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. After years of stagnation, Dokan is booming. Holiday homes and cafes are springing up where once there were reed beds. In a crowded restaurant overlooking the bridge, visitors are charged extortionate prices. 'Tourists have been coming to Dokan for decades,' says Shaho Qadir Ahmed, a former Iraqi volleyball player who now runs the Daban Tourist Village overlooking Dokan dam. 'But I've never seen anything like this.' People come from as far away as Basra to stay in one of his 53 holiday cabins, priced at between US$30 and $40 a night. Owned by the party which holds sway in the southern part of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, some of the profits from the village go towards the upkeep of the local militia, or peshmerga. With the rest, Mr Ahmed has plans to build more cabins, plus houses for visitors wishing to stay for a month or more. If you ask the party of 20 from Baghdad down on the beach why they are here, the answer is unanimous: it is safe. An engineering student from a wealthy district of Baghdad, Mohammed Jamal, claims he was captured by bandits earlier this year. They only released him when his father paid a ransom of US$10,000. 'The shock was too much for him,' says Mr Jamal. 'He packed the whole family off and told us to spend two weeks in Dokan. He's back at home making sure the house doesn't get looted.' His brother Uday adds, 'They actually have a government here, unlike down in Baghdad.' Both men say there is no shortage of tourist destinations, Habaniyya Lake, for instance. The only trouble is, it is now a resort for US troops. 'Once, Saddam got all the best places in Iraq', says Uday Jamal. 'Now it's the turn of the Americans.'
