Frazzled Iraqis enjoy rare chance to get away from it all

When it first leaves the bank, the raft, a few planks of wood slung over four lorry inner tubes, barely seems to be moving. Then the current catches it, flinging its ragtag crew into the middle of the river.

'This is the life,' Huseyin Mohsen, a technician on Kirkuk's oil fields, shouts over the screams of his four children.

The boatman ignores him, working his oar to avoid the worst of the eddies.

'My wife wasn't too keen on me taking the kids for this ride - none of them can swim,' Mr Mohsen grins, as we swirl past banks thick with families cooking meat on makeshift barbecues. 'I told her I'd dive in and save them if anything happened.'

The children are on school holidays and like countless others from the south and the centre of the country, Mr Mohsen and his family could not face the prospect of yet another Friday of cloying heat. So they decided to come to Iraq's Kurdish-controlled north.

Nestled under a huge dam, the picturesque town of Dokan was an obvious choice.

'Kids need water, and in Kirkuk all we have is oil,' says Nejat Mahmud Safwat, who like his cousin Mr Mohsen is a member of Iraq's Turkish-speaking Turkmen minority.