Hat tip Instapundit. Sharply edited for brevity--read the whole thing!
When Massoud Mazouri learned that the U.S.-led coalition had ousted Saddam Hussein from power on April 9, he hurried to Baghdad from his home in northern Iraq to set up an electronics business. Now the 28-year-old Kurdish merchant is selling televisions and satellite receivers at a brisk pace to gadget-starved shoppers. It’s among the first signs that Iraq’s larger economy is coming to life. Television sets, refrigerators and boxes of satellite receivers are stacked 10 feet high on the sidewalks of Baghdad’s shopping districts. Shoppers who have waited for years to be able to spend their hoarded dollars are out in force. ’’When I started in late April, I was receiving one container of DiStar goods per month,’’ Mazouri says. ’’Now, I am getting five to six containers.’’ Each container holds about 270 television sets or 3,800 satellite receiver units. He says he is grossing $20,000 a day. ’’All the sales are done in cash.’’
Since the collapse of Saddam’s regime, police Officer Gailan Wahoudi, 31, has bought a new television, a refrigerator and an air conditioner. ’’It is a new freedom I never had before,’’ he says. Louay Rasheed, 46, director of the Ministry of Planning’s trade statistics department, says he made the equivalent of $15 a month before the war and now earns $400 a month. Hassan al-Dinwani, 53, owner of al-Yussir Trading Shops in Baghdad’s Karada neighborhood, says one of his new customers was a policeman. ’’This was a surprise to me,’’ he says. In the past, officers couldn’t buy goods at his shop because their salaries were too low. Iraqi police Lt. Raad Rasheed says his salary is now the equivalent of $275 a month, up from $25 before the war. ’’My family is happy,’’ he says. ’’I am also more focused on my job because I no longer have to worry about money.’’ |