Syria and the confidence crisis

I’ll be honest and declare that this post isn’t really about travel, so you may well be asking yourself what it’s doing on a travel blog. I doubt if my answer will be entirely satisfactory but I think you deserve more than me excusing it by saying, “it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want”. If there is one link to travel it’s that having been twice to Syria in 2005 and 2006, I have many great memories of…

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Syria 2005 – a Kurdish welcome

I rarely need prompting to discuss political issues but when, on the streets of a dictatorship I am asked, “would you like to talk about politics”?, I may as well reply, “that’s why I am here”.  So it was that I encountered Havin, a Kurdish Zoroastrian, on the pavements of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. Naturally such hobbies are probably best not undertaken loudly in public as an extended stay at the invitation of the secret police would tend not to…

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