In this essay for The New Yorker, Elliot Ackerman visits the Citadel of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and reflects on the complicated, decade-long friendship between the United States and the Kurds, whose peshmerga fighters have become key allies against ISIS.

The Citadel of Erbil

Ackerman tours the world's oldest continually inhabited settlement, a UNESCO World Heritage Site at the center of a boomtown transformed by U.S. and foreign investment since the 2003 invasion, and considers it a symbol of Kurdish resilience.

Friends Without a Faction

Ackerman weighs the Kurds' unusual position in the region's ideological struggle among Islamists, autocrats, and the fading promise of the Arab Spring, concluding that the Kurds occupy no faction of their own, only a fraught status as "friends" of the United States.

A Bomb at the Ramparts

Ackerman closes with word, received days after his visit, that ISIS had bombed the base of the Citadel he had just toured, a reminder of how precarious that friendship, and Erbil's sense of safety, really was.

Read the Original Article

This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Read “How Strong Is the U.S. Friendship with the Kurds?” at The New Yorker →