Waving his hands wildly in the air, Abdel al-Khafaji explains that it should not take four hours of security holdups to reach Baghdad airport’s check-in line.
“It is really bad,” says the 70-year-old Iraqi exile, trying to head home to Denmark, where he has lived for the past 16 years, after a holiday.
“Before, everything was well managed but now it is so complicated, not just security but the whole process of travel,” he says, remarking on the relative ease with which he moved around before the ouster of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Khafaji is among many passengers whom the man in charge of Iraq’s airports has to impress.
Adnan Blebil, director general of the Iraqi Civil Aviation Authority, has grand plans for Baghdad Airport, 16km west of the capital, which until the 2003 US-led invasion was known as Saddam International Airport.
More than a decade of UN sanctions followed Saddam’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which closed down Iraq’s airports and forced travelers to take the long, costly and, at times, perilous overland route from Amman.
It left a bitter economic legacy that Blebil intends to reverse. His major problem, however, is securing the US$5 billion to US$7 billion needed to make his plans a reality.
“I would like to see European countries, such as France and Germany, come here [and invest], but for some reason they are waiting,” says Blebil, 55, a graduate of the Central School of Planning and Statistics in Warsaw.
Billions of dollars are needed, he says, to upgrade the airport’s interior, passenger facilities and infrastructure so that it is on a par with Dubai, the only Middle East airport in the world’s top 30 in terms of passenger numbers.
Government rules and the lack of a satisfactory investment law are among the other barriers inhibiting his vision of an airport campus filled with hotels, banks, convention centers, a business park, cargo village and shops.
Transport ministry figures show 807,848 passengers landed or took off from the airport last year, compared with more than 37 million in Dubai, according to 2008 figures provided by global monitor Airports Council International.
Although regionally based carriers Turkish Airlines and Etihad Airways are among those to launch services from Baghdad recently, with Emirates and Lufthansa to follow this summer, the reason for a lack of greater investment seems obvious.
The road — known as “Route Irish” — from the airport to the capital was nicknamed “RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] alley,” after insurgents fired rockets and small arms at passing vehicles in the wake of the invasion.
There are now few security incidents along the heavily protected highway, where three lanes have speed limits of 60kph, 80kph and 100kph.
The restrictions are routinely ignored by drivers on the return route to the city, betraying its history as one of the most dangerous in the world.
Aircraft were routinely shot at and a DHL Airbus cargo plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile eight months after the invasion, although it managed to land safely.
The normal flight path took planes into the heart of Anbar Province, the home of the insurgency, and the risk of being shot down led planes to adopt a so-called corkscrew take-off and landing where they repeatedly circled the airport to gain elevation and stay out of the reach of missiles.
Seven years later, however, a series of checkpoints along the route to the airport and a plethora of security staff, ironically, makes it the most secure in the world, the airport boss argues.
“It’s the safest airport I know because of the military forces that surround it,” says Blebil, who returned to Iraq after the war and has been in his job since 2005, having previously worked in the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
“We have very strict procedures and 660 security staff,” which equates to a dominant force when compared with a total of 600 other workers at the airport, he said.
Although security has improved in Iraq in the past two years, the difficulty of squaring private foreign investment with Baghdad’s all-dominant public sector remains a headache.
“We really need to develop the investment law,” says Blebil, alluding to various financial restrictions by Iraq’s government, including prohibitions on foreign companies owning land.
The disruption of a Baghdad-London service launched by national carrier Iraqi Airways, which led to the airline boss’ passport being confiscated and a chartered plane being impounded on its maiden and so-far only flight to the British capital, have not boosted credibility among investors.
It is all rather symptomatic of an industry trying to pick up the pieces after the flight embargo and several wars, Blebil says.
During most of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Saddam’s regime imposed a travel ban on Iraqis to curb capital flight, draft-dodgers and a brain drain.
With no such restrictions in place now, Blebil is upbeat.
“The country needs us, so we will make it happen somehow. We cannot wait for the French, German or US investors forever,” he says.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS