On 20 April, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy feature titled “Building the First Long-Distance Hiking Trail in Kurdistan.”
Lawin Mohammad collects trails in the mountains of Kurdistan. He has met scores of shepherds on their daily wanderings. He confers with beekeepers on high passes. He follows aging pesh merga on their former patrols and waylays Christian and Yazidi pilgrims. When he is stopped on the highway at a military checkpoint, staring into the aviators of a heavily armed 20-year-old, he will ask the soldier whether he ever walks to the next village over. Or if his grandfather ever did. He makes inquiries among Syrians like himself who a decade ago took the dangerous crossing from Rojava into the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, in northern Iraq, at the start of the civil war. He parleys with children and imams. I have seen him work over at least one furtive treasure hunter. His informants are legion.
The initiative is sponsored by the Abraham Paths Initiative, “a US-based nonprofit organization that helps develop walking trails and promotes intercultural connections through walking” in the Middle East.
Matt read this story, not knowing that a few weeks later a business trip would take him on a flight directly over these same mountains.
Flying north of Baghdad, the sand of the Iraqi desert on the Plain of Nineveh shifts into first brown hills and then the green ridges of the Zagros Mountains. From 40,000 feet, the horizon bends, and the mountains spread in folds and ridges across Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.
At the far horizon, Mount Ararat of Noah’s Ark fame is nearly on Turkey’s border of Armenia. (Mount Ararat is the snow-capped peak at the top left in the photo above, and at back right in the photo below.)
The Zagros Mountain Trail will eventually run 130 miles through the Kurdistan region of Iraq. It begins in the west at the Rabban Hormizd Monastery near Al Qosh north of Mosul, and “takes walkers along ancient pilgrimage routes, trading paths, and shepherds’ tracks to reach the foot of Mount Halgurd in the east.”
That monastery was founded in 640 AD, and is an important outpost of the Chaldean Catholic Church, a branch of Roman Catholicism in full communion with the Holy See.
From the New York Times report:
Once it is finished, the Zagros trail will be the first long-distance hiking route not only in Iraq but very likely in all of Kurdistan, a conceptual and unrealized country of mountains, pine forests, deserts and thousands of rural villages cleaved by colonial-era rulers into parts of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. There are models for such marathon enterprises — the Appalachian Trail, the Camino de Santiago, the Pennine Way — which attract hundreds of thousands of hikers annually and have transformed the economies of rural regions through which they pass. But none have yet been attempted in the Middle East’s canonical shatter zone.
This is only one of the multiple trails that The Abraham Paths Initiative is attempting to stitch together to commemorate the attributed travels of the patriarch Abraham. The organization summarizes its efforts on its website:
We have generated over 2000 kilometers of trail since 2007, working with partners in Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, Sinai, and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Trails and walkers stimulate regional economic development and kindle new perspectives.
Since the pandemic, Abraham Path Initiative has been effective online, introducing global audiences to people, landscapes, and cities of Southwest Asia through our webinar series Meet Us on the Abraham Path, LiveOnLine tours, and Postcards from the Path.
We envision the simple act of walking as a way for people from all over the world to connect with one another, explore together, and exchange ideas and knowledge. The Abraham Path Initiative (API) catalyzes global appreciation for the widespread traditions of hospitality that permeate Southwest Asia (aka “the Middle East”). People practice hospitality in honor of the myriad acts of kindness attributed to the legendary prophet Abraham/Ibrahim. API helps you access that hospitality through walking.
Peace be upon all who walk those trails, or fly above them.