Kurds say they have no friends but the mountains. The Zagros Mountains that zig-zag along the Iran-Iraq border have provided safety for Kurds fleeing conflict for centuries. In the 1970s, Kurdish rebel fighters, or Peshmerga, made guerilla raids against Iraq’s Baathist state from mountain strongholds. In 1988, Kurdish civilians fled their villages during the Anfal campaign and sought refuge in the mountainous and porous borders with Iran and Turkey to escape Iraqi bombs and bulldozers.

More recently, Kurds have begun to find another purpose in their mountains beyond survival: recreation. Within the last decade, Iraqi Kurdistan has experienced a boom in mountaineering and hiking groups who weather adverse conditions, including land mines and drone strikes, to go climbing on weekends. Arezoo Vaske, who founded the group Kurdistan Outdoors in Sulaimaniyah in 2013, organizes hikes on Fridays. She is inspired by how hiking bridges many divisions within society, including gender, urban-rural and political.

“It is incredible. Our group members have unified around going into nature each week. Through scaling mountains, hiking to waterfalls or crawling through caves, we have formed what I think will be lifelong bonds,” she told Al-Monitor.

Rekan Rasool, who co-founded the popular Erbil-based hiking group Rock Ur Bones in 2008, encourages people to go out and climb together. “Friendships and even marriages have started in the mountains,” he told Al-Monitor.