Globe and Mail  27 July, 2004

When it first leaves the bank, the raft -- a few planks of wood slung over four truck tires -- seems barely to be moving. Then the current catches it, flinging its ragtag crew into the middle of the river.

"This is the life," Huseyin Mohsen, a technician on Kirkuk's oil fields, shouts over the excited screams of his four young children. The boatman ignores him, working his oar to avoid the worst of the eddies.

"My wife wasn't too keen on me taking the kids for this ride; none of them can swim," Mr. Mohsen grins, as the raft swirls past river banks thick with families burning meat on makeshift barbecues. "I told her I'd dive in and save them if anything happened."

School is out in Iraq, and, like countless others from the south and centre of the country, Mr. Mohsen and his family couldn't face the prospect of one more day of leaden heat. So they come to the mountainous, Kurdish-controlled north. Nestled under a huge dam, the picturesque town of Dokan is a popular choice, only 2أ‚آ½ hours by car from Kirkuk.

"Kids need water, and in Kirkuk all we have is oil," said Nejat Mahmud Safwat, who like his cousin, Mr. Mohsen, is a member of the Turkish-speaking Turkmen minority.

The two cousins are in their 40s, and this is the first time they have visited Dokan since the creation of a de facto independent Kurdish territory in 1991.

"After the first Gulf war, it was almost impossible to travel to the north," Mr. Safwat explained. "The Baathists assumed you were trying to flee the country."

Now the north is accessible again, and Mr. Mohsen insists nothing has changed in Dokan. His cousin isn't so sure, pointing to the wicker-roofed shelters that line the riverbank. "None of this was here before," he grumbled. "You just drove up and set up camp."

After a decade of stagnation, when the autonomous Kurdish region was essentially cut off, Dokan is booming. It was once a sleepy town of 5,000, but its riverbank is now a mass of construction: cabins for tourists hoping to stay the night and eateries for the day-trippers. In a crowded restaurant overlooking the bridge over the Dokan River, visitors pay healthy prices for chicken, rice and marinated apricots, the local specialty.

"Tourists have been coming to Dokan for decades," says Shaho Qadir Ahmed, manager of the Daban Tourist Village overlooking the Dokan dam. "But I've never seen anything like this. We're fully booked for the whole of July."

People come from as far away as Basra to stay in one of his 50 holiday cabins, which at about $45 a night are relatively expensive by Iraqi standards. The tourist village is owned by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party that controls southern Kurdistan, and some of the profit goes toward the local Kurdish militia. Mr. Ahmed plans to use the rest to build more cabins, along with more lavish houses for visitors who wish to stay a month or more.

A group of 20 Baghdadis relaxing on the beach had no trouble explaining why they were visiting Dokan. The answer was unanimous: It's safe.

Mohammed Jamal, a third-year engineering student from a wealthy district of Baghdad, said he was captured by bandits earlier this year. They released him after his father paid a ransom of $10,000 (U.S.).

"They actually have a government here, unlike down in Baghdad," said his brother, Uday, also a student.

With trips to Jordan and Syria the preserve of the very rich, the Jamal brothers said there's no shortage of cheaper tourist destinations much closer to home. The only trouble, they said, is that most of them have been requisitioned by U.S. troops and are out of bounds to ordinary Iraqis.

"Once, Saddam got all the best places in Iraq," Uday complained. "Now it's the turn of the Americans."

Listening in on the brothers' conversation, an engineer from the nearby Kurdish city of Suleimaniyah was not amused. "They may say the right thing now," Aras Othman whispered, "but until last year, these people were Baathists. Why else would a father name his son after one of Saddam's sons?" he said, referring to Uday Hussein.

Though the Kurds are proud of their tradition of hospitality, Mr. Othman's whispered criticism was a glimpse of the tensions that exist between Kurds and Arabs in postwar Iraq.

At the Daban Tourist Village, porter Fala Hama, a former member of the Kurdish milita, reckoned that "20 per cent of the Arab guests are probably the sort of people we were fighting 15 years ago."

In general, he added, there is little mixing between Kurdish tourists, who come for a break during the week, and Arabs, who prefer the weekends.

Fadil al-Jabari, a doctor from the southern Shia city of Najaf, and his bride are spending the first half of their two-week honeymoon at Dokan.