![]() To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Lawin Mohammad collects trails in the mountains of Kurdistan. He has met scores of shepherds on their daily wanderings. ![]() He confers with beekeepers on high passes. He follows aging pesh merga on their former patrols and waylays Christian and Yazidi pilgrims. When he is stopped on the highway at a military checkpoint, staring into the aviators of a heavily armed 20-year-old, he will ask the soldier whether he ever walks to the next village over. He makes inquiries among Syrians like himself who a decade ago took the dangerous crossing from Rojava into the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, in northern Iraq, at the start of the civil war. I have seen him work over at least one furtive treasure hunter. He does not know how many trails he has found in this way - probably hundreds. IQIYI is one of the most popular Chinese online video platforms, and undoubtedly, it’s the best place where you can watch Chinese movies online with English subtitles. They do not always hold their shape for long. When you watch a video, you can turn off the subtitle and switch it to other languages like Korean, Thai, Spanish, Indonesian, Arabic, etc. Sometimes acts of nature - floods, drought, fire - close part of one path or open another likewise acts of war, fences, I.E.D.s and tahini factories. In extreme terrain, trails may be augmented by raised berms, bridges and tunnels blasted from mountain depths, but such interventions are still rare in rural Kurdistan. Most walkers he meets in the Zagros follow the unpaved routes the mountains offer up to them, trusting in the collective genius of a thousand wanderers, no two of whom press exactly the same steps, but out of whose millions of foot-size contentions a mean is worn to smoothness. Through their collective walking, a path of maximal desire is formed. Mohammad is a founding partner in a project to build a 150-mile-long hiking trail through the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq, or K.R.I., from the Nineveh Plains to the snow-covered mountains that border Iran. The route approaches zones recently liberated from ISIS and borderlands where Turkey is fighting an asymmetric war against guerrilla fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. Despite these complications, if all goes well, the tentatively named Zagros Mountain Trail will stitch into a single two-week-long route fragments of walks following old canals and seasonal grazing paths, passing Byzantine temples and Jewish shrines, all while navigating around some seven million unexploded land mines from the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars. Until recently, it would not have been possible for a group of hikers to walk across Iraqi Kurdistan, a region that has experienced a continuum of violent political crises almost without interruption for a century. ![]() They include a Kurdish rebellion in 1943 put down by British warplanes a revolution in 1961 revolts and government reprisals throughout the 1960s air attacks in 1974 that displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds and a series of genocidal Iraqi military campaigns and mass killings from 1980 to 1991.
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