By David Mac Dougall, Baghdad Bureau

It’s been a long, cold 36 hours, but producer Marcia Biggs, cameraman Michael Pohl and myself are finally back in Baghdad.

Our trip started very early Sunday morning, leaving the Patrol Base with Major Matt McGrew and his team, and driving 20 miles to Forward Operating Base Warrior on the outskirts of Kirkuk.  Sadly, this was goodbye for us after a fantastic week at Gaines Mill, but there’s a good chance we’ll be back in their area in the coming weeks to work on something else…

We spent most of Sunday in the city of Kirkuk, first attending a meeting of Non-Governmental Organizations at the city hall – interviewing representatives from Arab, Kurdish, Turkomen and Chaldean (Christian) groups to get their thoughts on the situation in Iraq’s most diverse city.  We had the chance too, to walk around in downtown Kirkuk getting “atmospherics”.  But our time in Kirkuk is the subject of another story on TV, and so I’ll post pictures and write about that in a few days.

Getting from Kirkuk to Baghdad took a painstakingly long time, involving four hours on a Chinook, sleeping rough near Tikrit, then a long wait for flights, and two more hours in a Blackhawk before our security team could pick us up.  Getting round Iraq has never been easy – and we certainly understand that dealing with the media is not the military’s top priority.  However, it always strikes me as curious that when the military wants to show off a particular event or project they lay on helicopters for a daytrip.  When we’re trying to get around the country, working on our own stories, the military is not always so helpful which is a shame, because I believe there are still many important stories out there to be told – and judging from viewer/reader reactions, people are still keen for us to tell those stories.

I’ll close the last chapter of my Kirkuk Diary with a few final photographs from our time in Northern Iraq, mostly starring the extremely hospitable and very welcoming soldiers at Gaines Mill (thanks for everything guys!)