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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Road Walker who wrote (267771)1/10/2006 1:25:55 PM
From: tejek  Read Replies (1) of 1576336
 
Its become pretty standard to think that while southern Iraq is a mess, N. Iraq aka Kurdistan is doing well. Well "doing well" is all relative. Last nite, I was reading part of an article on the Kurds in National Geographic. And to be honest, the place is a mess. Things are so screwy its amazing they make any progress. For an example, two of the fastest growing cities in Kurdistan are roughly 90 miles apart from each other. A person from one city can not call a person in the other city nor can they send mail from one city to the other. They are in two different provinces and have separate telephone and postal services.

There is no industry to speak of in Kurdistan....just oil. There has been some foreign investment but its so minor its not worth discussing. There is no banking system....no credit or debit cards. Expatriate Kurds are coming back with tons of money and investing in buildings but no market studies are done before a building is built. There is no planning department nor a building dept. to inspect the work. They don't do market studies to determine if there is a market for what's being built.

In fact, there has not been a census in decades and they have no clue what is the country's population nor the population of its major cities. Currently, they are building four 30 story office buildings and shopping mall for 6K shops in one city and they have no clue who will rent the spaces. The complex is under construction near the city's main street where all the buildings are one or two stories.....falling apart/falling down......it looks like a cross between a strip mall and a slum. There are no curbs on the streets.......the streets look they are stone covered, and not cement or asphalt covered.

I am not sure what I was expecting but I would have thought in 12 years, free from Saddam's rule, they would have made more progress. Then the article goes on to explain there are tribal feuds even among the Kurds and the only thing that's keeping them from breaking out is the insurgency and the problems they and Baghdad present to the Kurds. Frankly, the Kurds look better only by comparison.

ted
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