Refuge with Refugees

Dutch correspondent Thomas Erdbrink and I are driving around the mountains of northern Iraq with the help of this decorative scroll wall map.

There are so many scars from so many wars in Iraq, that sometimes when you go looking for one conflict you find another.

My colleague Thomas and I left the border crossing with Turkey Wednesday afternoon in search of the PKK -- Kurdish rebels at war with Turkey hiding out in the highlands of northern Iraq. But sunset comes early in the mountains in autumn, and looking for guerillas isn't easily done after dark. So we stopped in a small village with an illuminated cross to see if we could sleep in the church, or rent a room for the night.

That's how me met William and Mary, Assyrian Christian refugees from Baghdad. William was chopping wood behind the locked and empty church, and almost immediately invited us to his own home. Oriental hospitality and country kindness being in full force, he would hear nothing of accepting money for room and board.

Over dinner and tea, he and his wife Mary told us the of their former lives in Baghdad. They had both been employees for Blackwater -- the security contractors that protect American officials in Iraq. She was a cook, he was a cleaner, and they lived in the predominately Christian Dora neighborhood, until like so many others they received death threats from local militias. They packed what belongings they could and returned to William's ancestral village -- Gededky -- this one here in the north.

Christians have lived in northern Iraq since Biblical times, though they also shared the sufferings of Saddam's genocidal camping against the Kurds. (The Iraqi army burned Gededky five times during the 1980's.) But with Christians now on the hit list of almost every militant group in Arab Iraq, many have been returning to the last safe region in the country.

William and Mary's lives look pretty perfect to an outsider inclined to rural nostalgia, or compared to the civil war in the south. They tend apple trees and grow garden vegetables and their two teenage daughters are together and safe in a beautiful valley with a swift stream and willow trees and a starry sky at night. But there's no Arabic-language school for the girls -- who haven't seen the inside of a classroom since the American invasion of 2003 -- and money is tight, since there's not much paying-work for William, who lost most of his sight from wounds sustained when he was a tank gunner in the Iran-Iraq war.

There's one more problem on their minds. Turkey is on the other side of the mountains behind Gededky, and from there the Turkish army has shelled the two towns on either side of the village. The Turks claim they are targeting the PKK. William and Mary say the Turks fire at random. Not only that but Gededky is surrounded by two Turkish army outposts, which were built in the 1990's with the cooperation of the former regime. If the Turkish army ever invades Iraq to flush PKK militants out of these hills, they will almost certainly pass through Gededky. "We fled from Baghdad, and now we are afraid of the Turks," said Mary. "Where should I go?What should I do?"

--Andrew Lee Butters/Gededky