TRAVELS IN ARABIA 245A few years before my bumper car send-off from Damascus, I made my
first trip to Sulaymaniyah (“Suly”) in the mountainous Kurdish region of
northern Iraq. In the fall of 2003, I was summoned to meet with the prime
minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Barham Salih,
at his parents’ home in Suly. Until recently, Salih was affiliated with the
Suly-based Patriotic Union of Kurdistan political party. At the time of this
writing, Barham Salih is president of Iraq. Dr. Salih, a dignified and glob-
ally respected Iraqi Kurd leader, wished to discuss a project that he hoped
would help to bring Suly into the twenty-first century. Babylon Inc. had
been operational in Iraq for a few months, and we were ready to help with
his visionary project. There were no commercial flights connecting Iraq to
the rest of the world in October 2003, so I embarked upon a difficult and
at times dangerous journey to Kurdistan’s ancient intellectual center.
I flew from Istanbul to Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, where in my
hotel restaurant I attended a lively and colorful Kurdish wedding recep-
tion for two young newlyweds I had never met before. Copious amounts
of red wine helped to erode the cultural and language barriers. At least
for me. The next morning, I found a taxi that would take me from Diyar-
bakir to the Ibrahim Khalil border crossing, near Zakho, Iraq. The taxi
broke down halfway between Diyarbakir and the Iraqi border, and the
hours-long delay resulted in my having to make a dangerous, high-speed
nighttime sprint through Mosul later that night. (“Trouble with taxis” is
a recurring theme in the Middle East and would be a fitting title for this
chapter.) I made the risky overland trip to Suly because it was key to landing
an important initial contract for Babylon Inc. Thanks to the broken-down
Turkish taxi, I almost didn’t make it.
The plan was for Prime Minister Salih’s highly trained bodyguards to
meet me on the Iraqi side of the border for the onward trek to Suly. Time
was of the essence, since the bodyguards wanted to make it through the dan-
gerous city of Mosul before dark. Five of their colleagues had been killed by
extremists one year earlier during an assassination attempt on Salih, so their
security concerns were legitimate. I was instructed to arrive at the border by
noon. Unfortunately, because my taxi broke down in the middle of nowhere,
my arrival at the border crossing was delayed by a few hours.
At the border crossing, Turkish border police detained and interro-
gated me for two hours. Even though my project was in no way detri-