Postcard from Nusaybin, Turkey

One glance at a modern map is enough to understand why Nusaybin is a hotspot in today’s world. Lying in southeast Turkey, it looks across the border at its southerly reflection, Qamishli in northeast Syria; its main east-west highway hosts an endless convoy of tankers with their precious cargo heading out from Erbil in oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan into oil-poor Turkey; and another highway leads southeast to Iraq’s Mosul. This volatile triangle of territory is delineated by watchtowers and fences along the Syrian-Turkish border that were put up in the 1970s, and by the long Syrian-Iraqi desert frontier that became a physical barrier only after 2003.