A South Dakotan in Iraq: Erbil residents gain 'boring' life
Posted: Sat Aug 10, 2013 6:04 pmOne month after United States and coalition forces left Iraq, I moved there to be a legal consultant at an airport.
I joked with my friends at the time, “When the going gets tough, they send in the lawyers.”
As I quickly learned once settled into Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq, in the northern part of the country about 100 miles from the Turkish border, that was a really stupid thing to say.
Where I lived, the U.S. and coalition forces had been gone for some time. They left a peaceful, prosperous and nascent democracy. They helped accomplish what President George W. Bush hoped to accomplish in all of Iraq.
To the south — and not much south of Erbil, about 60 miles away in Kirkuk and Mosul — and of course Baghdad, about 300 miles away, sectarian violence smoldered and the electricity was off most of the day.
So, imagine living in Mitchell where everything is hunkey-dory. But just down Interstate 90 in Sioux Falls, you could get killed or kidnapped on the way there, let alone get stuck in the crossfire of rival militias.
On Fridays, when Muslims go to mosque to pray, those were typically the days with the most bloodshed. Mosul and Kirkuk were not on my travel agenda.
In less than 10 years — some of the “old timers” say less than five years — Erbil, a city of just over a million people, went from a sleepy and dusty backwater to one of the Middle East’s fastest growing and most modern cities.
I drove on newly constructed modern freeways. I visited the restaurants at the Divan and the Rotana hotels, elegant facilities that have no peer in South Dakota. I could eat a pretty decent hamburger at one of the malls or had my pick of a number of outstanding Italian, Greek, German, Indian, Turkish and Kurdish restaurants. Sami Abdul-Rahman Park is Erbil’s version of New York’s Central Park — a grassy, green and tree-filled oasis in a sea of concrete and tan dust.
Ten story-plus buildings pop up on an almost daily basis. The city buzzes with a boomtown feel of prosperity, a “rules are for other people” attitude and lots of 20-somethings driving Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs, Land Rovers and GMC Suburbans that would make even a Prostrollo, Billion or Eide blush.
In some ways, however, Erbil was like Potemkin village — lots of glossy storefronts, electronic billboards and fashionably dressed youth — belying a city with little to no zoning, no storm sewers (yes, it does rain in the plains of Mesopotamia), electric lines strung willy-nilly across sidewalks and buildings that are crumbling.
A colleague and I had a running joke while out and about when we spotted a building. “Coming up or going down?” one of us would ask. For many buildings, they appeared to be both — they were under construction but now abandoned and left to the elements. We decided that planning ahead and having sufficient capital before constructing a building were lessons the Kurds had yet to learn.
What’s fueling all this growth? Actual fuel — oil and gas, or at least the promise of potential oil and gas. Kurdistan sits on a region that, by some estimates, has the fifth-largest known reserve of petrochemicals in the world.
Nearly everyone you meet — Kurd or expatriate — has some sort of get-rich scheme. Imagine Al Swearingen before he laid down his hotel, gambling and brothel empire in Deadwood. Multiply Al Swearingen about a thousand fold, and that’s Erbil with a gloss of dark suits and expensive cars. It’s the capital of Iraq’s reasonably Wild West.
Adding to the Wild West feel, safety is not job one in Erbil. It is somewhere in the low teens. Besides the aforementioned wires running across sidewalks at 6 feet or so into overloaded junction boxes from an electrician’s nightmare, driving was an adventure.
Kurds don’t like seat belts. I saw many young children standing up through the sunroofs of their parents’ cars. Turn signals were for wusses. Entire families would fill small pickup truck beds (that also doubled as a cattle hauler), standing up while dad or Uncle Ahmed zipped through traffic like a rally racer. Yielding the right-of-way was unknown. Cars pulling out into busy streets without first stopping and looking were the norm. And I even got used to people driving the wrong way down the road, even busy streets.
It was like playing the Kurdish version of Grand Theft Auto, except the goal was to NOT hit others or be hit.
Plus, there is no insurance, and accidents play out like street theater, with every cab driver within 2 miles giving their opinion about what happened.
I had one fender bender while in Erbil. One Saturday afternoon, I was driving down 100 Meter Road, one of the city’s main ring roads, at the speed limit of about 45 miles per hour. Suddenly, my Nissan Xterra lurched forward. I pulled over, not knowing what to expect.
Two young Kurdish men dressed in T-shirts and jeans approached me. I figured they were going to be upset about running into the back of my vehicle. They had a BMW or some such nice sedan. Their front license plate holder laid on the hot street, a victim of their tailgating.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Yes, fine,” they answered in good English.
They were cool; no anger, and no agitation. We exchanged business cards in case we needed to follow up. Like that was going to happen.
Then one of the gents smiled, “See you at the next accident!”
That, I thought, summed up Kurdish driving. Why avoid an accident when you can welcome the next one?
My life in Erbil, in many ways, was not much different than my life in Harrisburg or your life. I got up, drove to work, worked, came home, went out to eat, talked to my family back in the U.S., then went to bed. Only to do it again the next day. That was much like my Kurdish colleagues’ lives.
Few demonstrations, no fear of being shot or bombed, just leading their lives.
That is the sort of “boring” life that the Kurds have craved for generations and now have. It is a sort of life that still escapes most of the rest of their Iraqi countrymen and women.
I joked with my friends at the time, “When the going gets tough, they send in the lawyers.”
As I quickly learned once settled into Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq, in the northern part of the country about 100 miles from the Turkish border, that was a really stupid thing to say.
Where I lived, the U.S. and coalition forces had been gone for some time. They left a peaceful, prosperous and nascent democracy. They helped accomplish what President George W. Bush hoped to accomplish in all of Iraq.
To the south — and not much south of Erbil, about 60 miles away in Kirkuk and Mosul — and of course Baghdad, about 300 miles away, sectarian violence smoldered and the electricity was off most of the day.
So, imagine living in Mitchell where everything is hunkey-dory. But just down Interstate 90 in Sioux Falls, you could get killed or kidnapped on the way there, let alone get stuck in the crossfire of rival militias.
On Fridays, when Muslims go to mosque to pray, those were typically the days with the most bloodshed. Mosul and Kirkuk were not on my travel agenda.
In less than 10 years — some of the “old timers” say less than five years — Erbil, a city of just over a million people, went from a sleepy and dusty backwater to one of the Middle East’s fastest growing and most modern cities.
I drove on newly constructed modern freeways. I visited the restaurants at the Divan and the Rotana hotels, elegant facilities that have no peer in South Dakota. I could eat a pretty decent hamburger at one of the malls or had my pick of a number of outstanding Italian, Greek, German, Indian, Turkish and Kurdish restaurants. Sami Abdul-Rahman Park is Erbil’s version of New York’s Central Park — a grassy, green and tree-filled oasis in a sea of concrete and tan dust.
Ten story-plus buildings pop up on an almost daily basis. The city buzzes with a boomtown feel of prosperity, a “rules are for other people” attitude and lots of 20-somethings driving Porsches, Mercedes, BMWs, Land Rovers and GMC Suburbans that would make even a Prostrollo, Billion or Eide blush.
In some ways, however, Erbil was like Potemkin village — lots of glossy storefronts, electronic billboards and fashionably dressed youth — belying a city with little to no zoning, no storm sewers (yes, it does rain in the plains of Mesopotamia), electric lines strung willy-nilly across sidewalks and buildings that are crumbling.
A colleague and I had a running joke while out and about when we spotted a building. “Coming up or going down?” one of us would ask. For many buildings, they appeared to be both — they were under construction but now abandoned and left to the elements. We decided that planning ahead and having sufficient capital before constructing a building were lessons the Kurds had yet to learn.
What’s fueling all this growth? Actual fuel — oil and gas, or at least the promise of potential oil and gas. Kurdistan sits on a region that, by some estimates, has the fifth-largest known reserve of petrochemicals in the world.
Nearly everyone you meet — Kurd or expatriate — has some sort of get-rich scheme. Imagine Al Swearingen before he laid down his hotel, gambling and brothel empire in Deadwood. Multiply Al Swearingen about a thousand fold, and that’s Erbil with a gloss of dark suits and expensive cars. It’s the capital of Iraq’s reasonably Wild West.
Adding to the Wild West feel, safety is not job one in Erbil. It is somewhere in the low teens. Besides the aforementioned wires running across sidewalks at 6 feet or so into overloaded junction boxes from an electrician’s nightmare, driving was an adventure.
Kurds don’t like seat belts. I saw many young children standing up through the sunroofs of their parents’ cars. Turn signals were for wusses. Entire families would fill small pickup truck beds (that also doubled as a cattle hauler), standing up while dad or Uncle Ahmed zipped through traffic like a rally racer. Yielding the right-of-way was unknown. Cars pulling out into busy streets without first stopping and looking were the norm. And I even got used to people driving the wrong way down the road, even busy streets.
It was like playing the Kurdish version of Grand Theft Auto, except the goal was to NOT hit others or be hit.
Plus, there is no insurance, and accidents play out like street theater, with every cab driver within 2 miles giving their opinion about what happened.
I had one fender bender while in Erbil. One Saturday afternoon, I was driving down 100 Meter Road, one of the city’s main ring roads, at the speed limit of about 45 miles per hour. Suddenly, my Nissan Xterra lurched forward. I pulled over, not knowing what to expect.
Two young Kurdish men dressed in T-shirts and jeans approached me. I figured they were going to be upset about running into the back of my vehicle. They had a BMW or some such nice sedan. Their front license plate holder laid on the hot street, a victim of their tailgating.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Yes, fine,” they answered in good English.
They were cool; no anger, and no agitation. We exchanged business cards in case we needed to follow up. Like that was going to happen.
Then one of the gents smiled, “See you at the next accident!”
That, I thought, summed up Kurdish driving. Why avoid an accident when you can welcome the next one?
My life in Erbil, in many ways, was not much different than my life in Harrisburg or your life. I got up, drove to work, worked, came home, went out to eat, talked to my family back in the U.S., then went to bed. Only to do it again the next day. That was much like my Kurdish colleagues’ lives.
Few demonstrations, no fear of being shot or bombed, just leading their lives.
That is the sort of “boring” life that the Kurds have craved for generations and now have. It is a sort of life that still escapes most of the rest of their Iraqi countrymen and women.