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In Kurdistan, brisk business in blast walls
13.3.2008
By Stephen Farrell
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March 13, 2008
GOPALA, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', -- Just
northeast of * Kirkuk is a factory doing some of the
best business in Iraq, but whose workers would be
content to see it close down.
It lies between Kirkuk and Sulaimaniyah on the
safer, Kurdish, side of the checkpoint marking the
boundary between the semiautonomous Kurdistan
Regional Government and the rest of Iraq.
Glimpsed through trees from the highway, the storage
yard at first seems to be a do-it-yourself medieval
fortress: scores of watchtowers,www.ekurd.net
blast walls, sentry
posts and barriers are stacked up in a field ready
for delivery to whichever home, compound or
neighborhood is next to be sealed off from the
outside world. |
A blast-wall factory in Gopala, Kurdistan region
'Iraq' |
Gray, featureless and crudely built, these blast
walls have become the most readily identifiable
symbol of the current state of Iraq, replacing the
endless lines of cheap, mustard-colored walls
emblazoned with eight-point stars that used to
surround Saddam Hussein’s military-industrial nerve
centers.
Getting them to their destinations is not always
easy. One delivery driver, who refused to be named
because he feared being killed, said: “We put our
lives in danger. We are risking death to make a
living. Twice I have faced gunmen who opened fire on
me in Tikrit, but God saved me.”
As workers covered in gray powder scrambled atop
cranes and molding cages, Younis Abdul Mohsin, the
engineer and manager of the privately owned plant,
said it produced 50 tons of concrete a day.
Most of it helps fill United States military
contracts in Kirkuk and farther afield.
The largest blast walls,www.ekurd.net
more than 18 feet high and weighing more than two
tons, take a whole day to manufacture. Less
time-consuming are knee-high roadside barriers that
weigh 471 pounds and are used at checkpoints and on
approach roads to major installations.
“We are still working on old contracts with the
multinational forces which will end after four
months, but I think they will be renewed,” Mr.
Mohsin said last month.
“The security improvement doesn’t affect too much
the rate of production of blast walls. The American
Army needs them and buys them nonstop to protect
their military bases in Iraq.”
He added: “Of course I want the situation to get
better. I am an engineer, I don’t want to make blast
walls. I want to build things. We all want the
situation to be better, and for this factory to
close.”
*
Kirkuk city is historically a Kurdish city
and it lies just south border of the Kurdistan
autonomous region, the population is a mix of
majority Kurds and minority of Arabs, Christians and
Turkmen. lies 250 km northeast of Baghdad. Kurds
have a strong cultural and emotional attachment to Kirkuk, which they call "the Kurdish Jerusalem.", Kirkuk is historically a Kurdish city.
The former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein forced
over 250,000 Kurdish residents to give up their
homes to Arabs in the 1970s, to "Arabize" the city
and the region's oil industry.
Copyright, respective author or news agency, nytimes
com
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