IRBIL, Iraq To land at the gleaming new airport in this booming regional capital is to glimpse what the United States hoped a decade ago that all of Iraq might become. Cranes swivel across a skyline whose glittering high-rises and five-star hotels bring an air of Dubai grandeur. Modern malls with brightly lit boutiques do a brisk business. Modern, wide highways include pedestrian bridges, some with escalators. (Sebastian Meyer/For The Washington Post) - Knitting students practice on looms at the textile museum in the Irbil citadel. Iraqi Kurdistan has been tipped by newspapers and magazines to be a new travel destination in 2011. This is Iraqi Kurdistan, a region that was semiautonomous even under Saddam Hussein, but one that has been transformed in remarkable ways since the American invasion of 2003. While the rest of Iraq remains saddled by scars and trauma from the conflicts the U.S. invasion unleashed, the Kurdistan region increasingly stands apart, with its own fractious, impoverished past mostly a distant memory. But Kurdistan can only be held up as a success story with significant caveats. Security has come at the expense of the repressive features of a police state. Two ruling political parties have held on to power through a vast network of patronage that has given the opposition little breathing room. Perhaps most alarmingly, its historically acrimonious relationship with Baghdad has become downright poisonous since the last U.S. soldiers left the country last December casting a pall over the sustainability of its aspirations. If the other Iraq cannot lift itself you will have a gap, and that gap will lead to conflict, Fuad Hussein, chief of staff to Kurdistans president, Massoud Barzani, said in an interview in his office in Irbil. Under Hussein, Kurdistan sat on vast oil reserves, but there were no commercial flights into the region. The gray, drab architecture spoke of a bygone era. Roads were rudimentary. Kurdish politics were infused with mistrust and the deeply entrenched grudges of a civil war. Today, a combination of security, investor-friendly policies and the allure of unexplored energy reserves have attracted an increasing number of oil companies, including the worlds largest, Exxon Mobil, which last year signed a landmark deal with Kurdish officials. At the same time, the social, cultural and political gaps between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq have widened in recent years as the northern region, which was largely insulated from the insurgency and had virtually no U.S. military presence during the war, continues to prosper while the rest of the country remains beset by violence. The Kurdistan region, in terms of development and economic growth, has the potential to become the Iraq the U.S. had hoped for the entire country, said Denise Natali, a National Defense University professor who has studied the Kurds for decades. The other Iraq Irbils new airport, completed in 2010, offers direct flights to Vienna, Dubai, Istanbul and Cairo, and it has been expanding steadily. Most foreigners can enter Kurdistan without a visa or may obtain one at the airport, unlike in Baghdad, which manages a cumbersome and expensive visa system that has long bedeviled prospective foreign investors. Washingtonpost.com
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