Back to Kurdistan

I startled quite a few people rushing around Beirut yesterday to organize my return to Iraqi Kurdistan. In a tense city under threat from a bombing campaign, a hasty departure by an American -- an American journalist, no less -- smacks of a rat leaving a sinking ship. People think I must know something bad is about to happen.

The truth is I had been hoping to spend most of June in Lebanon, enjoying the best part of the summer season and repairing relationships -- strained by travel and war and politics -- with Lebanese friends. But there's not a whole lot of healing going on in Beirut these days. I've never felt so much apprehension or seen so much extra security. I was searched four times on my flight out of Rafik Hariri airport, which was practically empty.

Not that Kurdistan is going to be a cakewalk. It's still the safest part of Iraq, but chaos is creeping in. Last month, a big car bomb went off right next to the Interior Ministry -- the first major terrorist attack in almost two years, and a sign that Islamic militancy may be making a comeback. And now the Turkish army is massing at the northern border, threatening to stage operations inside Iraq against the PKK, a radical Kurdish separatist group that has camps high up in the mountains. No one here in Erbil seems worried about this -- the border is at least a two hour drive, and no one expects the Turks to do much. But it's really not a good sign of things to come. The security vacuum in in Arab Iraq is starting to suck in the whole neighborhood.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Erbil