The Untold Quiet of Kurdish Iraq – The New York Times

What the Vietnamese photographer Lam Duc-Hien first imagined of Iraq before traveling there on assignment were the usual media tropes from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — tanks and violence, surges and refugees. Mr. Lam, who was working for nongovernment organizations and a French newspaper, said he had never heard of the Kurdish people, who by then were fleeing Saddam’s oppressive and violent Baath Party. But after he settled down in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, a region he documented for more than two decades, he found the country to be vastly different than what he had expected.