DUHOK, Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — Our “travel agent” in Turkey was a bit mis­in­formed. After con­tract­ing with the Kur­dish coy­otes to take us into Zakho, we were told we would cross a small river and then walk two of three kilo­me­ters to a truck that would take us to Zakho.

This was a big lie.

Our guide with the rocky teeth that we met in the alpine field was more of a baby sit­ter. He took us to a safe-house in a vil­lage on the Turkish-Iraqi bor­der. We had a din­ner of rice, cucum­bers, toma­toes and naan, the bread served with every meal here. Soon three men showed up. Only one, a small man with a wrestler’s physique and a ready smile, gave his name: Çimli. The other two were friendly, but didn’t talk much. They shook our hands and smiled, and then talked amongst them­selves for a while. No one spoke Eng­lish and J. and I don’t speak Turk­ish or Kur­manji, the Kur­dish dialect.

We waited around for about an hour, killing time by watch­ing Kurd­Sat record­ings of pop­u­lar Kur­dish singers. The smug­glers occu­pied them­selves with a great deal of com­ing and going. Finally, we were ready to go. The five of us shoul­dered the packs — the smug­glers refused to let us carry our own — and set out. As the small­est of the party, I got stuck car­ry­ing the food and the chai set. I was a walk­ing tea cozy.

Once out of the safe-house, we were loaded in the back of a trac­tor, where J. and I laid down as flat as we could, watch­ing the stars stream by over­head. After a short but vertebrae-bruising ride, we were let out on the side of the road. A cou­ple of quick words and the five of us, J., myself and our three coy­ote guides, set off down a hill.

To our left we could plainly see the Turk­ish encamp­ments about 1 km away. With a ring of lights and perched on a hill­side, they looked like downed fly­ing saucers. We hoofed it down sev­eral hills for another kilo­me­ter or so, and then came to a river — the Heyil Cayi, accord­ing to my map. The Turk­ish base was very close now, per­haps 500 meters away. Down under­neath the bridge, two sen­tries were on duty.

J. pulled out his night vision gog­gles and handed them to Çimli, who was very impressed. He smiled at J. in the dark­ness, his teeth gleam­ing in the Turks’ flood lights. “Amrika,” he said. “Bosch!” Good.

The gog­gles gave us a tremen­dous advan­tage. The Turk­ish sen­tries, stu­pidly, were also smok­ing, show­ing us exactly where they were. From the dark­ness of the river­bank, even I could see the ember of their cigarettes.

Çimli started tim­ing the sen­tries. When they turned their backs and started walk­ing down­stream away from the bridge, we made a run for it.

We scram­bled down the river­bank, and hit the bridge. Run­ning in a crouch, we were in full view of the base, whose inhab­i­tants had thought­fully lighted the whole bridge like Yan­kee Sta­dium at night. We were run­ning through the “kill zone,” a patch of ter­ri­tory where it would be more than easy to pick off targets.

Halfway across, and the juice kicked in. I no longer cared if I was seen or not and broke into a full scale sprint. J. was close behind me, but even with his longer legs he couldn’t catch me. Huff­ing and spit­ting, we made it to the other side, pro­tected by rocks. I almost took a tum­ble, but righted myself in the nick of time before dash­ing my head against a large boul­der just at the end of the bridge.

All of us across, we kept a mean pace until we were well out of sight of the Turks. Finally, we rested next to a spring. Each of us drank our fill under the sky and one of our guides turned to me and J.

“Turk­ishiye, no prob­lem,” he said and wiped his hands together.

“Prob­lem yok,” I replied. No prob­lem. It was in Turk­ish, but he smiled anyway.

Now the jour­ney got rough. J. and I had naively believed N. when he said that we would cross the river and take a lit­tle two or three kilo­me­ter hike, and then there would be a truck to take us to Zakho. We had already done the 2 – 3 km trek and were think­ing, “This isn’t so bad” when Çimli and Co. took us off trail. What fol­lowed from there were some of the most hell­ish hours of my life.

We had started out from the safe-house at around 9 p.m. It was now after mid­night and it was pitch black. We wouldn’t stop march­ing and climb­ing until sunrise.
We climbed three moun­tains that night, up and down. Accord­ing to the altime­ter in my GPS receiver, we were up around 5,500 feet at one point. And these moun­tains weren’t gen­tle slopes nor was there a flat sur­face on them. Each step was a gam­ble, hop­ing that I wouldn’t lose my foot­ing and tum­ble down into the river we were fol­low­ing some 300 – 400 feet below. Often the “trail” wasn’t even vis­i­ble, known only to Çimli and his cohorts from years tra­vers­ing this ter­rain. My ankles ached from the twist­ing. My calves and quads burned. My com­bat boots thank­fully had a good tread and didn’t slip under­neath me — much — but the steel caps banged my toes painfully, rip­ping the nails from three of them.

We stopped once that night, for about an hour. As the walk­ing tea cozy, it was imper­a­tive I sur­vive, so I was pushed, hauled and lugged up a sheer cliff to a roomy cave in the side of the moun­tain where we had a very civ­i­lized sec­ond din­ner. Çimli sang J. Lo songs and J. taught the smug­glers words for the var­i­ous makes of rifles. We were quickly becom­ing friends.

We tried to talk to them, find out how far it was to go. But the answer to “Kak kilo­me­ter Zakho?” How many kilo­mters to Zakho? was always the same: “Bir kilo­me­ter!” One kilo­me­ter! “One kilo­me­ter straight up?” I asked. Çimli just made an up and down motion with his hand like waves. Not encouraging.

It was get­ting cold now, and we walked and walked some more. The moun­tains in the Turkish-Iraqi bor­der region are either one big rock with sheer faces and very few hand– and toe­holds, or piles upon innu­mer­able piles of bro­ken, sharp shale that shift under your feet and cut at the your ankles. While my boots were high enough to pro­tect from the cut­ting, they didn’t allow enough ankle rota­tion to walk along the moun­tain sides like a moun­tain goat. Our guides, clad in Iraqi web belts, Kur­dish pants, mil­i­tary jacket and tot­ing Kalish­nikovs, also wore Nike and Reebok ten­nis shoes. Their ankles were as thick as PVC pipes. They, of course, had no prob­lem on these slopes.

By dawn we were close to another Turk­ish base, and I was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing. I imag­ined the guide in front of me was Emre, from Diyarbakir, and I couldn’t under­stand why he wasn’t respond­ing to me when I called out to him. Çimli and the guys needed to get to a hid­ing place because I wasn’t going to make it much longer. The pace they had set was bru­tal. On a flat, paved sur­face, it would have been a brisk walk, the kind that leaves one a bit winded after half an hour. This was over unsta­ble ter­rain, at night, up and down sev­eral times. And they never really stopped. And they did it car­ry­ing our packs, which weighed 30 – 40 pounds each. I have a great deal of respect for these guys, espe­cially since they seem to live on moun­tain air, chai and cigarettes.

As light was break­ing over us, we were almost to the shel­ter, a clus­ter of rocks that pro­tected us from Turk­ish snipers. But we had to cross an old min­ing oper­a­tion that had blasted an entire side of a moun­tain — which we had to clam­ber up, of course — into tril­lions of lit­tle pieces of shale. They just fell away in my hands, and it was like climb­ing a sand dune, except every grain of sand cuts through your skin. My hands will bear many scars after this.

Near the top, I gave out. I couldn’t make and begged Çimli to leave me, shoot me or some­thing. It was not one of my finer moments. This was the one time I was glad he didn’t speak Eng­lish. Instead, he hauled me up by my coat col­lar, pulled me up the slope and onto a road. Finally, we made it to the shel­ter where they dumped me behind some rocks and cov­ered me with a cam­ou­flaged tarp so the Turks wouldn’t see me. I slept for an hour before I awoke, shiv­er­ing. I drank some chai and fell back asleep until mid-morning. We would stay at that lit­tle camp until 1 p.m.

After that night, I wasn’t sure it could get worse. It did. All day and into the night we marched, never stop­ping for more than 10 min­utes at a time. The GPS receiver didn’t work here and I sus­pect the U.S. was jam­ming the sig­nal in the region. It still showed us in the lit­tle meadow where we thought this would be a light lit­tle adventure.

By night­fall, we were in the snows of the moun­tains, doggedly walk­ing. I no longer knew any­thing or cared about any­thing except plac­ing my feet in the foot­steps of the pesh­merga before me. When I could, I would reach down and grab a hand­ful of snow to suck on, hop­ing for some hydra­tion. It helped… a little.

I don’t know what time we entered the val­ley and finally saw Zakho in the dis­tance, but it was before mid­night. We were being handed off to two KDP pesh­mer­gas, Abdul­lah Karim and Sabdi. Abdul­lah was the younger of the two, look­ing a bit like Fred­die Mer­cury in his prime. Sabdi was obvi­ously an old war­rior, with his gray­ing red hair and fad­ing mus­tache. But he was a tough old slug­ger. They took our packs from us. I, of course, was again the walk­ing tea cozy.

For $200 they would take us to Duhok, which was fine with me. I was too exhausted to hag­gle, and in the light of the cig­a­rette lighter by which we con­ducted the trans­ac­tion, Ben Franklin seemed to be mak­ing faces at me.

That night, we walked until morn­ing, through more snow, and with only another hour to sleep. I fell down where we stopped and didn’t get up until they made me.

“Mis­ter, mis­ter!” Abdul­lah hissed, pok­ing me with his rifle. I woke up fast.

At day­break we started out again, climb­ing up and down hills. Abdul­lah was enthu­si­as­tic and funny, mak­ing dri­ving noises and warn­ing us of Turk­ish tanks that shell the cabs on the road to Zakho. J. couldn’t under­stand why the Turks would do this, as we were in Iraq, a sov­er­eign coun­try, and the Turks were shelling civil­ians. At point, later in the day, we would come across an unex­ploded clus­ter mine, dropped from a plane. Also, I picked up a few pieces of Turk­ish shrap­nel, left over from where the Turks had shelled the field. The road, which we avoided until well out of sight of the Turk­ish base, was pock­marked and scarred from the bar­rages. How did shelling Kur­dish civil­ians and taxis enhance Turk­ish secu­rity? I wondered.

At one rest break, Abdul­lah filled us in on his view of world pol­i­tics. “George Bush: Okaaaaaay!” he said, and gave a big thumbs up. Tony Blair got the same treat­ment. “Don­ald Rums­feld, Colin Pow­ell, Con­deleeza RIce,” he said, tick­ing off their names on his fin­gers. “Bosch!” But he lit­er­ally held his nose and sneered when he came to the names of French Pres­i­dent Jacques Chirac and Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Ger­hard Schroeder. He even found it in his heart to dis France’s ambas­sador to the United Nations.

He asked if J. and I had chil­dren. We didn’t but he did. He had five, he said. But then he started tick­ing them off again. The first one was killed by the Turks. The sec­ond by the Ira­ni­ans. The third by the Syr­i­ans and the fourth by the Iraqis. For all the death Abdul­lah has seen per­son­ally, he seemed remark­ably unbit­ter. But he was a full-on, “let’s roll” sup­porter of this war.

“Sad­dam, krrreeeeeek!” he said, and made a slic­ing motion across his throat. “Amrika, Kurdi dost!” he said, indi­cat­ing the friend­ship that existed between the Kurds and the United States. I felt such com­pas­sion for him at the moment, I wanted to hug him. Instead, I pat­ted his arm and nod­ded. “Friends,” I said. I des­per­ately hoped I wasn’t lying to him.

After another four hours of march­ing, we finally made it to the taxi, which was a pickup truck dri­ven by Abdul­lah. We had to go through a lit­tle mil­i­tary intel­li­gence rou­tine by a Kurd call­ing him­self “Che Gue­vara.” (That’s him on the left in the attached pic­ture. J is in the mid­dle.) If any oper­a­tional details of this trip leaked out, they would know who to pinch. I think I’m OK, since I don’t know any details.

Finally, Duhok. It was gru­el­ing jour­ney and I can hear the bombs falling on Mosul less than 40 miles to the south. One was large enough to shake the win­dows of the hotel while I was writ­ing this. I won­der if the trip over the moun­tains was really worth it… Tomor­row, Arbil.