I was just going through some of my old pictures from my time in Iraq recently and the picture of this Samsung sign makes for an interesting story.

The picture is from Baghdad taken from top of my Bradley. Not one of my better pictures but I took it with a camera in one hand and my 9mm in the other. My column of Bradley Fighting Vehicles had just moved through the center of Baghdad during the war and were trying to help secure Northern Baghdad. All throughout the war I did not see any billboards anywhere in southern Iraq until we got to Baghdad. When we got to Baghdad there were a few billboards that could be seen and most of them were from Korean companies. My unit later moved into Northern Iraq and there were no billboards up there either except for a few Turkish ones in Mosul. However, in Kurdistan there was advertising of Korean, Japanese, and Turkish brands, but I don’t consider Kurdistan really part of Iraq.

As the war ended and the occupation began; more and more advertising and billboards began to spring up it seemed over night. A lot of the advertising was from Korean companies. I remember asking an Iraqi that I knew why Iraq didn’t have lots of billboards before. He told me that when somebody put up a billboard it meant that they had a prosperous business which also meant they had money. So this then made them a target of Saddam’s security forces to extort money out of business owners. If they didn’t pay bad things would happen to them. So it wasn’t in a merchant’s best interest to advertise, which contributed to the stagnation of the Iraqi economy. So I asked him how the Koreans were able to put up advertising during Saddam’s rule and he said obviously they payed somebody a lot of money to do business here in Iraq.

During the occupation we would setup check points and run patrols and the amount of goods coming from Turkey was staggering. Anyone who had a van was going to Turkey buying electronics and other household products, loading it in there vans to maximum capacity, and driving back to Iraq to sell the goods. I was always amazed to see Korean vans filled with Korean electronics pouring out of Turkey. Then all the new Japanese and Korean cars began to flood into Iraq. How did the Korean companies get so organized so quickly to exploit business opportunities in Iraq I would wonder. If you listened to the media you would think only Halliburton was making money in Iraq but the Koreans and Turks were the ones making the real money. I would estimate a quarter of the cars on the stretch of highway between Turkey and Baghdad was filled with people hauling goods to sell in markets between Mosul and Baghdad. However, the criminal elements got wise to this and began carjacking vehicles and taking their goods with them in the name of “resistance” when in fact they were just criminals trying to make an easy buck. So there was nights we would go on patrol and Iraqi truck drivers and merchants loaded with Korean goods would ask us to escort them through dangerous stretches of highway to protect them from the “Ali Ababas,” the Iraqi thieves. I remember thinking back then that the ROK Army should protect these merchant convoys because after all they are all filled with Korean products. But the ROK Army is there now in Kurdistan for “reconstruction work.” However, they are not there to protect their business interests. The US Army will continue to do that.