IRAQ: Not without her daughter

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You know the story. A Middle Eastern man marries an American woman. They have a daughter, the marriage falls apart and he swipes the kid and takes her back to the old country.

But scholar Denise Natali, 44, adds a new twist to the story. She married a man from the Middle East. They moved to Paris, but it’s she who brought her 7-year-old daughter to the region, to pursue a job at the newly founded University of Kurdistan-Hawler in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil.

Her husband, a successful Paris restaurateur and an ethnic Kurd from Turkey, is packing up his business and following his wife back to the Middle East, albeit skeptically.

The pair pulled their daughter Haileen out of her Paris Montessori school and placed her in a Lebanese-run private school just set up here.

‘My friends say coming here is professional suicide,’ Natali says of her decision to spend time teaching in Iraqi Kurdistan. ‘They say, ‘You need to come back to the U.S. and teach at a real university.’ But I think this is a research gold mine.’

Natali is a chatty New Jersey native who received advanced degrees in social sciences from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. She began traveling to the Kurdish region soon after the 1991 Gulf War, first as an employee of the U.S. government and later as an academic researcher.

She moved here for real in 2005, teaching at the Salahuddin University, which she found to be a disappointment. ‘It’s the Baathist system,’ she said of the school. ‘It’s a security platform for the Kurdish political parties. It’s a place for socializing and a place to meet potential spouses.’

When University of Kurdistan-Hawler opened in 2006, with classes taught in English, she jumped at the chance. ‘Here we’re teaching the students to think critically,’ she says.

Even though she’s brought her daughter and dragged her husband here, she says Iraqi Kurdistan is still too unstable to build a life or make long-term plans.

‘We’re not taking money from Paris and investing it here,’ she says. ‘Are you kidding?’

--Borzou Daragahi in Irbil