This is Lyadov and today, I will show you how people live in Kirkuk, one of Iraq’s most troubled cities that was built over a large oil field, a target of a protracted and bloody war lasting for many years. Here, I’m having a, well, a security detail following me, two real bodyguards. The reason for this is that although it’s been relatively quiet in Kirkuk for the past few years and it’s considered generally a safe city, the truth is that all these ‘relatively’ and ‘generally’ remain a pretty ‘iffy’ affair, because Kirkuk is right in the middle of the territory where multiple terrorist sleeper cells are known to be, continuously hunted down by Iraq’s special services and popular mobilization forces that keep looking for the insurgency groups trying to continue the war, and so you never really know what might happen to you here. In order to understand what’s special about Kirkuk, you need to know two things about it. Firstly, it’s home to one of the world’s largest oil and gas deposit