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BASRA: After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Zuhair Kubba, an Iraqi contractor, celebrated by taking his extended family on a tour of five-star hotels around the Middle East. It cost him $53,000.
Last year, Kubba had to pay almost as much to get away from kidnappers who dragged him from his car at gunpoint and took him to the marshes outside Basra.
His experience is not unique.
Kidnapped foreigners may grab headlines for insurgent groups fighting Iraq's US-led occupation, but local businessmen provide rich pickings for more criminally motivated gangs.
The collapse of centralised Ba'athist rule has opened up new business opportunities in Basra, but the entrepreneurial spirit unleashed among the city's Shia nouveau riche -- eager to rebuild their dilapidated city and forge links with the outside world -- has been damped by the price they are paying for dangers around them.
Before, business success attracted unwanted attention from Saddam's Sunni henchmen, and Shia businessmen made do with scraps of subcontracting thrown their way by the well connected, says Loai al Abadi, a manager in one of Basra's more established groups. A month before Saddam fell, his uncle was jailed and threatened with lynching until he paid up.
"The southern merchants were poor before. Now they all want to make themselves rich," he says. And many are. Nine businessmen assembled at Basra's newly refurbished chamber of commerce said they had been raking in profits from construction, government procurement, trade and "marine services" -- a term that covers everything from smuggling to working the docks.
One member was building a new 150-room hotel. He was keen to promote the city as an exciting frontier for foreign investment. But the tales from his peers of kidnappers demanding half-million dollar ransoms showed fortunes are often lost as fast they are made.
The fact that they have been able to pay them indicates the kind of money circulating in a city whose crumbling buildings testify to decades of neglect.
The vice-president of the chamber of commerce escaped an attempted abduction without paying up -- but the bullet fired after him is still lodged in his ribs. Kubba spent three weeks in the marshes while a colleague haggled over the $150,000 ransom demand.
"I know exactly who they were but I will not pursue them until we have effective courts of law," he said.
Businessmen pay up to $3,000 a month for guards and other security measures, the chamber of commerce says. When they win work outside the city, they split profits with local tribesmen to secure protection. In Nassiriyah, north of Basra, they give 10 per cent of profits to a new business association. It was this money pooled together that helped secure the release of a kidnapped member in December.
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