On the face of it, the Sheikhallah bazaar is just the shabby little side street in downtown Erbil where you go to change money. But the whole of "liberated" Iraqi Kurdistan knows that another, more serious business is conducted behind those counters piled high with debased Iraqi bank notes.
It knows, because emigration is the Kurdish national obsession, and it is here that the would-be emigrants begin the long, clandestine, perilous, yet highly organized, odyssey, in containers and ramshackle hulks, to the Europe of promise and plenty.
It is here that they acquire a false passport. For none of Kurdistan's 3.6 million inhabitants possess one of their own. As Iraqis, they are entitled to one -- but they dare not go to Baghdad to get it.