Until recently, it would not have been possible for a group of hikers to walk across Iraqi Kurdistan, a region that has experienced a continuum of violent political crises almost without interruption for a century.
They include a Kurdish rebellion in 1943 put down by British warplanes a revolution in 1961 revolts and government reprisals throughout the 1960s air attacks in 1974 that displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds and a series of genocidal Iraqi military campaigns and mass killings from 1980 to 1991.
