A difficult border crossing: from Duhok to Mardin by bus

Waiting 21 hours on the Iraqi-Turkish border in December 2023

In my previous post, I shared how Nicole and I enjoyed travelling around Iraqi Kurdistan. Our next destination would be Turkey. We went to a city in the northwest of Iraq called Duhok. From there we would take a direct bus to Mardin, a beautiful old city in Turkey 270 kilometres away. The bus journey would normally take about six - eight hours depending on the time needed to cross the border. What we didn’t know was how problematic this border can be. Crossing this border usually takes three to eight hours, but in our case it took 21 hours. We later met a Swiss guy who even waited 30 hours at this border. Here’s what happened.

Getting to the border

Finding a bus from Iraq to Turkey was easy. We booked an online bus ticket (via www.obilet.com) with the Turkish bus company CAN Diyarbakir. Like many Turkish bus companies they have modern coaches with comfortable big seats. On board they serve drinks and snacks too. In the afternoon we got on the bus at Duhok’s international bus station, hoping we would reach Mardin early in the evening. After driving about an hour we reached the border. As there were many other buses, we had to wait four hours at a large bus park before we could get close to the first checkpoint. This was fine, there was even a restaurant where we had an early dinner. But things got weird when we entered the first checkpoint.

Near the first checkpoint we saw many men with bags full of phones, cigarettes and other stuff clearly meant to be smuggled into Turkey. Groups of them would get on to every bus entering the checkpoint, including ours. We had few passengers when we left Duhok, but now our bus was full with nervous smugglers. A border guard got on the bus to check our passports. Then we drove to a big parking lot. Here we joined another queue of buses to the second checkpoint, still on the Iraqi side. Immediately the smugglers got off the bus and ran to the first bus in the queue. The smugglers weren’t threatening, but this was certainly an experience.

Stuck between checkpoints

Our bus waited the entire night and morning at this parking lot. Because it was cold people made fires outside. There were no shops nearby, just a couple of toilets. Since we already crossed a checkpoint we couldn’t go anywhere. We didn’t pack for such a long journey. Fortunately there was plenty of water on the bus, we had stocked up on snacks with the rest of our dinars, and our bus drivers kindly shared their bread with us in the morning. The bad news was that the line had barely moved the entire night. When the bus driver told us it would take much longer, we started looking for alternatives.

We saw the buses weren’t let into the second checkpoint anymore, but that cars could still enter. Hanging around outside in the morning sun, we met a taxi driver who offered to take us into Turkey, and said it would just take an hour to cross. Together with a Belgian passenger from another bus we made a deal with him. For 200 dollars in total (68 dollars each) he would take us across the border and drive us straight to Mardin, which was still over 200 kilometres away.

Leaving Iraq

I think the taxi driver did this more often, as he seemed to know the border guards. We crossed the second checkpoint and the Iraqi Customs in just 45 minutes. Then we drove over a bridge past another long, unmoving line of buses and crossed the Turkish side of the border, from where we drove onwards to Mardin. Interestingly the road to Mardin was partly along the Syrian border. The fences separating Turkey from Syria were sometimes meters away, so there was a lot of army on the road. Finally, after 21 hours of waiting and 28 hours of travelling, we made it to Mardin at sunset.

So why did this take so long? Other travellers told me several possible reasons, namely political tensions between Turkey and Iraq, increased price differences for phones and cigarettes, busy traffic because of holidays and the rules that cars are allowed to cross before buses. People also told us that this only happens a few times a year. Still it is wise to be prepared for a long wait when crossing this border, or maybe take a plane instead.

Central AsiaArjan MookMarch 14, 2024