Booming, Not Going Boom
By Callimachus | Related entries in In The News, The War On Terrorism, The WorldHere’s what the whole of Iraq should be like.
The $300 million (£170 million) project, the brainchild of an Iraqi exile businessman, is quickly rising on the outskirts of Arbil, one of the boom towns of the Kurdish region of Iraq. The skyline of the region’s other main city, Sulaymaniyah, is also a web of cranes and semi-built apartment blocks, the main street a long building site of hotels, offices and houses rapidly shooting up to accommodate the sudden flood of workers to the area.
Much of the muscle going into the building boom is provided by Iraqi Arab companies and labourers from the south who have moved to this once war-torn region of northern Iraq to escape the horrors of the rest of the country.
A bubble of relative security, with a quasi-democratic, quasi-authoritarian government, the Kurdish region of Iraq is benefiting from the dilemma of businessmen wanting to invest in an oil-rich country that is also one of the most dangerous places on earth. “Of course it is better to invest here than in Baghdad,� said Talib Ali Ahmed, head of Sulaymaniyah’s Chamber of Commerce.
Many international investment companies seem to agree. In Sulaimaniyah alone, there are 48 Turkish and 30 Iranian companies, as well as contractors from China, Singapore, the Gulf States and several European countries. They blast new roads through the mountains, build bridges, tunnels and underpasses and create the endless housing developments.
About one hundred Arab companies have moved here from other parts of the country. The fact that the region � impoverished and attacked under Saddam Hussein, then racked by civil war after gaining de facto independence in 1991 � has no infrastructure provides investors with a blank sheet for vast building projects. The surge of investment is lifting the rugged region out of poverty and rushing it into the 21st century.
Next to the ancient souk in Arbil, where merchants sell honeycombs and goats’ cheese and pistachio nuts in a hive of crumbling alleyways, a vast shopping precinct of four 30- storey buildings is going up, with 6,000 retail spaces. On the road between the boom towns, peasants still live in Iron Age villages of stone and mud-brick huts, grazing sheep and travelling by donkey. Even in the centre of Arbil, people live in hovels carved from the ruined facades of Ottoman mansions on the Qalal, a hilltop fortress that has been lived in for 7,000 years � the world’s oldest continuously inhabited site.
There is little trace of sentimentality for the passing of the old ways. “We feel really happy watching our city being rebuilt,� said Ahmed Abdelhadi, a retired teacher working at his son’s shoe shop in the winding alleys of Arbil’s souk. “It used to be just sewage in the streets.�
Halor Sherkar, a member of the Sulaymaniyah Chamber of Commerce, has lost track of how many projects are rising from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, close to the border with Iran. “In five years’ time, it’ll look like Paris,� he said with a laugh.
The difference between Arbil and Baghdad? Hint: It’s not the Americans. We’re in both places. It’s not Halliburton’s fault, either. Notice how much of the work is done by Iraqis, and how much of the investment is regional, not U.S. The difference between Arbil and Baghdad? It’s spelled I-N-S-U-R-G-E-N-T-S.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 and is filed under In The News, The War On Terrorism, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
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