Duhok

Duhok is Iraq's most mountainous governorate, folded against the Turkish and Syrian borders, and most of what people come for sits outside the city itself. An hour southeast, in a valley near Shekhan, the Yazidis keep Lalish — you walk its stone courtyards barefoot, stepping over the thresholds rather than on them, past the fluted conical spires above the shrine of Sheikh Adi and down into the cave of the White Spring. North and east the roads climb hard. Amedi sits on a flat-topped mesa reached by a single cut road, lived on since Assyrian times; Zakho's Delal Bridge still steps over the Khabur in pointed stone arches. At Khinnis, Sennacherib had himself carved into a gorge above the head of a canal that once carried water toward Nineveh. Bring layers, as the evenings stay cold even in summer, and reckon on real driving between the mountain sites. Lalish asks bare feet and modest dress.