
Tourists at Gali Ali Beg waterfall in Erbil province in October 2020. Photo: Bilind T. Abdullah/Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Authorities in the Kurdistan Region are looking to boost tourism from central and southern Iraq, officials told Rudaw on Friday.
The head of Erbil’s checkpoints said more staff are being deployed to checkpoints to speed up processing of permits given to visitors from federal Iraqi provinces, who are usually given a one-month entry permit to the Kurdistan Region.
“We have a large number of teams for tourists and we only need 5 to 10 minutes for each tourist to give them a free permit. We will make all arrangements for their arrival” Lieutenant-Colonel Salam Khoshnaw told Rudaw on Friday.
Amal Jalal, the head of Kurdistan Region's tourism board, told Rudaw Radio that efforts are being made to establish information centers for visitors.
According to Jalal, more than 600,000 tourists visited the Kurdistan Region from January to April.
“If we compare it to the previous years, the tourist rate has decreased a lot, but after Eid al-Fitr the checkpoints are open and preparations are being made by the general directorates of the provinces to establish information centers.”
Jalal added that they are in touch with the Ministry of Education and international organizations to train more tourist guides.
“In each province we want to train 25 tourism graduates to become tourist guides so that they can provide thorough historic information on the ancient sites, the civilization of Kurdistan, and museums in English or Arabic.”
“We hope that by the end of 2021 we can have a number of tourist guides ready to be spread out across the provinces.”
In May, the Ministry of Interior lifted a coronavirus-related weekend ban on travel between between the Kurdistan Region and Iraqi provinces.
At the time, Jalal told Rudaw that no tourist had entered the Kurdistan Region from central and southern Iraq, though Sulaimani tourism officials said some 75,000 visitors celebrated the Eid al-Fitr holiday in the province.
The tourism industry has been hit hard by the pandemic. 2020 saw a 75 percent decrease in revenue from tourism compared to 2019.
Comments
Rudaw moderates all comments submitted on our website. We welcome comments which are relevant to the article and encourage further discussion about the issues that matter to you. We also welcome constructive criticism about Rudaw.
To be approved for publication, however, your comments must meet our community guidelines.
We will not tolerate the following: profanity, threats, personal attacks, vulgarity, abuse (such as sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia), or commercial or personal promotion.
Comments that do not meet our guidelines will be rejected. Comments are not edited – they are either approved or rejected.
Post a comment