Kurdistan's cultural capital — bazaars, kebab smoke, and mountain air
Sulaymaniyah (Slemani to Kurds) is the intellectual and cultural heart of Iraqi Kurdistan — a city of poets, universities, and teahouses where the great Kurdish poet Nali was born and where Kak Ahmad's kebabs have been wrapped in flatbread for three generations. The Grand Bazaar sprawls for over a kilometre and the Amna Suraka museum — a former Ba'ath secret police prison — is one of the most important human-rights sites in the Middle East. The surrounding Zagros Mountains are spectacular hiking terrain and the city has none of the security restrictions of Baghdad.
Sulaymaniyah was founded in 1784 by the Kurdish prince Ibrahim Pasha Baban, who named it after his father Suleiman, and it quickly became the Baban dynasty's capital and a centre of Kurdish literature and Sufi poetry. The city fell under Ottoman then British control, before becoming part of Iraq after WWI. Under Saddam Hussein it was a target of the Anfal campaign and the 1988 chemical attacks on nearby Halabja (5,000 civilians killed) that remain the defining trauma of Kurdish national identity. After 1991 it became the de facto capital of the Kurdish autonomous zone and has since rebuilt in…