Duhok

The valley Duhok occupies has been a route between the Mesopotamian plain and the mountains for as long as there have been travellers, and Assyrian kings recorded campaigns in these hills. The name is recorded from medieval times for a small settlement on the road, but for most of its history Duhok was a village rather than a town: the centre of power in this corner of Kurdistan was Amadiya, on its rock to the north-east, where the Bahdinan emirs ruled from the late Middle Ages until the Ottomans ended their autonomy in the 19th century.

The town grew slowly under Ottoman and then Iraqi administration, becoming the seat of a district and, after 1969, the capital of a governorate carved out of the Mosul region. The second half of the 20th century was hard. Kurdish revolts, the destruction of villages during the Anfal campaign in 1988 and the movement of people out of the border districts brought waves of displaced families into the city, and its population grew far faster than its infrastructure.

After the 1991 uprising, the Western no-fly zone and the establishment of Kurdish self-rule, Duhok came under the Kurdistan Regional Government and settled into the Kurdistan Democratic Party's sphere. Peace and the border trade with Turkey brought building, a university founded in 1992, and new suburbs on the valley sides. From 2014 the province took in very large numbers of people fleeing ISIS from Sinjar and the Nineveh Plains — Yazidis, Christians and Muslims — and camps around the city housed them for years. Turkish military operations against armed Kurdish groups in the mountains to the north have affected the border districts of the province repeatedly.

Duhok's language marks it out within the Kurdistan Region: people here speak Badini, a form of Kurmanji, while Erbil and Sulaymaniyah speak Sorani, and the difference shapes schooling, publishing and broadcasting as well as conversation. The city has a reputation for being more conservative and more reserved than Sulaymaniyah, though it has a lively student life through the university and an annual international film festival.

It is also the most religiously mixed corner of the region. Chaldean and Assyrian Christians have old communities in the city and in villages along the mountains, Yazidis live in the surrounding districts and hold their holiest shrine at Lalish, and Sunni Kurds are the majority. The displacements of 2014 added greatly to the Yazidi and Christian populations here, and camps and host communities have shaped the city's recent life.

Newroz on 21 March is the year's great occasion, with bonfires on the ridges, dancing, new clothes and picnics; the torch procession up the hillside at Akre, an hour or so away, is the best-known celebration in Iraq. Picnicking is close to an institution: Fridays and holidays empty the city towards the dam, the waterfalls and the mountain valleys, with carpets, samovars and grills in the boots of cars. Hospitality follows the regional pattern — tea first, food pressed on the guest, and questions afterwards.

Several hundred thousand people live in Duhok, the capital of a governorate counted at about 1.6 million in the 2024 census, and the city has grown steeply up its valley sides since the 1990s with apartment blocks, university buildings and shopping centres. Villages that were once separate are now suburbs, and camps and settlements for displaced families ring parts of the province.

Work is largely public and commercial: the regional government, the University of Duhok, hospitals and the security forces pay many of the salaries, and the road trade with Turkey through the Ibrahim Khalil crossing supports transport, warehousing and wholesale business. Farming in the surrounding valleys produces wheat, tobacco, fruit, walnuts and honey, and domestic tourism from the rest of Iraq fills hotels and restaurants in summer. Disputes between the regional government and Baghdad over oil revenue and the budget have repeatedly delayed public salaries, a constant topic here as elsewhere in the region.

The day begins early in the bazaar, slows in the afternoon heat of summer, and picks up again after sunset, when the riverside parks and the dam road fill with families. Electricity is a mix of public supply and neighbourhood generators, and water supply depends on winters that have grown drier. Young people's complaints are familiar: jobs, housing costs and the pull of emigration, with many families having relatives in Europe.

Duhok eats much as the rest of Kurdistan does, with a Kurmanji-speaking accent and the produce of the mountains close at hand. Dolma is the dish of family occasions: vine leaves, aubergines, peppers, onions and courgettes stuffed with spiced rice and meat, packed into a pot and cooked in a sour sauce. Quzi, lamb cooked until it falls from the bone over rice with almonds and raisins, is the food of weddings and guests, and biryani here means rice with meat, noodles, nuts and raisins.

Grills are the everyday restaurant meal — minced-lamb kebab, cubed tikka, ribs — with bread baked on the wall of a clay tannour oven, sumac-dressed onion and yoghurt. Kubba, shells of bulgur or rice around spiced meat, are fried or dropped into soup; sawar, boiled and pounded wheat, remains the staple of village kitchens, eaten with stews of beans, okra or aubergine. Breakfast is bread with honey, white cheese, eggs and geymar, the thick clotted cream, eaten with date syrup.

The mountain villages supply what the bazaar is known for: honey, walnuts, figs, pomegranates, grapes, dried fruit and sheep's cheeses, some of them matured in skins. Tea is drunk all day, strong and very sweet in small waisted glasses, and mastaw, salted yoghurt thinned with water, is the summer drink. Christian villages in the province make their own arak, and alcohol is sold in some shops in the city.