The backstory: When I nearly got deported from Kurdistan

I had never quite been drawn to the idea of reporting on the rest of the world. After all, India is so large and diverse, it’s enough to make you feel like a foreign correspondent within the country. And then, unexpectedly, while I was spending time in a village in Uttar Pradesh to observe life and politics ahead of the state elections, a distant war began to tug at my consciousness.

Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, was getting “liberated”, the news reports said. In 2014, fighters loyal to the former Al-Qaeda leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had swept out of the desert of neighbouring Syria into the city, causing the Iraqi army to flee. From a mosque in Mosul, Baghdadi had announced the formation of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS. In October 2016, a coalition of 68 countries led by the US launched an offensive with Iraqi government forces to retake the city. By the end of January, they were in control of the eastern side of Mosul. The news reports, overwhelmingly from western news outlets, often by reporters embedded with the military units of their countries, betrayed a triumphant note, while at the same time underlining the grave danger faced by a million people who were still locked inside their homes, surrounded by snipers and artillery fire.

I decided to go see the war for myself. The nearest airport to Mosul was Erbil in the Kurdistan region, which was a semi-autonomous part of Iraq, home to the Kurds, an ethnic group distinct from the majority Arabs. Kurdistan issued its own visas but it did not have an embassy in India. I emailed its offices in Washington DC where the staff asked me to contact the nearest representation – Australia. The Australia office did not respond to my email. On phone, a member of the staff asked me to go to the nearest Iraqi embassy. Now that was simple. The Iraqi embassy in South Delhi took my letter stating I wanted to travel to Erbil and Mosul to report on the war. And then I did not hear from them for a month.

By late March, Adityanath had become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. Within the first week, his government had announced a war of the meat industry. Preoccupied with the news, I had stopped following up on the visa and given up hope of travelling to Mosul. Out of the blue, I got a call: the government of Iraq had granted me the visa.

I scrambled to make plans for the trip. I didn’t know anyone there. I had never used a “fixer” – a local person, often a journalist, available to be hired as a guide and translator. Gathering some numbers, I made calls. “What story do you want to do?” one fixer asked. “I can arrange a story on children returning to school. It would make a nice feature.” At the end, I was lucky to find someone who understood that I had no stories in mind, definitely not “nice features”. But I was so underconfident of reporting from a region that I knew nothing about that I told my editor that I was not going to file any dispatches and this trip was just an educational tour on my personal expense.

‘We cannot let you enter’

I landed in Erbil in the last week of April. It was a small airport – not larger than the airports of many state capitals in India. The queue at the immigration counter was short. The exchange at the counter was even shorter. “You have come on the wrong visa,” said the officer curtly, taking a look at my passport. “This is Kurdistan, not Iraq.”

The next four hours were nerve-wracking. I tried explaining to the officers that I had contacted the Kurdish authorities first and they had directed me to the Iraqi embassy, and that the Iraqi officials knew I was flying to Erbil. “We cannot let you enter,” said the officer, in halting English. “Kurdistan is not part of Iraq.”

I called Iraq’s consul general in Delhi, who was outraged when I told him what the Kurdish immigration officers had said. He insisted Kurdistan was part of Iraq but had nothing more to offer.

Meanwhile, the Kurdish officer was threatening to put me back on the next flight. “I cannot help you, darling,” he said. Despite my precarious position, I shot back: “Do not call me darling.”

I survived deportation to find out that it was not uncommon for local people to call strangers darling. What had saved me from an ignominious return was the small world of the Kurdistan elite. I had been in correspondence with an academic who turned out to be part of an influential family. When he heard about my immigration troubles, he called the foreign ministry and got me the number of the Indian consul general stationed in Erbil, who vouched for my credentials. The Kurdish officers finally let me through.

The war in Mosul

Mosul was a 100-km drive from Erbil. All this while, I had imagined it as a place unlike anything I had seen – but it turned out to be like any large Indian city, only war-ravaged, with pockmarks on almost every building, craters on the roads, and rubble in every neighbourhood. In the middle-class localities on the eastern side of the city, where the war had ended, were homes with roses in the front garden and a familiar aesthetic in the living rooms – velvet sofas, floral carpets and a wooden, glass-covered showcase. The women, much like in India, would peek behind the curtains before entering the room with tea cups and taking charge of the conversation. Even the social fabric had the same fragility that diverse languages, ethnicities, religious and sectarian affiliations produces. For instance, a Sunni Arab shared language with a Shia Arab but could end up feeling more comfortable with a Sunni Kurd. And there were Yazidis, Shabaks and Syriac Christians.

As a city predominantly home to the Sunni Arabs, Mosul had felt neglected under the Shia Arab-led government of Baghdad. That’s why some of its residents had welcomed the Sunni fighters of the Islamic State in 2014, only to discover how brutal they were. Trapped in their own city – the Islamic State would not let people leave – the Mosalwis, as the residents called themselves, said they had looked forward to the Iraqi government’s offensive. What they had not expected was that their homes would be bombed. On the western side of the city, near the frontline, those fleeing the war told me over and over again: Mosul is not getting liberated, it is getting destroyed.

But this anger against the coalition airstrikes was not reflected in the western press. Barring one airstrike that had killed 100 people, there was barely any coverage of the daily bombardement to which the people of Mosul were being subjected. The reports tended to singularly emphasise the brutality of the ISIS fighters who were shooting at fleeing people.

Now, all these months later, analysis by the Associated Press shows that of the 9,000 residents killed in the war, 3,200 died in coalition strikes. The coalition, however, acknowledges just 326 of those deaths. In April, the month I had travelled to Mosul, coalition strikes had killed more people than the Islamic State fighters.

The other conflict

The war against the Islamic State had united Baghdad and Erbil. But less than two months after Iraq had retaken Mosul, Kurdistan held a referendum: 92% voters backed independence. However, the results backfired – Iraq reasserted its authority and sent troops into the territories occupied by the Kurds. It even stopped international airlines from flying to Erbil. Last week, the Kurdistan government sent an emissary to Baghdad to plead for the airport to be reopened.

Over the four days that I drove from Erbil to Mosul, every morning and evening, I got a taste of the Arab-Kurd conflict. Fifty-five km from Erbil was the de-facto Iraq-Kurdistan border. At the half dozen security checkposts, my guide calibrated his response, depending on whether we were talking to Kurds or Arabs. On the Kurd side, he spoke in Kurdish and emphasised his Kurdish identity. On the Iraqi side, he spoke Arabic and told everyone he grew up in Baghdad. Fortunately, for me, both sides loved Bollywood films.

A Kurdish military officer, while signing my daily pass, told me he was a big fan of Amitabh Bachchan. An Iraqi officer was more direct: “This permission would normally take four days. But I am granting it to you on the spot because of Shah Rukh Khan.” Even closer to the frontline, where things were considerably more tense, soldiers broke into a smile seeing a visitor from “Al-Hind” and almost always brought up an Indian actor. Stunningly, a greying soldier remembered Shammi Kapoor. But it was Akshay Kumar who seems to have had the biggest impact: just outside Mosul, I picked up this packet of chips.

Read Supriya Sharma’s reportage from Mosul here, here, here, here and here.