Paragliding Over Mosul – Because Iraq Just Isn’t Dangerous Enough Already

*Άρθρο των New York Times

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS AND ZAID THAKER

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Members of the Falcon Club paragliding near Mosul.

MOSUL, Iraq – The risk-averse will tell you that it takes a special sort of foolishness to jump from a mountain with just a paraglider strapped to your back.
So what, then, does that make the members of the Falcon Club, an Iraqi group of daredevils who sail through the air above Mosul, which is perhaps Iraq’s most dangerous city?

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Ahmed Assad prepares his parachute before paragliding with the group.

As if flying flimsy contraptions in a war zone was not enough, the Falcon Club faces the added danger of having been a favorite of Saddam Hussein – whose former friends and allies continue to be hunted down by Shiite militias and others.
Indeed, their recklessness leaves even the club’s members seeking a reasonable explanation.
“Flying is like a disease,” said Saba Yasin Fathi, 43, the club’s leader and a former Iraqi air force pilot who lost his left pinky finger to a propeller last year. “You do it once, you want to do it again and again.”
So the Falcon Club endures the suspicions of Iraqi soldiers at Mosul’s innumerable checkpoints who have never heard of a paraglider, have never seen a hot air balloon outside of an American movie and who believe — reasonably — that Iraq is dangerous enough without courting death.
None of this — or getting permission from the Americans to fly — had been a problem when Mr. Hussein himself became enthralled by their derring-do.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Yasin Kharaldin, 19, prepares a parachute at the Falcon Aviation Club’s headquarters in Mosul.

He bought equipment for them, gave club members land to build houses and even provided a small airport so they could fly whenever they wanted. They also received a small stipend for each flight: Males got one dinar (about $3); women were given one-and-a-half dinars.
The transition to a government with priorities that don’t include riding the wind has not been easy for the Falcon Club.
“We were given privileges and priorities that are no longer available to us,” Mr. Fathi said. “Now we need support.”
At the time of the United States-led invasion in 2003, club members said they owned 65 airplanes. All were destroyed by the American military as a potential threat. The group’s Mosul clubhouse was looted as well.
In recent years the Falcon Club has been so short of money that its members built a glider from parts they purchased at local markets. For a while, it flew, they said.
On one recent day, a handful of the club’s 260 members — 18 of whom are women — drove their rickety old white pickup truck up a long, winding road from Mosul to the top of a 4,265-foot hill overlooking the city.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times Ziad Abdulsattar lifts his feet when taking off with a parachute with Falcon Club near Mosul.

The wind was unpredictable, and the first few attempts at liftoff ended amid tangled lines and tumbles down the hillside.
But one by one, the gliders made it up into the buffeting wind, their orange, purple and red dots of color an incongruous sight over a city whose violence, on this day anyway, seemed a long way off.