Iraq and Czech Republic

Available for over a year

There is a part of Iraq that sees the ISIS-led takeover in places not as a catastrophe but as an opportunity; the Kurdish region in the north east, already autonomous, now plans to hold a referendum on independence. When Iraqi government forces fled Kirkuk, Kurdish fighters moved in to occupy the city. There, Hannah Lucinda Smith meets a football team which has good reason to hope it will stay part of Kurdistan, even though its members are not all Kurds; Chris Bowlby goes to a Jewish cemetry in Brno, Czech Republic to learn its varied history and what it can tell us about cultures converging in Central Europe.