During one cold night four years ago spent sheltering with a group of soldiers at a remote mountain checkpoint, the sight of a reporter's satellite telephone produced amazed whispers among the soldiers, and then, in English, a quiet request.
Last year 45 people were killed and already this year the death toll has reached 23, with Wednesday's museum raid following an attack on a mountain checkpoint in February that killed 4 police officers.
Ringed by mountains and checkpoints, Irbil was the safe alternative to Baghdad, its appeal most obvious when the violence elsewhere seemed most ominous.
A short drive from the frontier, along hair-pinned mountain roads, past Lebanese checkpoints where friendly soldiers shiver, is a Syrian safe-house.
Herrou drove the migrants across the border in his van – the same van he uses to deliver eggs in his tiny Alpine village – deftly avoided police checkpoints using mountain lanes, and later provided shelter at his hilltop farm.
The first involved running around the mountains looking for various checkpoints and answering riddles when you got there – we ended up doing 12 or 15km through the mountains.
He is originally from Rujban, and in the past few months he traveled back and forth between the military base and the mountains by lying at checkpoints and saying he was going to Tripoli.
I had to walk through the mountains to avoid the checkpoints manned by the Sudanese forces," says a 46-year-old carpenter, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.
We trudge up mountains and crisscross military checkpoints in the country's still-violent south, and then head north to the breathtaking Caribbean coast.
North of Aleppo, soldiers clashed with opposition fighters who attacked military checkpoints near a mountain the government had previously taken control of, according to the official Syrian Arab News Agency.
