SULAYMANIYA, Iraq — The night is young. The women are pretty. Danyar Farok, wearing a sparkly gray shirt and skin-tight acid-washed jeans, and a buddy are strutting along this Kurdish city's main drag.
Maybe they will wind up at one of the outdoor bars in the riverside Sarchinar district. Or maybe they will sit at a teahouse shooting the breeze.
Farok, a 25-year-old high school computer teacher, complains that he and his girlfriend, Medea, can't put together enough money to live together. His artist pal Shakwan Siddik, a 23-year-old with black hair down to his shoulders and sunglasses dangling from an open-collar shirt, is searching for a sunny studio to do his oil paintings.
As for the kidnappings, car bombings, drive-by killings and economic misery unfolding in the rest of Iraq, Farok is blunt.
"I don't care," he says. "The Arabs never cried for us when we were suffering. I'm going to a teahouse with my friend to have some fun."
Although much of Iraq is engulfed in insurgent, sectarian, political and tribal violence, the Switzerland-sized Kurdish autonomous region in the north of the country, established after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, is an oasis of safety and tranquillity where young and old concern themselves with mundane matters of life such as work, dating and home furnishings.
The growing sense that the Kurdish region is turning away from the rest of the nation was driven home over the weekend, when Kurdistan regional President Massoud Barzani banned the Iraqi flag from being flown atop official buildings. To many in Kurdistan, the banner symbolizes years of oppression and slaughter under Saddam Hussein.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki criticized the decision Sunday. "Until this moment we still have the current Iraqi flag and it should be raised over every point in Iraq," he said during an interview with an Arab satellite television program.
"Not only the Kurds were slaughtered under this flag, but many Iraqis were slain under this flag. Iraq was slain under this flag," he said.
Whichever flag prevails will fly in a prosperous area. The Kurdish region has thrived even as Iraqis elsewhere have taken their money and skills with them, fleeing cities such as Baghdad, Basra and Mosul.
A real estate boom has transformed cities such as Sulaymaniya and Irbil into noisy construction zones. The once-desolate road around Sulaymaniya is being filled from scratch with apartment towers and commercial buildings on a scale seen in oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms.
