The second fire was fearful and magnificent. It began as a puff of white smoke on the horizon, settling gracefully in a valley between mountains as evening fell, blending into the dusty sunlit air.

By the time the sun had set the flames were visible as a solid ring moving steadily down the mountain it encircled. We were only a 15 minute drive away from a city of million, but it felt far more remote as we watched from afar in silence except for the sound of insects whirring and chirping.

In a wealthy and highly developed region of Eastern Turkey, watching the fire seemed like an activity filed under “entertainment.” It almost seemed like a show demonstrating Turkey’s modernness. A parade of high-tech fire fighting machines showing the wealthy just how developed the country was.

As a commenter pointed out on the previous post, while Turkey is quick to put out fires and tack the bill onto the perpetrator in some regions of the country, the same government is simultaneously lighting the fires with intention in other parts– namely the poor, predominately Kurdish Southeast.

In Iraqi Kurdistan, the fire burned for two days.

BY morning the flames were invisible in the sunlight, and I hoped the fire had been extinguished over night. But smoke appeared by afternoon and that night, the fire began to climb the next mountain. After two nights the black area left in its path looked like a shadow cast by a giant cloud, but the sky was blue and empty.

No one knows how it started. An accident; a cigarette butt or burning heap of trash that lit the dry grasses. Some say it was intentional, lit by someone who hoped to develop the land in the future. Allegations that it was started by Iran or Turkey seem highly unlikely, though it would be believable in a region closer to the border.

The environment usually takes a back seat in areas of conflict, where security and basic human needs are the first concern. The land now called Kurdistan was repeatedly burned, razed, and doused in chemicals during Saddam’s Anfal campaigns against the Kurds in the 1980s. The history of Iraq reads like a list of back-to-back coups and wars. Of course it’s behind. The streets today are still strewn with empty bottles and other rubbish, and piles of abandoned garbage smolder in abandoned lots and the outskirts of villages. Yet the last two decades of peace and the recent wave of new investment makes Kurdistan a region in transition. It’s places like Kurdistan that must start leading the way with the development of more forward-looking environmental policies and attitudes.

The flames are out. But I hope this fire, and the many others that have burned outside the city and elsewhere , act as a wake up call.