Into Iraq - The American Army
Trip Start
Jun 30, 2008
1
12
17
Trip End
Aug 22, 2008
Zakho,
Iraq
Saturday, August 9, 2008
We met a guide, Mehmet Nasip Onen (nicknamed Montana - he's seen pictures and he loves the place), and an American woman, Sabina, in a Syrian-Christian church in Diyarbakir. We were all admiring a piece of iconography of Jesus Christ with a Turkish/Syrian style mustache. We had tea with Mehmet and Sabina, during which Mehmet told us about a trip he offers, and had just taken two journalists on, to Northern Iraq (aka Kurdistan) to meet the Yezidi people. Montana worked for the DOD in Baghdad in 2005 as a translator, and can speak English, Turkish, Kurdish, Russian and some Arabic.
A few hours later, the four of us, Eugene (who we've been traveling with in Syria), Sabina, Nick and myself, decided to go and the same day we crossed the border into the Iraq. The crossing was smooth as passenger cars are allowed to skip the hundreds of oil tankers lined up to get in. (We were instructed not to use the word Kurdistan on the Turkish side, but to say that we were students studying the Yezidi people.)
We met up with a friend of Montana's, Kevin, for dinner just on the Iraqi side of the border. He's a DOD employee (civilian Kurdish/Turkish/English translator), born in Turkey, ethnically Kurish, and spent some time growing up in California. Now he's a translator and cultural advisor to the higher-ups (as he says "I tell them not to fart in meetings and not to ask about other people's wife's.")
After dinner he showed us around the American military base. It performs two functions: firstly, it's the staging ground for supply convoys coming from Turkey, and secondly, the higher-ups on the base deal with the Turks when they raid PKK camps on Iraqi soil. (The PKK is the Kurdish Workers Party, a separatist terrorist organization which operates between Turkey, Iraq and Iran to create a Kurdish state.)
Kevin was showing us around the staging ground/yard for the convoys and we were playing around on the hummers (taking photos etc.) when the head of security for the buildings adjacent to the yard ran out with an m-16 wielding sergeant and a thuggish-looking Kurdish translator, of the Tintin ilk, in tow. Apparently the head of security sleeps on the roof and saw us on the hummers - but not Kevin. He was also insistent that we not take any more pictures, 'I'm sure you've got enough by now; no need to delete them, but no more.' He also wanted to be taken to Kevin's CO (who Kevin had received permission from.) During that time we were guarded by the sergeant, who had only been deployed to Iraq a few weeks previous. Everyone was generally pacified when they realized that we were all Americans and when we started asking the soldiers about their home towns etc. Eventually, everything was sorted out and we were allowed to go. We stayed the night at a hotel in the border town of Zakho.
