Iraq is food and water and electricity and all the things we don't have. This man is just Saddam."

The scenes of jubilation had vanished by this morning, but the anger against Mr. Hussein had not. Without a crowd to encourage him or a media throng to record the display, a lone Iraqi walking in the early hours past the empty pedestal where the dictator's statue once stood stopped to give the base a swift kick before continuing on.

American soldiers caught up in the jubilation the day before seemed surprised at their reception, and at the easy time they had moving into the middle of the city. A day earlier, they had been locked in fierce urban warfare on the outskirts of Baghdad, but by yesterday morning it seemed the resistance had almost completely melted.

"There was nothing today, we just rolled straight in," said Sergeant Grant Zaitz of the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, the unit that seized a large swath of central Baghdad yesterday morning, including the square where the statue once stood.

Nodding at the crowd, he smiled. "It's better than down south, better than getting shot at. I guess we should have got here sooner."

Soon after the statue was toppled, however, the crowd began to ask tough questions of the U.S. forces suddenly in control over much of their city. One man approached a marine standing guard on the square and asked him how quickly his electricity -- knocked out earlier this week in the midst of fighting -- would be switched back on. "One day? One week? More? And the water pressure is very poor," the man said.

The marine, who moments before had been signing autographs for the crowd, appeared dumbfounded. "I'm sorry, that's not my job, sir," he eventually responded.

Many Iraqis said they wanted the U.S. forces to stay only as long as it took to restore services and set up an Iraqi-led, government.

"I hope the American soldiers will stay for one year, then go," said Furat abd-Algamy, a 24-year-old engineering student. "If they stay longer, there will be trouble. I know this will happen, and there's nothing we can do about it."

In Saddam City, a poor Shia Muslim neighbourhood that had borne the brunt of several of Mr. Hussein's crackdowns, crowds swarmed out to meet a group of foreign journalists, showering them with kisses and flowery words as if they were the liberators. Moments later, however, a rock crashed through our back window.

"They are killers of my people," seethed Mejdee Abdul Khadr, glaring at the passing troops. "They bomb anywhere, they kill everybody."

The civilian death toll -- one measure by which coalition efforts to oust Mr. Hussein will be judged -- also continued to climb, with one Baghdad hospital reporting it had received 30 dead and 300 injured Tuesday night alone.

For much of the morning, however, the streets were simply empty. One man estimated that three-quarters of the people he knew had fled the city, seeking refuge in small towns and villages around the country. Of the few civilians we saw, some waved at us, while others looked on grim-faced, gripping their Kalashnikov rifles.

Such scattered militia units were the only defenders left in evidence as we weaved through the north and west of the capital. Very few uniformed Iraqi soldiers could be seen, and certainly nothing that could pass as a fighting unit. The only Iraqi tanks or defensive positions that we saw were either destroyed or, more commonly, deserted.

There was looting in many parts of the city, especially government office buildings that all seemed to be stripped of their computers and furniture by midday. At the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters, which Mr. Hussein's son Uday had turned into a torture centre, one man was seen leaving with a refrigerator. The base of the Mukhabarat secret police was being looted by the time U.S. Marines arrived and took it over.

While much of the city was surrounded by U.S. forces, free entry and escape was still possible to the north, toward Mr. Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.

While rumours about Mr. Hussein's whereabouts, or his existence, continued to ripple through the city last night, most residents seemed content to know that his days as leader were over.

Shortly after watching Mr. Hussein's statue fall, Fousi al-Hasseini made a phone call to his sister, who now lives in Toronto. His young nephew answered.

"Did you see? Did you see it?" Mr. al-Hasseini asked in English, dabbing at his eyes while his own children wept openly around him. "Today we got freedom."

"He's Still With Us"

 
(Here's an article I wrote in March 2003, about how Russians were treating the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death. Sadly, much of it - although obviously not the lead paragraph - could be published again today.)




MOSCOW

In his palace in Baghdad, increasingly isolated from the rest of the world as war looms, Saddam Hussein is said to seek inspiration on his bookcase -- from the many volumes he treasures that contain the writing of another infamous mustached dictator.

Joseph Stalin, the legend goes, is one of the few people Mr. Hussein looks up to. He sees his own story as linked to the former Soviet leader's -- Stalin survived famine and war and accusations that he was killing his own people to remain in power until the day he died.

Half a world away in North Korea, as the sabre-rattling Kim Jong Il pushes his country toward a confrontation with the West, the Dear Leader basks in the constant adulation of his citizens -- a cult of personality consciously built on the Stalinist model. He has gone much further in his hero worship than erecting a few statues; since assuming power in 1994, Mr. Kim has imitated everything from Stalin's labour camps to his penchant for nuclear brinkmanship.

It's perhaps no surprise that Mr. Kim, famously linked to Mr. Hussein in George W. Bush's "axis of evil," looks up to Stalin. His father was installed by Moscow in 1945.

In her two-room Moscow apartment, 85-year-old Galina Ionova hugs a book praising the man she says saved the Motherland, and explains why she thinks that Stalin is still having an impact five decades after his death.

"Stalin was a genius. None of us common people can understand what he was guided by," the retired history professor says, eyes glowing with an almost religious fervour. "Stalin is not our past. He's our present and our future."

---

Next Wednesday will mark 50 years since Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- also known as Koba the Dread and Joseph Stalin -- died peacefully at his countryside dacha near Moscow, ending one of the more violent periods in Russian and world history.

To most of the planet, Stalin's legacy is clear. He was a monster. The number of people executed by the secret police and other government organs during his 29-year reign is still being counted, but is known to be in the millions. Tens of millions more died during mass famines that he organized from his Kremlin office, ranking him with Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong as one of the bigger murderers in recent world history. Among his more minor crimes, Stalin bulldozed churches and sent entire ethnic groups into exile.

But in Russia, the anniversary of Stalin's death will be remembered with deeply mixed feelings. He may have terrorized this country and killed millions of its citizens, but he also presided over a period that saw the Soviet Union transformed from a backward peasant state into an economic and military superpower, a time that inspires nostalgia for many.

Many here believe that Stalin's crimes have been exaggerated by his enemies. Many, many more see him as the heroic figure who rallied the country when the Nazi army was at the edge of Moscow, and led the Soviet Union to victory in what is known here as the Great Patriotic War. That single accomplishment, many say, balances or perhaps outweighs all the evil Stalin wrought.

"We fought the war for the Motherland, for Stalin," Ms. Ionova's war-veteran husband, Alexander, says solemnly. "If he repressed so many millions, who was fighting in the war?"

The centre of next week's celebrations will be the dictator's sleepy hometown, Gori, an hour's drive outside Tbilisi, capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Although Stalin, who grew contemptuous of his fellow Georgians while in power, is believed to have visited only once after leaving the place as a teenaged troublemaker, the entire town has become a shrine to its famous native son, the only place in the former Soviet Union where a statue of Stalin still stands on the town's main square.

But it is Gori's renowned Stalin Museum, housed in a marble neo-Renaissance palace near the centre of town, that will be the target of many a pilgrimage in the next few days. Its exhibits include poetry written by Stalin in his youth, the furniture from his Kremlin office, and the death mask that covered his face for his public funeral, when weeping millions converged on Red Square.

What's missing from the museum's collection is any mention of the purges. Not one exhibit makes even passing reference to the millions who suffered in what author Alexander Solzhenitsyn later dubbed the Gulag Archipelago that stretched across the barren land mass of Siberia and present-day Kazakhstan.

That suits Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson, just fine. A retired military colonel who cultivates his resemblance to his grandfather to the point of trying to grow an identical mustache, Mr. Dzhugashvili dismisses the charges that Stalin was a mass murderer as "all lies." The real culprit, he says, was Leon Trotsky, his grandfather's rival in the fight to take over the Bolshevik party after the death of Vladimir Lenin. Stalin later had Trotsky assassinated.

"They always call them Stalin's repressions. Yes, there were mass repressions and the best people of the country were killed or exiled, but they were organized by Trotsky and his gang. It's not Stalin who blew up the churches, it was Trotsky," argues Mr. Dzhugashvili, who tried to become Georgia's president, but couldn't because he's a Russian citizen.

Instead of being condemned, he says, his grandfather should be praised for tracking down the "Trotskyists and Jews" behind the purges, and bringing them to justice in the infamous show trials of the 1930s.

"Stalin punished them for those repressions and he did it with open trials, publicly," he explains. "If they were not guilty, they were released, gradually. [Stalin's] enemies don't have any conscience and they invent any figures, like Solzhenitsyn, who named 110 million victims."

He says he even admires the way his grandfather allowed his oldest son Yakov -- Mr. Dzhugashvili's father -- to die. An artillery lieutenant, Yakov was captured in 1943 by German troops who offered to trade him for a captured field marshal. Stalin refused.

"War is war," he supposedly said. "All soldiers are my sons. What am I going to say to other mothers? I don't exchange a soldier for a field marshal." He even had Yakov's wife interrogated, bizarrely fearing it was all a plot to embarrass him. The Germans left Yakov's bullet-riddled body hanging on a barbed-wire fence for the advancing Red Army to recover.

---

Diana Suvarova was eight years old in 1937, when the knock at the door that all Soviet citizens feared came. A year later, her father, Mikhail Suvarova, was executed by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police.

"Nobody knows why they chose him," the 78-year-old retired librarian now says. "It was totally unexpected. They just came one night and took him."

The crimes he was accused of were many. While he was a farmer, the police said, Mr. Suvarova had been poisoning the wells and killing cows. Later, when he worked on the railway near the city of Kursk, he had been "organizing train wrecks." According to the case file, the NKVD also believed the elementary-school graduate had been spying for an unnamed foreign country.

Ms. Suvarova says her father, like many of Stalin's victims, was a good Communist who taught his children to look up to their country's leader.

She got the same sort of education at school. Stalin, she learned, was a selfless man who did everything for his country and his people. Ms. Suvarova learned this lesson so well that when her father disappeared, she believed he must have been guilty of some crime.

After his arrest, the whole family was tainted for being associated with an "enemy of the people." Thrown out of their comfortable apartment in central Moscow, they moved to the outskirts of the city, and her mother kept her job only because her employer took a personal risk and chose to look the other way. People on the street shunned them, not wanting to raise the suspicion of the NKVD. "Even when I was a child, people would cross the street so as not to meet a child of an enemy of the people," Ms. Suvarova recalls.

For years, the family believed her father was just in prison, and that all would be made well as soon as Comrade Stalin realized how his secret police were running out of control. Right to the end, Ms. Suvarova believed that Stalin was unaware of the terror his thugs had unleashed. She cried on March 5, 1953, when she heard that he had died, grieving for the man who was ultimately responsible for her father's death.

"We really believed, like good young Communists. Despite what happened to our parents, we believed in him, we loved him. That's how we were educated. We thought maybe he didn't know."

Arseny Roginsky has devoted his life to proving just the opposite. Born to two political prisoners in a camp near the northern city of Archangelsk, he now heads Memorial, a Russian human-rights organization dedicated to chronicling the true extent of Stalin's crimes.

Memorial has compiled a list of 12 million victims of the gulags, and another one million who were executed by the secret police. Documentary evidence shows Stalin personally signed off on at least 40,000 of the murders.

For Mr. Roginsky, the painstaking work is a way of trying to understand his own past. His father was arrested for anti-Communist activities in 1938, just before the war. His mother endured the "900 days" Nazi siege of Leningrad, then travelled to the Velsk prison camp, whose supervisor gave them special dispensation to live together since the father's sentence was formally over, even if he was not yet allowed to leave.

Being born in a prison camp, Mr. Roginsky says with a smile, had its advantages. The people Stalin terrorized the most -- because he saw them as potential threats to his power -- were the intellectuals. As a result, many of the country's top doctors were in the camps, to the extent that average citizens often asked to be treated at prison hospitals.

His father was eventually released, only to be arrested again a few years later. He died during his second stint in the gulag. It was 1951, two years before Stalin's death. Thirty years later, near the end of Leonid Brezhnev's reign as Soviet leader, Mr. Roginsky himself was arrested for trying to research Stalin's crimes, and sent to a labour camp not far from the one in Velsk where he'd been born. He was released four years later, shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev took over as Communist Party boss.

Although Mr. Gorbachev's policy of glasnost,or openness, made it possible to discuss Stalin's crimes frankly, many Russians still choose not to listen. A poll conducted this week asked 1,500 people what they think of Stalin, and 36 per cent, the largest share, feel the dictator did the country more good than harm. Another 29 per cent disagreed with that statement, while the remaining respondents were so split on how they felt they couldn't answer one way or the other.

Forty-five years after Nikita Khruschev denounced Stalin in his famous "secret speech" to the 20th Communist Party Congress, it's clear that many Russians are either unconvinced by the evidence, or believe that whatever Stalin did, he did for the good of the country.

Mr. Roginsky thinks that it's the latter phenomenon -- and that many Russians today still believe in the idea of a "Great Russia" that personal sacrifices must sometimes be made for.

Unlike in Germany, or post-apartheid South Africa, there has never been a concentrated attempt to prosecute those who knowingly took part in crimes against humanity. There has been no public discussion of compensating victims or their families. Stalin's grave remains on the Soviet Walk of Heroes along the Kremlin wall. A fresh rose is place on it every day.

"The official history still remembers Stalin as the great commander-in-chief who defeated Hitler," Alexander Yakovlev, the former Soviet ambassador to Canada and one of the chief architects of glasnost, said in an interview last year.

"No one wants to face the fact that he killed 30 million of his own people, most of whom disappeared without a trace. No one has apologized for what they did, and most people do not seem to care whether we confront this chapter in our history or not."

Mr. Roginsky sees something more sinister than a collective wish to forget in Russia's unwillingness to deal with its past. To him, it's proof that some of the traditions Stalin initiated -- notably, the idea of putting the needs of the state ahead of the rights of the individual -- still hold sway in the Kremlin today.

"It's not that Stalin, this short, plain man matters much anymore, it's what he left behind, his legacy," Mr. Roginsky says. "The spirit of Stalinism stayed with us. It's around us. . . . Physically, we outlived him, but he's still with us."

---

Tamara Shumnaya, director of Moscow's Museum of Contemporary History, is taking fire from all sides right now because of an exhibit entitled, "Stalin, the Man and the Symbol."

No one objects to the subject matter. It's just that no one is satisfied with what she and the museum staff decided to include. Some see too much about Stalin the great ruler, and not enough about the executions and the gulags. Others have exactly the opposite complaint. The exhibit "should have helped people remember the greatness of the country and the greatness of the people under strong leadership," reads one of the more tame entries in the museum's guestbook.

Ms. Shumnaya says she expected nothing less. "Fifty years ago, there were different, controversial opinions about Stalin, and there are the same opposing perspectives now, too. We wanted both opinions represented here. To be objective."

The exhibit opens with thick books that list the victims of Stalin's purges, which are in a display case alongside a simple green banner that reads "our parents don't have graves." On the wall above are photographs from the gulags.

The next room, however, is where most museum visitors spend a lot of time -- among the photographs and propaganda posters of Stalin at the height of his power. The most jarring display features a group of dolls in a case, against a background painted to resemble Red Square, holding aloft a banner: "Thank you Stalin for our happy childhoods."

Eventually, visitors gather around a small TV set in the corner to watch a black-and-white video of the scene in Moscow the day of Stalin's funeral. It's a short loop, and many of those staring and remembering watch it three or four times, as though comparing every detail with their memories of that day. Asked what they are thinking, they burst into lengthy personal stories, as though they've just been waiting to release pent-up emotion.

"I listened to the funeral on the radio. All the people were crying," 75-year-old Yuri Timofeyev, a retired metal worker, says as tears well in his eyes at the memory. "He was a great leader. It was a great loss."

Like many older Russians, Mr. Timofeyev is dismayed at how society has become more cutthroat since communism ended and a wild breed of capitalism swept into Russia to take its place. Life was much better under Stalin, he insists, gesturing sheepishly at his tattered clothes.

"It was a good time for us. We could study and we could learn and we were never hungry. There were no bandits, no hooligans -- there was order. It would be a good thing to have that order now. I will toast him on March 5th."

Standing two paces away, 54-year-old Ludmilla Shumskaya has the opposite reaction. "He was a bloody monster. He destroyed all the talented people, and all the witnesses of his crimes." It's clear she has a personal story beneath her rage, but she says she's still not ready to talk about it, even half a century later.

While most of those taking in the exhibit one afternoon this week are older Russians personally connected with the Stalin era, a few backpack-toting students show up after school.

"The idea is to form our own impressions," says 19-year-old Anatoli Balykin as he and two friends pause by a poster that reads: "Glory to Lenin, Glory to Stalin, Glory to the Great October."

The history books he is given in school offer a "neutral" portrait of the former dictator, mentioning both the days of the Red Terror and Stalin's role as a successful wartime leader, Mr. Balykin says. "Many young people respect him," he adds, and some of his classmates regard the evidence that millions were executed and sent to the gulags as "just some figures."

His friend, Artiom Dojev, also 19, says Russians alone have the right to judge Stalin. "It's interesting that in the West he is considered a monster, but nobody there suffered because of him. Here, people suffered, and they still admire him."

---

"Stalin wasn't just a symbol," the daily newspaper Kommersant declared last week. "He continues to exist in mass consciousness, not like a historical figure, but like a folklore image, someone like Dracula. Such persons are doomed to be liked by the masses."

Of course, they're also doomed to be imitated. An acquaintance of the young Saddam Hussein said the future Iraqi ruler used to sleep on a cot under bookshelves that sagged with books by and about Stalin. "One could say he went to bed with the Russian dictator," the friend famously quipped.

Since taking power, Mr. Hussein has repeatedly showed what he learned from his readings, ruthlessly using terror and frequent purges to keep a firm grip on power, staging phony elections and mass executions.

Meanwhile, his alleged "axis of evil" partner Kim Jong Il has modelled his entire state on the Stalinist vision. Run down a list of notorious dictators -- from Fidel Castro in Cuba to such lesser lights as Turkmenistan's Sapuramad Niyazov and Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko -- and each could cite the Soviet icon as as a leading influence.

But in Russia, even a dozen years into its experiment with democracy, the echoes ring eeriest. Every year, it seems, Russia has taken another small step toward embracing a past that most countries would be ashamed of and apologizing for. This pattern has accelerated since Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, took office as president. In the past four years, he has issued a set of coins commemorating Stalin as war leader and unveiled a Kremlin plaque in his honour. The tune of the old Soviet anthem was brought back, albeit with new words, and most recently the red star was reinstated as the symbol of the Russian military.

While political opponents accuse Mr. Putin of being a closet admirer of Stalin, it's likely that much of his desire to turn back the clock stems from the popular support for doing so. Communists remain the country's single biggest political party, and their current leader, Gennady Zyuganov, has won points with his largely rural following by praising the Stalin era as a "great period" and denouncing the allegations against him as "slanderous."

Mr. Putin also is the focus of a growing personality cult that makes some observers nervous. The President's likeness now can be found everywhere -- on matryoshka dolls, T-shirts and photographs hanging in homes and offices. A recent pop hit referred to the need for "a man like Putin." Entrepreneurs across Russia have tried to name everything from restaurants to a new breed of tomato after him. Some are reminded of a time when Stalin's image hung on every wall.

Mr. Roginsky of the Memorial group says that "I don't blame Putin. He's not the guilty party in this; he's just a creation of the system. He's like Russian leaders always have been. Most people don't share democratic ideals. They just want order, no corruption, security and social justice. They think it's as simple as some nice guy, some strong leader, coming in and doing it."

One young man has a much more basic interpretation of what's going on. Yakov Dzhugashvili, 30-year-old son of Yevgeny, believes that, having kicked away at his great-grandfather's reputation for 50 years, history is taking a fresh look.

Unlike his father, he doesn't believe that everything Stalin did was right. Embarrassed by his ancestry for years, he studied at the Glasgow School of Art under a false name. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and his native Georgia's spiral into chaos and poverty, he says he has come to understand why his great-grandfather did what he did.

"He was right in having ideals. Bad or good, people had aims to reach in his time. Now, we don't have any ideals at all, and that's very bad. The deeper the crisis in Georgia gets, the better I understand that Stalin wanted society to be perfect. He wanted people to live better."

On Wednesday, he says, his family will gather to toast Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- who will be back among them. Yakov's father Yevgeny explains that he insisted his infant grandson be given the name his famous forefather had been born with, and changed as a young revolutionary.

"I wanted to bring back the name of Stalin," he says, "so it will live forever."

High times in the Axis of Evil

By car from Lattakia, Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon – Thursday, Oct. 30

After three weeks of wandering through Iran, Iraq and Syria, may I humbly present you a brief backpackers' guide to the three of the least-understood countries on the planet:

Syria:

DO

* Spend a day or more wandering the Old City of Damascus. It's simply one of the most magical places on the planet.
* Pop by the Krak des Chevaliers near the port city of Tartus. I was there today and could have easily spent several more hours than I did wandering what is easily the best-kept Crusader castle in the region. Almost untouched by time, it looks like something out of a fairy tale (see the photo).
* Pack some going-out clothes. Syria may be an honorary Axis of Evil member (I think John Bolton described them as being in a subgroup with Libya and Cuba, sort of like the minor leagues of evil), but that doesn't mean the people don't like to have a good time. Damascus has one of the best nightlife scenes in the Middle East.

DON'T

* Giggle at all the portraits of President Bashar Assad, even if such enforced adulation is silly in the extreme. I counted 12 of them in one room at the Lebanon-Syria border today, many with slogans like “we're all with you” and “we love you” printed underneath the pictures of the smiling dictator.
* Try and ask Syrians about politics. Nine times out of 10, you'll run into a stone wall. People who say what they think here can easily end up in jail.

Iraq

DO

* Spend an hour or more touring the ancient citadel overlooking the city of Irbil.
* Go for a stroll in the laid-back Kurdish city of Sulaymaniyah. It's probably the only major city in Iraq where it's safe for a foreigner to walk around on their own, even after dark.
* Pop by the Christian town of Ainkawa, outside of Irbil. The German restaurant there is a pretty good send-up of a Munich beer house. There's a not-too-bad Chinese restaurant (think Manchu Wok) in Sulaymaniyah too.

DON'T

* Believe everything that you read. The “surge” is indeed working (along with, a more important decision by various Iraqi groups to hold their fire for now) and has reduced the level of violence from the insane heights of the bloodletting in 2006 and 2007 to the merely nutty levels of today, but this is still very much a war zone. Outside of the Kurdish north, it's only safe for a foreigner if you've got trustworthy Iraqi friends and a bulletproof vest. (For a daily tally of the latest violence, check out the Iraq Today website.)
* Leave home without Ciprofloxacin or some other wide-spectrum antibiotic in your kit. I've been to Iraq seven times and have gotten I'd-better-sit-down-and-start-writing-my-will sick on each occasion.

Iran (well, OK, Kish Island, the only part I was allowed to visit):


DO

* Do pull out an English newspaper or book if you're sitting by yourself at dinner. Iranians love showing off their mastery (or bare competency) of foreign languages. You'll be chatting with the locals in no time.
* Book yourself onto one of the dinner-boat cruises that circle this island after dark. It's the best way to see Iranians, in Iran, kicking back and relaxing as much as they're allowed to in the Islamic Republic.
* Check out the Dariush Grand Hotel, which somewhat garishly recalls the grandeur of ancient Persia.

DON'T

* Show up on Kish Island, hoping to talk your way into a full-fledged Iranian visa. Especially if you only have a Canadian passport.
* Hum the bars to John McCain's new hit song, “Bomb Iran.”

When I set out on this journey, some friends and family back home expressed concerns that I was taking my life into my hands (Iran, Iraq and Syria! Oh my!). And while it's certainly not a route for the faint-hearted, you don't need to be a journalist (actually it's probably better if you aren't, at least in Iran and Syria) to get a lot from such a trip. And while the bus services aren't great in some parts of Iraq and Syria, they're a great way to meet the ordinary people who live in these places and never make the news.

So, economic crisis be damned, call your travel agent now and tell them you want to see the Axis of Evil today. Get there before the American army does.

The sorry state of Syria's army

Lattakia, Syria -Thursday, Oct. 29

The army of the Syrian Arab Republic often appears as the bad guy in Western media narratives.

They were the brutish soldiers who oppressed Lebanon throughout their 29-year-stay in that country. They're the jihadi-friendly outfit that looks the other way as suicide bombers to be cross Syria on their way to Iraq. Israelis still shudder at the mention of 1973, when the combined forces of Syria and Egypt staged a surprise attack one October morning.

Up close, they hardly live up to their nefarious reputation. Poorly paid and badly equipped, they're most often seen walking along the side of the road in their fading camouflage gear, trying to thumb rides.

Today, I met Abdo, a 29-year-old tour guide in Lattakia who recently finished his three-year stint as a conscript. He said he earned 300 Syrian pounds per month (about $6) while stationed near the Lebanese border. "I live with my mother, but I still need 5,000 or 6,000 pounds a month," he said. Which is why Syrian soldiers are notoriously corrupt. They live on bribes.

My first encounter with the feared Syrian army on this trip was a trio of soldiers manning a checkpoint near the Turkish border. Ostensibly, they were there to examine travellers' documents, but taking shelter from the rain in a roadside shack, they were much more interested in bumming cigarettes.

"Are those good to smoke?" a somewhat portly middle-aged soldier said, spotting a pack of Dunhill cigarettes lying in the front seat of my longtime friend Raed's car.

Raed, a Jordanian and a skilled negotiator of Middle Eastern checkpoints, flipped him the whole pack. We didn't want to be held up and scutinized. (More on that later.)

Seeing our apparent generosity, two other soldiers surged forward, leaving their Kalashnikov rifles leaning against their chairs. "Hey, there are three of us," one says. Raed handed over a second pack.

The first soldier asked Raed where "the foreigner," me, was from. "Canada," Raed said.

The soldier raised his eyebrows. "He looks like one of us," he offered with a shrug before waving us on. His curiosity had been bought off by the Dunhills.

It was easy to imagine the notorious foreign fighters of Iraq sliding through the same checkpoint with even more ease.

The U.S. brazenly bombed eastern Syria this week, claiming Damacus wasn't doing enough to clamp down on the flow of jihadis into Iraq. The truth is that even if Bashar Assad's regime were to make helping the U.S. priority No. 1 (something that's unlikely given the angry, if orchestrated, demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus today) this underfunded, unmotivated force simply doesn't look nearly up to the task.

The Middle East Electoral College: Iraq results

So colour Iraq neither red nor blue. Or rather, colour it either, depending on what part of the country you're talking about.

During the course the week I spent in Northern Iraq, I asked more than two dozen Iraqis whether they'd prefer to see John McCain or Barrack Obama win the White House on Nov. 4.

The results were split almost perfectly down the middle. Most Kurds preferred McCain, seeing him as more likely to support their dream of independence and less likely to withdraw American troops from the country. Kurds, who actually speak with affection of George W. Bush, fear that a U.S. withdrawal would plunge the country into a new civil war that they could not stay out of.

The Arabs I met, however, were more likely to support Obama, believing that he is more likely to adopt different policies than Bush, the man they blame for destroying this country.

Here's a taste of what some of the Iraqis I spoke to had to say on this question:

“We cannot ask the U.S. troops to leave because that will lead to civil war… . Obama's policy is a rapid withdrawal of American troops. This will not benefit the Iraqi people in general.”

– Rahman Gharib, 42, a journalist affiliated with the Communist Party of Kurdistan.

“I prefer the black one. He will pay more attention to the situation in Iraq.”

– Walid Chiad, 42, an Arab refugee from Baghdad currently living in Kirkuk.

“I think America needs some change. People get sick and tired of a style, a face or a colour.”

– Father Sabri al-Maqdessy, priest at St. Joseph's Church in Ainkawa.

A third opinion which was shared by Arabs and Kurds alike is that it won't make much difference who wins and that Iraq will suffer under either man's leadership.

“Bush destroyed Iraq. He took our oil and gave us nothing in return,” said Ayyad Manfi, the mukhtar, or leader, of a refugee camp near Sulaymaniyah for former Baghdad residents. “We don't believe in this election. Whatever they say, they will change their promises later.”

So, how to award Iraq's 146 electors? My poll was obviously skewed by the fact I was in the Kurdish north of the country. The Arab refugees I spoke to were also uniformly Sunni, meaning this already unscientific poll takes almost no account of the feelings of the country's largest community, the Shiites.

The good news is that not every U.S. state is winner-take-all – and you could argue that Iraq is hardly one country anymore – so I'm doling out the electors based on the most obvious line: McCain has won Iraqi Kurdistan, Obama takes Sunni and Shia Iraq (the latter judgment based on the fact Shia leaders have been nearly unanimous in calling for a speedy U.S. withdrawal from the country, which is closest to Obama's policy). Kurds make up roughly 20 per cent of Iraq's population, so McCain gets 20 per cent of the votes, or 29 electors. Obama gets the remaining 117.

Arbitrary? Perhaps. But I'm the one battling to hold my insides in after eating at an Iraqi roadside diner and spending sleepless nights at the Simpan Hotel, so I get to make the call. You're at home surfing the Internet during a commercial break in Hockey Night in Canada, so you just get to complain about it in the comments section below.

Our running total now shows Obama surging from behind to take the lead:


Barack Obama (Dem.) – 147 votes
John McCain (Rep.) – 65 votes

Next up, Turkey, which has a dominant 175 votes in the 538-seat electoral college.

If Obama wins it, he'll shoot past the 270 mark needed to secure victory, meaning my little polling project could effectively be over long before election day. If McCain wins it, we've got a race to the wire, with Syria, Lebanon and Jordan deciding who takes the prize.

Follow the race at The Globe and Mail website.

Borderlines

Diyarbakir, Turkey — Saturday, Oct. 25

When you travel across the Middle East, you cross cultural lines as well as geographical ones. One of the most obvious barometres of where you are in the region is how much fun you're allowed to have on a night out.

So far this journey has taken me from the tip of Iran, where the country's cowed (but monied) liberal elites tried to have as much fun as they could, heading offshore to have listen to live music and chastely shimmy in their seats. Couples were welcome, so long as they were already married, but alcohol was strictly off limits, as everywhere in the Islamic Republic.

The next stop was the Kurdish north of Iraq, where the Johnny Walker and Heineken flow relatively freely inside the hotels and restaurants of cities like Sulaymaniyah and Irbil. But the drink-ups were strictly same-sex affairs. Female foreign aid workers might occasionally be seen in these dens of little repute, but never an Iraqi woman. The men drink and smoke and watch channels like "Sexy Sat," but their wives and sisters aren't allowed in the door.

Tonight I reached the southeastern corner of Turkey, also arguably the southeastern corner of what could loosely be termed the West. This is, after all, a NATO country, and what are all those guns and bombs for it not to spread "our values?"

Exhausted after the long drive from Zakho, I nonetheless accepted an invitation to head out on the town with Yilmaz Akinci, the local correspondent for the al-Jazeera satellite television channel. He took me to Major, a live music club in the centre of Diyarbakir, where for the first time in two weeks I watched men and women dance, drink, sing, laugh and generally behave as they wished.

If this is indeed a clash of civilizations that the world is in the middle of, it's my job as a journalist to try and understand all perspectives, and not to take sides. But between you and me, tonight at the Major, I couldn't help but smile.

One war zone to another

By taxi through southeastern Anatolia - Saturday, Oct. 25

The most surprising thing about crossing from northern Iraq into southeastern Turkey, which in the Kurdish narrative are two parts of Greater Kurdistan, is that you still feel as though you're in occupied land. In fact, the Turkish military presence here is more obvious than the combined presence of the United States, the Iraqi army and the Kurdish militias in on the other side of the border.

As we drove towards the city of Diyarbakir and into a gathering thunderstorm, Kemal and I were pulled over at a succession of checkpoints and twice made to get out of the car so my bags could be hand-searched. At each base, a makeshift machine-gun post had been constructed underneath Turkey's red-and-white crescent-moon flag. Armoured personnel carriers patrolled the highways.

To an extent, the security measures are understandable. While it was quiet today, southeastern Turkey has effectively been a war zone for much of the past 30 years, a place where hostilities between the army and the Kurdistan Workers' Party can flare up at any time.

The locals in this heavily rural part of Turkey are clearly resentful of the heavy handed military presence in their towns and villages. The residents are Kurds, many of them sympathetic to the PKK, while the soldiers are ethnic Turks.

"Turkey. Problem," Kemal explained to me with a disgusted shrug after a soldier had given my dirty laundry a thorough examination. Kemal was stretching the limits of his early-career-Schwarzenegger English, but I got the point.

Turkey most definitely does have a problem here.

I am a Middle Eastern cigarette smuggler

At the Iraq-Turkey border - Saturday, Oct. 25

I left Iraq this morning, crossing into Turkey via the busy Ibrahim Khalil crossing that is landlocked Iraqi Kurdistan's main lifeline to the outside world (see lineup of trucks at left).

I left Zakho, a dusty border town, and ascended into the jagged mountains of southeastern Anatolia in a Turkish taxi, a white Ford Focus driven by a gruff man named Kemal. It would cost me $150, he said, for the four-plus hour drive between the predominantly from Zakho to Diyarbakir in Turkey.

With his bald skull, and shiny black shirt tucked into shiny grey slacks, Kemal looked like an extra on some Turkish version of the Sopranos. Not Paulie or Silvio, mind you, but one of those anonymous thugs they sent out to rough up the guys who inadvertently picked up the trash on one of Tony's routes.

That's just me stereotyping of course. Or at least it was until Kemal pulled me aside at the border crossing and showed me a black garbage bag stuffed with several cartons of Gauloises cigarettes.

"For you," he told me with a please-understand-this-or-we're-both-in-trouble look in his eyes. "Not for driver."

I got the message. If anyone asked, I smoke six packs a day (despite my asthma) and came to Iraq for the cut-rate ciggies. Got it.

Thankfully, the question never came up, and Kemal, the Gauloises and I glided through to the land of Ataturk. A Kurdish guard on the Iraqi side, however, did have some queries about my passport.

"Kanada?" he said, eyebrows raised.

"Canada."

"America?"

"No, Canada."

"Like Montana?" (For some reason, it's the U.S. state best known in these parts.)

"No, different country."

"Like Kurdistan and Iraq?" (This gave me pause. Perhaps we are indeed only semi-autonomous in the Stephen Harper era. But my patriotism was by now in full roar.)

"No, like Jordan and Iraq."

The guard furrowed his brow. Canada being an entirely separate entity didn't quite sound right to him, but he obviously he didn't want to insult me either. He offered a compromise.

"Maybe like Kuwait?" he said, referring to the tiny Gulf state that Saddam Hussein always claimed was a renegade Iraqi province.

I took the offered olive branch. After all, the world had driven Saddam out of Kuwait when he invaded back in 1991. Not a bad precedent to establish for that inevitable day the Americans come seeking revenge for the War of 1812 and Celine Dion.

"Like Kuwait," I agreed.

Travel advisory

Zakho, Iraq - Saturday, Oct. 25

Travel advisory/Public service announcement: If you ever have the odd fortune to need to spend a night in the town of Zakho, Iraq, do avoid my residence of last night, the Sipan Hotel.

The toilets don't work, every drain is clogged with human hair and the walls are covered with bug carcasses. The only thing missing was the chalk outlines of dead bodies on the floor. But that's probably just sloppy Iraqi police work.

Iraq blackout

Zakho, Iraq - Friday, Oct. 24

In a fitting end to my latest spin through Iraq, the power has been out for the past half hour here in Zakho. Sitting in the dark is part of life in the new Iraq. (Thank Ataturk that I'm now close enough to the Turkish border to get Blackberry service...)

While the security situation in the country deservedly gets most of the attention, the lack of basic services here is an under-reported crisis. Power outages are a regular occurrence in Baghdad, as well as here in the relatively stable north of the country.

The electricity in Zakho comes on only after 5 p.m. each day. It's supposed to stay on until 9 a.m., but there have already been two cuts in the first six hours of that stretch.

It's not just the electricity. Tap water remains undrinkable across Iraq and, judging by the state of my stomach, the recent cholera outbreak in the country may be more widespread than has been reported so far.

Back in 2003, shortly after a wild-bearded Saddam Hussein was discovered in his spider-hole north of Baghdad, I went to a power plant in the capital to ask why electricty was in such short supply. The manager was short on answers, and embarassed to admit that despite the UN sanctions back then, the situation was better in Saddam's time. He blamed insurgent attacks on the infrastructure.

I wonder what he'd say now. Because no matter how many U.S. soldiers leave or stay in Iraq, this oil-rich country won't be able to move on in the dark.

Quote of the week

"George Bush is our friend now. He is adopting Communist solutions to the financial crisis."

- Rahman Gharib, journalist with the Communist Party of Kurdistan.

In this car, we drink Coke, listen to Nancy and despair for the future

By car from Irbil to Zakho, Iraq – Friday, Oct. 24

Perhaps the greatest debate gripping the Middle East has nothing to do with either the future of Iraq or the Israel-Palestine peace process. What really gets the locals agitated is a discussion of the comparative merits of the two pop vixens of the Arab world. Think Britney versus Christina, without the K-Fed subplot and the public breakdowns.


Nancy Ajram (the one on the left in the pic) is a 25-year-old pouty-lipped Lebanese singer who has won acclaim as the Madonna of the Arab world after a string of hit singles dating back seven years as well as racy (for this region) music videos. Her climb to fame accelerated a few years back when she became the Middle Eastern face of Coca-Cola. She sings and shimmies in almost every Coke ad broadcast on television in this region, and her face appears on every can.

Nancy's nemesis is Haifa Wehbe, also from Lebanon, who became a sensation by out-sexing her rival on satellite music channels, triggering a series scandals in the Arab that have been exacerbated by the fact Haifa is Shia Muslim (unlike Nancy, who is Maronite Christian). In one notorious clip, Haifa appeared in a wet red bathing suit that clung revealingly to her curvaceous form. The 32-year-old's saucy image provoked the Islamist-dominated parliament of Bahrain to pass a motion earlier this year calling for her concert in the country to be cancelled.

Her rivalry with Nancy is such that Haifa has been made the aluminum face of Pepsi, meaning the two stars stare lustily at each other inside convenience store refrigerators around the region.

"Nancy can sing, Haifa's just a body," Sherzad, my cheerful translator offered when I asked which side of the great divide he fell on. There's some truth to that – Nancy shot to fame after singing in and winning a televised talent show. Haifa's big break was being named runner up in the Miss Lebanon contest and then being selected by People Magazine as one of the world's 50 most beautiful people.

To be fair, Sherzad isn't really Haifa's type. She's made it clear she's not into nice guys like him, having made headlines in recent years by performing with rapper 50 Cent and endorsing Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah following the 2006 war with Israel.

Nancy, meanwhile, stands on the other side of the great Lebanese divide (one that reflects the split across the entire Middle East) having written a song mourning the 2005 murder of the country's popular former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, and endorsing Lebanon's pro-Western "Cedar Revolution." Much more Sherzad's type, frankly.

So we listened to Nancy Ajram as we plunged westward through Iraqi Kurdistan, heading for the Turkish border. But my impending departure was making Sherzad morose, despite the upbeat pop coming from the car stereo.

“You're lucky. You get to leave tomorrow. We have to stay here,” he moaned. “Maybe God will punish me when I die for not having done anything with my life.”

I told him that I hoped to come back in five years time and to see him happy, perhaps in an independent Kurdistan.

“That needs to happen,” he said. “Either we separate from Baghdad, or there will be civil war with the Kurds fighting the Sunnis and Shiites.”

I had no retort. We drove in silence for the next while, listening as Nancy cheerfully sing of love and hope.

Pricetags

By car from Irbil to Zakho, Iraq – Friday, Oct. 24

The question came naturally as our car approached a fork in the road during the drive today from Irbil to Zakho. If we took the left turn, we would be in Mosul, arguably the most violent city in Iraq. Happily, we veered to the right.

"How much do you guys think I'm worth?" I asked as our blue Chevy Neon crossed the Great Zab River, a tributary of the Tigris. Kidnappings are common in Mosul, and a Western journalist would presumably be a lucrative target.

My companions, Miran, the car's driver, and Sherzad, a translator I'd hired to accompany me on my trip through Northern Iraq, laughed uproariously. "I say $200,000," offered Sherzad. Though he doesn't have a mean bone in his body, the speed of his response suggested he'd previously turned the question over in his head.

I was insulted. A paltry $200,000 seemed like nothing compared to the rumoured sums other kidnappees had fetched. Especially with the way the dollar has fallen lately. You can barely buy a foreclosed house in Detroit these days with 200 grand.

"Don't worry Mark, I think you're worth a lot more," Miran said with a laugh that was probably meant to be reassuring.

Iraq's only tourist

Irbil, Iraq - Thursday, Oct. 23

I spent today wandering around the semi-restored remains of the Irbil citadel, a UNESCO world heritage site that overlooks the modern city from atop a hill in the centre of town.

Obviously once majestic – parts of it are believed to date back to the 6th Century B.C., making Irbil one of the oldest human settlements in the world – the vast citadel is unsurprisingly in desperate need of work. While the Kurdish Textiles Museum at its heart is worth a visit, there's little to see in large swathes of the ancient fortress beside graffiti-covered stones. The building that should be the citadel's centerpiece, the former Ottoman pasha's palace, looks like a hurricane blew through it, leaving behind only trash and a few walls for local teenagers to scrawl their names on.

Which raises the question, does the citadel need to be restored in order for tourists to consider coming to Irbil (let's pretend Iraq's security situation isn't an issue here – it's relatively calm in the Kurdish north), or is it a sad fact that no on will rebuild it until they see the first trickle of tourists and the colour of their money?

As I wandered the deserted remains, I bumped into a lonely guard. He confessed that other than the occasional group of Kurdish schoolchildren, there wasn't much for him to do most days.

"Sometimes the Americans come here on their day off. But sometimes there's nobody, or just one person," he said, giving me a sympathetic look.

For dinner, I travelled to the nearby Christian town of Ainkawa where a German restaurant – Der Deutscher Haus – does booming business serving premium Bavarian beers and authentic goulash and schnitzels.

Who says there's nothing for tourists in Iraq?

The plight, and flight, of Iraq's Christians

Ainkawa, Iraq Thursday, Oct. 23

Father Sabri al-Maqdessy is a man with a lot on his mind. A priest at St. Joseph's Chaldean Church in this Christian town in the north of Iraq, he's struggling to keep track of two equally disturbing trends: an influx of new families into his parrish and an outflow of longtime residents.

Neither is a new phenomenon. Since the U.S. invasion in 2003, Christian families have been fleeing to Ainkawa, chased from their homes in Baghdad and elsewhere by Sunni and Shia militants who bombed churches and demanded that Christian women adopt strict Islamic dress. The prewar population of this attractive little town doubled during the first four years of the war as 1,500 families arrived here looking for refuge.

Just as the situation seemed to be stabilizing, a spate of murders in recent weeks targeting the Christian community of the nearby city of Mosul has sparked a new exodus. Another 1,500 families have fled Mosul in the past month, with many of those arriving at St. Josephs, looking for shelter and food.

"Christians have always been targeted by different groups in the Middle East because we are the only people without a tribal system to protect us or the political power to give us security," the bald, soft-spoken priest said as we chatted inside the stone-walled compound of St. Joseph's, which from the street looks as much like a castle than a place of worship. "The church is weak. The Vatican does not have tanks."

Just as worrying for Father Sabri are those who are leaving Ainkawa. Theyre not returning to their homes, but headed for new lives in the West, leaving Iraq behind. As much as half of Iraqs prewar Christian population of 800,000 is believed to have emigrated since 2003.

"Everyone is leaving. If the situation continues the way it is for another 10 years, 20 at most, you won't see any Christians left here."

Landscapes

By bus from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

A few things I spotted as I stared out the dirty window of our Reagan-era Toyota bus as we winded our way from Sulaymaniyah to Kirkuk to Irbil:

- Iraq turns from green to brown as you leave the Kurdish north and head in the direction of Baghdad. As we left Sulaymaniyah, the forested mountains that surround that city were replaced by rocky brown hills which soon melted into the familiar desert of central Iraq.
- While the peshmerga fighters who man checkpoints under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government carefully checked the identification of anyone entering or leaving their autonomous area, the regular Iraqi army soldiers who patrol Kirkuk barely peer in the windows as they wave us on.
- Kirkuk still looks like the war zone it is – two bombs went off here as recently as Saturday – with some roads torn up by the tracks of tanks (likely American ones) and other streets barricaded to keep Arab and Kurd apart.
- Three things in a row along the highway northwest from Kirkuk to Irbil: first was the rubble of a stone fortress that served as a base for Saddam Hussein’s army before it was destroyed by American air power back in 2003. Next came a (presumably empty) discarded oil tanker with the word “Allah” scrawled on the side in Arabic. After that was an unfinished home with the blue letters “USA” written on the outside.

A short sojourn in Kirkuk

Kirkuk, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

I briefly ended up in the violent city of Kirkuk today, completely by accident.

When I arrived in Sulaymaniyah this week, I casually asked Miran, The Globe and Mail’s genial longtime driver/fixer in Northern Iraq, whether it would be possible to visit the city that has become the frontline in the struggle between Kurdish and Iraqi nationalists. No, he chuckled, “there are still kidnappings and murders all the time there.” It was the same answer he had given me on my last two visits to the country.

Even as a relative calm has returned to other parts of Iraq, Kirkuk has gotten worse as simmering, decades-old tensions over whether the city is Kurdish, Turkoman or Arab (Saddam Hussein forcibly tried to make it the latter during his reign) bubble towards a full boil.

So the journey today was supposed to be along the safe route. My translator and I boarded the bus to Irbil thinking that it would take the northern road, avoiding the potential trouble on the southern one. Straight out of the station, it went south to Kirkuk, a city I hadn’t visited since the summer of 2003.

Despite some nervousness among the other passengers about having to travel with a trouble-magnet foreigner (there was a long conversation between the driver and passengers before it was agreed that I could come along for the drive), nothing happened. The city I saw was one that divided and scarred by years of fighting – an oil-rich place where electricity is still a luxury that most homes experience for only a few hours a day – but one that was functioning, at least on the Kurdish side that we drove through.

The roads were packed with cars and the shops were open, including a few Christian-owned stores in the city centre that openly advertised the Turkish and German beers they carried in stock (liquor stores have long since disappeared in Baghdad and the Shia south, chased away by the militants).

As we drove through his hometown, Abbas Khorsheed, a 33-year-old dentist with neatly combed-back hair and dark, intense eyes, told me that, economically, the post-Saddam era has been good to Kirkuk. Where he was once paid a state salary of 3,000 Iraqi dinars – a paltry $1.50 (U.S.) – a month as a dentist, he said he now makes upwards of $12,000 a year.

He’s taken some of that money and is studying on the side to become an orthodontist. He advised me that braces would straighten my crooked bottom teeth.

But while most Kurds are big fans of the United States and President George W. Bush for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, Mr. Khorsheed is less sure the sacrifices have been worth it. A pessimist, he sees either unending war, or unending American occupation in Iraq’s future. Kirkuk will remain a dangerous frontline city in whatever happens next, he predicted.

“There is no agreement between the different groups, Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, Christians. The situation has been like this for centuries. It will not get better,” he said, his quiet voice barely audible over the bus’s squealing engine. And while he’s thinking of leaving the city, he’s convinced the Americans will stay, no matter who wins next month’s U.S. presidential election.

“Iraq will become like Japan. The Americans will stay forever, I think.”

By bus from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil, Iraq – Wednesday, Oct. 22

When I lived in Canada, a road trip meant piling with friends into my green Ford Escort, the windows down and the radio loud as we set off from my hometown of Ottawa to Montreal or Toronto for the weekend. During the years I lived in Russia, a “road trip” usually meant taking the train, speeding between Moscow and St. Petersburg or rolling slowly across the awe-inspiring distances to the east.

In the Middle East, a road trip means military checkpoints. Whether you’re driving between the holy cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, heading to the scenic south of Lebanon, or doing what I did today – cutting across the north of war-torn Iraq by bus – hitting the road means spending a large chunk of your journey having your documents and belongings checked by nervous soldiers.

For the three-plus hours the 17 other passengers and I sat crammed into a decades-old Toyota bus, we hit six checkpoints. Two of them were manned by Iraqi army soldiers, the other four by the pershmerga (ready-to-die) militia that is the de facto army of the autonomous Kurdish region in the north of Iraq. By the last of them – when I was asked to get out of the vehicle so that I could be more closely examined by a swarthy soldier with kebab breath – I was even thinking fondly of the Ontario Provincial Police and their nefarious speed traps. Yes, the checkpoints were that aggravating.

The bumpy, 205-kilometre drive from Sulaymaniyah to Irbil was nonetheless as exhilarating in its own way as those weekend rips to Montreal. For the past five years, reporters like me have had to skulk around this country, fearing car bombs and kidnappings. The last time I was in Baghdad (back in March), a colleague and I used four cars between us, hoping that switching vehicles often enough would keep the anonymous bad guys from tracking our movements too closely. Other journalists travel with their own security detachments.

But today my translator and I simply headed down to the main Sulaymaniyah bus station, found a driver who was hollering out “Hawler! Hawler!” (the Kurdish name for Irbil) and hopped aboard. I grabbed a seat between a gregarious 22-year-old peshmerga fighter heading home to Kirkuk and an intense 26-year-old economics graduate going to Irbil. We sat back and chatted the afternoon away as though we were travelling through a completely normal country somewhere else on this planet.

But this wasn’t that other country, as the jolts to our spine that we experienced each time the bus bounced off a pothole reminded us. Saifeddin Shamseddin, the recent economics grad, was bordering on depressed. His degree, he said, meant nothing in a country where there was no work of any kind for young people like him. He had been in Sulaymaniyah filling out the necessary documentation to go to police college – another Iraqi intellectual forced to pick up a gun because there’s nothing else to do.

“No one is happy here. There are thousands of young students who have just graduated and are now sitting at home jobless” he said, his long legs curled up almost to his chin because the bus seats were so close together.

Mohammed Amin, the young peshmerga fighter, nodded in agreement. He confessed that he was saving up money to pay a smuggler to take him, along with his wife and infant daughter, out of Iraq, to London if they could manage it. “It will continue to get worse here day after day,” he predicted. “I’ve lived here 22 years and I have yet to see one happy day in Iraq."

Forty-eight hours in Iraq

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq – Tuesday, October 21

Iraq, unquestionably, is a safer place now than it was a year or 18 months ago, when the worst of the inter-communal fighting was raging. But what does “safer” mean in the Iraqi context?

To give you an idea, I thought I’d resurrect a feature from the blog I did during my last visit to Iraq, and treat you to a short summary of the violence around the country in the 48 hours since I’ve arrived in this comparatively calm corner of it.

While most of the shootings and explosion are considered to minor for the media to report on anymore, the overall picture is far from pretty. Even though the main Sunni and Shia militias are largely holding their fire for now, this is still arguably the most dangerous country on earth, with the northern city of Mosul (which has a mixed Sunni Arab and Kurdish population) now rivaling Baghdad as the centre of the chaos.

(The incidents were not confirmed by me. The reports are courtesy of the folks at Iraq Today and McClatchy newspapers)

Today (as of 6 p.m. local):

- Three electricity workers and an Iraqi army soldier were wounded when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off in eastern Baghdad.
- A bomb targeting a police patrol exploded in eastern Baghdad, wounding two civilians, Iraqi police said.
- Fifteen people were killed and 40 others were injured in fierce clashes that erupted overnight and continued sporadically till noon in an area southwest of Iraq. The deadly clashes occurred when people from the city of Ramadi, capital of western Anbar province, attacked people from Babel province near the Jurf al-Sakhar area, some 60 km southwest of Baghdad. The battle erupted due to a dispute between the two sides over the ownership of farmland.
- Gunmen blew up a drinking water station east of the district of al-Dalouiya, near the Tigris River.
- Clashes broke out between armed gunmen and Iraqi army soldiers in the al-Siddiq neighborhood in the east of Mosul.

Yesterday:

- A roadside bomb struck a double-decker bus in eastern Baghdad, killing two people and injuring seven. Iraqi police and hospital officials said the bus was carrying employees of Iraq's Housing Ministry through the Shiite-dominated neighborhood of Mashtal when the blast occurred.
- Nine decomposed bodies were found in Latifiya, 40 km south of Baghdad, police said. The victims had been buried for more than a year.
- The Iraqi army killed two militants and arrested 51 others on Sunday in different areas across Iraq, the Defence Ministry said in a statement.
- A roadside bomb planted near a school for girls in central Baghdad.
- A bomb placed under a taxi exploded at Maysaloun Square in east Baghdad, police said. Police and health officials said two people were killed and two injured.
- A roadside bomb detonated on Palestine Street (east Baghdad) targeting a police patrol. Four people were injured, including a policeman.
- In two separate incidents, individual dead bodies were discovered in eastern Baghdad.
- Three insurgent gunmen were killed near the city of Baquba when an improvised explosive device they were planting exploded.
- Police accidentally shot and killed a civilian during a raid on the town of Muqdadiyah, north east of Baquba.
- Police shot and killed three gunmen during clashes in the town of Mandli, east of Baquba.
- A civilian was killed by a roadside bomb that exploded near his home in the town of Khanaqeen.
- One man was killed and another injured by a roadside bomb that exploded in the northern city Mosul.
- Gunmen assassinated a member of the Kurdistan Democratic party (KDP) in Mosul.
- A sniper shot and killed a policeman in Borsa neighborhood in Mosul.
- Six people, all members of one family, were injured when a roadside bomb exploded near there car in Mosul.

Barrack Obama wants to start withdrawing U.S. soldiers from this country, something those Iraqis I’ve spoken to in the past two days believe will lead to even more violence. But at least that’s a new policy. John McCain thinks America is “winning” something here.

Dreams, and nightmares, of Baghdad

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq – Monday, Oct. 20

The situation in Iraq is getting better, the statistics say (though the daily blow-by-blow is still mind-numbing to read). By most accounts, Baghdad, an all-out war zone for most of the past five years, is becoming almost livable again.

But don't try telling that to the 300-plus people - almost all of them former Baghdad residents - living in miserable conditions in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah. Such rosy talk is nonsense, they say. Returning to their old homes in Baghdad, for them, remains an impossibility.

The stories they tell paint a very different picture than the one emerging of late in the Western media. They don't see an Iraq that's beginning to heal, but instead one where the divisions have become irreparable.

All of the refugees here are Sunni Arabs (Sulaymaniyah is in the Kurdish autonomous region, the majority Kurds are Sunnis) and most of them were driven from their homes by Shia militias during the worst of the sectarian fighting in 2006 and 2007.

It's safe to go back to Baghdad, they say, if it is in a Sunni neighbourhood. If your old home was in a Shia area, there's still no going back.

“I will never go back to Baghdad, It’s impossible for me,” said, Layla Shalan, a widowed 48-year-old mother of six. Wrapped in a head-to-toe black abaya, she told me how she remained in the mixed Dora neighbourhood of Baghdad even after her husband disappeared in 2004, leaving for work one morning and never coming home. She finally fled Dora with her children after Shia gunmen came to her door shortly afterwards and kidnapped her one-year-old daughter Nora, saying they'd return her only when Ms. Shalan and her family vacated their house.

There are dozens of stories like hers in this ramshackle collection of tents in the eastern corner of the Kurdish Autonomous Region. This is a place where optimism is even scarcer than decent food or shelter. Despite the steady stream of good news coming from Baghdad in recent months, the tent city remains home to more than 60 families – making it slightly larger than it was when I last visited here in early 2007.

“If they gave me all of Baghdad, I wouldn’t return. People who say it is getting better are media liars,” Iyad Manfi, the camp's leader, or mukhtar. He moved into one of the shoddy tarps-and-wooden-pole tents here in 2006 after his house near the infamous Abu Ghraib prison was hit by a mysterious explosion. He says he returned to Baghdad once already, believing the security situation had improved, but returned here shortly afterwards after receiving more threats.

Mr. Manfi, whose tense face makes him far older than his 32 years, says returning was a mistake he won’t make again. “When I leave this camp, it will not be to go home. It will be to leave this country.”

That sentiment is common across this battered country. Unsurprising new statistics released by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees today show that while the number of Iraqis seeking asylum in the West has dropped by more than 10 per cent since the same time last year, Iraqis still lodge far more asylum applications than any other nationality.