Khruangbin and Lord Huron to headline Outside Festival. More than 50 of them will die—shot dead, killed in accidents, or freezing to death—and countless more will be arrested and imprisoned. Alex Perry travels to Iraqi Kurdistan to investigate the roots of a trade that all but defies comprehension. New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you.
Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! Heading east across Iraqi Kurdistan toward the Zagros Mountains and the border with Iran, we pass from a land of sand and dust into the green prairies of Mesopotamia. For an hour, we cross fields of barley and watermelons, and orchards of figs and pomegranates. Reaching the foothills, we follow a tumbling cloud of swifts, like a hundred tiny crossbows, into a canyon that plunges to the heart of the massif. After a while, the gorge arrives at a natural rock amphitheater enclosing the small frontier town of Tawella.
And there, saddling his mules in front of a warehouse just off the bazaar, I find an old highlander in a jacket, cummerbund, baggy trousers, dress shirt, and dress shoes who agrees to tell me about the smuggling.
The boxes his four grown sons are humping from the warehouse are pound air conditioners, the man says. Avoiding border patrols and year-old mines left over from the Iran-Iraq War, they will slip through terraces of walnuts and almonds, then copses of wild oaks and pistachios. Above that will come crevices and caves where Neolithic families once lived, now home to bears, eagles, wolves, and leopards.
Above the tree line, the men will risk open ground—first thistly yellow-grass hillside, then shale, then scree. Evading their own patrols and mines, the kolbars will lug the loads five hours down their side of the mountain to the town of Nowsud. There they will stack them onto trucks, to be driven through the night to Tehran, arriving in time for the morning market.
