After years of reports about chaos and mayhem in Iraq, Anthony Shadid’s upbeat report, “Resurgent Turkey Flexes Its Muscles Around Iraq” is both welcome and extremely discordant. I hope that we’ll be able to follow the fortunes of Rushdi Said.

“This is the very beginning,” said Rushdi Said, the flamboyant Iraqi Kurdish chairman of Adel United, a company involved in everything from mining to sprawling housing projects. “All of the world has started fighting over Iraq. They’re fighting for the money.”

Mr. Said’s suit, accented by a black-and-white handkerchief in the pocket, shines like his optimism, the get-rich-quick kind. In some ways, he is a reincarnation of an Ottoman merchant, at ease in Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and Arabic. In any of those languages, he boasts of what he plans.

He has thought of contacting Angelina Jolie, “maybe Arnold and Sylvester, too,” to interest them in some of his 11 projects across Iraq to build 100,000 villas and apartments at the cost of a few billion dollars. So far, though, his best partner is the singer Ibrahim Tatlises, the Turkish-born Kurdish superstar, whose portrait adorns Mr. Said’s advertisement for his project the Plain of Paradise.

“The villas are ready!” Mr. Tatlises says in television ads. “Come! Come! Come!”

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at 10:30 am.