Hasankeyf

They say humans have been living in the cave dwellings here for more than 10,000 years. Next year much of the area will be under water, part of the reservoir of a dam being built on the Tigris river.



The Byzantine-era citadel:

The remains of a 12th century bridge:

It was 105 degrees in the shade but inside caves I would guess 30-40 degrees cooler, so I had plenty of spots to sit and recover between bits of hiking.

Some caves are now used as lounging areas, others to feed livestock.

Local yokels gawk at me:

cash is king

In Istanbul, when you try to break a 100 lira note for a purchase of under 20 liras, they sigh heavily and send a loitering boy to another shop to get change. For reasons I have yet to understand, nobody has any problem breaking large bills here, as everyone seems to carry a thick wad of money. I put down a hundred note to pay for my kadayif with goat-milk ice cream this evening and the kadayifci produced first a wad of hundreds and fifties from his front right pocket, then fifties and twenties from front left, and then tens and fives from back right. Each wad looked about as thick as could be fit into a pocket.
Maybe people don't trust banks here. I will inquire at the tourist bureau, full of twenty- and thirty-somethings with nothing to do because no tourists are here (actually I saw my first obvious group today, Scandinavian women), where I have started hanging out whenever I also have nothing to do.

Every night, usually starting a bit after the evening call to prayer, comes the pop pop pop of fireworks thrown at police stations and armored vehicles and of tear gas canisters fired in retaliation. My second night in town, I was in a back seat of a packed minibus when pop pop pop sounded loud and close and then fireworks were exploding on the street few down the street, in front of a police station. The driver slammed on the breaks and standing passengers fell into a heap. He paused a moment then said, It's just fireworks, nothing will happen, and started forward again. Then two exploded very close to the bus and standing passengers tumbled forward again and seated passengers frantically jiggled windows closed. As the driver reversed toward a back street and alternative route, I caught sight of the insurgent, a skinny kid in skinny jeans and a black shirt. Then as we turned away he ran away and an armored police vehicle, nicked up as they all are from hurled rocks, passed us to give chase. I wonder what they do to fireworks to make them more grenade-like; I suppose there is a part of the firework that makes it fly before exploding that you can remove.

theories

The case of Turkey is a problem for the theories of Robert Putnam, Jurgen Habermas et al. who say that the key to everything good in democratic politics is for people to sit around chatting together. There are an incredible, unbelievable number of associations and unions and NGOs and school clubs, and much free time across the age spectrum is spent sitting in cafes or parks arguing. Twitter and Facebook are extremely popular (some charts here and here). And this vibrant public sphere is an echo chamber of bullshit.
The default logic is to look at a global event, figure how it can been seen by some stretch of the imagine to benefit one global power or another, and then leap to certainty that the event was entirely orchestrated by that global power. This is the logic used across the political spectrum, and lends itself to some remarkably creative theories, putting to shame even the contortions of a cleric explaining how nasty things are also God's will.
The only explanation for the rise/popularity/survival of one's political opponent, be it the AKP, HDP, ISIS, or Bashar al-Assad, is that they are a pawn of the US, UK, and/or Israel. Last night a friend explained to me how from the time of the first Gulf War the US had planned the rise of ISIS by stirring up Shiite opposition but then not deposing Saddam so he would crush them. The US then let sectarianism fester for a decade and then invaded knowing that a few years [and a few thousand US military deaths] down the road ISIS would emerge.
Nobody believes me that the US government is incompetent and bumbling about the world with little foresight, with political and corporate actors certainly taking advantage of opportunities presented to them but controlling very little. And when I point to ideological changes creating policies that are not consistent over time, e.g. the change from a realist Bush I administration that didn't depose Saddam to  a neo-con Bush II administration with dreams of democratization, I am met with knowing winks that whatever ideology outwardly appears to be, there is always a deep state within that state that remains constant and really orchestrates everything. (NB one need only go into a wikipedia wormhole clicking on links leading from the Susurluk scandal article to see that there have indeed long been crazy connections in Turkey between drug trafficking, pope shooting, cold war special forces training, Kurdish inter-tribal conflict.... which makes global conspiracy theories seem less fetched)
At any rate, the idea of disunity and inconsistency within world powers clashes unacceptably with the belief in their deity-like powers. Yesterday's friend and others, both Kurds and nationalist Turks, have told me with absolute confidence that if the US wanted to it could crush ISIS in a day, and so ISIS's survival must be part of an American plan. Of course there remains the problem of why the US would want ISIS to thrive. Sources vary in this regard: the US may want an excuse to properly conquer the oil-producing bits of Iraq and Syria. Or it wants to sell more arms to everyone in the region. Or it is afraid that a strong Turkey would undermine American regional influence and so is stirring up shit on Turkey's doorstep.

Certainly a skepticism toward official explanations is healthy and often lacking when you talk politics with Americans, but a public sphere that breeds an understanding of politics based fundamentally in conspiracy theories (substantiated only by retrospective rationalizations of how the powerful might conceivably have wanted events to happen) seems not so much better than culture of complacent fear of whomever your national media tells you is coming for you.

It's been a while since I've used a squat toilet

Diyarbakir is a different kind of hot than Istanbul. The city has one of those little airports, at least the civilian side of it is little, where you climb down a staircase and then walk to the terminal and I had soaked through my shirt by the time I reached the baggage claim. Military planes making sorties to bomb the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan take off from the same base and scream over the city. I'm the only one who stops and looks up like they're something noteworthy and I will try to break that habit.
The taxi driver cursed a double parker in Turkish and Kurdish and told me that such behavior made life unlivable and then blew through a red light to cut off a whole line of cars a few blocks later. He dropped me off in front of the municipality, which is BDP-run and so Kurdish language newspapers and calendar commemorating Kobani resistance are everywhere. A friend of a friend at the municipality sat with me and I was so happy to be speaking Turkish in a real conversation for a change that I blathered on my thoughts about ISIS and Obamacare  to excess but he liked me and he and his municipality coworker seemed to have nothing better to do that afternoon. Then we drove around and picked up fresh milk in a plastic bag and picked up and dropped off one of his 10 siblings and then he dropped me off with my host, Giyas.
I had forgotten how incredibly hospitable people are here--like Iranians except they don't spoil it by constantly talking about how hospitable they are. Actually I feel deeply uncomfortable with hospitality from poor people who refuse to take rent in a way that I didn't used to when I traveled and blithely took whatever I was offered as if by birthright. Over tea and nuts in the evening Giyas and his sister told me all about how hard life is for them and how she wanted to move to Canada with her husband.
I feel the kind of numb discomfort toward these stories and requests for help with migration or education or whatever that white bourgeois New Yorkers feel toward homeless people. I used to be genuinely interested and try to make friends but the gross inequality creates an inevitability  that he will write me on facebook in 6 months and ask again about migration or other help and I will send him a useless NGO or university link if I respond at all and just not want to deal because I have moved on and know it is a pipe dream for him anyway. Money exchange makes things cleaner. Maybe I will move to a cheap hotel with an internet connection and a shower that isn't just a faucet on the wall at waist level. spoiled

drums of war

Thank goodness despite my prediction there have been no terror attacks in Istanbul despite warning by Turkish intelligence that mass transit might be targeted. My suspicion is that this is because the tacit agreement not to escalate hostilities hasn't entirely broken down between Turkey and the Islamic State, since after a token attack on ISIS Turkey has focused most of its military strikes and police raids on anti-ISIS Kurds.
Since June elections has been a hung parliament, with the AKP having the most but not a majority of MPs, largely because of the success of the leftist pro-Kurdish HDP party, which had been mediating a cease-fire and peace process between Turkey and the PKK. If a coalition is not formed, there will be an early election called this fall. I think with an eye on this next election and adopting the old "if you can't beat 'em, disenfranchise 'em and round up their leaders" strategy, Erdogan, who would very much like a return to one-party AKP rule and a majority strong enough to rewrite the constitution to make his presidency even more powerful, has been ramping up nationalist rhetoric against the HDP. Erdogan demanded that HDP MPs' parliamentary immunity revoked, after which to be badass HDP leader Demirtas announced that the HDP would submit a bill to lift their own immunity and encouraged all other parties to do the same in the name of accountability (not happening). The rumors are now that a legal case will be opened soon to shut down the HDP (as happened to its predecessor Kurdish-left parties: HEP > DEP > HADEP > DTP).
Meanwhile in eastern Turkey violence is ramping back up. The PKK launched a suicide tractor attack on a Turkish police station the other day, numerous areas in the east have been re-designated "military zones", and even opposition Turkish newspapers are equating the PKK and ISIS and stirring up anxiety among genteel White Turks.

I thought the Kurds were the good guys

Increasingly credible reports are coming in that the Iraqi Kurds are engaging in ethnic cleansing, looting and razing Arab villages in their expanded territory to reverse the Arabification of the oil-rich area around Kirkuk that Saddam forced decades ago. This seems to follow a fairly typical pattern for US proxies in the War on Terror Era. In Afghanistan, the US allied itself with warlords who got money and weapons in exchange for producing Al Qaeda and Taliban enemies. When there weren't any Taliban at hand, the Taliban having disbanded and returned home or to Pakistan, the warlords called their local rivals Taliban and quickly realized that the good governance and human rights conditions nominally attached to American aid carried far less weight than prerogatives of killing or capturing "terrorists". And because American money allowed them to buy fighters and monopolize power and the opium trade (as they got to decide whose opium crop got raided), those warlords felt little need to compromise or share power with rival local factions. So the rival local factions actually became Taliban and civil war returned to Afghanistan.  Iraq over the past decade has shaken out into a similar story up to the rise of ISIS and ouster of Maliki. There was a glimmer that the "Sunni Awakening", in which previously marginal Sunni tribesman went on American payroll and joined the Shiite-majority government to fight jihadis, signaled a more inclusive and effective strategy of American imperial rule. But then the awakened Sunnis were used "like a tissue" and then tossed away, as one of them complained about 50 minutes in here, and the government went back to sectarian ways--Maliki controlled aid and oil money so why share power? Enter the Islamic State as an option for pissed off militarily-trained Sunnis.
So are the Kurds, who are now getting US and especially European money and weapons in exchange for fighting ISIS, following the same pattern? I was in Kirkuk in 2007 hosted by the head of the provincial council and at the time the Kurds were the largest local faction but were in a much weaker political position. Both peshmerga from Iraqi Kurdistan and mostly-Shiite Iraqi Army soldiers were stationed in Kirkuk, oil was sent south and money came from Baghdad, and Kurdish politicians talked very nicely about inclusion and brotherhood among Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Turkmen, Christians, and Kurds in the province.
Now that the peshmerga are in full control of Kirkuk, the Iraqi army having run away after IS took Mosul, and are the darling of Euro-American Warriors on Terror, why be nice any more? I hope that War on Terror Imperialism 2.0 will involve a strategy with more foresight then simply encouraging local proxies to kill American enemies, with a blind eye turned to whatever else those proxies do. War of Terror Imperialism 1.0 followed that strategy and created/inflated the once-illusive enemy it was supposed to defeat and encouraged the good guys who were supposed to be on our side to become kleptocrats and sectarians.
It remains to be seen how serious the diplomats interviewed in the first story linked are about expressing their concern to the Kurdistan Regional Government about ethnic cleansing. If there is an actual credible threat at this early stage that the US and Europe would cut back aid if the Iraqi Kurds pursue an ethnic cleansing campaign (as the roundly-ignored Leahy Amendment--see e.g. aid restoration to al-Sisi's Egypt--says the US is legally required to do), that aid is in fact conditional not just on killing IS fighters but on not repeating the kind of politics and allowed IS to emerge, it may change things.

Please ignore this next paragraph as it is the middle of a conversation inside my head:
Maybe this is a fuzzy argument walking a tight-rope that doesn't exist between double government--close management of the Iraqi Kurds affairs, such that they lose incentive to cooperate with their foreign patrons and/or become locally unpopular because of their collaboration--and indirect rule. Or maybe I'm just calling for an atypical form of indirect rule based not so much on enemy-of-my-enemy alignment between local and imperial power as on the local power finding a way to rule and consolidate power that doesn't involve the usual pattern of patronage to the local ruler's own group and screwing everyone else. Certainly it is an argument based on the assumption that War on Terror imperialism will continue, that the US won't decide to just counter terrorist by beefing up airport security and withdraw militarily from the Middle East. But I think that is a safe assumption.

In other news, Turkey has joined the fight against the Islamic State, shelling IS territory this morning in retaliation for an IS attack on a Turkish border outpost, and is going to allow the US launch strikes on IS from its air bases, though Turkish and American sources at the moment conflict on whether this is on the condition of the US creating a no-fly zone in northern Syria. I expect Islamic State attacks in Istanbul in the very near future, and will avoid crowded areas.

What are you doing? the jihadists ask PM Davutoglu.
I'm building a wall to keep ISIS members from passing into this side, Davutoglu replies.
All three are on the Turkish side of the border.
Haha, say the jihadists.