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.

My own Iraq war

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq - Monday, Oct. 20

This morning, after five years of covering the war here in Iraq – and managing to largely stay clear of the fighting – I finally became a participant in the violence. Upon arriving in my hotel room here in Sulaymaniyah, exhausted after a journey from Kish Island that included two flights and a long drive, I was confronted by a real live terrorist. A cockroach almost the size of my closed fist. The Osama bin Laden of the insect world.

I won’t drive you off the website with all the gory details, but suffice it to say that this was a real this-room-isn’t-big-enough-for-both-of-us battle that lasted upwards of half an hour. The fall of Baghdad didn’t take this long.

The plastic slipper I found in the bathroom did nothing but tickle this behemoth of a bug. I swear he was giggling as I slapped him with it repeatedly. Next up, I tried a shock-and-awe campaign using the sole of my shoe that at least managed to irritate my many-legged nemesis. Finally, borrowing from the U.S. Army’s overkill playbook (think air strikes and wedding parties), I lifted up the minibar fridge and dropped it on the offending roach, ending his one-bug intifada against my occupation of room 207.

Surely there’s some metaphor for the entire “war on terror” somewhere in that story.

The Battle of Room 207 was a bloody end to an exhausting journey from Kish Island in southern Iran to the eastern corner of northern Iraq. The plan had been to get from there to here overland across the Islamic Republic, but after the mullahs decided I wasn’t worthy of even a transit visa across their country, I had to abandon that plan and travel to Sulaymaniyah – the next stop on my itinerary – the long way (answering the question posed by Dion Nissenbaum over at McClatchey newspapers). Two flights and a three-hour drive later, I was face-to-face with Osama the Cockroach.

More geopolitically relevant than my discovery of new uses for a minibar was the reception I got upon landing in Northern Iraq. Walking into the pre-fabricated airport at Irbil, the effective capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, is always a reminder of how detached from the rest of Iraq this place has become.

The fact that I had no Iraqi visa didn’t matter to the blue-uniformed guard who marked page 17 of my passport with a red-and-blue “Kurdistan Regional Government” stamp. There was no sign of the Iraqi flag anywhere inside the terminal – in fact, Arabs from the rest of Iraq were the only people on my flight who received serious scrutiny when they landed in Irbil.

The growing independence of Iraqi Kurdistan is fraught with problems. The Kurds aren’t content with the three northern provinces they currently control, and a conflict with Baghdad is looming over the future of oil-rich Kirkuk, a city Iraqi Kurds refer to as their “Jerusalem.” An independent Kurdistan of any size is also anathema to neighbouring Iran and Turkey, who each have their own large and restive Kurdish populations. Fighting between the Turkish army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, has escalated along the Turkish-Iraqi border again in recent days, and Iran has also taken to shelling Northern Iraq, targeting Iranian Kurdish groups who use Iraqi Kurdistan as a rear base.

But being here and seeing the determination with which the Kurds have gone about building their own mini-state over the past five years, it’s clear that a point of no return has been passed somewhere along the way. The Kurds will never accept the return of Baghdad’s authority over this land they’ve fought so long to call their own.

The Middle East Electoral College

Among the questions I’ll be asking people – Iranians, Iraqis, Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Israelis and Palestinians – as I travel overland across this region over the next three weeks is how they feel about the upcoming presidential election in the United States.

Outside of the U.S. itself, it’s safe to say that the Middle East is the region most affected by this faraway vote that they have absolutely no control over. The George W. Bush era brought them the (failed) Road Map to Israeli-Palestinian peace, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the election (and international rejection) of Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah and the now-stalled Annapolis peace process. All were considerably affected by the man who sat thousands of kilometres away in the White House.

So what next? Would a President Obama keep his promise to negotiate with Iran, and rapidly reduce the number of American soldiers in Iraq? Would he be a better mediator in the Middle East peace process? Or perhaps a President McCain would be a better pick for Israelis, who fear being pressured into a peace agreement with the Palestinians, or those pro-Western Lebanese who want U.S. support in facing down Hezbollah? Who do Turks, polarized into camps of secularists and Islamists, with the Iraq war lapping at the country’s southeastern fringe, want to see win the election?

To keep track of this project, I’ve come up with a system based on the U.S. Electoral College and its 538 members. I’ve distributed those 538 votes among the eight countries that I’m going to visit, according to their populations. The winner of this completely unscientific exercise will be known by election morning, Tuesday, Nov. 4.

Here’s the breakdown:

Kish Island, Iran – 8 electors
Iraq – 146 electors
Turkey – 175 electors
Syria – 98 electors
Lebanon – 21 electors
Jordan – 34 electors
Israel – 36 electors
Palestinian Authority – 20 electors

A few footnotes: I based Kish’s population on the one million Iranian tourists who visit Kish each year rather than the 16,500 who actually live on the island. I also allocated Turkey only half the electors its population of 70 million should receive, mostly just to keep the election from being decided solely by the Turkish vote.

Some early results are already in. Barack Obama had the support of 100 per cent of the Iranians I met during my week on Kish Island giving him all 12 Electoral College votes from there.

I won’t arrive in Israel or the Palestinian Territories until after the Nov. 4 election, but after living in Jerusalem for the past three-and-a-half years, I feel comfortable awarding the 36 Israeli votes to Senator John McCain. While polls of Israeli opinion on the election have returned mixed results, even the left-wing Haaretz newspaper has concluded that McCain will be better for Israel’s interests than that other guy with the Muslim-sounding middle name.

Similarly, the Palestinian Authority’s 20 Electoral College votes go to Obama for almost the complete opposite reasons. In fact, some Palestinians have gone so far as to run phone banks for Obama, dialing up unsuspecting voters in the U.S. to ask them to vote for Barack.

So, with 16 days to go – and five countries to travel through – before Election Day, the Middle East Electoral College looks like this:

John McCain (Rep.) – 36 votes
Barack Obama (Dem.) – 28 votes

Colour Iran and the Palestinian territories blue, and Israel red.

Next stop, Iraq. Stay tuned.

Next year in Tehran?

Kish Island, Iran - Thursday, Oct. 16

Over the years, I have been turned down on three separate occasions when I applied for a visa to visit Iran. The first two attempts were via the Iranian Embassy in my old home of Moscow, and once I was even approved for a journalist visa by the Foreign Ministry in Tehran only to have it revoked when I went to pick it up at the Tsarist-era building that housed the embassy on Moscow’s tree-lined Pokrovsky Boulevard.

With over-the-top ceremony and politeness, the ambassador treated me to half-a-dozen cups of tea and a plate of cookies as he rolled out a lengthy explanation of why I wouldn’t be allowed to board my flight to Tehran the next morning. “Iran loves Canada,” he told me earnestly. “But Canada does not love Iran.” I had no retort. After that much tea, all I could think of was my bladder and what level of diplomatic faux-pas it would be to relieve myself in the snowbank outside the embassy.
The ambassador didn’t say it out loud, but he didn’t need to. The visa had been revoked because of the diplomatic brouhaha over Zahra Kazemi, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist who was raped, tortured and beaten to death in 2003 inside Evin Prison, in northern Tehran. No Canadian journalist, the Iranian authorities correctly surmised, could travel to the country without making an effort to investigate what had happened to Ms. Kazemi.

During the nearly four years I lived in Jerusalem, an Iranian visa was an effective impossibility. In fact, you're forbidden from travelling to the Islamic Republic if you've even set foot inside Israel/the Zionist Entity. Though there were a few intrepid correspondents who did the occasional Jerusalem-Tehran commute, they were generally old Iran hands who had contacts inside the regime in Tehran who could be trusted to look the other way when their visa applications arrived. So when I finally convinced my editor to let me drive across the Middle East to mark the end of the Bush era, I knew that the biggest hurdle would actually be in reaching the starting point of my journey.

There were two routes I could try. First I sent in an application for a tourist visa via an online service that promised Iranian visas “in 7 easy steps.” I was so enticed that I didn’t notice the chart on the same webpage which suggested Canadians are more likely to be turned down for Iranian visas than any other nationality, including Americans. I gamely sent in the 72-euro application fee, only to get the predictably negative reply a few weeks later.

So Kish Island represented a last, desperate chance to see Iran before I ended my tour of duty in the Middle East. And today, I was told – again – that I was not welcome in the Islamic Republic. “There is a problem with your visa,” the shy desk clerk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office told me. The office is one of the few places on the island where photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khameini are displayed.

After a week of battling with the bureaucrats and being repeatedly promised a visa, I was as grumpy as the two ayatollahs looked in their official portraits. I demanded to know what the "problem" with my visa was. I got a one word answer: "Politics."

In Canada, we call these places “gay hangouts”

Kish Island, Iran - Wednesday, Oct. 15

I can’t believe I’m still on Kish Island. I’d hoped to have a visa to head onwards to mainland Iran by now, but that’s starting to seem an increasingly distant prospect. When I went to the Foreign Affairs office today, I was told only that there was “a problem” with my application. This doesn’t look good. I’m terrified that the only corner of Iran I’ll be allowed to see is this bizarre Disneyland of the Persian Gulf.

I’ve already visited the local Dolphinarium, toured the 92-square-kilometre island by bicycle and had dinner aboard a catamaran. Those are all the activities the guide book lists for Kish. This scenic place is starting to feel like my own personal Alcatraz, although I suspect it’s easier to find a drink, and some decent television, inside the actual prison.

I spent the afternoon today at the island’s men-only beach, a place that’s fenced off from the rest of Kish so that nobody in a chador gets lustful at sight of my unsculpted furry chest.

The beach is white sand and the water is wonderfully warm, and clear enough that you can see the marine life swimming around you. But somehow the absence of women and children makes even this stunning place feel like a failed house party, where lots of invitations went out, lots of preparations were made, but no one showed up.

A quartet of young guys from Tehran jump and dive after a volleyball, but no one watches or cheers their feats of athleticism. Men swim alone or in pairs, but no one splashes the water at anyone else or plays tag or even laughs too loudly. It’s serene, it’s beautiful, but it’s no fun at all.