A Kurdish mountain city between the Tigris tributaries — Lalish temple, Amadiya plateau village, and the most stable, welcoming region in modern Iraq
Duhok is the capital of Duhok Governorate in Iraqi Kurdistan — a city of 400,000 in a mountain valley near the Turkish and Syrian borders, surrounded by grape terraces, Christian villages, and Yazidi holy sites. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq is dramatically different from the rest of the country: it has been effectively autonomous since the 1991 Gulf War no-fly zone, has its own army (Peshmerga), its own government, and its own border controls, and has maintained security through the most turbulent periods of Iraqi history. From Duhok, visitors reach Lalish — the Yazidi religion's holiest site…
Duhok Province encompasses some of the most historically layered terrain in the Middle East: Assyrian cities, Roman frontier posts, early Christian monasteries (the region was one of the earliest centres of Eastern Christianity), and the ancient Yazidi heartland. The area was part of the Ottoman Empire's Mosul Vilayet and was allocated to British Mandatory Iraq in 1923 over Turkish objections. The Kurdish population was subjected to the Anfal Campaign (1986–89) under Saddam Hussein — systematic destruction of villages and mass executions estimated to have killed 50,000–180,000 Kurdish civilia…