While in Ankara, Aykut and I spent a day try­ing to find the local offices of var­i­ous Iraqi and Kur­dish oppo­si­tion groups includ­ing the KDP and PUK. We were look­ing for var­i­ous offi­cials who might be able to help me when I went to Diyarbakir in the south­east and on to Iraq, but we weren’t hav­ing much luck, and kept dri­ving through twisty neigh­bor­hoods hop­ing the cops weren’t fol­low­ing us.

At one point, the com­edy descended into farce, as we drove into a mil­i­tary res­i­dence area look­ing for the embassies. We found the embassies, but the PUK still eluded us. We drove past the Jor­dan­ian, Syr­ian and Saudi Embassies, but finally stopped out­side the the United Arab Emi­rates while Aykut jumped out of the car and asked a bored-​looking secu­rity guard for directions.

“Excuse me, where are the offices for the Patri­otic Union of Kur­dis­tan?” Akyut asked while I shrunk into my seat and tried to look invisible.

The guard, a Turk and appar­ently no friend of Iraqi Kurds, looked him up and down, looked me up and down, and then motioned off down the road.

Aykut dropped his bulk into the dri­vers’ seat and smiled at me.

“Don’t do that again,” I said.

He apol­o­gized, but at least the guard’s direc­tions were good. We finally found the rather sad look­ing house that was the office for the PUK. No one was around except for a plain­clothes guy who watched us closely and smoked a cig­a­rette like a fugi­tive. He made me ner­vous, so we left to go meet A. Turan Demir, the deputy chair­man of HADEP, the Kur­dish party in Turkey. The tran­script — from Aykut’s trans­la­tion — follows:

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