Saddam’s Villas To Become Tourist Attractions

Saddam Hussein made his palaces a desert paradise, but now his hometown is seeking foreign investors to turn the late dictator’s playground into a tourist mecca.

Local officials see the 76 abandoned Saddam villas sprawled across hundreds of hectares (acres) as a potential gold mine for Tikrit’s cash-strapped Salahuddin province.

“These villas only need rehabilitation and a few other things to turn the whole area into a wonderful tourism site,” Jewher Hamad al-Fahel, the head of Salahuddin’s investment commission, told Reuters Television.

Saddam built big at Tikrit, his tribal stronghold about 95 miles north of Baghdad. He put up six villas at his birthplace, the village of al-Awja, alone and made the Tikrit palace complex his largest.

Boasting artificial lakes and date orchards, the site totals 136 buildings and covers more than 1,000 acres, according to the U.S. Army. American troops used it as a base until turning it over to Iraqi authorities in November 2005.

Now many of the sand-colored structures, often domed and turreted and with marbled interiors, sit decaying near the Tigris River. Some still show heavy damage from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that overthrew Saddam.

Salahuddin Governor Mutasher Hussein Allawi said he was eager to smooth the way for foreign investment in the villas since his budget was too small to rebuild decrepit infrastructure quickly.

Canada Remains Americans’ Favorite Country

With all due respect to Washington’s special relationship and shared values with Israel, Americans much prefer their neighbor to the north.

According to a new Gallup poll released over the weekend, Israel ranks fifth among the countries viewed most favorably by Americans, behind Canada, Great Britain, Germany and Japan.

A paltry 10 percent of Americans said they had a favorable view of Iran, which came in last place among a list of 20 nations. The survey was conducted among a random sampling of 1,025 respondents.

Americans’ perception of the Palestinian Authority has vacillated over the course of the last decade. In 2005, 27 percent of Americans held a favorable view, but that number dropped to 11 percent following Hamas’ election victory in 2006.

In 2009, the PA’s favorable rating recovered to 15 percent, and this year it increased further, to 20 percent. However, 70 percent of Americans still said they held an unfavorable view of the PA.

With regard to the foreign countries most often mentioned in the news, American public opinion did not significantly change with the Obama administration’s assumption of power.

Drought Threatens Iraq’s ‘Garden Of Eden’

A severe drought is threatening Iraq’s southern marshes — the traditional site of the biblical Garden of Eden — just as the region was recovering from Saddam Hussein’s draining of its lakes and swamps to punish a political rebellion.

Marshes that were coming back to life a few years ago with U.N. help are again little more than vast expanses of cracked earth.  The area’s thousands of inhabitants, known as Marsh Arabs, are victims of the debilitating drought that has ravaged much of Iraq and neighboring countries the last two years.

“I have no work. Our livestock have died, our children have left school because we don’t have money to buy them clothes,” said fisherman Yasir Razaq.  He spoke in front of his wooden boat, which sat on a dried-up lake bed in the Hor al-Hammar marsh near Nasiriyah, 200 miles south of Baghdad.

“Before when there was fishing, we could get money for children’s clothes,” he said. “Now we have lost everything and our situation is miserable.”

The Marsh Arab culture existed for more than 5,000 years in the 8,000 square miles of wetlands fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.  The marshes boasted hundreds of species of birds and fish, and periodic flooding created fertile farm lands.

The flooded, flat plain is said to have played an important role in the development of an agriculture-based culture that helped raise civilization to new heights. Some biblical scholars identified the vast marshes — the most extensive wetlands in the Middle East — as the site of the fabled Garden of Eden.

The Next Vacation Hot Spot: Iraq

Iraq has received its first group of Western tourists since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the Tourism and Antiquities Ministry said.

The group of eight holidaymakers — five Britons, two Americans and a Canadian — arrived on March 8 and toured Iraq’s landmark historic sites, including the Biblical city of Babylon, fabled home to the Hanging Gardens.

Their three week trip was organized by a British adventure tour operator, ministry spokesman Abdul-Zahra al-Telagani said, but he declined to name the company.

“This is the first group since the regime’s fall,” he said. “We expect these tourists will convey a positive message to their citizens back home that the situation in Iraq is good.”

Their itinerary included the Castle of Arbil — a relic of the medieval Ottoman empire in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region — as well as the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, in Mosul, a dangerous city still crawling with Sunni Arab insurgents.

They visited the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites of Shi’ite Islam, whose devastation in a bomb attack in 2006 unleashed a wave of sectarian violence that brought Iraq to the brink of civil war.

In the south, the tourists saw the holy Shi’ite shrines of Kerbala and Najaf, which are already popular with religious pilgrims from Iran, and the southern oil-hub Basra.

They will finish with a visit to the Iraqi National Museum. The building was re-opened last month for the first time since looters pillaged it after the U.S.-led invasion.

Iraq, part of a region known as the cradle of civilization, has countless archaeological and religious sites but decades of war have shut the doors to foreign tourist groups.