Michael J. Totten is a journalist and blogger who’s back and forth to the Middle East and writes about it, quite well in my opinion; he supports this by freelancing and with his blog’s tip jar. He gets lots of link love from the right-wing blogosphere, which is puzzling because Totten is balanced and clear-eyed and doesn’t seem to have any particular axe to grind. Recently, he and a friend were having fun in Istanbul and, on a random drive out into the country, decided on impulse to keep going, all the way across Turkey and into Iraq; into the Kurdish mini-state in Iraq’s north, to be precise. It makes a heck of a story, with lots of pictures, in six parts: I, II, III, IV, V, and VI.
