Yesterday, Ambassador Dan Speckhard, head of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office in Washington, reported that 30,000 new businesses have registered with the Iraqi government in the last year. “And who knows how many unregistered business starts there were?” he remarked to American Forces Press Service. “There is a huge ’gray market’ that brings significant revenue.”
One mostly unremarked-upon sign of this vitality is the estimated 50-fold increase in Internet use since the fall of Saddam Hussein. According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, there are now more than 147,000 Internet users in Iraq, not counting Internet cafes, where hundreds of thousands more go online. That compares to 4,500 Internet users in Iraq before the war.
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