Carrying the gear, I dropped down into the ravine and found a bush where I could park the duffels and look for a better place to hide until nightfall, when there was less chance of being found out. Up on the ridge overlooking Iraq was a blade of sedimentary rock about three-quarters of my length. It was brown like the bark of a redwood tree, and small creatures were entombed inside it. With my knees pulled up, people couldn't see me from the road, and I waited. I looked at the sky for an hour. Flights of birds flew overhead. A farmer drove his tractor back and forth over his field, and the day went on slowly until the light failed and the moon lit a sheet of clouds. When I could move around, I went back to the bush with the gear and slept in the long grass, waking to a frog chorus. A mouse lived in the bush and made rustling noises when I was still.

From 8 until 10 that night, a steady stream of expensive SUVs came from the direction of the Iraqi border. I couldn't move to see which road they had taken, but the only other road from the river was a dead end at the ferry.

At 11, the traffic stopped and there hadn't been another car on the road for an hour. It was time to go, and I walked up and out of the ravine to the asphalt track that went down to the ferry landing. The road was still dangerous that late, and if a Syrian had seen a man walking with luggage, they either would have stopped to give him a lift or they would have immediately taken him to the police. If the cops had found me, they would treat the river business as espionage and ask unfriendly questions. I left the road and walked over a field to a ridge. Past this ridge was a steep cliff and the Tigris. As I neared the river, a sound came up from the banks, a jet engine noise. It was the river rushing past rocks, fed by melting snow in southern Turkey, and it roiled and ran. This gave me a sour feeling in my stomach, because it was running much faster than I'd expected. Upstream there was white water. From the ridge, I looked for a place to get the boat in the river out of sight of the border posts.

There was a notch cut in the riverbank by a stream, a V-shaped cut, as if someone had struck it with an ax. I inflated the boat and reminded myself to stay off the south bank of the river, to avoid Iraqi soldiers. If I landed in the wrong spot, the plan was to immediately get back in the river and try again. On the opposite bank, the Turkish encampment looked like a floodlit fast-food place. The border forces were half a mile upstream and needed to get lucky to hit a man in that river at night.

Once the gear was in the boat, I rowed out into the Tigris and was caught in a fast current that sent the boat toward an outcropping on my right, the Saddam-controlled side. After the fast water was a calm stretch, where the boat handled well and made good progress. The Syrian and Iraqi bank was a great black shape, and the boat moved away from it toward the Kurdish side. I ran aground on the north side of the river and hauled the gear out. I pulled the boat on the riverbank and slept in it until morning.

At daybreak, I found a man driving a battered German dump truck and I asked him what country we were in. He said, "Kurdistan," raised his fist in a victory sign, and pulled me into his cab where it was warm. Farsad and his brother Kamran, the truckers, drove me all the way to Dohuk, several hours away. At every checkpoint, the Peshmerga militia welcomed us and waved us through.

In March, 2003, I was locked out of Iraq. Despite a sincere attempt to get a visa through the Iraqi embassy in Damascus, I was rejected and had to figure out another way to enter the country. Eventually, I decided to buy an inflatable raft and row across the river at night from Syria to the autonomous Kurdish-controlled region. This is the story of that journey. A week or so after my journey, Sion Touhig, a great friend and colleague, made the same journey equipped with a crude hand-drawn map of the Syrian border. This story was originally published in Salon.com.

LEAD IMAGE: 12 March, 2003, Iraq. I crossed the Tigris river from Syria to Iraq in an inflatable boat. It was cold night and I was slightly worried about drifting downstream into Saddam-controlled territory. Once across the river it seemed wise to wait for dawn to break before moving around. Shortly after these pictures were taken, a man in dump truck gave me a ride to Dohuk, Kurdistan.
Photo: Phillip Robertson

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