Q & A

Some of you have been ask­ing ques­tions in the com­ments sec­tions of this site. I will attempt to answer some of them as best I can in a quick one-off. These are ques­tions that don’t war­rant a full story or dis­patch. What was the prob­lem with the Irid­ium satel­lite phone?
There was noth­ing wrong with the actual phone, as it turns out. But for some rea­son I couldn’t con­nect to the Irid­ium net­work that allowed me access to the Net. No con­nec­tion, no email. And that was bad. This wasn’t Iridium’s fault, of course, but really more a con­nec­tion issue between the Tough­book and the phone. Any­way, the data guys at Irid­ium set me up with a sta­tic IP address rather than DHCP and it’s work­ing fine now.
Why’d you use a dumb — and offen­sive — metaphor about the Bataan death march?
Because I was in such a hurry to get to sleep that I got lazy and used an inap­pro­pri­ate metaphor, for which I apol­o­gize, espe­cially to peo­ple who lost rel­a­tives in Bataan. What I expe­ri­enced was not a death march. How­ever, it was a forced march in that once I signed on, there was no stop­ping. I was phys­i­cally hauled to my feet sev­eral times or pushed for­ward when I thought I was too far gone to con­tinue. We climbed five or six moun­tains in pitch black­ness, some­times going high enough to trudge through calf-high snow. I hal­lu­ci­nated and became deliri­ous. There was lit­tle water to drink and not much food. The lan­guage bar­rier was beyond frus­tra­tion. Death march? No. But I hon­estly wanted to die sev­eral times.
When are you going to start report­ing?
What, inter­view­ing Kurds about their aspi­ra­tions for nation­hood isn’t good enough? Talk­ing with pesh­merga about their sup­port for the war too mun­dane? Should I be throw­ing myself into the pitch of bat­tle imme­di­ately after a 36-hour forced march (see above)? I just got here. I left a lit­tle over a week ago, and I think there’s been some decent report­ing already. It’s not Asso­ci­ated Press inverted pyramid-style writ­ing, but I didn’t think peo­ple wanted that on a site such as this. My report­ing com­bines the per­sonal, the micro and the macro. It’s not nec­es­sar­ily new, but it works for me.
How do the gitem con­trol the vil­lagers?
Well, by receiv­ing guns and money from Ankara, they intim­i­date, bully, harass and some­times tor­ture — or just kill — the vil­lagers they super­vise. They’re local thugs used by the Turk­ish mil­i­tary to keep order in the south­east. The sys­tem reached its apogee dur­ing the 1984 – 1998 Turkish-PKK war, but they’re still around and ter­ri­fy­ing the peo­ple of the region. While the emer­gency rule has been offi­cially lifted, Turkey finds the gitem a valu­able ham­mer for pound­ing the nail of Kur­dish nation­al­ism. (Mind you, most of the peo­ple abused by the gitem sys­tem are just sim­ple vil­lagers who get caught up in per­sonal score-settling. Nice, huh?)
What the heck is chai?
It’s what peo­ple call tea in this part of the world.
Where are the pic­tures? And how do we know you’re really in Iraq?
Patience, patience. I’ve just sent three of the pic­tures — of the Ortho­dox Church in Mardin, at our camp in the meadow wait­ing to leave and a pic­ture of J. and two pesh­mer­gas who helped us. They should be up later today, I hope. My band­width is extremely lim­ited. Also, bear in mind, that the last two days weren’t exactly con­ducive to snap-shooting.
That’s it for now. At the moment, I can barely walk. My feet are in bad shape, but J. and I will head to Arbil tomor­row where I will hook up with some old friends and renew my con­tacts with the KDP and the KRG. I’ll post a full account­ing of the forced march tonight in a few hours. That is, if anyone’s interested.

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