The Untold Quiet of Kurdish Iraq
A serpentine river gently cuts through a mountain plateau. Shepherds tend their flock while young men hunt wild game, fish along ancient tributaries or kayak over rapids. This pleated landscape of rolling hills and jagged mountains is most verdant in spring, when the junipers are full, the grass a vibrant emerald. These quiet moments and […]Kenneth R. Rosen writes for The New York Times:
A serpentine river gently cuts through a mountain plateau. Shepherds tend their flock while young men hunt wild game, fish along ancient tributaries or kayak over rapids. This pleated landscape of rolling hills and jagged mountains is most verdant in spring, when the junipers are full, the grass a vibrant emerald.
These quiet moments and images are not often associated with Iraq. But the Kurdish region, in the country’s northern reaches, is home to such reprieves. Beyond the oil fields of Taqtaq and Kirkuk, far east of Mosul and many miles north of Baghdad, the semiautonomous region often feels timeless and progressive, restive and at peace.
What the Vietnamese photographer Lam Duc-Hien first imagined of Iraq before traveling there on assignment were the usual media tropes from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — tanks and violence, surges and refugees. Mr. Lam, who was working for nongovernment organizations and a French newspaper, said he had never heard of the Kurdish people, who by then were fleeing Saddam’s oppressive and violent Baath Party. But after he settled down in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, a region he documented for more than two decades, he found the country to be vastly different than what he had expected.
