FOR the Kurds of Iraq, Zakaria Abdulla is the nearest thing to the Beatles, rolled into one man. He claims that one of his more recent albums, “Telinaz”, meaning “lovely”, has sold more than 3m copies across the region and in Europe. But mere musical success is no longer enough. These days he has a political vision and a business nose to match.
As a budding property magnate, he is the driving force behind Naz City, a burgeoning housing development on the edge of Erbil, the Iraqi Kurds' capital, with some 700 Western-style flats designed to “bring something beautiful to Kurdistan”. Such projects, he hopes, may lure back some of the thousands of professionals who fled from Saddam Hussein and are now used to European and American living standards; Mr Abdulla spent some years in Sweden. So far, he says, seven ministers in the Kurdish regional government, more than 100 assembly members and at least 50 academics have taken flats in Naz City.
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