Tag Archives: Iraq

Inappropriately Dressed in Iraq

We arrived in Al Sulaymaniah in the mid-afternoon. Guess what? It was hot. Dry desert hot with the sun burning down in a way that makes a body want to find even a tiny piece of shade and hide until after sunset.

I was still dressed for Iran (i.e. covered from wrists to ankles). I Could Not Wait to get myself into a shower and change into proper, lighter, shorter, summer clothes – the things that had been stuffed in the bottom of my backpack during the whole time we’d been in Iran.

We’d met a local family at the Iran-Iraq border crossing. The Dad had recommended a hotel in Sulaymaniah – he knew the owners. With no guidebook, no internet and an eye on safety we just went with that recommendation even though when we checked in we learned that the price was more than a couple of notches above our usual basic backpacker level. But, the premium bought us a standard Western business hotel with (oh joy!) hot American-style power-showers.

I came back downstairs to wait for my husband and boys in the lobby – this woman is usually first ready in our family. The lobby was empty except for the desk staff, me and the furniture: two long leather sofas and a bunch of easy chairs around a glass coffee table. I settled on one end of a sofa, my flip-flop dangling on the end of a short-skirted bare leg and my arms, neck and shoulders ready for sun in a simple black tank (looking just like this, but without the boat or the ocean).

I turned my head at the whoosh of the hotel’s automatic door. What happened next was a study in cross-cultural impressions and similarities.

A group of about eight men, all tall, had just got out of a pair of imposing black SUVs and were filing into the hotel lobby.
“Gulf Arabs”, I thought, based on their dress. It was an easy guess since the dress style is fairly unique: a long-sleeved, full-length white dress (called a Thoub) and a checked headscarf (called a Shumag). When I was in college we referred to those as “Yassir Arafat scarves”. Gosh, that was so long ago now. I slipped into a little reverie about my college days, smiling to myself about being young, foolish and too broke to eat regularly but always able to find money for a pint of Guinness if the crew was heading to a bar.

White dresses lined up on the sofa opposite me. Politely, I pulled in my legs and made myself smaller on my sofa, assuming that the group would spill around the coffee table by the time they’d all checked in. They seemed to be moving as a group.
Another one successfully checked in and he perched himself on the side of the already-full sofa.
The lucky (or unlucky) next guy took one of the end armchairs.
Now this was interesting. Not one of them wanted to be the first to share my sofa. There was a pair of particularly bushy eyebrows sending disapproving looks my way. I wondered which was more offensive: bare head, bare legs or bare shoulders?
“Oh well. Your baggage, not mine.” I thought and relaxed back still waiting for my boys to show.

The elevator pinged and BigB came running over: “You look like yourself again”.
This kid had really had a hard time with me in Islamic dress. I am stern to start with. With a headscarf, all the soft edges were gone and being all wrapped up in such hot weather made me grumpy to boot. His three-week living nightmare of traveling with my cruel stepmother alter ego was visibly over.
“Yes, and now we can do this again too.” CAM reached over and mussed up my hair.
I batted him away like my favorite pesky fly. You’d have to have been blind to miss the affection in all of this.
“Let’s go.”

I stood up, almost expecting to hear gasps of derision from the audience on the other sofa. I just had to take a surreptitious peak to see how they were reacting.

I might have been imagining it but I swear that the bushy eyebrows seemed less forbidding. It appeared that my boys had taken center stage and their universal boy-energy and tomfoolery was appreciated. There were smiles beneath some of the Shumags.

Well now. Maybe being a Mom made me less of a jezebel.

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US Soliders Iraq Turkey Border

Soldiers on the Iraq Turkey Border

US Soliders Iraq Turkey Border

When we passed through this border checkpoint just north of Mosul, Iraq, I waved out the window of our taxi at these kids taking a smoke break. I think they were shocked to see us.

They came over to chat so I had to put my camera away lest I be breaking any rules by taking photos, but not before I got this colorful shot of the battalion art on the walls.

Zakho Iraq US Battalion Art

In honor of Veteran’s Day for all who have fallen in combat on all sides of conflicts current and past.

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[catlist tag=Iraq numberposts=5]

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Crossing the Iran-Iraq Border II: At the Border

Euphorbia, tenacious and growing recklessly on the lower reaches of the steep hillsides by the side of the road, leaves glaring green in this dry, mountainous desert heat. Allium, like over-sized purple dandelion seed-heads, a border of color looking completely out of place in this forbidding landscape. Nothing left in shorn fields of recently cut wheat or grass but a golden stubble. Every so often our bus passed a field where people were cutting their crop with hand tools, entire family groups, the women mostly in full hijab. We were on our way from Iran to Iraq but I felt as if our trajectory, though ostensibly west, over the Zagros Mountains, had also taken us back in time.

So this was the Iran-Iraq border. The pleasant bucolic, agrarian scenes outside my bus window so totally at odds with the sadness and death I associated with this area. Half a million people were killed in a six year-long war over this very territory, something which still impacts people’s lives in this area, and indeed, global politics to this very day.

The bus pulled on to the actual border crossing. We climbed out, blinking in the sun, our feet squelching in the mud from the construction site where the new, multi-lane border post was being built. We followed our bus-mates to the current border checkpoint. Ah yes, another addition to the “101 Uses of a Shipping Container” series. There was a door, firmly closed, and a young man in uniform at the single window on one side.

Reviewing our current situation: here we were, in Somewhere, Iran, hoping to walk across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan. We didn’t know if we needed visas. If we were turned back we didn’t know if we’d be able to get a bus back to Sanandaj. All four passports in hand, I joined the group of people crowding around the window, giving my husband one last “I can’t believe we’re doing this” eye-roll.

Murph was a minor celebrity among the jostling crew. There was a truck-driver from Azerbaijan who had some English and was full of questions about who we were and what we were doing right here, right now. Murph played to the crowd:
“We’re just passing through. Yes, we’re backpacking, yes, those are our boys. Yes, we just spent a couple of weeks exploring Iran. No, we’re not on a tour.”
 I was too preoccupied watching the border guard puzzle over one of our passports, making multiple phone calls (to whom?) to pay my husband’s camaraderie with random truck-drivers much attention – but it was a handy distraction.

Then one by one the passports were handed back over the heads of waiting locals and we were waved on. We walked through the concrete arch of the in-progress new construction to another steel box – this time with three windows – to have our passports and bags checked by the Iraqis.

Some bright spark had decided to put a plexi-glass cover over the waiting area on this side, obviously not realizing that in doing so he had created a sauna in the desert. If my children could have stripped to their undies I think they probably would have done so.

For some reason the atmosphere on the Iraqi side of the border was positively relaxed. People commiserated about the heat and stood in orderly lines. My kids were beyond any jovial chatter so I made faces at a little kid waiting with his parents beside us. His Dad, who we learned was an English teacher and a translator, pointed out that since we were in Iraq I could take my headscarf off now. I nearly kissed him.

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Iran-Iraq-Border-Sanandaj-to-Suleymaniah

Crossing The Iran – Iraq Border: Leaving Sanandaj

Iran-Iraq-Border-Sanandaj-to-Suleymaniah

It was almost 11pm at night when Murph and I left the tiny ticket office on the main street in Sanandaj, Iraq. We walked back out into a throng of people still bustling about doing their shopping in the warm evening. (These things are related by the way, in Iran in July it’s so ferociously hot in the middle of the day that people shift their daily activities to much later in the day).

In such crowds you’d think we’d have had to push our way through and that conversation would have been impossible. That would be incorrect. On the streets of Sanandaj, in Iranian Kordestan, to be a Westerner walking down the street is so unusual that everywhere we went everyone stopped and stared. Where we walked the crowds parted in front of us and we got to keep on chatting normally. It made me feel like a movie star every time.

Murph was grinning in a way that would have put the Cheshire Cat to shame.
“It’s going to be great, I’m telling you. We’ll be fine. And you didn’t want to go back to Tehran anyway”.
“I can’t believe you convinced me to do this.”
He put his arm around me, “It’ll be fine. Trust me. What’s the worst that could happen?”
(Actually he didn’t put his arm around me at all. That would be a public display of affection, something which people just don’t do in Iran. And, like I said, they were all looking at us, so we had to behave.)
I started to mentally list the potential problems we could encounter on our way from Sanandaj to Al Suleymaniah in Iraq: we didn’t have visas for Iraq, we didn’t know the route the bus would actually take, we didn’t know anything about the border crossing, there was a war…. I stopped. Thinking about it was making my blood pressure go up. Just the very notion that we were going to take a bus across the Iran-Iraq border was stressing me out, that we were taking our children with us was another order of magnitude of stress in itself.

My charming husband was still smiling. He’d been hooked on this idea of cutting across Iraq (into Turkey) since the folks from itsonthemeter.com had described this route to us a couple of weeks earlier in Yazd. Initially, I’d said no. Flat-out, no way, absolutely not a chance. CAM, our very reluctant traveler had surprised us both with “Iraq? Now that would be a cool thing to tell my friends back home”. BigB was with me. He and I thought we’d leave Murph and CAM off on their madcap meander through a war zone and we’d just take the easy route to Turkey through Tehran. And now here I was, with four bus tickets to a city in Iraq I’d never heard of before in my hand.

So how had this miraculous transformation occurred? Firstly, there was the weather. I read a phrase somewhere which described Southern Iran in the summer as a place for only “mad dogs and Englishmen”. I’d change that slightly to all of Iran in the summer. Or at least all of Iran that I’d visited. It had been 45C in Tehran, almost 50C in Yazd and Shiraz. Irish people are not designed for such temperatures.

Secondly after nearly three weeks in Iran nothing, not even transiting through Iraq, seemed too outlandish any more. We’d done it. We’d ventured into this historic, enigmatic, vilified and feared country and found it all so very, very normal. OK, headscarves and fashion police excepted, but once I got used to the dress code it didn’t seem so important. From this perspective Iraqi Kurdistan positively beckoned: “Come check me out, you’re going to be even more surprised”.

Iran-Public-Bus

At 6am the next morning the taxi picked us up to take us to the bus station where we waited and waited and waited. We even wondered if we’d been scammed although that idea we discounted pretty much immediately since it was so at odds with the reality we’d experienced to date in courteous, welcoming, polite and safe Iran. We climbed onto a serviceable but not luxurious coach about two hours later. Us, another western-looking couple and about a dozen other people, mostly male.
“No going back now”, I thought.

On the outskirts of Sanandaj the engine started grinding as the bus began to climb up into the higher reaches of the Zagros Mountains. And then it just stopped. The driver disappeared outside. Finding out what was going on wasn’t an option so we just sat tight and waited. The locals got off and stood around smoking and watching whatever it was that the driver was doing. Cheshire-Cat-Man wasn’t grinning but was confidently telling BigB, “Not to worry, we’ll be off again in a moment”. In the realm of absurd and surreal family travel situations I was pretty sure this was in a special class of it’s own. I actually had to suppress nervous-Nellie giggles. But a rush of quickly stubbed out cigarettes from the peanut gallery told us that the driver was on his way back into the bus and then we were off again.

Next: Crossing the Iran-Iraq Border II At The Border

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