Don't mention the K word

In 2005, it was third time lucky – if you can call it that – after two failed attempts on my part to get into Iraq and eyeball the war.

In 2003 Canadian journalist Scott Taylor and I had tried foolishly to sneak across the Turkish-Iraqi border from the South-eastern Turkish town of Silopi, which had a large local Kurdish population. Silopi is also close to the Syrian frontier.

This part of Turkey formed part of the stage of a decades-long Kurdish separatist insurgency, eventually brought to an end.

We hired two pushbikes from some local Kurds. Our plan was to pose as local peasants riding back to our village or if caught play dumb lost tourist. We managed to cycle past the Turkish border checkpoint, which largely ignored us.

Dismounted we began our trek for the border. Darkness began to fall. Taylor, an experienced war reporter with decades of covering global conflicts, noticed a land mine sign. So the only option was to turn back and sneak past the Turkish border post again.

But this time luck was not on our side. Taylor's bike chain fell off and began making a rattling noise, which alerted the Turkish border guards. We were quickly apprehended and taken into the guardhouse and confronted by the Turkish commander, who looked baffled to see us.

We began the dumb lost tourist routine. The Commander was having none of it. He couldn't speak English and we couldn't speak Turkish. So he picked up the phone and called his girlfriend, a university student who spoke excellent English.

He handed the phone receiver to Taylor and Taylor explained our situation. The Commander grabbed the phone off Taylor and spoke Turkish. He hung up the phone. There was a pause. Horrible thoughts of the film Midnight Express then began to run through my mind. Would I be locked up in a notorious Turkish prison?

The Commander pulled out a map showing us where we were. Again we played dumb. Then he gestured with his hand, making a slitting his throat motion and pointing to us. We didn't need an interpreter to understand that if we were caught again we would face dire consequences. Surprisingly we were let go. But our bicycles confiscated we had to walk 5 to 10 kilometres back to the town of Silopi.

I can only speculate that the reason for being let go was the Turkish Commander might have suspected – wrongly – we were Western Intelligence operatives and he didn't want to draw too much attention to his chain of command.

In 2004, Scott Taylor contacted me and asked if I wanted to accompany him into Iraq. Lacking the funds I was forced to decline. Months later, I had received word that Taylor had been kidnapped by Islamist terrorists in the town of Tal Afar, Northern Iraq and held hostage for five days before being released. It was touch and go for Taylor. His Canadian government had abandoned him. Fortunately, a female Turkish journalist, Zeynab Tugrul, who was kidnapped with Taylor, was released and she raised the alarm back in Turkey. Eventually Taylor was released and later became the subject of a television documentary.

If I had the money at the time, I too would have been kidnapped and suffered the same fate as Taylor and Tugrul.

In 2005, the US Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment (3ACR) was on a tour of duty in Tal Afar, Iraq. It was led by a brilliant Commanding Officer (CO), then Colonel HR McMaster, who later reached Lieutenant General rank and was President Trump's National Security Advisor.

Colonel McMaster had read Taylor's book, Among the Others: Encounters with the Forgotten Turkmen of Iraq.

The Turkoman are an ethnic group, akin to Turks, and speaking a Turkish language. A large number of Turkomen live in the northern Iraq town of Tal Afar, which is about 480km northwest of Bagdad, the Iraqi capital.

Over 3 million live in Iraq and after the Arabs and Kurds are the third largest ethnic group in Iraq. The majority are Sunni Muslims.

Turkey, naturally, took a protective concern for their kinsmen across the border in Iraq, especially with the Kurds and Sunni Arabs making inroads into the Turkoman enclave of Tal Afar. Some of the local Turkomans were involved in the insurgency against the US, who had been mistakenly portrayed as foreign Islamists.

As Taylor explained:

"The only thing that convinced me to return to Iraq [in 2005] after being held hostage was a personal request from Colonel H.R. McMaster, the US military commander in the city of Talafar. He had read my book about the Turkmen of Iraq, and McMaster wanted to fly me in to brief his soldiers, so they would better understand the local population. He knew it would be difficult for me to revisit 'the scene of the crime' so to speak, but the American military prepared to fly me in by helicopter and provide full protection. As a direct result of this visit, my contacts with the moderate Turkmen leaders in Talafar were able to reach an understanding with McMaster, and a lot of lives were saved in the subsequent combat operations. To sweeten the whole experience, the US unit managed to capture one of the insurgents who had tortured me, and he is now convicted and serving a life sentence in a Baghdad jail."

In 2005 Taylor, Canadian cameraman Stefan Nitoslawski and I had crossed the Turkish border at Silopi by taxi car into Iraq – legally! The border checkpoint is also known as the Gates.

On the "Iraqi" side was a large Kurdish flag, and the border guards in combat fatigues had the Kurdish flag patch on their sleaves. In effect, this was a de-facto Kurdish state in Northern Iraq – - backed by the US. The Kurds were reliable allies for Washington in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Whilst we waited for our US Army chopper to pick us up and fly to Operating Base, Sykes, just outside of Tal Afar, the HQ of 3 ACR, a Kurdish border official noticed me became suspicious. Because of my olive complexion, he accused me of being a Turkish intelligence operative.

I spent some moments explaining to him I was an Australian journalist of Macedonian parentage, hence the swarthy appearance. He didn't seem convinced. I then started playing with my gold crucifix and necklace. That seemed to do the trick.

Our ride, the US Army Blackhawk helicopter, and escort, an Apache helicopter, arrived at the Gates to pick us up.

After settling in at the US army base, all three of us, Taylor, Nitoslawski and I, then took part in a 3ACR patrol, an armoured convoy, into Tal Afar.

As Taylor explains: "the purpose of our trip into this volatile northern Iraqi city was to retrace the route taken by my captors when I had been abducted and held hostage the previous September [2004]."

We reached our destination and began walking through the town, which had a majestic citadel, fortress, built in Ottoman times. I began filming Taylor as he talked with US officers pointing to a map. Alongside were Iraq Army soldiers, in reality, Kurds who were regarded as 100% loyal to the US.

We reached a wall and I quickly panned the camera from the wall onto Taylor without paying too much attention as to what was daubed on the wall. It was virtually a Nano-second, faster than a blink of an eye.

It was only when a US Army officer, a media handler, began to hyperventilate that it was brought to my attention of the US's hypersensitivity in using the Kurds as 'Iraqi Army" soldiers.

On the wall was painted a large Kurdish emblem. The US Army officer had assumed I deliberately filmed the Kurdish emblem here in the heart of Tal Afar, a Turkoman city and with an ever-watchful Turkey in the background. The US was trying to maintain a precarious balancing act of using Kurds as Iraqi soldiers but at the same time keeping its NATO ally Turkey happy. The US Army officer then calmed down, probably realising he had overreacted. We all then acted as nothing had happened and resumed with the walkthrough town and the filming.

Playing the Kurdish card by the US has been strategically useful in taking down the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003 and in combating ISIS in Syria. That the US has abandoned the Kurds is no real surprise. The US has a history of doing such to other loyal allies. South Vietnam and the 1975 fall of Saigon come to mind.