MIDDLE EAST:Relaxed locals in Dohuk, northern Iraq, are stoic in the face of a possible Turkish attack, writes Michael Jansen
A sabbatical calm lays on the rolling fields covered with the golden stubble of harvested wheat. Cows and goats graze along the roadside.
Shepherds wearing baggy trousers bound with cummerbunds and tight jackets watch from the shadows of rocky outcrops or stunted trees. We pass a few cars and fewer lorries, most of them massive vehicles with Turkish plates carrying supplies for Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara has imposed a go slow at the harbour bridge on the nearby border where a large proportion of this region's supplies enter the region. Normally, even on a Friday, there would be a steady stream of heavy lorries on the road between Irbil and Dohuk.
Kurdish troops and police manning checkpoints glance at our passports, hand them back and wave us on with a smile.
There are no soldiers and no troop carriers, no sign that the Iraqi Kurds are expecting an incursion, an invasion or air strikes from across the border.
The people we meet during our meandering journey through Yezidi villages between Irbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, and Dohuk are not even listening to radio news to catch the latest bulletins on the meetings between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and senior Turkish officials in Ankara. They do not know she is telling Turkish officials that the US, Turkey and Iraq will counter any cross-border attacks mounted by Turkish Kurdish rebels of the Workers Party (PKK). Raids by PKK rebels have killed 47 people in Turkey since September 29th, including 35 soldiers. Some 35,000 people have died since the PKK launched its off-and-on campaign in 1984.
After weeks of rising tension - attracting an influx of journalists - Ankara tried to calm the situation on Thursday by saying that any military action would be directed against the PKK and not the people and fragile infrastructure of the country.
Perhaps in response to a softer tone from Ankara, the region's prime minister Nechirvan Barzani issued a statement yesterday saying there is "no place in the modern civilised world" for the attacks carried out by the PKK. His words amount to the harshest directed against the PKK by a senior Iraqi Kurdish figure since the crisis erupted in September. Initially the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) was noncommittal, causing Ankara to accuse it of being pro-PKK. But once the KRG saw that Turkey was determined to stamp out PKK violence, Iraqi Kurdish officials began to see that something had to be done to avoid military action.
While saying what the Turks want to hear, the Iraqi Kurds are also not leaving things to chance. The region's military are being mobilised to defend the region against any incursion by the Turkish army. But since the Dohuk mountains are gentle slopes when compared with the sheer-sided rock peaks of the Qandil range along the Iranian border where PKK guerrillas are now based, the Iraqi Kurds are not expecting an invasion of distant Dohuk by ground troops.
We arrive in Dohuk just as the weekly prayers finish and men are streaming out of the mosques into the empty streets. Shops are shuttered and there is no traffic in a city where the streets are normally jammed.
Dohuk is a rapidly modernising city stretching along the foot of the brown mountain range. Most of its million inhabitants are Muslim Kurds although there are Arabs living peacefully among them. The air of well-being and peace in Dohuk reveals the relaxed attitude the populace has adopted about what everyone calls "the situation" with Turkey. During the late 1980s, the Turkish army reached Dohuk during an incursion into Iraq. Today, the vanguard of any Turkish force would reach Dohuk, now as then an open city, within a couple of hours along wide and well-surfaced roads.
When we ask Kurds we meet whether they are afraid, they shrug.
"We have been at war for decades, why worry?"