It was dusk. Already the stars were revealing themselves, boiling on the summer horizon. I would be allowed fifteen minutes at the summit of the citadel; the policeman kept my passport as collateral. This was Kirkuk, Iraq, July of 2008, in the fifth year of the war. We were there to film in a city being pulled asunder by vestiges of the former regime and by the ensuing sectarian melee among Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmens, and Arabs. My fixer seized my hand, the two of us yoked amidst the bedlam. Dog-tired American soldiers on patrol had compelled us to swiftly run across the bridge towards the gate of the citadel where we would be safer. And so we ran.
In Iraq, one acutely hones the faculty of abiding in entropy, of perambulating the borderlands of chaos and order.
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