Peregraf- Ammar Aziz
Despite the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) consistently touting the importance of tourism, dozens of hotels in Duhok governorate have closed down because people are not visiting the area. As a result, hundreds of workers have lost their jobs.
“I have a hotel in Amedi. I spent about $15,000 to complete it. Not a single tourist has contacted us for four to five months to rent a room,” Sdqi Mohammed, who owns the Bansan Hotel,told Peregraf.
“The reason is obvious: on the one hand, there is Turkish bombing and, on the other, the government does not have a good program to attract tourists,” Mohammed added.
The area around Amedi and northern Duhok governorate has become a battlefield between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The local economy has suffered and tourists have been deterred by incidents where civilians have been killed.
In July 2022, the Turkish military shelled the Parakhe resort in the Zakho administration, which killed nine tourists, all of whom were ethnic Arabs from central and southern Iraq. Twenty-two other people were wounded.
Mohammed further complained that the KRG has not given hotel owners tax breaks or relief from water and electricity costs. Doing so would help them get their businesses off the ground.
“We only work for two or three months in the summer. It’s not like this anywhere else in the world. Not only does my hotel not have any customers, but dozens of other hotels do not either,” he said.
“The workers have been laid off and hundreds of them remain unemployed,” the hotel owner added.
According to statistics from the Duhok Hotels and Motels Association, 68 hotels have closed in the central district of Duhok and thirteen in Amedi. Half of the hotels in Zakho have shuttered.
"The number of tourists in the governorate has decreased significantly, which has had a very bad impact on hotels," said Ihsan Isa, president of the Duhok Hotels and Motels Association.
"The damage is mostly for the owners. Each hotel or motel has spent tens of thousands of dollars, in addition to taxes and annual licenses. Additionally, according to our investigations, 750 people who worked in these hotels and motels are now unemployed,” Isa added.
Renowned for its beauty, tourists from central and southern Iraq and neighboring countries regularly come to the Kurdistan Region, in part to enjoy the relatively cooler temperatures in the mountains.
According to the KRG’s Tourism Board, 7,279,913 tourists visited the Kurdistan Region as a whole in 2023, which constituted a 20% increase over the previous year.
However, Isa said that the number of tourists coming to Duhok governorate actually declined.
He said that only about 1,000 tourists stayed in hotels in the governorate during the Christmas and New Year period at the end of 2023.
“The number of tourists also decreased during other holiday periods,” Isa said, adding that the solution is for more government investment in tourism, tax breaks for hotel owners to reduce costs, and ensuring that tourists can easily pass through checkpoints.
Provincial tourism officials in Duhok told Peregraf that tourism numbers are highly dependent on the season and that they expect an increase in visitors in the coming year.
"We have planned a number of programs to attract tourists,” said Shamal Haruri, spokesperson for Duhok Tourism.
“We will have a special market during the month of Ramadan and we have planned for other occasions,” he told Peregraf.
The cabinet of KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani has consistently touted tourism as an important part of the Kurdistan Region’s economic development strategy.
Over the past four years, there has been more than $7 billion spent on tourism investment, according to the KRG Tourism Board.
“In 2023 alone, tourism projects worth $1.278 billion were implemented,” said Amal Jalal, head of the Tourism Board.