By Carl Caldwell
Professor at American University of Iraq
SULAIMANI, IRAQ — My wife, Carolyn, and I accepted the offer of teaching positions at the American University of Iraq — Sulaimani (AUI-S) in late January 2009.
A common comment and question was, “It’s dangerous over there. Are you crazy?”
Well, in fact, the question of safety was the first question I put to John Agresto, the person with whom I was talking about the teaching positions and who helped to found the university two years before.
He satisfied me that the Kurdish area of northern Iraq is very different from the area around Baghdad. In exchanging e-mail messages with AUI-S faculty at the time of this conversation, I learned that Agresto’s assessment was indeed accurate. With the issue of safety now resolved, we then we on to talk about teaching assignments.
Avoiding chaos
Since coming here in September, 2009, to begin our teaching appointments, we have found that we can move about the city of Sulaimani, population of 800,000 people, with ease.
While we can use the drivers and vehicles that the university has made available to us, we can pick up taxis at curbside, and we can also walk. Other faculty and staff of AUI-S do the same. Our greatest danger, actually, is being hit by a car, the drivers of which appear to assume that it’s our job to get out of their way, not their job to slow down for a moment to let us cross the street.
We walk along busy streets. We walk through quiet neighborhoods. We have never felt threatened.
How can this area be happening in the same country as Baghdad and yet be so different from Baghdad in terms of security?
The answer is that the Kurdish area of Iraq has been essentially self-governing since the early 1990s, a full decade before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Because it was self-governing, it was able to avoid the chaos of the early months after Saddam’s fall when lots of foreign insurgents, bent on creating their own version of a post-Saddam Iraq, flooded into the country. Some, like the adherents of Al Qaeda in Iraq, wanted their version of a strict Islamist state like the one that the Taliban installed in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union withdrew.
Others wanted to keep the Sunni leadership in power over Shi’ites. Yet others wanted a conservative Shi’ite state with influence from Iran.
Regardless of the end goal, the tactics were the same: create enough havoc to keep religious and ethnic differences inflamed and to cause people to question the ability of any government to carry out the most basic of functions: maintaining public safety.
Security checkpoints
But as this chaos was unfolding in the south, the Kurds already had in place the means to keep foreign insurgents out: a well-protected border. Their practiced militia, the peshmerga, was already checking all of the crossing points through which insurgents might enter the Kurdish area. And if an insurgent were able get in, the numerous check points along both major and minor roads would likely catch the person.
While there are no checkpoints within the city of Sulaimani, any time one leaves the city there are numerous checkpoints along both major and minor roads.
As we have traveled outside the city in the care of local drivers, we have experienced moments when, as the driver identifies himself and says we are Americans who teach at AUIS, the guard will simply wave us through.
On occasion a guard will ask to see our passports. We know of one member of the AUI-S staff who was being driven to the city of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and who forgot his passport. After being on the road for two hours, he was refused entry into Erbil and the driver had to turn around and come back to Sulaimani. So nationality matters; passports matter.
The net effect of these efforts is that the Kurds have managed to create a region and a city in which traffic flows smoothly, trade is active, new buildings are going up all over the place and infrastructure elements like water pipes and electrical lines are being built daily.
It is a vibrant, safe city to live in, and it is an honor to be here as The American University of Iraq —Sulaimani moves beyond its experimental stage to become an established part of the educational system for this region and indeed for all of Iraq.
If you wish to read more about our experiences in Iraq, feel free to check out this blog site: http://carlcarolyn.blogspot.com/. Or, if you’d rather just look at captioned pictures, you can find them at: http://picasaweb.google.com/averagerider3/LivingInIraq#. Feel free to write to either of us at: carl.caldwell@auis.org, or carolyn.caldwell@auis.org; we’d love to hear from friends.
