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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Divided by similarities in Kurdistan

The people of Iraqi Kurdistan show us that just as much divides Kurdish people as unites them. Trying to decipher the goings on in the Kurdish regions spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran is confusing battle of acronyms: PKK, PYG, PUKD, YPG, KNC etc etc. Each region has its own jumbles of letters representing political parties and military groups, some of whose interests cross borders to link with other groups of capital letters. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they…

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A Syrian in Kurdistan

A brief encounter with a Syrian refugee in Kurdistan

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