A different view: How has the pandemic affected people and nature in Iraqi Kurdistan?

It was October 2020 before I returned to Iraqi Kurdistan. Businesses had re-opened, and travel into and around the Kurdistan region was restarting. I flew back to Erbil to live, but also to administer a small grant from our funders, assessing the impact of the pandemic on the more remote sections of trail. The work would take the form of a roadtrip with Laween and photojournalist Emily Garthwaite.

We planned to go from west to east, broadly following the corridor of the trail, and at key points we’d reconnect with local guides that we’d been working with to design the route. The first stop was Akre, a town built into the fold at the foot of a mountain, where houses climb haphazardly upwards above the central bazaar, running out of steam halfway to the top. It was here I reunited with shepherd Sadiq Zebari who’d spent weeks guiding us on previous visits.

The most common feedback we received was how successfully the landscape and wildlife had regenerated. “I’ve never seen it like this in my lifetime,” said Jawad.

Sadiq told us that almost everyone he knew had caught COVID-19. His own experience was brief, but brutal. “The fever was so bad,” he said, “that every night I rode my motorcycle to a spring at midnight and jumped in fully clothed.” The spring was known locally to cure illnesses, and he was sure that this is why it only took him one week to recover.

Northeast, in the lush Barzan valley, our friend and guide there, Anwar Safti said that the majority of his village of 200 families got sick. “I had pain from my head to my feet,” he said. But no-one died, he told us.

Farther along, where the spine of the vast Bradost Mountain curves inwards and squeezes the Great Zab river into ever-narrower gorges, we walked with colleague Jawad Qamaryan from his village to a high ridge. “Ah, the virus from China,” he said, after some initial confusion. “No-one here has had it.”

No-one? I asked.

“I heard some bad stories from Erbil, but here it didn’t bother us,” Jawad said. We found out the schools had closed, but it seemed little else changed. “Villages like ours are clever. We keep everything local anyway. If I can’t go to Erbil, no problem. Who wants to go to Erbil anyway?”

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Jawad’s life seemed to have been affected less than most. Surrounded by mountains and fertile land and living in a small, tight-knit community, his family could spend the days outside, working and walking the land, and socializing back in the village. Even so, the virus altered reality in the form of wider travel restrictions and school closures, but for others, here and elsewhere, the impact on everyday life was far more dramatic.

Maybe one of the few universal truths that we can take from this is that everything has changed. The second, perhaps, is that our existence is fragile. A third that when we stop moving, the earth beneath us heals.

The road trip was also a reminder of our responsibilities as travelers. I was also acutely aware that while it was remarkable to be moving again, we had to be certain we wouldn’t be risking transmission of the virus to those that we met.

The most common feedback we received was how successfully the landscape and wildlife had regenerated. “I’ve never seen it like this in my lifetime,” said Jawad. Just around his village, he noticed a visible increase in the population of deer and bird species that have been increasingly threatened by poaching. “The pandemic meant hunters mostly stayed at home,” said Jawad.

Additionally, shepherds returning from the hills said they’d seen wolves in the mountains and otters in the rivers. The same was true for the forests of Kurdistan which have shrunk dramatically in the last 20 years, mainly due to widespread illegal logging. The oak trees had a reprieve this year, and this habitat supports healthier populations of wildlife, including the Persian leopard. The question now, of course, is whether the positive gains can be maintained.

For our friend Anwar, the pandemic made him rethink his own commitments. He previously devoted much of his time to his work in the armed forced, but told us that he now wanted more variety of experiences. He’s signed up for English lessons and started attending a local college course in IT. “If I learn some new skills, I’ll have even more options,” he said.

It will likely be years before we know why there seem to be so many inconsistencies in how and where this virus spreads. Cities in the Kurdistan region suffered terribly. Laween witnessed that first-hand in Erbil.

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But in the villages, it was more unpredictable. As we found, some saw widespread infection, others barely any at all. In the city of Choman, by the Iranian border, we heard the death rate in hospitals was as high as 10-15 per cent, but just 10 miles to the west, no deaths were reported. There was no discernible difference between the actions of the local population in each place.

The road trip was also a reminder of our responsibilities as travelers. I was also acutely aware that while it was remarkable to be moving again, we had to be certain we wouldn’t be risking transmission of the virus to those that we met.

Our team was tested every two days, and we wore masks and socially-distanced at all times. Our local colleagues did the same, and we did not stay in people’s homes as we used to. The responsibilities and privileges of travelers have finally come into sharper focus in the last year, and the pandemic accentuates the questions that we all must ask ourselves when we move: Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve? Who is really benefiting?

I don’t suppose any of us spent the last year the way we’d planned, wherever we found ourselves. All I know is I was acutely aware how lucky I was. Surrounded by loved ones in the UK, I was healthy, and, for a while—dare I say it—even enjoying the lack of movement.

I was reminded of the great guru of stillness Pico Iyer, who said that 90 per cent of his life was spent at a desk, writing about the 10 cent when he was more active. But while thinking about traveling sometimes felt improper at times, when my mind did wander, it was not to new places; it was to those mountains I’d left behind.

Anwar likens the past year to climbing a mountain in winter. “The snow is deep and every step is miserable,” he told us. “But we also know that in five, or 10, or 20 hours, we will be done. We will be finished, and after that we can go home. Things always change. It’s bad, but it will get better. We must trust in that.”

And right now, I really do take solace in the words.