When I was fifteen, my family moved to Washington, D.C. I tried skateboarding there, but the locals were far less welcoming. Within a couple of years, I’d given it up. It was time to start thinking about college, the future. My parents were surprised when I decided to join the Marines, but the draw soon became obvious. The insider language: The enemy’s TTP is to use frags. The varied backgrounds: my first platoon had kids from Texas, the Dominican Republic, and Canada within its ranks. And the importance of being good—or as Marines say, tactically competent.
Over eight years, friends like Staff Sergeant Sean “the Skwerl” Brownlee and Gunnery Sergeant Willy “Bare Knuckles” Parent became dear comrades, replacements for my skater friends. Other friends I lost: Dan Malcom, Garrett “Tubes” Lawton, J.P. Blecksmith, Paul Fellsberg, Aaron Torian—a roll call of ghosts who follow me still.
When I returned to London after my Iraq deployment in 2004, I found myself wandering down to Southbank, spending hours there. I’ve returned several times since, as I do in the weeks after Amirli.
The day is cold but clear. Tourists and Londoners stop to watch the skaters. I mix among the onlookers but want to get closer. Weaving among the kids who rush by on their boards, I find my way to the beam. I sit on the petrified piece of wood and run my hands along the shards of granite cemented to its top. I can still feel the tingling in my finger, the one I’ve stopped thinking of as my right index finger and have, some years before, started thinking of as my trigger finger.
Then a rail-thin teenager, in a baggy white T-shirt badly in need of a wash, skids up to the beam. He sits next to me, reaching into his pocket for an envelope of tobacco. He seems not to notice the geezer perched next to him. But soon I catch a few of his wary glances.
“I was a local here twenty years ago,” I tell him.
He licks down the paper of his hand-rolled cigarette. Then, slowly, he begins to nod his head. “Safe, man. Safe.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Safe.”
NO FRIENDS BUT THE MOUNTAINS
KOBANE, ERBIL
It is autumn now, a few weeks before Thanksgiving of 2014. In a farm field outside of Kobane, the slick mud freezes into sludgy clods, which threaten to clog the tire wells of the black Peugeot we drive everywhere. The horizon has condensed into a dark mass, a mix of slate clouds and cement buildings, their tops shorn at jagged angles from the weeks-long battle. We arrived that morning from Gaziantep, on our way into northern Iraq, just Matt and me. Some of Matt’s clients have expressed an interest in the humanitarian fallout from the Islamic State’s siege of Kobane, the most significant engagement since the fighting around Amirli, so he thinks it’ll be useful to take a quick detour here, to see what’s what. I just want to see it. A few days before, Matt had visited Kobane with a journalist who’d flown in to write a piece about the battle at this strategic border crossing. The two of them had watched US air strikes from a hilltop barely inside of Turkey. When too many journalists gathered, the Turkish authorities had dispersed the crowd with CS gas. This morning, those same Turkish authorities won’t allow us past their checkpoint on the D833, the main thoroughfare into the city. So we drive across the farm field.
Our Peugeot’s axle crunches against frozen troughs of earth, the noise like teeth on hard candy. To break an axle out here falls into the category of unimaginable. A flat tire, only slightly less so. We check behind us, toward the D833, which soon dissolves on our rear horizon. We’re looking for a way around the Turkish checkpoints so we might get to the hill where Matt had watched the air strikes. He points out a dirt road that threads between two fields. We ease in that direction, again scraping against the troughs. Though we hardly exceed ten miles per hour, it is a white-knuckle drive as we pray our car won’t break down.
It seems appropriate that Matt and I should crawl toward the Islamic State’s siege of Kobane, for its columns have slowed to a crawl as well, stalling here after a summer of blitzkrieg. The name Kobane isn’t native to the region: it comes from the German word kompanie, after the railway company whose workers built the town in tandem with a section of the Konya-Baghdad Railway in 1911. That this obscure backwater might prove to be the high-water mark of the Islamic State’s advance is no less remarkable than the fact that those who will stop them are, until recently, an equally obscure people: the Kurds.
There is a saying among them: We have no friends but the mountains.
The Kurds of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran have a long tradition of retreating into the mountains of their native lands to wage insurgency. When Kurdish men or women leave home to join any number of separatist groups—the PKK, YPG, PJAK, PUK—it is said they are going to the mountains.
With the rise of the Islamic State, the Western powers need the Kurds to come down from the mountains, to provide the ground troops that the Americans, British, French, and others are loathe to commit.
Matt has a history of working alongside the Kurds. Shortly after graduating college in Boston, he took a position at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani. The school was a novelty then, largely financed and supported by Dr. Barham Salih, a bookish and bespectacled former Patriotic Union of Kurdistan dissident who in 2006, when Matt arrived, had ascended to the office of deputy prime minister of Iraq. In those early days, a cluster of trailers composed the university’s campus while a handful of students toiled away at their degrees, dreaming of the time when they might ascend to membership of Iraq’s—or even an independent Kurdistan’s—educated elite. With long-held national ambitions, the Kurds have used the last decade of chaos among Arab-Iraqis to consolidate power, creating the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, which administers an autonomous zone in the north.
Today the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani encompasses several hundred acres of glass and sandstone buildings. Filled with the trappings of any major Western university, the simple existence of such a place challenges certain of my conceptions: this is not the Iraq I knew, one of cratered streets and crumbling buildings with little prospect of repair, one of idle men watching our foot patrols with hard stares. The country is different in the north. As Dr. Barham is fond of pointing out, “Though the Iraq War did not turn out well for you Americans, I am a single-issue voter. Any Kurd who dreams of their own nation will forever be indebted to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda.”
Yet the most costly gifts are those given for free. With the rise of the Islamic State, the Kurds must now spill blood to hold on to their last decade of gains. Their neighbors to the northwest, the Turks, are leery, if not openly hostile, to Western collusion with the Kurds in the fight against the Islamic State.
Matt and I continue to cross the rutted farm field, stumbling upon a wisp of dirt road that takes us far around the checkpoint we’d encountered on the D833, and it seems we’ll be able to loop back toward Kobane and find our way to the hilltop. But before we can upshift from first to second gear, we turn a bend that leads us into a serpentine of concertina wire obstructed by an armored car on the far side. There is no time to change course. We brake on the shoulder, just before the wire. A pair of Turkish soldiers hops out of the cab, striding toward us, rifles leveled, hands riding pistol grips and barrels. Matt raises his palms from the steering wheel, presenting them toward the windshield. I do the same. It’s been some time since I’ve been eye to eye with a teenage soldier. A young man who has yet to shave, carrying a gun, holds a unique type of menace: inexperience and unaccountability often go hand in hand. When one of the soldiers noses the barrel of his rifle up the road, so we might go back to where we came, we turn around and give up on Kobane.
We head east instead, farther into the mountains, and at a place called Silopi we’ll cross into Iraq.
* * *
For five hours we drive in fifth gear, tracing the border. A mesh and wire fence oscillates toward and then away from us, coming so close that at times I could throw the can of Diet Coke I’m sipping into Syria, or the part of Syri
a that is now called the Islamic State. At other times the fence recedes into the distance, nearly disappearing, only to sweep back toward our car, as if it might run us off the road. Less than an hour from the crossing, the border juts north, then hooks back down, following the Dicle Nehri, a tributary of the Tigris, which—along with its cousin, the Euphrates—makes the vast desert south of us something more: Mesopotamia, the “Land of the Two Rivers.”
We are driving into Silopi now. Buildings crowd the choked roads, their half dozen or so floors stacking unevenly upward, leaning over us, as if their balconies wished to clasp onto one another in friendship, like the Damascene homes in Abed’s poem. Our papers are in order, but the authorities’ byzantine shuffling of permissions and visas will take hours, so Matt and I pull over to grab a late lunch, knowing it’ll be some time before we eat again. We park the Peugeot with two of its four tires on the sidewalk, which is the practice here, and wander into a kebab shop that looks like any other: a window display like a butcher’s, space heaters buzzing inside, a lazy cluster of men sipping tea. The tiled floor gleams while flies orbit the meat. We place our order and sit. Before cooking our meal, the owner, a man who looks as if he developed his frown, stubble, and thick mustache in utero, makes a point of turning up the volume on two televisions. Their songs drown one another out, but the programming he plays for us needs no translation: a choir of women stand in a green, flowered field. They wear a traditional pastiche of brightly colored gowns: yellow, pink, blue. Behind them, men dressed like Bible salesmen, in black slacks and white shirts, play their instruments: hand drums, lutes, wooden guitars. The song has a swinging cadence, one that’s easy to march to. Snaps of fighting cut in and out of the frame: a heavy machine gun on the back of a pickup truck chugs out egg-shaped bullets, men charge through a field that isn’t grass but dirt, women march with Kalashnikov rifles slung tightly across their chests the way Western women might wear a BabyBjörn. There’s only one word I understand in the lyrics, repeated in a loop that gains force with repetition: Kobane! Kobane! Kobane!
While I watch the televisions, Matt makes two calls. The first is to a Turkish contact who will drop us at the border and then look after the Peugeot while we are in Iraq. The second is to Dara, a Kurdish alumnus of the American University whom Matt hasn’t seen in six years. Once in Iraq, Dara will give us a ride to Erbil. With the afternoon listing toward evening, we finish our kebabs, pay the bill, and wander outside. The armored cars of the Turkish gendarmes flit back and forth, mingling with and at times cleaving through the traffic. Although the Kurdish motorists yield to them, behind each windshield there is a scowl, one that’s familiar to me. When driving in a column of armored Humvees in Iraq, I saw the same look from the motorists who yielded the road to us.
Matt’s Turkish contact soon arrives and drops us at the border. As our Peugeot speeds away, I wonder if we’ll ever see it again. Matt seems unconcerned. It’s a confidence that comes from having been stranded before, as a researcher in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a journalist in North Africa, as a student in Lebanon. His optimism is not rooted in the certainty that nothing will happen but rather that if something does happen, he’ll be able to figure out what to do next.
“I guess we should find somebody to show our passports to,” he says, as we amble along the highway’s shoulder. Parked next to us, and extending for hundreds of yards, is a line of cargo-laden sixteen-wheelers. None are moving. Many appear abandoned by their drivers. This seems to be a trip that is not easily completed. I’d assumed Matt had made this overland crossing before, but I realize now that he hasn’t. So I tell myself we’ll figure it out as we go, attempting to mimic his optimism.
A van pulls up next to us. The driver, a teenage boy with a shaggy bowl cut and threadbare sports coat, can’t stop looking at Matt, seemingly entranced by this six-foot-plus, blond-haired, blue-eyed giant who has appeared at his border crossing. Circling toward us from the passenger door comes an older man. His features—a ridged nose, jutting lips, and fleshy cheeks that sag—are of an imprecise composition, like the work of an unskilled sculptor, and when looking at him I can see the ugliness that the boy will grow into and I realize the two are of some relation. The older man reaches for my bag and I jerk away. His mouth cinches into a frown, which he overcomes. “Forty lira,” he says, raising his smile like a flag of truce and pointing into Iraq.
Matt and I look up toward the border crossing, a bridge that spans a flooded marsh. Mixing among the zigzag of checkpoints and obstacles are a couple of vans similar to this man’s, and it seems he will facilitate our passage with the customs authorities. And the amount he demands is nothing.
“Forty lira?” asks Matt, expecting to pay more.
The man and the boy exchange a quick look. They are partners just as Matt and I are, even down to their matching sports coats, the chauffer’s uniform they seem to have agreed upon.
“Thirty-five,” the man answers.
Matt laughs, offering his hand.
The man takes our bags and loads them into the back. Then he opens the van’s sliding door, sweeping his hand inside with a flourish. As we pull into a queue of trucks, cars, and other vans, he offers us bottled water and breath mints. He turns on the heater, holding his thick, stubby fingers in front of the vent while glancing back at us to make sure we are neither too warm nor too cold. He seems quite intent on our comfort, and while we wait for an audience with the Turkish and then the Iraqi gendarmes, the man and the boy sit rigidly in the front seat and vacantly stare through the windshield. One will say something, a minute or two will pass, then the other will reply. In this way they extend what would be an hour’s conversation into a day’s worth. The intimacy of slow conversation is one I know well, and the cadence of their exchange reminds me of days spent on patrol in a Humvee with Ames, or Pratt, or any number of Marines who were my friends. This crossing into Iraq marks ten years to the day since Dan Malcom was killed on the high-rise. It is also my first time back since the war. Yet when I mentioned this anniversary to Matt, it rings with hollow significance for me, perhaps because not enough time has passed. If I were to return twenty or thirty years later, maybe the experience would feel equal to the catharsis of D-Day veterans who’ve walked the placid beaches of Normandy or Vietnam veterans who have wandered the lush, verdant jungle north of Saigon. Returning to the country where I fought my war, while that country is still at war, offers no closure. It does not end an experience, but only adds to it. And if what I am doing is additive, then my war is not over.
We navigate the first Turkish checkpoint with little trouble. The older man simply takes our passports, visas, and residency cards and disappears into a nondescript trailer on the bridge’s near side for the better part of an hour. When he returns, the gendarme who accompanies him knocks on the van’s side window, waking both the boy, who has fallen asleep behind the wheel, and Matt and me in the back seat. The gendarme glances at us, then our passports, and waves us all across. We pass a candy-striped gate, weave through some Jersey barriers, and then, just ahead, I catch a glimpse of a tricolor banner—red, white, and green, with a yellow sun affixed to the center: the Kurdish flag. I search for an Iraqi one, but it seems they’ve stopped flying it. The late-afternoon sun is tangerine, and we’re running out of light.
The van jars to a stop in no-man’s-land.
The old man hops out, jogging across the road to a three-story building. “Where is he going?” I ask, mindful of the late hour. Before Matt can take a guess, the boy slides open the side door, motioning for us to get out. We reach for our bags, but he shakes his head as if that won’t be necessary. Then, as the two of us stand on the street, the boy pulls a screwdriver from his pocket and gets to work. He levers open the van’s plastic side-paneling, he yanks up every seat cushion, he unscrews the coverings along the wheel wells. Within three minutes, the boy has stripped open a dozen compartments. Just as Matt and I begin to understand what he’s doing, his partner sh
uffles out of the building. Shopping bags filled with cartons of duty-free cigarettes hang from the older man’s arms. He’s even crammed a carton into each of the pockets of his sports coat. When he gets back to the van he fumbles half of the smokes over to the boy like a relay racer with too many batons, and the pair stuff their smuggled cargo into the many pried-open compartments. For the places where an entire carton won’t fit, they tear open the boxes, tucking the packs of smokes between seat cushions, under floor mats, even pushing a pack into the foam padding of each headrest. With the van fully laden, the pair smile a weak apology at both Matt and me and offer us our now lumpy seats inside the van. The thirty-five lira we thought we paid to cross the border were really paid so we could serve as mules for this cigarette-smuggling operation.
When the sun finally sets, the older man is in another office with the Iraqi authorities, making his case for passage based on the strength of our US passports. By the time we cross the border, the Kurdish flag is invisible in the darkness. The boy parks the van on the road’s dirt shoulder. To our south the stars peek above the jagged Qandil Mountains, a hint of light above the dark earth. On the other side of this range is Erbil. The older man circles around the van’s front, helping Matt and me unload our bags. His courtesy arises not from his belief in servicing us as clients, but in his guilt at having roped us into his smuggling scheme. But what resentment can I feel toward someone who does what he must to survive?
So when the old man offers me a pack of smokes, I smile and take it. Little has changed here, and lighting the cigarette, I count out the ten years since I’d last had one in Iraq.
* * *
Places and Names Page 10