Original version

BBC World Service Online

From Our Own Correspondent

News

Insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers.

Insight, wit and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers from around the world.

From Our Own Correspondent: Iraq and Colombia

28/03/2013

Iraq and Colombia

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, Iraq and Colombia

Why Iraqi Kurdistan wants more visitors; plus, meeting a desert smuggler with 27 children.

Theopi Skarlatos sees Iraqi Kurdistan shrugging off the past and hoping for more foreign visitors; Charlotte Pritchard meets a smuggler with 27 children in La Guajira's desert zone

Pascale Harter introduces personal accounts from journalists, writers and reporters around the world. In this edition, two dispatches from once-notorious areas, which find them on the mend and trying to attract tourism. Theopi Skarlatos is in Iraqi Kurdistan, a land once targeted by Saddam Hussein's regime, then battered by the US-led invasion 10 years ago and still wracked by disputes over oil, frontiers and religion. Yet it's also a booming area full of new ski resorts and condominiums - and hoping for ever-greater numbers of foreign visitors. Charlotte Pritchard is in La Guajira, the desert covering some of the frontier between Colombia and Venezuela, and meets one smuggler-turned-tourist guide with an impressive family record.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

From Our Own Correspondent

Iraq and Colombia

Genres

Brand

BBC World Service Online

About BBC World Service