BAGHDAD — The hotel receptionists from the Philippines wear gray blazers and smiles. Bellhops in gold-buttoned vests wait for luggage to carry. Plastic red dandelions and white roses decorate the shiny white linoleum corridor. The bar is stocked with beer and whiskey, and you can wander into the hair salon if you need a trim before clinching that million-dollar deal.
Inside a compound at the Baghdad international airport, a few entrepreneurs are betting that boom times are around the bend. As the saying goes, if you build it, they will come. In this case, a British company and an American firm opened the Iraqi Airways International Business Center and the separate Baghdad International Airport Hotel on Friday in hopes of drawing private investors and corporations to this war-ravaged country.
"We want the international businessmen to take us as an example for them. We took the risk, so what is the point of not coming here? It is getting better and better every day," said Ammar Urfali, an Iraqi American whose company, Sigma, is one of the partners in the project.
Some would call Urfali and his colleagues gamblers in a land where ethnic and sectarian tensions reign, corruption remains entrenched, and private enterprise is limited mostly to reconstruction projects funded by the U.S. and Iraqi governments.
But Urfali is not fazed. On Friday, he cut a red ribbon and announced grandly, "Baghdad is open for business."
Urfali, who returned to Baghdad after Saddam Hussein's fall, did not seem worried that the firms had yet to find tenants for their eight floors of office space in a solemn-looking brown Iraqi Airways building. On opening day, a few Japanese, Ukrainian and American guests came to the hotel, built by the U.S. Army and then furbished by Urfali and his fellow investors.
Urfali's firm has teamed with a British company named Veritas and the Iraqi government. Sigma and Veritas hold a three-year lease on the facilities and have invested $10 million. The government will receive half of their profit.
The center's pitch is this: If Baghdad remains dangerous, bring the business meeting to the heavily guarded airport compound. If visitors need to head into Baghdad, the center can hire a private security firm to drive them. If someone needs to exercise, the hotel has a gym. If a person falls sick, it has a clinic. If a businessperson needs a interpreter, the staff can supply one.
